Writing Down What Your Best Salesperson Says

The person who closes the job

In most small businesses one person wins more of the work than anyone else. Sometimes it is the owner, sometimes a long-serving estimator or the person behind the counter.

Customers who talk to that person book. They hear why the price is what it is, why the cheaper option costs more in the end and what will happen on the day, and they stop worrying.

None of that is on the website. The site lists services and says to call for a quote.

So the people who never talk to that person, which online means most of them, get none of it.

What they say that the site does not

• Why the price is what it is, in plain terms.
• How you compare with the cheaper option.
• What happens first, and what the customer must do.
• How long it takes, and why.
• The worry they always hear, and the answer.
• The questions they ask back to size up a job.

The second is the one websites avoid most. Owners worry about sounding negative about competitors, so the page says nothing, and the customer makes the comparison alone with only the price to go on.

Interview them

The person who wins the jobs rarely has time to write, and their written version is usually stiffer than how they talk. Interview them instead.

Book an hour, record it on a phone, and ask about real conversations: the last three jobs they won, what each customer was worried about, what they said.

Ask them to explain the price of a typical job as they would to a stranger. Ask what they say when a customer mentions a cheaper quote.

If the recorder makes them self-conscious, have a colleague play a customer and ask the questions as a customer would. The answers come out the way they do on the phone.

Then ask what they wish customers knew before calling. That answer is often the best page the site does not have yet.

Turning answers into pages

Each strong answer becomes a page, or a clear section of one, with a heading in the customer's words: what affects the price, how long a repair takes, what to expect on the day.

Transcribe the recording, keep the sentences that sound like them, and cut the repetition. The aim is their explanation, tidied, not a brochure rewritten from it.

Keep their examples and numbers where you can. A sentence about what a typical job of a certain size costs, and why, does more than a page of adjectives about quality.

Link each page from the service it belongs to, and from the contact page, where people hesitate just before they call.

A worked example

An espresso machine dealer and repair shop has two technicians at the bench, a showroom of home and commercial machines, and one employee who has been there almost twenty years.

Customers who talked to him usually bought one. He would open a machine, show them the boiler and the heavy brass fittings, and explain why it costs several times what a department store model does.

The website listed the brands it carried, repairs and descaling, with a phone number. Enquiries by email mostly asked for a price and stopped at the answer.

The owner recorded him answering five questions on a quiet morning, and each answer became a page.

One explains why the machines cost what they do, one how they compare with cheaper home machines, one what a yearly service involves. The others cover how long repairs take and what hard water does inside a machine.

Each page keeps his own explanations, including his usual comparison: a cheaper machine is fine for a coffee a day, but built to be replaced, not repaired. Staff now answer price emails with a figure and a link.

Comparing yourself with cheaper options

The comparison is where the experienced person earns their keep, and it can be written without attacking anyone.

Describe the cheaper option fairly, say what it includes and what it leaves out, and explain when it is the right choice. Then explain what the extra cost buys.

Keep it factual. Claims about competitors have to be accurate, like any advertising claim, and a fair comparison persuades better than a sneering one anyway.

Keep their voice

The temptation after transcribing is to polish. Resist most of it.

The phrases a good salesperson repeats are repeated because they work. A roofer who says most leaks start where something passes through the roof has explained flashing better than a paragraph of product names.

Fix grammar, remove filler and check the facts. Leave the plain words and the order of the explanation alone.

Check it with the team

Before publishing, read the pages back to the person interviewed. They will catch anything that went wrong in the tidying, and they will send customers more readily to pages they recognise as their own.

Then show them to whoever answers the phone. If the pages say something different from what the office says, customers notice.

And book the same interview again for next year, since prices, products and the common worries all change.

The counter-case

Some sales conversations depend on seeing the job: a price that cannot be given without a visit, a recommendation that depends on what is behind a wall. A page can explain the reasoning but not replace the visit.

Some experienced people also say things that should not be published, such as a frank view of a supplier or a discount given at their discretion.

And a business whose best salesperson is the owner, who answers every call anyway, may feel less urgency. The pages still work at night, at weekends and on the owner's day off.

For most, interviewing the person who wins the jobs is the quickest way to give the website something worth reading.

From interview to page

1. Name the person who wins the most work.
2. Book an hour and record it.
3. Ask about real jobs, not general principles.
4. Ask about the cheaper quote and their answer.
5. Turn each answer into a page.
6. Read the pages back to them.
7. Repeat the interview every year.

Step three is the one that makes the interview work. Asked for general principles, people recite a brochure; asked about the customer last Tuesday, they say what actually won the job.

Getting what one person knows onto the site before it fades follows the same logic as the project write-up done the week the job ends.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.