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How Seasoned Salespeople Should be Using Their Experience [Insights from Dr. Carmen Simon]

Jan 23rd, 2017

 

How can seasoned sales reps use their experience to hone more distinct messages while keeping the conversation fresh?

After all – the same old statistic, slide and conversation can feel old after a while. Although it might be true, sometimes it needs a fresh angle to make it more engaging.

Dr. Carmen Simon, author of Impossible to Ignore, shares some tips for experienced sales professionals who can make quick use of their professional experience to have impactful and memorable conversations with prospects and customers.

What are some tips for seasoned sales and marketing professionals that want to become more memorable?

CS: If you’re a seasoned professional, that means you have more expertise to create a distinguished message. Unfortunately, the reality I am observing is that even seasoned professionals fall victims to old habits and/or run out time to think of something fresh and distinct.

For example, I am sure you’ve seen many accomplished presenters use slides with Steve Jobs and how the iPhone changed everything. Stop doing that. These messages were memorable years ago when they were first presented. Now too many business people have at least one slide in their presentation on how the “iPhone has revolutionized” us. Time to move on.

Just the other day, I enjoyed seeing in someone’s presentation a message that said, “Mobile changed everything? Mobile changed nothing.” I liked how that stood out from a topic that has been run into the ground for too long.

I also remember a conversation with the CEO from a growing start-up, where one of the questions was, “which company has inspired you?” She went for the predictable: Apple, Google, and Amazon. Not a good differentiator for someone’s image because these are such ubiquitous answers.

So for any seasoned sales rep and marketer out there: please identify the similarity of messages in your field and then have the courage (and make the time) to deviate. The key word in this piece of advice is not “deviate” but rather “similarity.”

You can’t deviate unless your audiences have perceived some sort of similarity in your field. If you’re first to market with something, you don’t need to spend time “differentiating.” But if you’re not first, a distinguished message that moves away from similarity will be a memorable message.

If you missed the last posts in this series, read:

The next post in this blog series with Dr. Simon will discuss tips for driving improvement in sales training and onboarding programs.

Get a copy of Impossible to Ignore and find more information about Dr. Simon’s work at RexiMedia.com.