While hitting quota is undoubtedly a top priority for every high-performing salesperson, the sales process isn’t only about closing a deal. It’s also about building genuine, meaningful relationships with prospects by addressing their pain points and discussing potential solutions.
So, in a way, salespeople should assume the role of trusted advisors who help potential customers navigate the complex and frequently confusing process of decision-making regarding the solution that best fits their needs.
To achieve this, sales professionals need to have engaging, relevant, and personalized conversations with their prospects. And this requires more than improvising or relying on their gut feeling, which is why scripts have long been staples of all sales calls.
However, traditional sales scripts tend to be too static and rigid, failing to capture prospects’ interest. Their inflexibility leaves salespeople sounding robotic and unable to adapt to different scenarios and customer responses.
Logical-branch scripting is a powerful feature that helps your sales team stay on message even when conversations shift or take unexpected turns.
What Is Logical-Branch Scripting?
Unlike its traditional counterpart, logical-branch scripting allows you to implement tried-and-true dialogues from your top-performing representatives that can be customized and adjusted based on the prospect’s responses and reactions to your scripts.
This enables your sales reps to follow the dynamic flow of conversations, quickly adapt to any changes or challenges that may arise, and chat with confidence.
Finally, these dynamic, non-linear scripts make it easy for salespeople to quickly access powerful objection rebuttals, relevant customer data, and key differentiators, thus being able to demonstrate value and persuade prospects to take action.
With such comprehensive information at their fingertips, your sales team can steer conversations in a way that not only addresses customer objections but also shines a spotlight on the unique attributes of your product or service. This, in turn, results in more convincing presentations, increased customer buy-in, and, ultimately, higher close rates.
Here’s how logical-branch scripting works and how it can help your team boost sales.
Deliver Consistent Sales Messaging
Through their light guidance, sales scripts are valuable tools that make the collection of data and delivery of sales messaging consistent across your sales department. Consistency is key here. Without this uniformity, there is no real baseline to gauge performance.
As we’ve already mentioned, the most common issue with scripts is that they can be inflexible to the flow of natural conversation. That’s where logical-branch scripting excels. It offers the fluid, natural speech flow of a normal conversation but offers the consistency of a pre-meditated message.
Logical-branch scripting provides segments of information to the salesperson and then adapts to the conversation based on how the prospect responds. The salesperson can be presented with either specific messaging to be spoken verbatim or provided with message guidance, such as bullet points, hints, suggestions, or relevant talking points that offer a greater degree of flexibility with what they say while still being steered to help stay on point as the call progresses.
The salesperson will be able to select options and responses based on the direction of the conversation that, when clicked, offers the next segment of the script.
For instance, let’s say the salesperson asks the prospect if they currently use a product or service similar to the one your company is offering in the qualifying portion of a script.
If the prospect answers in the affirmative, the sales rep knows they understand the value of using a product or service like yours, so the conversation should be geared toward distinguishing your company from competitors.
By clicking “Yes,” the sales rep will get a new subscript pop-up that instructs them to ask which competitor the prospect uses. Here you can build subscripts that address the competitive analysis between you and your biggest competitors. These subscripts can have specific value and benefit differentiators for each competitor instead of generic phrases to blanket them all.
On the other hand, if the prospects aren’t using a competitor, the salesperson clicks “No,” and is presented with subscripts aimed at highlighting the value and benefits of your product or service based on the prospect’s need.
Approaching scripting at such a granular level allows sales management to determine the best responses to any question, including how to handle common objections, and develop the most appropriate messaging to guide the conversation to its ideal conclusion: an informed decision on the part of the prospect.
Once this is implemented, every salesperson, whether just out of training or a seasoned veteran, has access to the messaging and sales techniques that allow for natural, intelligent conversations with prospects that yield the highest probability of success.
Collect, Update, and Operationalize Customer Data
Another part of scripting is about qualifying questions that shed light on the prospects’ needs, situations, and potential objections. Logical-branch scripting allows for customer data to be collected in fields directly in the script or script screen.
This facilitates collecting prospect information such as who the decision makers are, if they are using a competitor, what their budget and buying timeline is, company information and demographics, or any custom data or comments that are important in their buying process.
As the data and comments are entered into the script module, it is automatically transferred and saved to the contact information. This eliminates the need to take notes during a conversation and then manually enter them into the system.
These fields can be open text fields, drop-down options, or can even track the label of the subscript selected based on the prospect’s response as a value to collect.
Let’s look at the example of the scripting around competitors.
When asking a prospect about what competitor they are using, the sales representative can either have a drop-down menu or, in the case of building subscripts around each competitor, you can have the answer as a subscript button. In either instance, the answer selected will automatically populate the custom field in the prospect’s information for future use.
As sales cycles get longer, collecting data for future reference helps the salesperson build relationships and promote themselves as the trusted advisor they are. Offering a consistent and seamless method for collecting and saving this data only enhances these efforts.
In Conclusion
Logical-branch scripting not only creates consistency in sales messaging — it also helps your sales team maximize their efforts by giving them the right information at the right time as they progress through their conversations with prospects. This feature also reduces the amount of time your team spends writing down notes and entering that information into the system after the call. Instead, they are free to move on to the next conversation more quickly and with all the relevant information at their fingertips.
