Why Your Agency Needs a Sales Script but Shouldn't Use It

Welcome to Inbound Sales Journey. If you want to hone your sales skills and learn from the leaders on inbound selling, you've come to the right place. This episode of Inbound Sales Journey is brought to you by Do Inbound, the world's first project and process management platform built specifically for inbound marketing agencies. Learn more@doinbound.com now here are your hosts, Ryan and Gray.

Welcome back to Inbound Sales Journey. This week on episode number 99, Ryan and I are going to be digging into sales scripts. So, Ryan, we are going to dive right in here today. Why don't you walk me through what sales scripts are and then does my agency need them?

So sales scripts is basically. I mean, in a very literal sense. And a lot of agencies, but just like salespeople, companies in general have scripts. And the idea is it is a script that a salesperson can essentially read from, or it's a very thorough outline to help them understand what they need to say during a sales call or a meeting, but typically over the phone for a confession.

I've used sales scripts on a live call before.

But you didn't know what they were. Why'd you ask me that question?

I forgot. Temporarily trying to set you up here, Ryan.

Yeah. You're speaking on behalf of the people.

I just. I use them. I didn't know they were called sales scripts until you explained it to me.

Oh, there you go. Great. How did.

That's a lie.

I'm gonna toss it back over. Have you actually used them?

I have, yeah.

How'd it go?

Not very well. Shockingly well.

That's good, because that's the premise of my episode.

We. I remember that was like, a big deal. One of our first trips, actually, before we ever went to an inbound. So this would have been probably middle of the early 2013 up in Boston. Went to the HubSpot office, hung out with them for a day, and talked to a couple folks on the sales team and then the partner channel team, they gave us some scripts, and we were like, this is awesome. This is really helpful material. So naturally, noob mistake, get back and I'll word for word and pretty much have them. I literally. I remember this. I think I've got maybe five different variations or pages or something all printed out on paper and had it taped up on the wall right behind where.

Such an embarrassing story.

I know this is horrible. Where my computer was. I can't believe that there was a point in time and not that far in the past where this was what I used. And that Was essentially the reference point for. I mean, I didn't go. I'd like to save a very small like 2% of face here and say I didn't actually read it word for word. But I had them up there and based on where the conversation would go, I kind of have my little flowchart of. All right, well, here's what we'll try. Try that probably for a week. And realized like, I cannot try and read something and go all robotic on this. I just need to understand what we're selling, what we're doing, and I just need more experience. But I need to do this on my own. I need to own these answers. I can't use someone else's words here.

So. Okay, this is where I'm gonna go with this gray. Because. And I'm gonna help you look a little bit better because I do. I don't believe that what you did fully was. Was wrong. I think the way you did it was wrong. But there are legitimate ways. Yeah, it's like kind of like the father. Like, I'm not mad, disappointed.

You actually didn't do the wrong thing, you just did it the wrong way. So congratulations on messing up the right thing to do.

Right.

What?

So, alright, let me circle back here. So.

Need to work on your dad skills.

Yeah. Not a father yet. You've got two. You're ahead of me.

You've got time.

So with sales scripts, they're actually gonna be really helpful and not from the sense of reading them word for word because I think that's gonna really, really hurt anyone. And people know, you know, like you can't just read something and have it sound natural. Like no one's that good at doing that. But I think that creating sales scripts is actually a benefit to you as an agency. And here's why. Whether you're either a small agency getting started, a couple of founders selling for yourselves, or you're a larger agency and you are bringing in new people into sales. Creating a sales script can be hugely, hugely beneficial. And the reason is, is because it forces you to sit down and think about what are the questions that I'm asked? Or. Well, not. Or. And I guess the things that I want to extract from prospects to help identify a good fit. So the exercise of building sales scripts, which gray is why I said that you did it wrong because you took someone else's.

Yep.

And tried it and tried to actually use it versus what I'm suggesting is create your own, but don't use it. Don't use it literally as a Guide to read from. Use it in a sense that it's going to help provide structure and framework for you yourselves. If you're agency owners and you want to try to get some consistency. And it's really the first step in developing kind of your sales process is what are the different questions I need to be asking that I need answers to? Getting those documented and getting everyone on the same page there and then sharing that with any new team members that you have. What's also really helpful is let's say you have multiple sales reps or you have multiple people doing sales and handling at the agency. Have everyone create their own version of a sales script. And really, it's kind of like I say script. It's really an outline of the call, how it goes and what information they're trying to gather. And have everyone do it independently and then collect all of those and bring them together and review them all together. Hey, how are you doing this versus how am I doing this? What are some of the common things that we see? Like, I'm sure you guys are going to have similar types of questions. There's overlap there. Those are probably good ones that you should be asking. But then you might find out that one rep is asking different questions or has a different flow to their calls. That actually works for them and is pretty beneficial. So gather some ideas, get everyone's kind of take in different styles together and use that as a way for people to learn from one another. So have the script actually have it written out. You can even print it out and keep it near you. And typically the way that I see it done is it's not paragraph formatting. What it's going to be is more sentences with checkboxes, and you can check those off as you go. That still might trip people up. So not saying that you should definitely have that, but at the end maybe review it. And hey, did I get answers to these questions that I should have had? So that's great. I think what I think is the most beneficial thing is go through the process of creating it. That's where you're going to get the most out of it. And then use it after as kind of a checklist of did I get the correct information? And eventually what you're going to do is as you do more and more sales calls and you go through that process, it's going to get more natural. You're going to feel better about the information you're trying to get.

Well, yeah, once you take the time to go through and rewrite it in your Own words, figure out how you like to explain it. And then you're going to get to the point where like, eventually this happened. Eventually I get to the point where now I can mix and match from different things that have worked. Like, here's a metaphor that worked well over here. Here's how I combated this objection that somebody had. See, I shouldn't even say combated. Combated sounds so aggressive. And like we're fighting. We talked about same side selling a couple episodes. I need to go with a different approach that isn't the battle paradigm. But then you're able to start to pull from the experience that you have and the comfort level that you have is you just understand and know your own process. But I do think it is helpful to have those resources as a starting point. And you can certainly gain from what other people have done. But rewriting that in your own words is going to help you. And honestly, that what helped me the most was trying to onboard other people into sales at Guavabox and being forced to teach them and walk through, what does sales look like? How do we handle these objections? How do we handle these questions? What are the answers? What's worked for me? What hasn't worked for me? A lot of what hasn't worked for me. And then also just writing about it, writing about sales, I think helps you out an awful lot as well. And I mean, there's a whole bunch of different things that go into maturing in a sales role. But I agree with what you're saying. I think that taking the time to build those out probably is helpful. I was going to add in. You talked about the checkboxes having. That's one of the things that. From HubSpot, which of course comes from like baseline selling, Dave Curlin and a whole bunch of other resources that they've put pulled together. But having a framework, if it's not checkboxes, you can still have a framework. Initially they went with the Bant framework, budget, authority, need and timeline. And you've just got this acronym in your mind of have we hit on all of these things? And this is the order that I want to work through them. And then that eventually expanded out into goals, plans, the whole gpct. There you go. The whole. The whole framework that you have. So I think figuring out how do I want this call to go ideally, and then how do I adjust as the call may flows a little bit, a little bit differently than what I had scripted out, you'll get to that comfort point. But I do definitely agree that taking some time to plot out what you're going to say in these different situations. Just like an athlete or anyone else, you know, you're going to think about what types of situations am I going to face? How am I gonna respond to those? Same thing applies in sales, so. Right on.

Yeah, we'll take the athletic kind of approach here. So when you write out the script, you're studying up on the. On the team, and then at the end, after you have the call, it's like watching film. Check off the boxes and see what you did, what you didn't do, what you can get better at.

There you go.

That'll wrap us up. Gray. Episode 99 in the books.

In the books next week, the big one Hundo.

Can't say it better than that one, hundo. You probably could, but no, it'll be a special episode. We're gonna recap some of the things that we have learned from a hundred episodes of Inbound Sales Journey and podcasting in general. It's gonna be maybe an eclectic episode, Greg. Excited for it.

That's a lot of podcasts. Technically, our hundredth episode is gonna be what we've learned from 99 episodes. Oh, Gray, these math people. All right, let's wrap this one up here, guys, before we go any further down the hill. And please join us next week for episode number 100. We're excited to celebrate that one and we'll talk with you in a week.

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