“Am I dealing with prospects who are even capable of buying?Just because a prospect gives you time to talk doesn’t mean they fit your profile.” Mark Hunter offers 10 Questions to Ask Yourself When You Can’t Close.
I don’t agree with everything Seth Godin says here, but this line stuck: “Of course, people have been blocking ads forever. By ignoring them.” Seth discusses Ad Blocking.
With this startling opening: “If your sales lead is one hour old, you’re about to make a cold call,” Roy Williams, the Wizard of Ads, gives us a crash course on How the Internet Has Changed Us, and what it means for those of us who work in marketing, advertising, and sales.
Not really a “sales” article, except for this: if you are on the road a lot, you find yourself in public restrooms on an almost daily basis. If you’ve ever wondered Which Gets Hands Cleaner: Paper Towels or Air Dryers?Melissa Dahl has an answer for you.
This has some good advice, but it also stands out for the subheads: For example: “3. On a.m. workouts (Or, “You’re probably already sleeping in your yoga pants anyway.”)” and “4.You can’t dress for the job you want if you’re already late for the one you have.”Kathryn Dill helps youHack Your Morning: 7 Ways To Get The Day Off To A Great Start.
When you sit down to write an ad, you have a chance to tell a story. Who is the hero of the story? It’s not the advertiser.
photo by likstudio/dpc
In his e-book How to Tell a Story, Donald Miller lays out a very effective structure for a marketing piece:
A character [the hero] as a problem, then meets a guide who gives them a plan and calls them to action.
That action, Miller explains, either results in a happy ending or a sad ending. For example:
In the movie Star Wars, Luke Skywalker wants to fight against the evil empire, but he also wants to know if he has what it takes to be a Jedi. He meets a guide named Yoda who gives him confidence, a plan, and training to go out and defeat the enemy. The happy ending happens when Luke destroys the Death Star and preserves the Rebellion to fight another day.
In the stories you are constructing for your clients, the advertiser is not the hero – the advertiser is the guide. The advertiser’s customer is the hero.
A man wants to buy a car but has lousy credit. He meets a guide – your car dealership client – who helps him get a car loan at an affordable rate and payment, and and puts him on the path to rebuilding his credit. The happy ending occurs when his new car pulls into his driveway.
A couple is frustrated that their home is too hot in the summer, it’s drafty in the winter, and their energy bills are too high. They meet a guide – your window dealer client – who shows them how new triple-pane windows will make their home more comfortable and bring their energy bills down.
A woman looks in the mirror and doesn’t like what she sees. She meets a guide – your aesthetic medicine client – who shows her how the clinic’s whizbang laser will make her look 10 years younger with no surgery, scars, or downtime.
A way to get started: begin your first draft by writing the words “This is a story about…”
Then answer the following questions:
Who is the hero? Write a brief description of your advertiser’s target customer.
What problem is the hero experiencing that your client – and the guide – can help solve?
What’s the plan – what product or service will the advertiser offer to solve the problem?
What is the happy ending that this plan will produce?
Now you’ve got an infrastructure to design your campaign.
One other note to keep in mind: when you are marketing yourself and your medium to potential advertisers, you also have a story to tell.
You are not the hero of the story – you are the guide.
[reminder]What’s the best story you’ve written for an advertiser?[/reminder]
Sales Development Services conducted a survey in which they asked small business owners to describe The Best Salesperson I Ever Had. Warning: this is a press release that takes you to a landing page where you have to sign up to get a white paper. But the white paper is good stuff — if you are a sales manager it will give you strong material for a sales meeting.
If you’ve ever walked away from a “network meeting” wondering if you’ve accomplished anything, Peter Shankman has some advice for you in Six Ways You’re Networking Wrong. Tip #6, on asking an “off-topic” question, is especially intriguing.
If you’re in sales, you’re a writer. Every time you send your client an email or a text… every time you deliver a proposal, your clients are judging you in part on how well you write. So it’s worth exploring Kaleigh Moore’s article in Entrepreneur Magazine: 4 Apps That Can Make You a Better Writer.
It’s tough to get all the decision-makers in one room. “I need to talk to my business partner [or accountant, or spouse, CEO] before I can commit” is sometimes a legitimate issue, and sometimes a brush-off. Mike Brooks gives you some tools to find out what’s going on inSix New Ways to Handle: “I need to talk to my boss/partner/corporate” etc.
A TV station management team recently told me that too often production people — and their salespeople — put more time and effort into making an ad “pretty” than they did in getting the message right. An hour after that conversation, I stumbled on this piece from The Ad Contrarian, Bob Hoffman. Hoffman asks the question, “Did you ever wonder what would happen if you took a creative team that had no idea and gave them all the money in the world?” Then he answers it with a big-budget commercial you’ve probably seen. Enjoy
We have this expression, Christy [Turlington] and I. We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.
— Supermodel Linda Evangelista, interviewed in Vogue Magazine, 1990.
photo by pathdoc/dpc
Evangelista may have been joking, but there is a serious principle behind what she said.
If you are a salesperson and want to make more money, you’ve got three options:
Sell to more customers
Increase the number of transactions to existing customers
Increase the average dollar amount of each transaction
All three of these options have merit, but the fastest and most efficient way to increase your income is to increase the average dollar amount of each transaction.
How do you do that? Increase your Evangelista Number.
Ask for more in every proposal.
Here’s an exercise to get you started:
Assemble every direct proposal you made over the past three months (skip the RFP-driven agency ones — direct is under your control). Add up the total dollars you asked for, and divide it by the number of proposals you made.
An example with easy math (your numbers will be different):
Let’s say that over the last three months you did 50 direct proposals.
The total you asked for was $175,000.
This means that your average proposal “ask” was $3500 ($175,000 divided by 50).
If you’re happy with the money you’re making, you can stop right here. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll make what you’ve been making.
If you want to make more, ask yourself… what if you increased your average proposal size from $3500 to $5000?
What if you made $5000 your Evangelista Number?
To do this, you need to make a commitment to yourself — you won’t start a proposal unless you can ask for at least $5000.
If your workload stays the same, you’ll do another 50 proposals over the next three months. But your total “ask” will increase from $175,000 to $250,000 — a 42% increase.
This doesn’t mean you won’t accept an order for less than $5000. There will still be negotiation.
But instead of negotiating down from $3500, you’ll be negotiating from $5000. More often than not, the number you wind up at will be larger than it was before.
Over time, you’ll see another benefit: more loyal customers, and more repeat business. That’s because customers who spend more with you will see stronger results, and that makes them much more likely to renew.
A warning: to make this work, you’ll need to shed the customers who can’t even consider a proposal at your Evangelista level.
This is a good thing — those are the customers who are least likely to get good results. They’re the ones who say, “I tried [name of your medium] and it didn’t work.”
Let them go, and use the time you save to find bigger fish.
So there’s your exercise for the week. Figure out your average proposal “ask”, decide how much more money you want to make, and set a new minimum.
[reminder]How do you decide how much to ask for?[/reminder]
“Your seat at the table makes a political statement about your role in the meeting and your importance to the organization.” Geoffrey James, writing in Inc. Magazine, helps you figure out Where to Sit at a Conference Table
“The last thing you want to do when getting started with social media is to open a number of social media accounts and publish to them with incomplete information. It’s okay to take some time and make sure your profiles are set up professionally before making them public.” Brian Hasenbauer of the Center for Sales Strategy offers 3 Ways Salespeople Can Stand Out Using Social Media.
“In the rush of the final stages of a deal, it’s unlikely that your salespeople devote the time to truly personalize their proposals. Momentum gained from other personalized sales interactions is lost, though, with nothing more than a boilerplate cover letter and pricing table in a Word document.” Just one of the 4 Things Your Sales Proposal Would Tell You If It Could Talk, as passed along by Jesse Kurth.
“Every new contact is a new audition. There is likely more than one person involved in deciding whether to hire you. You are auditioning for all of them, all the time. The process continues, regardless of whether you believe that you have already passed the audition.” Your Audition Has Already Begun, says Anthony Iannarino
“Of course, the simplest thing to do is to get up and walk away… However, a much better approach is to step back from the negotiations for just a moment. What you are going to want to do is to take a look at the “big picture”. By understanding the different pieces that make up the deal that you are trying to reach, you just might be able to save this negotiation.” Dr. Jim Anderson discusses negotiation strategy in How To Defend Against A “Take It Or Leave It” Position.
