Email Templates and Phone Scripts for Every Sales Team

An article we liked from Thought Leader Peter Kazanjy of First Round:

Here are the Scripts for Sales Success — Emails, Calls and Demos That Close Deals

Building a winning sales deck is one thing.

But what about the email templates needed to get prospects on the phone? What about the phone scripts for setting those sales presentation appointments? The best sales deck in the world isn’t super helpful sitting on a shelf, gathering dust because you aren’t setting appointments in which to use it! And while a sales presentation is all well and good, a well-scripted, live demo is required to show prospects it’s not all smoke and mirrors.

Of course, teaching a team of people what to say in each of these situations, not to mention, simply remembering yourself, is an entirely different animal than simply putting together a compelling set of sales slides.

 

The key is to take as much variability and improvisation out of the equation as possible so you can define, test and stick with what works.

But where do you even start?

First, it’s a question of making sure that the commercial arguments you likely have embodied in materials like your sales deck, and core sales narrative, are also available in the format for other parts of the sales funnel. That is, you can't build a house with just a hammer. You need the right tools for each part of the job. It’s also a question of how you want your company to sound. It’s not too far off from how startups need to position and define the public-facing tone and voice they want to use.

Sales is a significant channel through which companies need to tell a compelling story in a distinct voice. Every email your sales team sends, every voicemail they leave, and every demo they give in person or over the phone reinforces or detracts from this commercial argument you make to your prospect about why your solution is so fantastic for her business. The success or failure of this commercial argument is what will drive your revenue success or failure. You can see why starting from a strong position is so important.

In this exclusive article excerpted from my book on enterprise sales for founders and other first time sales staff, I share the critical lessons I’ve learned to nailing these interactions both in our sales org at TalentBin, and at numerous other early stage sales orgs I’ve advised.

But I also know it’s not enough to suggest the type of things people should say to clients. That’s why I’ve shared a number of examples of actual emails and demo scripts that have worked for us. You can take these and mold them to your own tone and value proposition, but if you’re looking for a starting point to get these conversations rolling, you’ve come to the right place.

EMAIL TEMPLATES

Just like your sales deck, the emails your team sends should be medium-specific encapsulations of your sales narrative, with an end goal of driving recipients to an online or offline presentation and demo. And just like your deck, these can start at the most basic level and get more elaborate from there as your messaging gets more specific.

We’ll start with the idea of outbound outreach. While inbound leads (that you heavily qualify) are the highest-quality source of potential deals, it’s unlikely when you’re first starting out that you’ll have inbound demand of any merit before you start doing outbound.

To start, you simply need a couple of outreach templates that you’ll use to contact decision-makers at prospect companies. The benefit of prospecting is that...

Read the rest of this article at firstround.com...

Thanks for this article excerpt and its graphics to Peter Kazanjy, the co-founder of Atrium and TalentBin, of First Round.

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