Sales people often believe that prospects will remember their emails or voice mails, when in actuality we are really not that important.It’s a crowded business environment and we get inundated with information every day, or every waking hour for that matter.
Therefore, sales messages should be crafted a little bit like ads.Sales messages shouldn't sound salesy, but they need to be memorable. Just like in advertising, you want to make sure that you penetrate a person’s mind with your communication. And by penetrate I don’t mean that you aimlessly repeat the same thing (which some sales people do) but you effectively craft a message that will resonate with your target audience.The best ads are the ones where we not only remember the message, but we also connect the message to a brand. Geico anybody?This can only be accomplished when we weave repetition into our outreach.In other words, you want to say the same thing over and over, using slightly different versions, changing the order a bit.Let me give you an example. Let’s paint the scenario where you want to get the attention of a COO (Chief Operation Officer) of a mid-size manufacturing company. Your goal is to get a response from that person to either, book a meeting with him/her or get a referral to the person who is responsible for that area.You want to craft an email/phone outreach cadence of five touchpoints where you use the value proposition over and over, using slightly different words.For example, you talk about your solution and how it can create efficiencies to help save time and money and that’s the message you want to come back to time and time again. Everything else you say is basically a filler. What you want them to remember is “saving time and money by creating efficiencies” using your solution.But the key is not only repetition, but also to have no more than 10 business days between the first and the fifth outreach. You can only tap into people’s memory when the intervals between each outreach are short.Again, we all get inundated with information and for somebody to remember you and the message you are trying to communicate, it is important to stick to this recipe.Short Time Frame + Repetition + PerseveranceAlso, many sales people are hung up on the fact that their prospects should remember the company they represent. Unless you work for IBM, SAP or any of the other known brands, people generally don’t care. What they care about is “What’s in for me?”. The key is not for them to remember the company you represent, but how you can help them solve a business problem.