Capturing Conflict in Your Content

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“Every great story depends on conflict to propel it forward, Jane Cleland writes in Writer’s Digest. The conflict can be one of four types:

  • actual or threatened physical attack
  • emotional
  • spiritual (loss of faith or shaken beliefs)
  • mental (a puzzle or intellectual challenge)

However, Cleland cautions, “if someone doesn’t care about a situation, you don’t have a conflict.” That means, she says, “We need to understand what makes people care“.

When it comes to content marketing, “conflict is a problem that the customer is motivated enough to resolve,” Truss Creative adds. In brand marketing, though, it’s not about the business owner’s origin story or their “disruption story”, but about the customer’s story. Writing effective content, therefore, means identifying the customer’s:

  • everyday annoyance
  • burning desire
  • quiet wish
  • tower foe
  • existential threat

In other words, what does your audience notice, value, want to protect, and want to project to others?

Years ago, my friend and admired sales training expert Tim Roberts told me that, while salespeople try to develop good problem solving skills, he challenges them to  first find, then solve. Finding a problem that the prospect hadn’t considered is what makes a salesperson valuable.

In blog posts, we teach at Say It For You, the opening paragraph is there to make clear not only what need, issue, or problem is to be discussed, but also what “slant” the business or practice owner has on the issue. Then, it’s crucial not to end in a “fizzle”,  leaving web visitors trailing off in a disappointed move. The ending has to resolve the central conflict, issue, or problem you’ve raised, leaving readers with a path to action and positive expectations.

Capturing conflict in your content might be the secret to success.

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In Sales, Words Matter!

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Words can have a negative or positive impact on your sales efforts. Guest author Gary Kurtis shares some examples….

The interrogation with the overhead light:

Sales people are rightfully taught to ask questions to uncover problems. Often this comes across to the customer as an interrogation. Before asking the questions, be sure you have created a comfort level with your customer, and then have the questions be “conversational”. The best questions are thought-provoking, meant to elicit a reply such as “What a great question! No one’s ever asked me that before!” With questions posed in this manner, prospects will be more likely to tell you about their problems.

The 50/50 dilemma:

How many times during the sales cycle do we ask a question or make a statement and not get the answer we are looking for? For example, we say “I am calling to follow up on our proposal”, only to be told “Well, nothing has changed”. (Why ask a question if there is at least a 50% chance you will not get your desired answer?)

Dealing with the competition:

Here are two scenarios we all want to avoid. a)You had a great call leading to an anticipated sale, but the customer goes with your competition. You never had the chance to address your advantages – because you didn’t ask if they were looking at other options!  b) Following another great call, you remember to ask the prospect if they are planning to look at the competition. They reply, “What a great idea! We hadn’t thought about doing that, but it now makes perfect sense.”  Neither scenario is good for you. Rather than suggesting there is competition, once the customer expresses a desire for your solution, simply ask them what next steps they plan to take to have your solution fully approved. (If they do plan on looking at the competition, that will be revealed in their answer.)

Getting the customer to state what they dislike about their current vendor:

Sales people are often taught to ask this question to determine how they can become a better source compared to the current vendor. The problem is most (particularly if they don’t know you), prospects will not automatically open up. In fact, they may become defensive, since it was their decision to select that vendor. Take the high road. Ask your customer what they like about their current vendor. Then ask them what they would improve or add. This technique essentially gives you permission to ask what they don’t like, doing it in a positive way.

Requesting a meeting:

Sales people are given numerous scripts to request a meeting. These are performed by cold calling, phone, email, letters etc. The basic request is to make it about you and your company and having an opportunity to introduce yourself to eventually “earn” your business. In this era of information overload and “pushy” sales people you become part of the noise. A better approach is to identify your differentiation from others, learn what’s most important to your targeted customer and request to have a conversation to share how you helped other similar customers to see if there is a fit.

In sales, the words you use and your choice of questions to ask – matter – a lot!

 

Today’s guest post was contributed by Gary Kurtis, Principal of Sales Tips101. For more information, call (301) 775-1318 or visit https://salestips101.com.

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Simplify Selling With Technology and AI

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According to multiple studies, sales reps spend less than one-third of their time actually  “selling”.

Meanwhile, selling itself has become more complex than ever before, with more administrative work required for each sale. With the virtual world allowing more buyers to be more involved in every conversation, sellers are simply overwhelmed and unable to stay on top of the multitude of tasks and touchpoints.

You might be asking yourself, how could AI solve this problem?  Doesn’t more technology lead to more complexity?

And the answer is yes, it can — if not implemented properly.

The #1 reason for using AI in sales, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article, is to make a sales rep’s life easier, not harder. If used properly, Artificial Intelligence can be a powerful tool and act as a teammate for a salesperson.

AI can handle the non-selling activities – preparing for meetings, researching industries, updating the CRM, and handling all manner of repetitive tasks, allowing the salesperson to increase the amount of time they spend building relationships, finding opportunities, and ultimately — closing deals.

These benefits don’t apply to only enterprise level companies.  Entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and small businesses have just as much to gain from this time-saving technology.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management predicts that if implemented properly, AI could be used to save 27% of a sales rep’s time.  Since, as noted above, those sales reps are now spending only one third of their time selling, might technology at least double their effectiveness?

Artificial Intelligence is still advancing, and, every day, we are learning more about how to make the most efficient use of it.

 It’s still early in the game. For salespeople, the key is staying informed enough to not be left behind.

Today’s guest post was contributed by Jordan Ledwein,”the AI Sales Guy”. A Certified Sandler Trainer and a Partner in Sales Lift, a HubSpot Agency, is a frequent guest on Sandler podcasts and webinars, sharing strategies to help sales professionals combine methodology and technology and “sell smarter”. For more information, check out https://www.sandler.com/training-centers/i10-solutions-llc/ and https://saleslift.com/  .

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It’s the Chef, Stupid, Not the Food or the Decor

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The latest Forbes Special Issue devotes an entire page to restaurant reviews:

  • “Lively French bistro with Austrian overtones in menu and decor, epitomized by its sensational schnitzel Viennoise.”
  • “Magnificent Middle Eastern meals, especially the breads and spreads.”
  • “Blonde wood room effectively fuses two of the world’s greatest cuisines: Japanese and Peruvian.”

As a person who appreciates both good food and good content, I couldn’t help thinking that, of the 25 different descriptions of sumptuous eateries, all highly complimentary, there was only one that stood out above the rest:

“Iconic chef Marcus Samuelson’s new restaurant reflects the fusion of his birthplace Ethiopia and his adoptive home of Sweden, where he was raised. The blending of the two influences is astonishingly successful in one delectable dish after another.”

In another Forbes article, one published more than ten years ago, “5 Keys to Successful Small Business Marketing”, Ty Kiisel wrote, “Because business is personal, sharing a little of yourself makes you more accessible. People like doing business with other people. Over the years,” Kiisel revealed, “my readers have gotten to know me because I share with them some of the details of my life.”

The Forbes restaurant reviewer, by sharing information about the chef,  not only about the food, made me feel that I was meeting a person, not merely being presented with a product.

In content marketing, we teach at Say It For You,  stories that “humanize” the owners and workers, even stories about past mistakes and struggles, tend to generate feelings of admiration for –  and trust in – the entrepreneurs or professional practitioners who overcame both outside obstacles and the  effects of their own early mis-steps.

It comes down to storytelling – Why did those owners choose to do what they do? Where did they come from? What are they most passionate about? What are they trying to add to – or change – about their industry?

It’s the chef, (stupid), not the food or the decor.

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Content Creation By –and For — Humans

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AI algorithms can produce thousands of words quickly without needing a human to do research or writing. What’s more, “most AI-generated content will be grammatically correct,” itseeze.com authors concede. AI tools are certainly cost-effective in terms of time-saving, but “there are also risks that you need to be aware of.” As a blog post content creator for so many years, I was interested in  itseeze.com’s list of specific disadvantages of using AI for blogging:

  • Inaccuracies (the more AI content generated in the public space, the more likely it is that inaccuracies will increase, as the algorithm searches its own content).
  • Plagiarism (by “stitching and combining” content, as well as “parroting’ existing content), AI tools can easily fall into plagiaris.
  • Devaluing of content (AI is capable of mimicking humans, but lacks personalization and the ability to generate new ideas).
  • Lacking in personalization (because AI relies on already existing content, it is not identifying the user’s intent and “common sense behavior”).

Wow! Talk about food for thought for us content marketers…Revisiting our own Say It For You mission statement, we note our devotion to creating content based on understanding  each client’s unique ways of doing business. Our policy of one-client-per-market is designed to avoid conflicts of interest, so that we can give our best work to each business or practice owner, based on coming to understand and then helping express their personal values and priorities.  What’s more, as per our Say It For You client agreement, all rights to the content we’ve created are assigned to the client.

As to the potential devaluing of content through using AI, in surveys, it was discovered that the main reasons people share online content is that they enjoy bringing value to others, but also as a way to define themselves to others, coschedule.com explains. In practical terms, that means adding value (not devaluing), helping business owners and practitioners express their own new and original ideas, and their “take’ on current happenings in the community they share with their target readers.

“Human writers play a crucial role in content creation. They bring creativity, emotions, and empathy that are difficult to replicate by machines. They also have the ability to understand nuances of language, context, and cultural subtexts that are often lost in machine-generated content,” aicontentfy.com  opines. “AI does not have emotions.”

At Say It For You, content creation will continue to be generated by human writers, meant for our very human readers!

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