There is this almost religious debate among sales professionals: should you work with or without a script?
The answer is not "either-or." Instead, do both!
What are the Common Arguments Made Against Sales Scripts?
Professionals who believe sales scripts don’t work often defend their position with the following points.
Salespeople Don’t Want to Act and Sound Like Robots
Nothing is worse than reading a sales script verbatim over the phone. You can’t build rapport that way, and it turns the creative part of selling into mindless assembly line work.
This is how low-quality, high-quantity telemarketing works, but I trust that as a reader of this blog, you’re not in the business of selling lottery tickets to random strangers over the phone.
Telling ain’t Selling
The anti-script proponents say salespeople who work from a script typically listen less to the prospect because they focus on the script.
Experienced High-Performers Dislike Scripts
You can’t hire top-notch sales talent if you expect them to work from a script. Experienced, successful salespeople want autonomy. They trust their ability to handle prospects more than a written script.
Developing a Sales Script is Tedious
Writing a sales script is the work most salespeople would rather avoid. It’s a boring process involving a lot of editing, structuring, and slow detail work, all of which run counter to the DNA of most sales professionals. Download your free sales script to get started.
Updating Sales Scripts are a Piece of Work
A sales script isn’t like a great novel that you write down once, and it’s done. Sales scripts need to be managed, maintained, and constantly updated. You’ll need to continually revisit and improve it when your product and market change and you find opportunities to optimize.
I think most people who are anti-sales script simply don’t know how to use scripts effectively. They see scripts being used badly and assume they are intrinsically worthless. They fail to see that scripts, when used right, have many benefits.
Why You Should Be Using a Sales Script
Refine Your Methodology
Sales scripts force you to think things through. By developing a sales script and writing things out word for word, you bring structure and clarity into your thinking and polish your process.
Raise Your Entire Teams Sales IQ
If you involve your whole sales team, you can create a constant feedback loop. Let reps share success stories, best practices, and new creative ideas. There’s a lot of great sales knowledge in the room that typically is just stuck in someone’s head. By collaborating, you can access that vast reservoir of insights from which everyone benefits.
Improvements Spread Faster Throughout Your Whole Team
When you have a sales script or talk tracks that everyone is using, and one sales rep deviates and tries a different approach and finds it consistently performs better—that improvement now gets shared! The whole team learns this way rather than it being just one creative sales genius. You continuously elevate the skill level of your whole team.
Fewer Low-Performance Days
Many sales reps experience strong fluctuations in terms of the results they deliver. Some days are unique, and some days suck, and it’s very much dependent on the state of the individual sales rep. By having a script, you create a safety net for shitty days that prevent shitty performance.
Develop a Scalable Sales Process
You’ll train, manage, and scale your sales team better. Building an effective sales operation is not about finding individual sales superstars. It’s about creating an all-star team.
You don’t want to be the team with the best individual players; you want to be the strongest team. A sales script helps you bring new people up to speed faster, train and benchmark them better, and scale your sales faster.
Sales Scripts Empower Your Reps to Be Better Listeners and Be More Creative
If people have a good sales script, they are better listeners, not worse. A sales script frees your mind up to pay attention to what a prospect is saying because you don’t have to think so much about what you’re going to say next; you don’t have to constantly compute your answers all the time.
Think of a basketball team: they train pretty much every single day. They practice their footwork, shooting, rebounding, and dribbling every day. When they play a game, they can perform more freely and creatively. Their brains take care of all the individual actions automatically, without conscious thought, so they can play the game on a higher level.
The same is true for sales: You want your reps to have individual sales maneuvers so deeply ingrained that they always have at least one option for responding effectively to a prospect.
How to Use a Sales Script Effectively
Develop a sales script. Involve everybody in the team in the initial creation of the script.
Train your sales reps to know the script by heart and commit it to memory. Let them role-play, practice, and study it until you can wake them up at 3 a.m. and tell them:
“Well, your product is great but too expensive for us.”
And they’d respond without blinking: “At which price would you buy?” (Or, however, you handle the pricing objection.)
Once they know the script inside out, you can allow them to experiment with their approaches, trust their instincts, and be better than the script.
You don’t want sales robots; you want sales reps who bring in their personality, ideas, and creativity. But equip them with the mental sales tools to face every situation confidently.
Have a team meeting once or twice a month to collaborate on improving the script. Discuss what works and doesn’t work, ask questions, bring in your own experiences, and then edit the script so you can come up with the next version. This continuous improvement will result in steady, unstoppable sales force growth.
Unleash the Power of the Sales Script
Despite the many reasons sales script opponents cite, there’s tremendous value in developing and continuously improving your script.
Use it mindfully, not robotically. Require your sales reps to study the script, but give them the freedom to deviate and experiment with their approaches as much as they want.
Regularly collaborate to improve the script and spread new learnings throughout your sales force.
