7/9/2024-“How am I differentiated??” (Gulp.)

Your VP is a weapon that should require a permit to use. Do you use it as such? That would mean you wield it like a sword to differentiate your company and offering.

Your meeting with a prospect is going great…you showed one of two key slides, you asked some strategic open-ended questions, and the good vibes are flowin’.

Suddenly, the barometric pressure in the room changes when the buyer asks how you’re different from your competitors. (Yikes…did those lights just flicker?)

How much time on the clock do you think you’ve got ’til you must reply with a cogent, smart, tailored answer?

Practice your value prop today. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been selling, you need to own your VP.

Owning a VP means memorizing it and then practicing it so it doesn’t sound memorized.

Practice means role-playing. Yes, role-playing. (It’s not below you.)

It’s the only way to train for the moment when a customer asks you to explain your differentiators.

BTW, you get about 1.762 seconds before responding to your buyer in a cool, calm manner that sounds intelligent and human.

Nothing against your marketing or enablement teams, but if you recite the VP they created in a pitch meeting, your customer will look at you as if you have two heads. Mostly, VPs are written as sales collateral, not talking tracks.

To get to a place where your VP sounds great to your customers, you may want to try these two ideas:

1. Edit the VP so it’s street-ready. You will not anger your internal teams or even your sales manager for doing so. Speaking up about needed edits will unleash other feedback and suggestions that will help strengthen this dynamic tool for everyone.

2. Once you have developed a talk track that sounds right, practice saying the words aloud to hear how they sound. Take it a step further and speak the VP into your phone’s voice recorder app; it’s guaranteed you’ll hear things you can improve upon when listening to the recording. That move will help you apply easy fixes that make the VP sound more human and customer-focused.

The most important step in practicing your VP is what happens when you grab a friend inside the org and role-play different scenarios.

VPs are dynamic tools that should be framed individually for every customer and different situations. Practicing them with a peer will sharpen your skills and turbo-charge this skill for you.

Role-playing is guaranteed to help you build strong selling muscles.

Role-playing can be fun. (You heard it here first!)

But it depends on your attitude.

If you take it seriously and use it to perfect a value prop scenario that is sure to come up, you’ll thank yourself and your BFF seller for putting in the time.

For inspiration, watch Dwight Schrute and Jim Halpert from The Office demonstrate the perfect role-playing technique. (Boy, that Jim, he’s devilish!)