There are several ways for IT companies to differentiate their products and services. They include:
- STRADOF framework to look beyond features to find differentiators
- Marketable Items to make headway in crowded markets
- ASPOs to improve cold call response rates.
But all of them cost money and take time.
Meanwhile, here’s a low hanging fruit for IT vendors to set themselves apart in the market: NATO Phonetic Alphabet.
According to Wikipedia,
The NATO phonetic alphabet is the most widely used radiotelephone spelling alphabet. … The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) assigned codewords acrophonically to the letters of the English alphabet, so that critical combinations of letters and numbers are most likely to be pronounced and understood by those who exchange voice messages by radio or telephone, regardless of language differences or the quality of the communication channel.
(Click here to download a high-res PDF version of the above graphic.)
This simple, yet not-so-oft-used artefact, helps you to elevate the profile of your inside sales team and is especially useful in the coronavirus-driven remote working era.
Let’s see how.
Inside Sales / Sales Development Reps make hundreds of calls to prospective customers every day. During those calls, they need to communicate their company’s name, product name, website URL and email address to prospects on the other side of the telephone line. It’s often necessary for them to spell out some words and use expansions for letters in the word e.g. “A for Apple, B for …”.
During our engagements with IT products and services companies in the campaign phase, we’ve noticed the following issues:
- Rookie SDRs don’t recognize the need for expansion
- Experienced SDRs recognize the need for expansion but there’s a tendency for each of them to use their own expansion e.g. one SDR says “R for Raja” whereas another SDR says “R for Rajasthan”
- Most SDRs struggle to find any expansion at all, especially for letters like F, Q, U, X, Z.
This tends to annoy prospects and risk losing their attention.
These days, it’s so darn difficult to get a prospect on the other side to take your call that it’s a shame to lose their attention because of ambiguity in conveying spellings.
Fortunately, you can solve this issue easily by having all your SDRs uniformly use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet during their telephone calls.
The key advantages of using NATO Phonetic Alphabet in outbound marketing are that it:
- Helps to quickly demonstrate your company’s professionalism
- Strikes a chord with prospects in the western markets immediately because most of whom are familiar with the world’s most popular spelling alphabet
- Works well in all markets, even where English is not the native language
- Improves the clarity of your team’s communications when the telephone line quality is not great
- Enables your team to get crucial things like email addresses, company names and website URLs across to prospects right first time.
As sales leaders know, inside sales teams are the face of a company and it’s important to get first impressions right. As they say, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression.
In business development and lead generation (as also customer experience), differentiating on communications is as important as differentiating on product or service. The NATO Phonetic Alphabet provides a quick-and-dirty way of doing that.
Please feel free to print out the above NATO Phonetic Alphabet and pin it up in front of your inside sales executives’ desks.
You can thank us later!
