The Sales Trailer

Generally speaking, we entrepreneurs are enthusiastic when we tell people about our business.  It's easy to get excited about the details, the strategy, the features, etc. and perhaps unknowingly, we can end up talking too much to someone who just might not be that interested in what we have to say.  To combat this tendency, Craig Wortmann and his team at SalesEngine developed a useful and intuitive tool called the 'Sales Trailer' to not only focus the speaker, but also qualify the audience.  As defined on SalesEngine.com:

A “Sales Trailer” is to a business what a movie trailer is to a movie. It’s the concise but descriptive statement that answers the question you get 1,000 times a day; “What do you do?” The Sales Trailer does not answer all of the questions about your business, on purpose. It is meant to draw prospects into a well-structured conversation.

In other words, a well designed sales trailer is a teaser that induces the audience to say: What does that mean?  With this question, the audience is indicating that they want to learn more about your business, at which point you can proceed to the next step of the conversation.  To the contrary, if the audience does not respond enthusiastically to your trailer, there are basically two explanations: 1) your sales trailer needs to be tweaked or 2) the audience is simply not interested in hearing more.  If it turns out to be the latter, that's OK!  You've just qualified the audience/customer, which is valuable insight for any entrepreneur and can save you from wasting time talking to an uninterested audience.  Beyond selling, the Sales Trailer approach is also effective in a presentation setting; rather than talk in detail about every topic, try using a 'teaser' to introduce the topic and see how the audience responds.  If the audience wants to learn more, they'll ask, and time can be spent more efficiently by diving deep into only the topics that are of the most importance to the audience.

Writing a sales trailer is difficult and requires many iterations.  In fact, here at SlideStacks, after working with Craig, we've been through at least a dozen different versions that have been tweaked based on audience response.  In our trailer, we try to explain 1) what the product does and 2) what makes it unique, all without going into too much detail that might distract the audience.  For those who are curious, here's the Sales Trailer that is currently in the rotation:

SlideStacks is an online slide delivery software that transforms presentations into conversations.

The Sales Trailer is one of many helpful tools that the SalesEngine team have crafted.  To learn more visit their website: www.salesengine.com.

To all the readers and entrepreneurs out there, what's your Sales Trailer?

~Marc