Out Now Consulting, a marketing agency specialising in targeting gay and lesbian consumers, estimates that if same-sex marriage was legalised in all US states, it would generate over $1 billion of new matrimonial spending within one year. Out Now’s research also revealed that when civil partnerships were legalised in the UK in 2006, the spending impact of lesbian and gay marriages delivered a £130 million ($209 million) boost to the UK economy in the twelve months that followed.
Now it’s legal in all 50 states.
I’m not here to argue about religion or politics — if gay marriage goes against your religious or moral beliefs, that’s your department. But if you’re okay with this development, there’s a rapidly growing market for:
Jewelers
Wedding halls
Florists
Formal wear shops
Restaurants and caterers
Travel planners and hotels
During the same week as the gay marriage ruling, the Supreme Court solidified another media sales opportunity by preserving the Affordable Care Act. Now that ObamaCare appears to be the law of the land, businesses who were paralyzed by uncertainty can make plans and take action.
One category with significant potential: insurance brokers.
In South Carolina I recently met with two different companies who specialize in helping individuals and families qualify for insurance tax credits and subsidies. With those subsidies and credits now firmly in place, more companies are likely to move into the field.
Meanwhile, many insurance companies have announced plans for significant individual-market rate hikes in 2016. When the premium notices come out in a few months, they will cause a lot of people to start shopping for new policies.
All of these businesses will need to reach out to these new customers. Your traditional media and digital tools can put them in front of the right people — but only if you call them.
In Montana, I once sent a television salesperson to a doctor’s office for a white coat.
Photo by Oleksandra Voinova/dpc
We were working on a proposal for a doctor who wanted to market a procedure she had developed. I’d written a script in which the doctor would deliver the message herself on camera, and wanted to show her how the ad might look.
For that, we decided to produce a version of the commercial in advance of the presentation — a “spec ad”.
Of course, we couldn’t ask the doctor to appear in the spec — that would’ve spoiled the surprise. So the AE went to the doctor’s office and borrowed a lab coat.
Sales Skills: The Power of the Spec Ad
Photo by ellisia/dpc
Spec ads are a very powerful way to move an advertising prospect toward a buying decision.
What we’re doing is a thing called demonstration selling… it ranges from the tiny nibble of peach at your outdoor farmers market by the peach vendor to the one-ounce tube of shampoo they hang on your doorknob to the showy exhibition of all the uses from slicing and dicing of those famous knives on TV.
When you test drive a car, slip on new shoes and walk about or study the floor plan of an unbuilt home, you are involved in one of the many forms of demonstration selling.
When you enter your client’s office and play a cassette tape as part of your presentation you are doing demonstration selling. The words and sound that come from your tape recorder, regardless of content, are a demonstration of how radio works.
Thoughts come out of a small electric box and into the brain of the listener. That is the essence of radio. You are using radio to sell radio.
The tools have changed since Williams recorded those words. Cassettes are gone, replaced by digital files you can play for your client on an iPhone.
The principle is the same in the Age of the Smartphone as it was when we operated on tape: use radio to sell radio. Use TV to sell TV.
[bctt tweet=”Technology has changed. Human nature hasn’t. Spec ads should be in your sales arsenal.”]
In the demo we produced for the Montana medical clinic, the AE played the role of the doctor. It was not award-winning work — the station Production Department was very busy with paying clients, so they banged ours out quickly.
When we presented, production quality didn’t matter. The doctor immediately imagined herself in front of the camera. She went back to her office to make sure she had the money for the campaign, and signed the contract the same day.
Spec ads work for the same reason that test drives work on the car lot: customers are beginning to experience “ownership” of the product. You are putting them, mentally, behind the wheel.
You can’t make a commercial in advance for every proposal — production departments are busy and frequently undermanned. Pick your spots carefully, make them count, and take your Production Director to lunch every now and then.
Deployed properly, spec ads will move your prospects one step closer… a BIG step closer… to buying. Use ’em.
[reminder]
* A tip of the hat to my friend Rod Schwartz for introducing me to Jim Williams, whose work has held up quite well in the decades since it was recorded. Rod has digitized some of Williams’ material, and you can listen to it here.
Not long ago, I took a “no” from a client who should have said “yes”.
I didn’t react well.
photo by fresnel6/dpc
That weekend, I spent a lot of time stewing about the effort I’d put in, the difficulty of communicating with the decision-maker through a third party, and my firm belief that if he’d had the guts to try what I’d recommended, it would have been a profitable investment for him.
What snapped me out of my snit was an old (from 2008) post from Seth Godin called “Two Ways to Deal With No” . Godin lays out the choices this way:
You could contact the organization that turned you down and explain that they had made a terrible mistake, the wrong choice and a grave error…
or
You could be more gracious than if you’d won the work. You could send a thank you note for the time invested, you could sing the praises of the vendor chosen in your stead and you could congratulate the buyer, “based on the criteria you set out, it’s clear that you made exactly the right choice for your organization right now.”
The full post, which you can read in its entirety here, has much to ponder.
I’ll add a thought of my own — advice I’ve given many times when I’ve conducted sales training, and which I managed to forget during my bout of resentment:
[bctt tweet=”A no isn’t the customer’s fault. There’s always something you could’ve done differently.”]
Don’t blame the customer for not buying. It’s a losing strategy, and most of the time you’re wrong. In the course of the sales process, you have choices in how you present your ideas. There’s always a way you could have done it differently.
If the choices you made didn’t result in a sale, your mental energy is more profitably invested in thinking about what adjustments you’ll make in your presentation the next time you get a chance.
Godin’s second option will go a long way toward ensuring that the chance will come again.
Sometimes the least efficient forms of communication have the most powerful effect.
Photo by BillionPhotos.com/dpc
Personal Interaction Sales Skills Lesson 1
My Toastmasters club meets every Saturday morning. Every Saturday morning there are three speeches, and a club member evaluates each one. The roles are assigned in advance. Every now and then the meeting organizer has to fill a role at the last minute.
Generally, the organizer sends out a mass email to the whole club — “Hey, everyone, we need an evaluator for Jim’s speech. if you can fill in, please let me know!” Generally I glance at those emails and move on.
But I didn’t delete last week’s email from David Johnson.
Dear Phil,
We have two slots open for the meeting on Saturday.
Dominic volunteered for the grammarian spot
Would you like to be the General Evaluator or Ruth’s speech evaluator?
The email went on to describe Ruth’s upcoming speech, and ended with a nice assumptive close: “Please let me know which role you would prefer.”
I wrote back and signed up to evaluate Ruth’s speech.
Why did I respond to this email when I’ve ignored most of the others?
Because I know David, and he had written directly to me. It is certainly possible that he copied and pasted the body of the email, but it felt like a personal message.
Personal Interaction Sales Skills Lesson 2
I fly on business at least twice a month, usually on United Airlines. Most of the time the flights go smoothly, but every now and then the plan breaks down: weather or mechanical difficulties can result in missed connections and hassle.
When that happens, I often get an automated email from United the next day apologizing for the inconvenience. I delete those as fast as they hit my inbox.
Last week at Portland International Airport, I was attempting to fly to Columbia, SC. My plane to Dulles sat on the ground as a mechanical issue turned our 8:00am departure into an 8:30 departure… then a 9:00 departure… then a 9:30 departure. When it became clear that I was going to miss my connection, I talked the flight crew into letting me off the plane so that I could book a new itinerary.
As I stood at the gate working out the paperwork with the agent, the pilot walked off the jetway, introduced himself, and apologized to me for the inconvenience.
“If I could just divert the flight to Columbia and drop you off, I’d do it,” he said. We chatted for a few minutes, he thanked me for my flexibility and patience, and he got back on the plane.
I’m a grown man and have been for a while, but there’s a little kid in me who was thrilled to be personally acknowledged by the pilot. I was so startled that I neglected to write down his name.
I told that story on Facebook the same day, and told it to several of the salespeople in Columbia. It will likely make its way into my sales seminars.
…when you are playing at a higher level, creating and capturing more value, efficiency isn’t the goal.
A human being helping connect you to the person you need to speak to creates greater value than a call tree that first requests your customers language, asks them to pay attention because their choices have changed, and then offers them 8 different choices in a voice that makes it difficult to pay attention.
A human being showing a real interest in developing a relationship with you creates a very different experience than a slightly customized email with a clumsy ask at the end. A human being that has personally sent you ideas, in their own handwriting, with highlighted passages and personal notes, is different than an automation funnel.
The salesperson who sold you something calling you to follow up to ensure you are 100% satisfied and that you are getting the outcome you bought and paid for is different than a survey link being sent my email. One says “I care about you” as a person, and as a client. The other says that your company is checking the box.
Are you really connecting with your customers, or just checking the box?
Iannarino acknowledges that there needs to be a balance — for getting your work done, automation can be a godsend. But efficient isn’t always effective.
There’s nothing complicated about media sales. To paraphrase author Dan Jenkins (who was writing about baseball), if sales was half as complicated as some trainers try to make it, most of us couldn’t sell.
photo by iQoncept/dpc
Sales skills can be taught. But what separates the best and most successful salespeople from the mediocre isn’t skill level — it’s the willingness to put the work in, and practice some very simple steps consistently.
Here’s what the best salespeople do all the time that that the others don’t.
They are constantly looking for new business. Account lists are shaky things. In a good year, 20-25% of your list will turn over no matter what you do. Businesses get bought and sold. They reorganize, downsize, close entirely. The contact you’ve spent years cultivating suddenly takes another job. These factors are completely out of your control.
In a bad year, it can be a whole lot worse than 25%.
The best salespeople read their local newspaper every day, looking for leads. They tune in to commercial radio in their car… listening for new advertisers. They don’t skip the commercials on TV — they watch the commercials on TV. And they follow up on what they find.
They read constantly.Books, magazines, blogs. They read about sales skills, networking, effective advertising techniques, copywriting, technology, business.
During training sessions, I am often asked what books I recommend. I point people to this poston my blog. The links are Amazon affiliate links. I don’t do the affiliate links to make money — the commission is something like 32 cents a book. I do it so that I can see whether anyone takes action.
The best salespeople I work with buy the books….and read them.
[bctt tweet=”Sales skills are easy to learn. Putting the work in every day is hard. Top sellers do the work.”]
They “think like a rookie”— no matter how much experience they have, they’ll try something new. Rookies will try anything — they don’t know any better. The longer we do the same job, the greater our tendency to dismiss a new technique by saying, “That’ll never work.” Top sellers recognize that they don’t know everything. They try things.
They learn from their failures.When I was a new radio seller, someone taught me an exercise to do in the parking lot after every sales call. I’d take my notepad out of my briefcase, turn to a blank piece of paper and draw a line down the middle. I’d label the left column “What Went Right” — even the worst call had something redeeming. The right column was titled “What I’d Do Differently”. There’s something to learn from every call — writing the lessons down right after the meeting helped me retain the lesson long enough to act on it.
They keep their commitments.In the past five years, I have talked to over a thousand advertisers in 31 different states. In every market I’ve visited, clients have told me stories of Account Executives who didn’t return phone calls, or deliver the information they promised, or get the copy produced on time. In fact, this has often worked in our favor — the reason we were let in is because the other guys dropped the ball.
It pains me to say this, but if you promise to call with information on Wednesday and you actually call with the information on Wednesday, you will be the exception.
They present solutions from the client’s point of view.Years ago, a Dale Carnegie Sales Training seminar leader put me through the “Which Means to You” drill. I had to take every claim in a proposal and add the words “…which means to you” to it. If I couldn’t articulate why the client would care about a specific point, the point had to come out. It was infuriating to have the instructor interrupt my presentation over and over again with the words, “WHO CARES?”, but the lesson has stuck with me for a couple of decades.
You’ve got a budget to hit, your manager’s got a quarter to make, and your clients don’t care. You know why you want to sell that package — why would your client want to buy it? The best salespeople develop a deep understanding of their client’s problems and goals. They position their offerings as tools to solve those problems and achieve those goals.
Can your proposals pass the “Which Means to You” test? How about your media kit?
They are careful about who they work with.The late Jeffrey Mayer taught me that sales is a process of disqualifcation. He gave me a three-part formula:
No Money = No Sale
No Authority = No Sale
No Need = No Sale
Make a list of the people you’re calling on. Have you established that they have a need for what you’re selling? Do they have they authority to buy it? Do they have the money to spend what it takes? For a story about how he got me to dump a prospect, click here.
All of these steps are simple. The sales skills are easy to learn.
Practicing them every day is hard. Really hard. The best salespeople perform the steps and make the real money. Can you?
