subject: A Few Good Words: You Want A Script? You Can't Handle A Script! [print this page] A Few Good Words: You Want A Script? You Can't Handle A Script!
I can see it now...
Jack Nicholson in his prime is a gritty, in-the-trenches, senior marketing consultant, whose selling and servicing techniques have become embedded in the DNA of billions of business conversations, every year.
For the ten-thousandth time, he is asked to write a telephone script that will instantly build sales or elevate customer satisfaction ratings.
Looking over the request, he bellows with equal measures of contempt and vituperation:
"You Want A Script? You Can't Handle A Script!"
The film will be titled, A Few Good Words, and believe me, it will be a spellbinder!
What makes a great drama, I'm told, is conflict. And there is plenty of that whenever we tinker with the words our associates use to sell and to serve.
Here are the top 5 reasons most sellers and supporters can't "handle" scripts:
(1) People are notorious for spurning verbal templates, no matter how effective they are. I introduced an utterly simple line into conversations that helped a major electronics firm to overcome customer anger and up-sell in a single breath. It succeeded in reducing rage while ringing the cash register a whopping 50% of the time, but a certain cohort of workers refused to use it because they either "Didn't like the idea of a script" (consisting of one phrase!) or thought it was "Too manipulative."
(2) Even if we succeed with a script, we get bored. It's too easy to win. So, we place pebbles in our mouths by inserting random words that diminish, and often reverse the effectiveness of the planned patter.
(3) "I don't talk like that!" is something you can expect to hear about expert-scripts crafted by gurus. This is precisely the point. May I remind everyone, at a certain stage of life none of us talked; we babbled and gurgled. We had to become CIVILIZED by our parents, who along with televisions, patiently taught us what we know. Using a script involves an equivalent "Ordeal of Civility," to borrow a phrase from a brilliant historian. We have to adjust ourselves to the words, to be more effective-not the other way around.
(4) Most companies don't invest in understanding WHY certain scripts work while others fail. They constantly tinker, which frustrates workers. There is very little genuine SCRIPTING EXPERTISE loose in the world. Just as every waiter in Hollywood thinks he can write an Oscar-winning film, nearly every phone hack thinks he can breeze through composing a money-making and customer thrilling dandy.
(5) Scripts have to be closely monitored, measured, and managed. Testing and refinements need to occur. Like a split-test in an email campaign, there needs to be a "control" document against which a new script is being compared, for its relative effectiveness.
In fairness, I may have overstated the rejection of scripts, by reps. Some workers go to the other extreme: they become script-changing junkies.
Just as they beg managers for new calling lists, that will magically change their sales luck, scripts can be modified way to often. Like Swiss cheese, you start with a solid block and poke holes in it. If you get carried away, pretty soon you'll poke your way to having no cheese.
In other words, change scripts often enough and you'll create the equivalent of a non-scripted situation.
A script isn't a villain or a savior. Done well, introduced and managed properly, it can become nothing less than a Money Machine, a communication ATM that dispenses profits whenever you want.
But you won't be able to tap it for more than what you put into it.
