Here are the Scripts for Sales Success

This article is by Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of Atrium and TalentBin (acquired by

Monster Worldwide in 2014). It's excerpted from the sales demo, phone, and email
scripts chapter in his book, Founding Sales, which tackles everything founders and first-
time sales staff need to know about acquiring early customers, building and scaling
winning sales teams.

Building a winning sales deck is one thing. But what about the email templates needed
to get prospects on the phone? What about the phone scripts for setting those sales
presentation appointments? The best sales deck in the world isn’t super helpful sitting on
a shelf, gathering dust because you aren’t setting appointments in which to use it! And
while a sales presentation is all well and good, a well-scripted, live demo is required to
show prospects it’s not all smoke and mirrors.

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Of course, teaching a team of people what to say in each of these situations, not to
mention, simply remembering yourself, is an entirely different animal than simply putting
together a compelling set of sales slides. The key is to take as much variability and
improvisation out of the equation as possible so you can define, test and stick with what
works. But where do you even start?

First, it’s a question of making sure that the commercial arguments you likely have
embodied in materials like your sales deck, and core sales narrative, are also available in
the format for other parts of the sales funnel. That is, you can't build a house with just a
hammer. You need the right tools for each part of the job. It’s also a question of how you
want your company to sound. It’s not too far off from how startups need to position and
define the public-facing tone and voice they want to use.

Sales is a significant channel through which companies need to tell a compelling story in
a distinct voice. Every email your sales team sends, every voicemail they leave, and
every demo they give in person or over the phone reinforces or detracts from this
commercial argument you make to your prospect about why your solution is so fantastic
for her business. The success or failure of this commercial argument is what will drive
your revenue success or failure. You can see why starting from a strong position is so
important.

In this exclusive article excerpted from my book on enterprise sales for founders and
other first time sales staff, I share the critical lessons I’ve learned to nailing these
interactions both in our sales org at TalentBin, and at numerous other early stage sales
orgs I’ve advised.

But I also know it’s not enough to suggest the type of things people should say to clients.
That’s why I’ve shared a number of examples of actual emails and demo scripts that have
worked for us. You can take these and mold them to your own tone and value
proposition, but if you’re looking for a starting point to get these conversations rolling,
you’ve come to the right place.

EMAIL TEMPLATES
Just like your sales deck, the emails your team sends should be medium-specific
encapsulations of your sales narrative, with an end goal of driving recipients to an online
or offline presentation and demo. And just like your deck, these can start at the most
basic level and get more elaborate from there as your messaging gets more specific.

We’ll start with the idea of outbound outreach. While inbound leads (that you heavily
qualify) are the highest-quality source of potential deals, it’s unlikely when you’re first
starting out that you’ll have inbound demand of any merit before you start doing
outbound.

To start, you simply need a couple of outreach templates that you’ll use to contact
decision-makers at prospect companies. The benefit of prospecting is that you are able to
select prospects that have the business pain characteristics that your solution is able to
transform and relieve. So conveniently, when you’re creating these templates, you can
assume that readers have the pain points that you’re solving and, moreover, talk to them
plainly about their business pains and your solution.

As you read the following email templates, you should recognize parts of your master
narrative: the problem and who has it (the recipient!), the differences between yours and
existing solutions, and proof points of your product’s superiority.

You’ll note the subject lines are often customized — there’s information in there to show
the prospect that this message was specifically designed for him or her — and include
qualification information (e.g., “Hiring Ruby devs? That’s NOT easy”). You’ll also see
that the templates include “click targets,” hyperlinks pointing to pieces of collateral (I
like YouTube demo videos in particular) that draw clicks from the prospect.
These are important not just because they can provide more context and persuasion, but
because, with the sort of email instrumentation you should implement, they will allow
you to see which prospects are clicking and thus demonstrating interest in what you have
to say. And they don’t have to be just text links. You can embed a screenshot of a slide or
— one of my favorites — a thumbnail of a demo video that’s hyperlinked to the source to
drive click-through to more compelling information. Email templates should also include
links to your website. This helps with the click-target question, but also allows the
prospect to learn more, and potentially become an inbound lead requesting your demo.

You’ll also note that these sample templates are very specific about what the solution
addresses, and take pains to demonstrate to the prospect that research was done to
confirm that he or she has those business pains. In TalentBin’s case, that’s hiring
technical talent. These emails don’t talk about “social recruiting.” They don’t talk about
“recruiting” in general. They don’t talk about interviewing. They talk about the pain
points of finding and recruiting technical talent, and potential solutions to those problems.
And the messaging continually comes back to the prospect’s point of view. Prospects
don’t care about you. They care about them.

You must prioritize the prospects’ point of view; even as you present
information about your solution, ground it in how it helps them.
The best templates do all of this in a plainspoken (dare I say fun?) way that speaks to the
prospect candidly, authoritatively, and as a peer. They avoid bullshit jargon-speak and
unnecessarily “businessy” communication patterns.

Same with overly ornate designs. Your templates should be 100% text, avoiding
marketing images — with the exception of screenshots and slides, if you like. But avoid
high-sheen logos and such. It makes your outreach look like a robot sent it, like there’s no
qualification behind it and it’s therefore inapplicable spam rather than highly targeted
consultative outreach. Don’t let your emails get mistaken for that other crap.

Lastly, you’ll notice that there are strong calls to action at the conclusion of each email,
asking to set up a one-on-one interaction (whether via telepresence à la Join.me,
ClearSlide, etc. or face-to-face). That is the ultimate goal of this outreach: to drive to a
synchronous presentation and discussion of the prospect’s business pains and your
solution. A “demo,” in the vernacular.

Here are a couple examples of cold-outreach emails (with mail merge code in place):

TEMPLATE: Short and sweet — quick pain

documentation and ask.
SUBJECT LINE: Hey {{First Name}}! The magical solution to your technical
recruiting headaches.

Hey {{First Name}},

I hope you're having a great day!

It’s {{User.FIRSTNAME}} at TalentBin, and I’m reaching out because I have something
that I think help make hiring all those Ruby, iOS, and Java roles I see on your career
page.

If you’re like most technical recruiters we work with (we have thousands of customers),
you’re probably frustrated by the poor LinkedIn profiles of most developers, the fact that
they don’t respond to InMails, and that it all just takes way too much time. Super
frustrating.

The good news is, TalentBin is designed specifically to reduce that time and drudgery via
automation, so you can spend more of your time having great candidate conversations
and selling them on working at {{CompanyName}}. Which is what recruiting is all
about, right?

You see, TalentBin is a talent search engine that helps recruiter find and reach out to
fantastic technical talent based on the activity they demonstrate on places like Github,
Stack Overflow, Twitter, Meetup, the US Patent Database, and more. More
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fClV97ONRyI

I'd love to show you how we might be able to help you find qualified technical candidates
for your open positions and hire more and better technical staff, faster, with less work on
your part.

Do you have 20 minutes next week? What times work for you? Feel free to reply to this
email, or you can ring me directly at {{User.BIZ_PHONE}}.

Thanks,
{{User.FIRSTNAME}}

TEMPLATE: Short and Sweet — the basics of

TalentBin.
SUBJECT LINE: Hey {{First Name}}! Meet TalentBin: the Talent Search Engine

Hey {{First Name}},

I hope you're having a great day!

It’s {{User.FIRSTNAME}} at Monster, and I am looking to introduce you to our newest

acquisition, a technical recruiting tool called TalentBin. It’s clear that
{{CompanyName}} is hiring technical talent, and I’d love the opportunity to show you
how TalentBin can make your life easier in that regard.

TalentBin has developed an amazing talent search engine used by recruiters to find
software developers and other technical talent. More in this helpful video
here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fClV97ONRyI

Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce, and hundreds of other companies have

recruiters using TalentBin daily to search for and recruit these hard-to-find candidates.

We derive our candidate data by crawling the *entire Internet* and making it your
technical-recruiting playground. That means we are capitalizing on the grand potential of
the Internet by recording information from disparate web locations and constructing rich
composite profiles. So all those software engineers with terrible or nonexistent LinkedIn
profiles who don’t respond to InMails? We have profiles for them based on what they do
on GitHub, Stack Overflow, Twitter, Meetup, and more. And we have their personal
email addresses.

These profiles span professional and personal interests, and they include personal email

addresses!

Based on the open technical positions I see listed on your career site
({{CareerSiteLink}}), TalentBin should serve you well.

I'd love to show you how TalentBin can help you find qualified technical candidates for
your open positions and hire more and better technical staff, faster, with less work on
your part.

Do you have 20 minutes next week? What times work for you? Feel free to reply to this
email, or you can ring me directly at {{User.BIZ_PHONE}}.

Thanks
{{User.FIRSTNAME}}

TEMPLATE: Quick Summary of TalentBin —

focused on how it will save time.
SUBJECT LINE: Want to reach twice the technical candidates in half the time?
TalentBin can help.
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Hi there {{First Name}},

It’s {{User.FIRSTNAME}} here with Monster. I wanted to take a minute to introduce

you to the newest addition to our ever-growing bag of recruiting tricks: TalentBin. If the
information below is relevant to you, I would love to connect one-to-one to discuss
further. I believe it will be a very helpful tool for you.

TalentBin has developed a search engine used by recruiters to find software developers
and other technical talent.

Facebook, Amazon, Kelly IT, Robert Half, and hundreds of other companies and
agencies have recruiters using TalentBin daily to search for these hard-to-find candidates.

Based on the open positions I see listed on your website, TalentBin should serve you well
in your search!

Snapshot of some sweet features:

 4–5x more technical candidates than LinkedIn Recruiter can identify

 Millions of personal email addresses
 Messaging templates and mass emailing capability (Send an email blast to up to
30 candidates at once in a single click.)
 Email-open/link-click tracking (See when a candidate opens your emails.)
 Gmail and Outlook integration (Send candidates emails from within TalentBin
without having to bounce out to another window.)
 CRM functionality (pipeline management & automation—no dropped balls)
 ...and some more cool/nerdy data stuff. :)

Quick explainer video (It's pretty funny. You *will*

laugh.): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fClV97ONRyI
We’d love to show you how TalentBin can help you find and recruit qualified technical
candidates for your open positions. Do you have 30 minutes next week? What times work
for you?

Don't believe the subject line? Email me! I'd be happy to explain. Or you can ring
me directly at {{User.BIZ_PHONE}}.

Thanks,
{{User.FIRSTNAME}}

You should always approach these types of email templates with an iterative mindset. As
your solution extends, you’ll extend them. In fact, as you add slides to your sales deck,
you can often add a correlating outreach email, maybe even with a screenshot of the slide
embedded. As you find permutations in your customer base, you can fork off templates
that are specific to sub-genres of your customers.

As with your slides, you should keep email templates in some sort of “source repository”
— which can be as simple as a Google Document or, eventually, a more complicated
content management system, like Yesware, SalesLoft, or some other email-prospecting
tool.

PHONE & VOICEMAIL SCRIPTS

While targeted email outreach for appointment setting is one of the most scalable means
to put your message in front of qualified prospects, you’ll likely be getting on the phone
— either dealing with inbound calls (perhaps prompted by your outbound emailing!) or
doing out-and-out cold-calling (which everyone knows can be pretty nerve-racking).

While there’s little chance that a phone call will directly follow a script, having at least
some quick bullets to refer to can be helpful to ensure that you’re nailing your messaging
points. Again, these should be a reformatting of your core narrative, designed to be
delivered in thirty to ninety seconds. This is not the kind of phone script that you’ll have
when you get to 10+ sales reps; instead, it’s about having guideposts to help you when
you get on the phone trying to drive toward a demo.

Below are some appointment-setting phone scripts from a company named HIRABL,

which makes revenue-acceleration products for recruiting agencies. These scripts are for
a product that helps agencies know when candidates that they’ve submitted to clients may
have been hired, even though the client hasn’t reported it.

Cold-Calling Scripts — HIRABL

Version #1
Hi there!

This is NAME at HIRABL. I wanted to reach out, because we’ve been helping staffing
agencies like yours identify backdoor hires.

Are you familiar with backdoor hires, or have you had many at your agency?

Customer: Yes, we are familiar with them, but we don’t do much about it because we
don’t know how we’d go about it.

Yeah, we hear that quite a bit. It sounds like a demo with our Account Director NAME
might make sense — do you have 20 minutes on DAY or DAY?

Version #2

Hi there!

This is NAME at HIRABL. How’s your day going?

The reason I’m calling is that we develop software that notifies recruiters when clients
hire their candidates and forget to tell them. Last year, we found over 4,200 missed fees
across just 120 customers.

I’d love to set up a time for you to speak with our Account Director NAME, because I
think we can identify fees you’ve already earned.Do you have twenty minutes on DAY or
DAY?

---

And this is a more involved call script for TalentBin, which includes more of the sales
narrative than the succinct ones above. It’s unlikely that all of the information in this
script would be used in a given call, but having the information available to the caller is
always helpful.

Hey there!

It's NAME from Monster.

(Pleasantries. Weather. Sports team. Personal tidbits.)

So, I'm calling because I know that ACCOUNT_NAME hires quite a few (software
engineering/design/health care) professionals.

Monster recently acquired a company called TalentBin. Did you see that news?
(Customer responds.)

Got it! So TalentBin develops tools used by recruiters to find talent. And it does this by
crawling the entire Internet for activity that those folks engage in.

Because these sorts of candidates are highly employed, recruiting them often requires a
passive-candidate outreach approach.

But at the same time, because these folks tend to not spend time on professional social
networks like LinkedIn, finding them there can be really problematic. Unlike recruiters
and salespeople, they just don't spend time there.

However, these sorts of professionals do spend time other places online, leaving trails of
information about what they do professionally. TalentBin scoops up all of that
information and makes it recruiter-ready.

As a result, TalentBin identifies more of these professionals than any other sourcing tool
on the market. It makes it easy for you to reach them directly, by providing personal
contact information, like personal email addresses, and social communication vectors like
Twitter, Meetup, Facebook, and so on.

Pretty nifty, eh?

Yeah, what’s more:

[Technical: For instance, in a given geography, say TalentBin will have five to ten times
the number of Ruby, Java, .NET, iOS, and Android developers compared to LinkedIn,
and will have oodles of personal email addresses for those candidates. This is because
TalentBin has crawled GitHub, Stack Overflow, Meetup, Twitter, and many other sites
where those engineers hang out.]

[Healthcare: For instance, in a given geography, say TalentBin will have five to 10 times
the number of registered nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, physicians
(oncologists, orthopedists, etc.), and so on thank LinkedIn. And it includes lots of direct
phone numbers and other contact information for these candidates! This is because
TalentBin has crawled every single healthcare license database where those professionals
have to show up. So we literally have every healthcare professional in the United States
in our database! How cool is that?]

Lastly, TalentBin saves recruiters tons of time by automating a lot of the drudgery
involved in candidate sourcing and outreach. Features like integrated email, templating
and mail merging, mass messaging, drip-marketing campaigns, and email-open and click
tracking make our clients super efficient jet fighters! It's like a robot recruiter helper,
freeing recruiters up to spend more time on higher-value activities, like closing
candidates.

Which is why Monster bought the company! Because it's really impactful for our clients
who hire these sorts of staff. Thousands of clients have signed up for TalentBin,
including big names like Amazon, IBM, Kelly Services, Manpower, and more.

Because of ACCOUNT_NAME's current hiring characteristics, I feel that this is

something that would be very impactful to your business. I would love to set up a walk-
through demo for your team with myself and my TalentBin product specialist colleague
to dig in more.

Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be
worth your time.

---

When we built this script, we also included some reaction permutations to help guide the
next steps of the call:

Client is interested — Book demo.

Great! What are some times that work for you next week? I have availability TIME
BLOCK on DAY, TIME BLOCK on DAY, and TIME BLOCK on DAY.

Great. I'll send a meeting invite to block your calendar with the online meeting room
information. We'll do a screen share and walk through some slides and the product.
Looking forward to it!

Client asks follow-up question — Defer and drive to demo.

That's a great question! Usually that's the sort of thing we like to get into in a brief
presentation and demo with one of the TalentBin product specialists, who are the pros
when it comes to explaining every feature. It's usually thirty minutes and focuses
specifically on your business pains and where TalentBin can help.

It's very educational, and well worth the time.

Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be
worth it.

Client asks, “Is it free/does it cost money?” — Defer and drive toward demo.
It is not free, but it's extremely powerful and provides a strong return on investment. It's
not uncommon for TalentBin to drive an additional engineering hire per month.

But usually that's the sort of thing we like to get into in a brief presentation and demo
with one of the TalentBin product specialists. It's usually thirty minutes and focuses
specifically on your business pains and where TalentBin can help solve them.

It's very educational, and well worth the time.

Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a 30-minute demo? I promise it will be
worth it.

Client says, “I'm not interested” — Deflect and articulate value. Drive toward a
demo.

NAME, I wouldn't be on the phone with you right now if I didn't strongly think that this
could help ACCOUNT_NAME hire more people, faster, with less cost and less work on
the part of your recruiters. [In the case of an agency, "And ultimately make
ACCOUNT_NAME more money."]

I promise you that this sort of technology is going to be industry standard. By deferring
consideration of it, you're putting your business and your ability as a recruiter at a
disadvantage.

Client asks, “Is this like [COMPETITOR NAME]?” — Deflect and drive toward
demo.

Oh! You're familiar with COMPETITOR_NAME. TalentBin is similar, but is actually

the original pioneer in the industry, with the richest functionality, the best data sources,
and the most automation. Which is why TalentBin has won the most industry acclaim and
awards! Given your familiarity with the space, it seems like a demo would be very
helpful for you to further complete your knowledge.

Are you available DAY or DAY next week for a thirty-minute demo? I promise it will be
worth it.

Client says, “No, I'm really not interested.” — Articulate that you're going to follow
up, and aren't going away. (More on how to do this here.)

Okay, I understand that while this is relevant to your business, it sounds like the timing is
not right just this instant. However, I am convinced that TalentBin is something that will
help your business be more successful.
So I'm going to send some video examples of the massive time savings and ROI that
TalentBin can provide for ACCOUNT_NAME, and I'll make sure to touch base in a
month or so to update you on what's new. [From there, follow up by email with materials
as defined in Email Templates.]

---

Next, we have some example voicemail scripts designed to prompt callbacks. As covered
in the appointment-setting chapter, voicemails should generally be paired with emails.

While listening to a voicemail can be easy (especially in the age of

transcription to email), prospects will rarely return messages. It’s better to
think of them as audio emails.
That said, an email that is paired with a voice mail that has piqued a prospect’s interest is
ripe for a reply.

Follow-Up Voicemail

Hey there! It's NAME from Monster again.

I wanted to follow up on my previous message regarding TalentBin by Monster, the

talent search engine.

On paper, it seems like your company would be a great fit for our tool, given your hiring
needs, and I just want to chat for a quick minute to see if scheduling you for a live web
demo would make sense.

Once again, NAME calling from TalentBin, PHONE NUMBER, that’s PHONE
NUMBER. I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Customer Proof Voicemail

Hey there!

This is NAME from TalentBin.

I’m reaching out because our company makes amazing technical talent search software,
and it looks like your organization loves to hire amazing software engineers.

We're super popular with awesome technical recruiting organizations like Facebook,
Amazon, Groupon, Microsoft, and hundreds of others. So we're legit.
I'd love to connect with you on what we're up to and how it can help you guys with your
engineering hiring needs.

Hit me back at NUMBER. I look forward to chatting with you soon!

Thanks!

---

Of course the goal of all these emails and phone calls is to get to the demo stage of the
process. That’s concrete progress through the sales funnel, and your chances of making a
sale at each stage are that much better. Of course, your chances of fumbling the deal are
also greater because you’re moving into a higher touchpoint part of the process. To make
sure you don’t sacrifice all the hard work that comes before a demo, the next section is
about how to win at that level.

DEMO SCRIPTS
Your demo should be crafted with your overarching sales narrative front and center. And
because a live demo will typically come after you’ve shared some initial slides from your
sales deck, you should follow the framing you presented in your deck. Your demo will
reiterate much of it, but with much more context, customization, and visual clarity.

What exactly is that framing? Well, as with your sales deck, it’s the bucketing of key use
cases and the features that enable them. Ideally, you should already have those use cases
identified, as they are likely referred to in your sales deck. But think about the
combination of most common, most important, and most impressive use cases your
solution enables. Then rank them, such that you start with the most important and most
compelling ones — because you never know when a demo will have to end early!
Beyond that, I like to think of a demo as telling the story of how your solution is used,
again starting with major pain points.

Customization

Your demo is where customization to the specific prospect can really be done in earnest.
In fact, as you’re developing your product, think of ways you can make it easier to
demonstrate using prospect content — it could be something as simple as ensuring that a
prospect name and logo can be quickly embedded, or as complicated as making it easy to
import customer data to use in a live demo. But the purpose of the demo is not to be a
cold rehash of the features that you may have just touched on in your sales presentation.

Your demo is an opportunity to demonstrate the potential value the product

could provide to the prospect, richly, before their eyes.
More customization will raise close rates and shorten deal cycles. The simplest version of
this type of tailoring is knowing the prospect’s business context — either from prior
research or from discovery questions at the beginning of your call — and using that to
guide the demo.

At TalentBin, that meant making sure that our sales reps knew the technical- and design-
hiring requirements for prospects they were talking to, which was easily divined by
looking at those prospects’ career web pages ahead of time. That way, the TalentBin rep
could easily say, “I know by looking at your careers page that you’re hiring some iOS
developers in Philadelphia. I would love to show you how TalentBin could help with
that.”

Consider this in contrast to something that is non-contextual, like “How about we show
you what this looks like for recruiting for Java developers in San Francisco?” — when
the prospect doesn’t recruit for Java, and definitely isn’t based in San Francisco. What are
the key pieces of information you could use to modify your demo and make it more
impactful to the prospect? Which can be sniffed out ahead of time, and which need to be
elicited from the prospect?

If your demo is non-contextual and not tied directly to the business realities of the
prospect, it will always smell like you’re running the demo to make the product perform
at its peak attractiveness, rather than showing how it will work when used by the client.
You can avoid that by focusing on the prospect’s business context first and foremost. It
will make your materials more believable than other vendor demos they see and raise the
trust factor. It also helps to do this research yourself. Because if you simply ask clients
what they want to do, they may not know, or may ask to go in the wrong direction.