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5 Awesome Must-Read Blogs For Ambitious Media Salespeople

The best salespeople read constantly. Books, newspapers, newsletters, online courses… and blogs. We live in an age where there is an enormous amount of great information available for free about business, marketing, advertising, and sales.

Here is some required smartphone reading for anyone who works in media sales or advertising:

Photo courtesy Hubspot

Great Advertising, Marketing and Sales Blogs

Dan O’Day Talks about Radio — The ostensible subject is radio, but about 50% of the time he is talking about advertising, and what he says can apply to television, Internet, and other media just as well as radio. His Commercial Smackdowns, in which he gleefully dismantles a radio ad, are both instructive and a great deal of fun.
Jeffrey Gitomer’s Sales Caffeine — not technically a blog (he has one of those, too but rarely posts). You have to subscribe by email to get this. Gitomer, the author of dozens of sales books including Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness, has been sending out these emails since 2001. He has been known to repeat himself, which is not surprising when you think about having to write 52 of these a year for 15 years. But he lives and breathes sales, has strong opinions, and knows what the heck he’s talking about.
The Jim Doyle & Associates Blog: In the interest of full disclosure, let me point out that my day job is as a consultant and sales trainer for Jim Doyle & Associates. But I was a paying customer of this company before they hired me – when I was a radio account executive, I paid out of my pocket to be part of Jim’s sales coaching program. Jim himself wrote Don’t Just Make A Sale… Make A Difference: How Top Achievers Approach Advertising Sales. He, Tom Ray, Pat Norris and John Hannon all provide content to the blog. If you sell radio, television, print, online, billboards, or any other media, this stuff works.
Monday Morning Memo Every Monday, Roy Williams (the Wizard of Ads, not the basketball coach) pontificates about advertising, marketing, persuasion, and anything else that he wants the world to know. Sometimes, he wants the world to know how smart he is, so his blog does occasionally go off in the weeds. But more often than not, he has excellent advice on how to enter somebody’s mind and convince them to do or think something. His book Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads: Turning Paupers into Princes and Lead into Gold is required reading for anyone who works in advertising, or wants to.
Sam Richter’s Know More Blog Richter is the author of Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling, a terrific book on how to research prospects online. He offers a variety resources, some for free and some for money. He is a blog tackles a variety of topics, from sales techniques to to search for information to the value of social media.

[reminder]What’s your favorite advertising, marketing, or sales blog?[/reminder]

Does Relentless Advertising Work?

One answer to this question comes from a study conducted a few years ago by the Stanford University School of Medicine and Packard Children’s Hospital.

child and fast food -- result of relentless advertising — Photo by Andrey Armyagov/dpc

According to AdAge.com, kids 3 to 5 years old were fed two sets of identical foods — some in McDonald’s wrappers and some wrapped in plain paper.

They overwhelmingly preferred the stuff when it came with a Mickey-D’s logo.

“Each child was given chicken nuggets, a hamburger and french fries from McDonald’s, and baby carrots and milk from the grocery store… With one exception, significantly more children said the McDonald’s-labeled product tasted better.”

McDonald’s spends an enormous amount of money to advertise to children, and apparently they have purchased brand loyalty beginning at a very early age. If you’ve ever driven past a McDonald’s at lunchtime with a car full of kids, you’ve seen brand loyalty translate into sales. And although they’ve hit some bumps in the road recently, they’ve got a 60-year track record of sales dominance — without question, they belong in the advertising training textbook.

McDonald’s has enough money to be seen and heard just about everywhere; the rest of us have to be more selective in choosing market segments and media opportunities we can afford to dominate. But even without a huge marketing budget, you can still follow the basic principles that have kept McDonald’s at the top of their category:

1. Have a consistent theme and spokesperson — the Golden Arches logo has been there forever, and Ronald McDonald has been a significant part of the marketing effort for decades.

2. Establish a long-term plan, and stick with it. The most successful markets map out a year at a time, and they don’t cancel their ads after a bad weekend.

3. Make an offer. A small portion of McDonald’s advertising is for image, but most of it gives the target consumer a specific benefit — a coupon, a new product, a movie tie-in — for doing business with them today.

[bctt tweet=”The basic techniques for generating action haven’t changed. Start early, keep going.”]

It takes careful planning, patience, and money to establish a dominant position in your market. Attention spans are shorter than they’ve ever been.

But the basic techniques for gaining the consumer’s attention, interest, desire, and action haven’t changed. Start early, keep going.

[reminder]

How to Say No to Blah: Can It Pass The “So What” Test?

Timing is a funny thing. The other day I read the Miles & Co What Are You Bragging About? blog post, in which Lynn Peisker finds a hotel chain’s chest-thumping less than compelling. Peisker asks this question:

Does your messaging truly reflect your above-and-beyond-brand of Shareworthy Service, or are you promising what every customer simply expects?

radio advertising sales tip: get rid of the blah — photo by chrisdorney/dpc

The very next day I received an email from a television advertising salesperson on the West Coast. She was looking for a creative idea for a roofing company. She had asked the client what made his roofing company different, and got this answer back:

“We will complete the job to the customer’s satisfaction. We are here before, during and after the job.”

That’s the company’s unique selling proposition? They’ll complete the roofing job to a customer’s satisfaction? That’s an awfully small hook to hang their hat on.

Looking for something more, I went to the company’s website, where I learned that they are “Roofing Experts”.

Blah.

.
Customers expect a job done to their satisfaction. They expect a the people who work for a roofing company to be roofing experts. Any of their competitors can make exactly the same claim.

Advertising Sales Tip: Say NO to Blah

If you are an advertising salesperson tasked with coming up with a strong campaign, you have a responsibility to say NO to blah. need to dig for something more.

What else can your client talk about? Do they offer a guarantee that’s better than anyone else in town? Offer a product, or installation technique, that’s unique to the area — and better than the alternatives?

What does your client do that nobody else does? What can they offer that nobody else can? Find the answer, and you’ve got your campaign.

[reminder]What’s the most interesting claim you’ve ever been able to put into an ad?[/reminder]

Can You Describe Yourself In Three Words or Less?

How do you want your customers to describe you? Can you give them an easy, short phrase to remember?

Re-reading Scott Ginsberg’s How To Be That Guy recently, I happened upon this gem:

PICTURE THIS: you’re sitting in the CNN Green Room, ready to be interviewed about your cool new idea, company, or product. After giving the producer the correct spelling of your full name, she asks you, “Oh, and one last thing before you go on the air in five minutes: what two or three words do you want written underneath your name?”

radio advertising sales tip: two or three words — Photo by mishaabesadze/dpc

Ginsberg is known as “The Nametag Guy” (his web domain is HelloMyNameIsScott.com). How To Be That Guy, which came out in 2006, is a quick read with a lot of actionable tips on how to make yourself more memorable.

The “two-or-three-word” exercise is a valuable reality check. You might have a multi-page web site or brochure. You might have a complex and sophisticated integrated media campaign going. But when one of your customers mentions you to a friend, relative, or co-worker, the description may only be a few words.

Your assignment this week is to boil your selling proposition down to its essence — describe the value you provide in three words or less.

[reminder]I’m Phil Bernstein, Attention Rental Expert. Who are you?[/reminder]

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Should You Burn Your Media Kit?

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet. This information can be found at a website that is full of useless facts.

You know what else might be full of useless facts? Your station’s Media Kit.

Radio advertising sales tip: burn your media kit — PHOTO BY ILYA AKINSHIN/DPC

We tend to grab pages from the Media Kit without thinking much about the information we’re passing along. Before your next sales call, take a cold hard look at what’s in the folder. How much value is it really providing?

A few weeks ago, I was working with a television station sales department in a Midwest market. We’d had a great week of needs analysis calls, and I had finished the first drafts of all the proposals. It was up to the account executives to add the television and digital advertising plans, along with information about why their television station was the best choice for the client.

I opened a revision from salesperson, and in the “Why Our Station ” section was a page that said, “WXXX was recently chosen the Best Local TV Station by the readers of Springfield Magazine.” (Call letters and market name have been changed to protect the guilty).

I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that nobody cares what the readers of Springfield Magazine think of the TV station.

The viewers don’t care.

The employees of Springfield Magazine don’t care.

The customers weren’t going to care, either. This information was not going to move anyone any closer to spending money on the station.

And yet, there it was… in that proposal and four or five others from the same staff. It was in there because someone in the station marketing department had made that page and put in the media kit. The path of least resistance was to copy that page and paste it into the proposal.

HUGE MISTAKE

Slapping media kit pages into your presentation is the easiest thing to do, and it’s a huge mistake. Media kits are often written by somebody who’s never met your station’s clients, and has no idea what customers really want to know. Without major modification, media kit pages do not belong in your proposals.

Here are some common media kit subjects that your clients don’t care about:

· The “Award-Winning News Department.” News awards are like youth soccer trophies: everybody gets one. All of your competitors have “award winning news”, too.

· The station’s share of adults 25 to 54… when the client’s customers are all 55+.

· A pie chart showing that 56% of some survey’s respondents believe that your medium is “the most influential”.

Here’s what the clients will care about: bringing new customers to their businesses and making more money. Your clients and prospects care about themselves.

When it comes time to do an important presentation for major dollars, burn the media kit. Take the extra time to write each page from scratch — make it about your customer, not about you.

Before including any piece of information in the proposal, ask yourself: “If I were the client, would this information cause me to want to buy the plan we’re proposing?”

Be ruthless about this. If the answer is no, leave it out.

[reminder]Agree? Think I’m crazy?[/reminder]