4/8/2024-“I’m not sure I buy my VP.”

To excel in sales, you must learn to integrate elements of your scripted VP in all of your customer conversations. Even if you don’t love your company’s VP script, make it work.

Your VP is a utility knife.

It can help you open, and close meetings so that your benefit package is burned into your buyer’s minds.

Your VP can help you close…and defend business. It can also help you reinforce positive buyer perceptions and overcome objections.

If you’re not using your VP in every customer interaction, it might mean you don’t buy it. And because you need a utility knife, this problem needs to be fixed.

You’ll rarely recite the entire VP from A-Z in pitch meetings…so think like a utility knife and talk to buyers about the best parts of your VP…the parts you believe in.

Today, grab a friend and practice integrating elements of your VP for the different use cases listed above. (And any other use cases you can think of.)

VPs aren’t perfect, but that’s no excuse for talking only about processes and features in your pitch meetings and ignoring benefits.

Likely, your company’s value proposition is not as strong as you’d like it to be. Consider that for every seller in your org, there’s one unique perspective on what the VP should be.

But that doesn’t mean you should settle.

Indeed, it’s your job to get involved and provide feedback to your manager about how to improve the VP, but hell could freeze over before the org creates another version that’s more to your liking.

Deal with what you have and be responsible for making the current VP work.

Besides, the standard VP – including an elevator pitch plus three bullets that best outline your differentiators – is rarely presented in a linear way to your customers. To excel in sales, you must learn to integrate elements of your scripted VP in the language you speak that is relevant to the conversation.

Force yourself to talk about value even though you don’t like the current VP script. Get as creative as you need when using them with customers. They need to hear it over and over again!

This vintage training video about benefit selling from the UK is worth 2.5 minutes of your time.

Its tone couldn’t be drier – and more outlandish – as it reinforces the need to tell the customer precisely what’s in it for them.