Whether you believe you need to access and engage with Decision Makers or not, having a comprehensive Reference story is critical for all phases of your selling journey. The makeup of a solid Customer “story” Reference is designed to help you take pieces of it for cold calling, Social media prospecting, first sales call agenda, and throughout any and all phase of your sales cycle.
Let’s take a look at what makes up a killer Story.
The first rule of thumb is you need to state their pains and issues BEFORE you sell what you have. Then share how another account, similar to them achieved their goals by addressing these pains. Even after that, you do NOT sell your solution. You are selling the “results” your solution brings to your customers! All of this requires “proofs”. These proofs (free “gifts of Knowledge”) make the prospect immediately comfortable and help build trust – so they either finish reading your email, listening to your voicemail or engaging with you in a face-to-face meeting. These proofs are NOT easy to get. But your prospects could care less. If you do not have them, you can bet your competitor will! They are:
- How you improved a process “or” lowered costs that was measured in actual $, %, or Time.
- How you improved a process “or” lowered costs by quoting Industry figures if you do not have actual customer metrics.
Let’s look at an example:
Reference Story 1:
_________, a healthcare company, struggling to comply with security policies that were recently implemented in response to a theft of intellectual property; was looking for a way to identify, in real-time, any unauthorized attempts by insiders and contractors to access employee-sensitive and confidential data. (Note the pain or issue and the impact it has to make it of importance).
The impact to the business was estimated at ___________________ (loss of $, loss of profits, etc.). Shortly after deploying our Solution (note the lack of a product pitch), they identified and reacted immediately to an employee attempting to run an automated password extraction routine. The solution enabled _______ (this is a few words of your technology or solution’s key benefit) to take immediate action, preventing all unauthorized access, and saving, an estimated ________ (the close using $, %, Time, Risk, etc.). in potential loss of intellectual property.
Reference Story 2:
__________, a leading financial organization, required to comply with both SOX and internal auditing policies, was struggling with finding a way to cost-effectively and efficiently audit user database access to highly sensitive customer data; as well as to monitor privileged database user activities.
The impact to the business was estimated at __________. Using our solution, they were automatically monitoring all database access and activity; while streamlining the auditing and reporting process. This led to a 15% reduction in audit preparation costs, estimated at _______, with a _____ ROI.
What do you do next? Send us an email and we’ll arrange for you to speak with Ed to chat about how these learnings can help build more sales just for your business.