Most call centers and sales coaches work with a 100% script policy. When their staff calls someone or talk face-to-face to a customer, they have to follow the script until the closing.
One of my favorite sales trainers, very senior, very professional, and very experienced, taught us a 15 pages script, which we have to use. „I can not tell you if you will be successful without this script, but I can tell you, you will not have success not using it word by word.“
Within the first months, I worked the script to 100% but was not very successful. Consistently below the top ten salesmen of the company and not satisfied. I talked to the Top 3, and they all told me they developed their own working scripts within the years. And were successful with it.
After about 12-15 versions of my own script, I developed out of a journal with +120 pages I wrote in more than a year with all thoughts and experiences; I was a part of the Top 3 until I left the company.
Scripts are great for rookies, beginners, and less creative salespeople. They might work for simple sales jobs and for mass calls. They usually have 2-3 branches, and at the end, the customers buy or not.
Individual scripts are different. They include very personal experience, need empathy, creativity, and resilience. No script works at the first time and all scripts have to be updated about every month (which I still do with all of my scripts for UNIWO and my clients). Personal scripts often do not work for all other salespeople in the company because of their different personalities and style.
Standard scripts also have a common problem, not to let the salespeople sound like robots, after 2 hours.
In sales calls, they are not the key to top performance, but in live demo’s and presentations, these standards are game stoppers.
If you ever got „entertained“ during a 30min product presentation, where the moderator talks 98% of the time, you know what I mean.
Moderation, dialogue, listening, qualifying, personal selling, and always entertaining will lift these presentations to new levels of success.
