Selling to Business Tips: Keep it Simple

Recently I had a lengthy phone conversation with a prospect half way around the world. The company said they had their marketing strategy figured out, and they only needed help with sales execution. But, they admitted, sales were really tough and they didn’t understand why. I asked them what their value proposition was, and first the CEO responded for about five minutes, and then the second in command chipped in for another five. I told them that if they couldn’t articulate what their company did and why that was interesting in about 10 words they probably hadn’t really figured it out.

Most prospects won’t wait for 10 minutes of explanation to decide if they should give you another 10 minutes. But if you can tell them in one sentence, they might decide to listen to another one.

During the Civil War, newspaper correspondents developed a story telling style as an insurance policy against the telegraph wires being cut while they were sending it back to the paper. It’s still in use today. They would start with a simple statement of who, what, when, where, and why “After three days of bloodshed General Grant won a decisive battle over Lee outside the sleepy crossroads town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” If only that one sentence got through, the reader would at least get the essence of what happened. The next paragraph would retell the story in more detail, and the next in more detail, and so forth. This also made it easy for the editors to cut the end off the story to fit the available space.

This is the way to tell your story. Start with a simple description of what you do, who would find it interesting, and why anyone would care. If you tell the right person about your business in that fashion, the best response you can hear is: “How do you do that?” That answer means you’ve hit pay dirt. The prospect wants to see evidence that it might work for them. “How do you do that?” gives you the opportunity to re-tell your story with more detail, just like those newspaper reporters from the Civil War. As the prospect gets more engaged, there will be ample time for more and more detail.