All About Sales Scripting and Sales Training

I want to tell you a story that might seem a bit long-winded, but holds one of the secrets to better customer service and higher sales -- without spending a penny.

I'm not talking about minor increases of 10% and 20% for your sales but MASSIVE increases of 50%, 100%, 200% and even 300%. Every industry is different, but time and again people have achieved these massive results, and I'm going to tell you how. But first, I have to set the stage for your understanding.

Out of college years ago, I ended up working for a prominent Wall Street firm. My job, as Director of Research, was to come up with all sorts of mathematical models - anything and everything that could be computerized - that could be turned into computerized systems that were automatically traded to make money in stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies. At that time, I was one of a handful of experts in the world for this field, though everyone does it today.

The whole idea behind this computerized portfolio trading was based on BACK-TESTING investment ideas I thought might work. First I would come up with some theoretical idea of an investment method that might work in producing good BUY and SELL signals for precious metals, bonds, stocks, commodities or whatever, back-test that idea on past data to see if it indeed worked historically, and if it performed well in the past, we would then take the risk and incorporate it into the portfolio system that would generate buy and sell signals for future trading.

The point?

We came up with ideas, TESTED them to see if they worked historically, and if they did we made them an automatic component of our portfolio system. We never ASSUMED anything worked but TESTED all our ideas to see if they indeed produced superior trading returns in the past. It was all about coming up with ideas and then TESTING them. If they worked, we tried to improve them here and there, bit by bit, to get even better investment results. Granted this is a different field than marketing and sales, but I want you to take away the lesson of testing. In fact, I have super secret investment systems that go back 50-80 years and work much better than buy-and-hold over these incredibly long time periods.

Now all through those Wall Street years as head of investment research, I was an avid reader. Two books during that time struck me in particular: Ogilvy on Advertising was one of them, and the other was John T. Molloy's Dress for Success.

In Dress for Success, Molloy performed hundreds and hundreds of tests to see what colors and types of clothing styles people responded to BEST for sales situations and situations of trust and rapport. The book is a masterpiece of testing, simply amazing and definitely under appreciated.

Molloy didn't just speculate or shoot from the hit claiming, "People will trust you if you wear a button down Oxford white shirt," but performed dozens of tests to come up with the EXACT color and style that would produce the results he was interested in, and he analyzed how people responded to clothes people in terms of the sexes and all sorts of other groupings.

Dress for Success, which became a bestseller, impressed the heck out of me because it, too, stressed the premise of TESTING for results to come up with a conclusion on the particular clothing you should wear to bring a response you want. The idea was testing once again, but the subject matter was CLOTHING.

David Ogilvy, the famous advertiser who built the firm Ogilvy and Mather, was also a big fan of TESTING. He worked for George Gallup at his Audience Research Institute where he also learned the value of testing. He was so impressed with this insight that it's stressed throughout his books.

Ogilvy wrote that he especially admired Claude Hopkins, "Father of Modern Advertising," who wrote the famous work you should have in your library, Scientific Advertising.This classic also stressed the idea of TESTING all your advertising and marketing ideas rather than simply assuming they will work.

So here we have the idea of testing once again, though in the field of ADVERTISING AND MARKETING.

Ogilvy wrote "Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read Hopkins' Scientific Advertising seven times," which is why I updated Claude Hopkins' work with my own book, The Claude Hopkins Rare Ad Collection and Study Guide which you can find at www.ClaudeHopkinsAdvertising.com.

Ogilvy came to the conclusion, from working with Gallup, studying Hopkins and mastering the methods of direct marketing, that the only way to improve advertising results was not being creative but TESTING an idea, seeing if it increased sales and then incrementally improving it.

Once again, he didn't take the position that anything and everything goes in advertising but that SALES results matter, and you find out what works best by testing. Plain and simple, test to find out how best to sell, how best to market and present your goods and services and satisfy people's wants and needs and desires.

Rather than go into my forays into naturopathic and Chinese medicine, which also seconds this lesson on the importance of TESTING, I want to fast forward this dialogue and come to the topic of sales and advertising Today.

In many cases, I tell clients that for better SALES RESULTS they should methodically test which sentences they use in dealing with clients to find out which ones produce the best results. It's like finding out which type of guarantee produces the most sales, because it taps into what customers want MOST.

For instance, the following Killer sentence has tested best with many retailers in helping increase their sales.

When a potential customer comes into a store, a retailer or salesperson should not ask, "What are you looking for?" Rather, if they want to increase their sales and customer service, they should probably ask the following question (using these EXACT words): "What brings you into the store today?" or "What ad brings you into the store today?"

This sentence has tested best in establishing better rapport with customers, helping salesmen serve them better, and ultimately increasing sales than any other sentence people have tried. Of course you have to test this yourself compared to what you are already saying, but you'll probably find that any other sentence doesn't lead to as favorable sales results as this one.

Try it and see, or simply tell your retail store buddies to help them out and wait to see if they buy you dinner as THANKS!

Finding this type of sentence that increases your sales results, and then teaching your staff to use it is called SALES SCRIPTING. When you go to McDonalds, order a hamburger and they ask "Large coke with that?" -- I guarantee whatever sentence they use has been tested to see which one increases up-sells the most. They've probably tested all sorts of possibilities such as "Would you like a soft drink with that?", "Large or small soda?", "Soda?", "Large Coke or small" and so on.

Finding that sentence and then teaching it to your staff to use is the process of sales scripting.

Elmer Wheeler, who wrote Tested Sentences that Sell in 1938, performed 10 years of such research testing 105,000 words and phrases on 19 million people, and wrote that there are no magic words but there is word magic. He urged that salesmen build a sales talk through testing, and stressed that how you say things can definitely have a profound result on your sales.

That's the key to sales scripting. If you just record the sales talks of your superstar salesmen, combine them together and add in NLP phraseology, and then turn those sales dialogues into scripts for your underachievers, you can revolutionize your sales results almost overnight.

One rule Wheeler came up with is that you should always phrase your words to give customers a choice between something and something else. For instance, in helping restaurants he found that the phrase "Would like red wine or white wine with your dinner?" doubled wine sales versus "Would you like wine with your meal, sir?" I've written a book for restaurant waiters and waitresses to help them increase their tips, and this is just one of the many secrets inside that you can dig out from the field of NLP and sales scripting.

Without doubt, the absolute master of the sales scripting process is Dr. Donald Moines, who has studied thousands of salespeople and who specializes in writing sales scripts for financial services.

You can find his book Unlimited Selling Power at Amazon.com to get introduced to the field, and give him a few hundred thousand dollars and he'll produce dynamite results for your business. Pick up Unlimited Selling Power by Donald Moines and Kenneth Lloyd if you want to find out more.

SALES SCRIPTING is actually commonsense selling where you know what words you should or should not use in selling to people. There's nothing devious, manipulative or hypnotic about it. It's basically diplomatic word usage.

For instance, the following is also consider Sales Scripting or sales NLP. In your sales conversations (and letters) you can replace the following words on the left with these on the right and your selling situations will usually run much smoother:

This is such important information for building rapport with customers, and smoothing away their pre-purchase jitters, that I helped put together several books on this topic which you can find at www.thewordsthatsell.com . They make use of psychological profiles, NLP, occupational studies, and tested sentences of what to say or not say when dealing with people of certain occupational groups.

We have reports on selling to, persuading, negotiating with, motivating, dealing with entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, engineers, CEO's, personnel directors, ... you name it. It's powerful stuff, but not what I wrote to tell you about.

The topic, however, finally brings up the concept of NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming, which is what I've been leading up to. This whole article is about the words you should use - and how to find them -- to better bond with customers, increase rapport, find out what they REALLY want and thereby ultimately serve them better and increase your sales in the process.

If you sell a product or service for a living, you already know that it's hard to sell anything to anyone without first establishing rapport. Without rapport people won't like you or trust you, and if they don't believe you or like you, they won't listen to what you have to say. Forget about sales in such a situation.

So how do you establish rapport?

The answer is through NLP, which teaches you how to bond with prospects in the quickest way possible so you can find out what they ULTIMATELY want. Kevin Hogan taught me the following tested NLP formula, or sales script, for quickly determining what clients or prospects want.

Sales is about ASKING questions, and you can QUICKLY find out what your customer is really after if you lead them through the following 4 questions:

This formula is GOLDEN. Memorize it, practice it, use it. It's basic NLP.

Another basic principle of NLP is that some people can be described as auditory thinkers, visual thinkers or kinesthetic thinkers. NLP teaches you how to quickly determine which type of representational system predominates in a person, after which you can start using words keyed to that representation system to bond with the prospect.

For instance, with visual thinkers you can use words in your sales dialogue such as see, illustrate, picture, imagine, show or colorful. When you are talking to auditory processors, you should pepper your sales talk with phrases such as listen, talk it over, hear, resonate, call, or tune it. Kinesthetic thinkers can be approached with words such as feel, touch upon, get a hold on, heavy, light, or walk through. This is a whole art in itself, but just too complicated for me.

Some people have NLP skills as a natural talent, and others have to learn it, but how do you learn NLP and what do you learn to help you handle customers and ultimately serve them better and increase your sales in the process?

You can spend a fortune on books, tape sets and expensive courses out there and never really learn how to use NLP, so here's the secret weapon. Here's the point of the whole article. Here's the valuable tip I'm writing to give you that finally made NLP "click" for me and made the whole field come alive and USEFUL.

Like others, I could not digest all those NLP teachings out there until I came upon this source. NLP is now no longer too complicated, too involved, too esoteric.

Why? Because I found Glenn Osborn.

Glenn is a marketer and NLP expert. He has gone to dozens of Jay Abraham seminars, marketing seminars, copywriting seminars -- years worth and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth. He has specialized in studying millionaires and billionaires and how they made their fortunes.

In particular -- and this is the whole point of this lesson -- Glenn is totally unlike other NLP experts in that he has TESTED everything he has LEARNED from dealing with SUPERSTAR salesmen and entrepreneurs who have used NLP to build their sales organizations into GIANTS.

Everything he has developed is simple, practical, TESTED and WORKS.

I cannot go into the details but remember the stories about investment testing, David Ogilvy, Claude Hopkins, Dress For Success, and Elmer Wheeler we just went over? Glenn belongs in that category, which is why I can endorse his stuff.

Glenn has a pet peeve - he hates people who spit out all sorts of marketing, advertising, sales and NLP theories but who cannot explain in stepwise 1-2-3 fashion how to implement what works in increasing sales. As stated, he's spent a lifetime interviewing multimillionaire and even billionaires to find out the EXACT words, techniques and VERBAL SALES FORMULAS they used to increase their sales.

So what's the point?

Glenn has lots of short NLP tape sets, usually about $100 bucks each, on all sorts of topics, including how men can meet woman using NLP. Not thousand dollar tape sets, not courses costing hundreds of dollars, just power sets of tapes for about $100 on methods you can immediately APPLY that WORK.

His number one product that will increase your sales, if anything in NLP can, is called "Enchanted NLP." The point of this entire lesson? Get it!

Not only "can you find out more," but I WANT YOU TO FIND OUT MORE about Glenn's Enchanted NLP package, so go there right now.

If this is what you need, get it, listen to it, and master it so that your sales increase through the POWER OF NLP that helps you find out what customers really want, and helps you figure out how to BEST help them. There's no hypnosis involved, no manipulation, no trickery, no slickness -- just better communication through NLP that helps you serve customers better. That, in turn, leads to more sales because of more TRUST, better service and better communication. The materials in Enchanted NLP help you create LOYAL customers for life.

This $100 tape set is the multimillionaire secret I wanted to give you concerning Sales Scripting, but I needed all this intro to make you appreciate the DEPTH of this material and its importance. All its contents are simple, simple, simple and tested, tested, tested. It's not complicated, there's little to memorize, it works. Check out his site. Everything so far was written just to tell you to go look!

So let's review.

One of the keys to increasing your sales is to find out what sentences WORK BEST by TESTING them and then implementing what you find. Copywriters do that in writing advertisements and sales letters and you should do that for what you SAY in sales situations as well. Sales scripting is copywriting testing for the spoken word.

The biggest thing you can test, other than written advertising, is the exact words you use when talking directly to a customer. This field is called NLP or sales scripting, and to learn some of the best NLP ideas for bonding with customers and ultimately selling more, I'm directing you to Glenn Osborn who has done more to simplify this field than anyone else I know.

Go read about his * Enchanted NLP * package, which is a lesson in NLP itself. That's all I want to say. And if you like you can get his other products, too, as most people do.

Lastly, pick up Donald Moines' book on amazon.com to help me feel I've done all I can to teach you about Sales scripting.

The best of marketing and management to you,

Bill