You are a marketer and you are a sales professional. If that is a true statement then you use words to market and to sell. Words have power and you need to use them properly. Weak words equal weak results. Powerful words create powerful results. Choose your words carefully whether spoken or written. Here are three that you should use and use to their full effect.
1. YOU. Everyone cares most about themselves. They care about their life, their job, their problems and their reputation. Make everything you do in sales or marketing about them. Take a look at your elevator speech, your pre-approach letters, your website, your brochures. Rewrite everything and remove the “I”s and the “we”s and replace them with “you” and “your”. Make it about them. YOU will see better results.
2. NOW. Create a sense of urgency. A related word, “urgent,” is powerful as well. Make your message relevant in this moment. Make your solutions active in the present. People want action now, not empty promises for something in the future. People hate to miss out and NOW and urgent create a sense of a limited time offer. Everyone is wired to care more about losing things than gaining them. “Instantly” is another cousin in this family of creating the sense of immediacy. We live in a world of instant gratification. Creating a sense of urgency NOW will create action.
3. FREE. The number one word in advertising and sales—and I so wanted to leave it off this list. But how can I? Everyone wants something for free. It’s a powerful word that will grab your customer’s attention every time. It can even change their buying habits. It never loses its power. It’s also very relevant to what we sell in the promotional products world. We create FREE offers for our clients, thus empowering them to use the most powerful word in all of sales and marketing. Do not assume that your customers already know this. Show them how they can use the power of FREE by offering promotional products to reward a new customer, to create loyalty among existing customers, to draw traffic to their business or their trade show booth, to get people to sign up for their newsletter or opt-in to their email or any number of great objectives. You may even want to offer them something for FREE for ordering from you.
