Are you a food label reader? Much of my grocery store time is spent reading labels. I'm always looking to see the ingredients, searching for trans fats, mono and diglycerides, in addition to other incidious chemicals that make me immediately search for a piece of fruit.

Since my last Twinkie was consumed around 1975,  I'm not too familiar with what's in them, however, when I read an article in Newsweek recently and found out that there are 39 ingredients in a Twinkie, including a "food grade plaster of Paris", I was pretty grossed out. Especially since I made a friend a birthday cake on Friday that had only 7 ingredients and it was awesome. (After all, what's a Twinkie...cake with filling, right?)

So what does this have to do with sales, you ask, aside from the fact that many of us practically live in airports and are forced to eat food from vending machines? Quite a bit, you see. Because if we can bake a cake with 7 ingredients instead of 39, why do we need to spill our guts with 473 features and benefits in our sales calls? Why not just discuss 7 of them?

Since I admit to being obsessed with food, let's consider the magic in SEVEN and put some structure to this whole feature/benefit thing. Let's say you have a club sandwich. You are sort of a picky eater, so you order one with bread, meat, and a slice of tomato. If your bread is the feature, your meat is the benefit, and the tomato a check-in, you have a nice immediate engaging conversation with your customer. Just layer it this way from now on in your call so that you AND the customer are focused. I refer to this as the F-B-C.

"F" is for "feature (defined as a fact, you know that!)  "B" is for "benefit" (there are only 5 in the universe...saves money, saves time, reduces stress, increases productivity, and makes money.) Lastly is your "C" for "check-in". This is where you know that your customer is inviting more information--or not. So, your club sandwich, using my business at SalesPEAK, may look like this:

"Curly, we prepare for working with your team by getting to know how they do their jobs, before we plan the programs. The reason for that is your organization will gain more relevance from the program and you'll see quicker sales results to make more money. How important is that to you when choosing a firm to work with?"

Then, shut up and wait for your customer to respond. If Curly says, "Renee we hear that from all phone selling training companies.", I'll come back with another part of the club sandwich. This time, it may sound like this:

"Curly,one differentiator our clients point out is that we have a best seller on the topic of phone selling that addresses HOW salespeople are dealing with customers in today's competitive and often-changing environment. They like this because they get to maximize their training dollars with a book for all of their salespeople that actually WORKS, gaining immediate results in their investment. On a scale of 1-10, how significant is that for you to get these results?"

Keep repeating until you have 5-7 layers of this club sandwich. The beauty of this technique is that it is quicker than talking too much and if you are on the phone, while your customer may be tempted to check his email, maybe you have just engaged him enough to get some real meat in this conversation, leading to a faster closed sale.

Try out your club sandwich and let me know how it goes. Just don't eat a Twinkie for dessert!

(c)Renee Walkup, All Rights Reserved, www.salespeak.com   678 587-9911