Mr. Carpenter doesn’t need a preamble to this tip. It just makes good sense!

TIP # 73 Talk Money Instead of Percentages. If your product or service can save your prospect money or provide a significant return on investment, tell him the value in dollars. For example, if you discover that he is spending $ 100,000 a year on IT maintenance and your solution can save him 30 % per year, tell him you can save him over $30,000 a year. You can bring home the value when you translate that into what he could do with the money, such as hire a new assistant or free up money for advertising.

Carpenter, E.R. Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend (Kindle Locations 423-427). Forest Wade Press. Kindle Edition.

Your job as a professional salesperson is to engender confidence in your prospect about your abilities. You need to know as much about your prospect’s business as possible. In the case of a tie regarding your product and/or your company, you need to make yourself the reason that your prospect buys your product. In my book, I give suggestions on how to track news about your prospects and customers. Mr. Carpenter does the same in his book and even gives a great template for communicating that information to a prospect.

TIP # 8 Quote news about the prospect’s company and the source of that news. Using news stories about your prospect is one of the better ways to personalize your message to her. It allows her to know that you are thinking about her company and not 400 similar companies too. When using news stories, be smart about it. If you discover a problem the company is having that your company can solve, by all means, use it. Yet you don’t necessarily need to find a problem to use the news as a trigger event. Good news about a company such as growth, relocating, or hiring a new CFO could all be reasons to reach out. For example, if their stock is rising, you could share how your solution can help the stock to continue to rise. If the company is relocating, perhaps your marketing solution might be just what they need to keep their customers informed. It’s impossible to mass produce trigger event – prompted emails. That’s great because personalization is desperately needed in sales. However, you can always create templates to speed up the process. They would look something like this:

Subject Line : (Name): Regarding the (blank) article on (Company)

Hey (Name) –

I hope this email finds you well. I wanted to reach out to you specifically because I read on (website) about how (company) is (challenge or pain). If this is still a challenge you’re dealing with, I have a few ideas on how you can solve it. One way is to eliminate no – shows on first sales meetings. That’s something we specialize in at ABC Company. ABC Company helps organizations with this challenge through our permission-based sales and marketing database. Executive prospects register for the database and tell us their top business challenge up front. Check out this case study we did with Coca-Cola at www.emanuelcarpenter.com / cokecasestudy. Let’s schedule some time next Tuesday or Wednesday for a quick, demo/intro call. Just let me know what time works for you, and I’ll take care of the rest.

Let me know,

Emanuel Carpenter

Carpenter, E.R. Brain Dump: 167 Tips & Tricks from a Six-Figure Sales Prospecting Legend (Kindle Locations 137-155). Forest Wade Press. Kindle Edition. (content reformatted to make it easier to read on this site)