Media – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

The One Thing Your Prospects Can’t Ignore

You’ve got a great idea for a prospect. What’s the best way to communicate it?

I know. You’re crazy busy.

Between prospecting, internal paperwork, make-goods, and that new initiative corporate just dumped on you, there aren’t enough hours in the day.

So when you’ve got something big to propose to a client, email looks awfully tempting.

You could meet in person with them. But that means getting in the car, driving across town, and cooling your heels in the reception room before you get 15-20 minutes to explain the whole thing.

The other option: email. Attach the Powerpoint to the message, press “Send”, and call them later to make sure they got it. Email’s fast, it’s easy, and you don’t have to pay for gas or parking.

Think twice before you hit “Send.”

A study by Professors Mahdi Roghanizad (Western University) and Vanessa K. Bohns (Cornell) found that an in-person appeal was 34 times as persuasive as an email.

The researchers instructed 45 participants to each ask 10 people to complete a brief survey. There were 450 requests in all.

One group made the request by email, and the other group made the “ask” face-to-face. They used identical scripts.

Both groups were asked to predict in advance how successful they’d be. Both groups expected to persuade about half their prospects to complete the task.

The Results

The “face to face” group had a 71.5% “close” rate.

The emailers were…let’s just say overestimated their abilities when they made their predictions. In real life they persuaded only 2.1% of their prospects to complete the task.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jdv2Wp9MzY0

[shareable]The one thing your prospect can’t ignore is a human body in their office. [/shareable]

To review:

“Face to face” persuaded seven out of ten. Email converted less than one.

As Vanessa Bohns put it in Harvard Business Review,

You need to ask six people in person to equal the power of a 200-recipient email blast.

It’s interesting that the emailers expected to do much better. Bohns has this explanation:

Why do people think of email as being equally effective when it is so clearly not? In our studies, participants were highly attuned to their own trustworthiness and the legitimacy of the action they were asking others to take when they sent their emails. Anchored on this information, they failed to anticipate what the recipients of their emails were likely to see: an untrustworthy email asking them to click on a suspicious link.

Indeed, when we replicated our results in a second study we found the nonverbal cues requesters conveyed during a face-to-face interaction made all the difference in how people viewed the legitimacy of their requests, but requesters were oblivious to this fact.

Other reasons email may be less effective:

Those who read it may not read it closely. Busy clients may glance at the screen while multitasking, misinterpreting or completely missing important points you tried to convey.
Your personality is missing. Text on the page can never convey the thought, enthusiasm and passion you put into your proposal.
It’s easily ignored. Prospects get dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of emails every day. It’s easy for them to scroll past yours or delete it without reading it.

There may be times in-person just won’t work — not enough time, lack of client availability, or distance.

In those cases, you can try be “face-to-face” through the power of online video.

You can present your proposal online with a service like Zoom. With a webcam and a little bit of practice, you can let your client see your face and hear your voice…and have some control over the way they consume the content.
Record a screencast of your presentation, upload it to YouTube, and email them a link. This is less effective than a “live” web presentation because you lose the ability to have a real-time conversation. But it does transmit some of your enthusiasm and personality.One way to make this a bit more effective is to call the client on the phone after sending the email. Tell them you just want to make sure the link is working properly, and ask them to click on it while you’re on the phone. This way, you know they at least watched the beginning.
Use video email to cut through the email clutter and deliver your message with your face and your voice. There are several paid video email services out there — I am partial to BombBomb.

All three of these options will give you better results than a text-only email.

But if you can carve out the time and have the access, nothing beats the persuasive power of an in-person conversation. The one thing your prospect can’t ignore is a human body in their office — your body.

If you need to persuade… really persuade…a face-to-face presentation beats email 34 to 1.

Get your fingers off the keyboard and your butt behind the wheel.

[reminder]

How to Turn Sales Opportunity Into Defiance

“I keep trying to tell him how dumb his radio buy is, and he just won’t listen.”

insulting a client chhoice won't make you a sale — Photo by pathdoc

So said a television account executive as we prepared for a sales call with a window retailer. The owner was a long-time radio user, and my job was to convince him to start using TV and digital. The AE had been calling on him for more than a year.

“I’ve shown him all the research from TVB — people just don’t listen to the radio anymore, and he really needs to move over to television.”

“What does he tell you?” I asked.

“He gets defensive, and he tells me his radio’s working fine.”

Whatever medium we work in — television, radio, newspaper, outdoor, digital, — we see “research.” Some of it is independently done, but much of what we see is produced by our industry association. It can be helpful, but it’s designed in part to convince our customers that our medium works better than the other guys.

Television has TVB, the Television Bureau of Advertising. TVB has studies to show advertisers that TV works better than radio.

The radio industry has RAB — the Radio Advertising Bureau. RAB has charts and graphs to show advertisers that radio works better than TV.

When you’re new to the business, and all you see is your own industry’s research, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’ve got the only medium, or the only station within that medium, that works. From there, you can leap to the conclusion that anyone who uses the other guys is either misinformed or stupid.

But as Gregg Easterbrook once put it, “Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.” Advertisers who have seen charts and graphs from competing media reps are inclined to believe none of them.

Trying to use those numbers to convince a prospect that the decision he’s made is a bad one is unlikely to have the desired effect. Even if you’re right, you’re wrong.

Anthony Iannarino, author of The Only Sales Guide You’ll Ever Need, puts it this way:

The weakest choice available when trying to create a compelling reason for your dream client to consider leaving their existing supplier (or partner, as the case may be) is to directly attack your competitor. This approach creates resistance, and you cause your prospective client to defend their existing supplier—and their choice.”

A much better approach is to carefully ask a question to see if there might be any doubt in the prospect’s mind already. The question I like to use for an advertiser who’s been using a competitor for a long time is this:

“Is [name of medium] working as well for you as it did five years ago?”

You can then tailor your approach to the answer.

I asked the window retailer that question. He thought about it for a few seconds, and then told me that his radio was still getting results, but there’d been a bit of a drop-off in the past couple of years.

I then asked him which of the four radio stations he was using worked best, and he told me that he thought that two were producing good results and two were not.

I advised him to stay with the two that were working and drop the other two. We came back with a plan to use that money on a television/digital strategy, and he agreed to do it.

Some prospects will insist that their advertising is working just as well as ever. No chart or graph will convince them otherwise, and they’re not going to cancel something they believe is making money for them. It can be very difficult to convince them to change.

But it’s not impossible — sometimes you can persuade them that using your products can open additional doors for them.

In formal PowerPoint presentations, I set aside a slide that commends them for their success. In big red letters, I say this:

You’re doing really well already without me.

Here’s how to make a strong campaign even stronger.

From there, I detail a strategy that either adjusts their messaging slightly, or demonstrate that we can put that message in front of desirable consumers who aren’t seeing it now.

Does this work every time? No. There are plenty of times the client decides not to take action.

But it works much better than a direct attack, which will only alienate the client. Respecting your customer’s decision leaves the door open to further conversations… and business when they’re ready.

Chic-fil-A Dumps Its Agency: Lessons For Sellers Like You

Last month, after 22 years and millions of sandwiches, Chic-fil-A fired its agency.

This came as a shock to many.

The Richards Group introduced the “Eat Mor Chikin” cows in 1995. As AdAge reports, Chic-fil-A has become the top chicken chain in the United States, with $6 billion in annual sales.

In spite of all that, Chic-fil-A fired their agency. Understandably, Richards Group executives seemed stunned. Again, from AdAge:

“It’s not very often that a campaign this successful results in an agency being fired. I don’t know that there’s much precedence for it,” Stan Richards, principal and founder, The Richards Group, said in an interview. “It is a little hard to understand, and in many ways it’s the saddest occurrence in my long, professional life.”

For all of us in the media sales game, there are some lessons.

1. If you are working with your station’s biggest agency, your income is at the mercy of the clients that agency represents. Your biggest biller may be one phone call away from being a much smaller part of your paycheck.

2. No matter how good your account list looks right now, stuff happens. Marketing directors get fired. Successful companies hire new people who have other ideas. Owners sell their businesses.

You have no control over any of that. You do control your activity.

You can build relationships with the local clients your agencies represent. Agencies get fired, and if the only person you know is the media buyer, you’re in trouble.
You can look for new business every day. Here are several ways to find leads.

Or you can sit on your list and assume everything’s going to be fine forever.

It’s your call. Will you do what it takes to build a sustainable sales career?

Or are you a chikin?

Why a Little Dabbling Will Doom Ya

A West Coast Toyota dealer delivered a great lesson to a TV salesperson recently. And I got to watch.

Media sales tip: make sure they eat enough — photo by puhhha/dpc

The dealer was a loyal, consistent radio user — in fact, he told us that he spent nearly $50,000 a month, every month, on radio. He’d done this for years.

He would occasionally advertise on the TV station I was working with. On those occasions, he’d average about $3-4000 a month, generally for a couple of months.

On radio, he runs local ads making a strong offer. On TV, he’d use the manufacturer’s creative — 25 seconds about the Camry with a 5-second dealer tag at the end.

I asked him: “Which works better for you — radio or TV?”

His reply: “Radio’s always worked for us. We’ve dabbled in TV, but it’s never worked as well as radio has.”

This was a needs analysis call, and I have a rule on needs analysis calls — no arguing. So I bit my tongue until the AE and I were back in the car.

He spends 50 grand a month on radio, 12 months a year, using copy that sells for his dealership.
When he “dabbles” in TV, it’s with less than 10% of his radio investment, for a couple of months at a time, using national image ads.

Of course radio works better for him!

This applies to all media choices. Over the years I’ve seen plenty of cases where the investment levels were reversed — advertisers making a genuine commitment to television and dabbling in radio. Those advertisers invariably decide that TV works better.

I’ve watched major long-time advertisers on TV or Radio Station A give Station B a small short-term “test”. Inevitably, they conclude what they “knew” all along — Station B just doesn’t work as well as Station A.

As media sellers, we get mad at these clients for not giving our medium a fair shake, but some of the blame belongs with us. Because we let them do it.

Every time we accept a small order from a big advertiser…

Every time we let them “test” our station for a month…

Every time we let them dabble when we know that they need to make a real commitment…

…we create another client who tells everyone that “I tried [name of medium here] and it didn’t work.”

Don’t let ’em dabble.

[reminder]How do you convince new clients to make a real commitment?[/reminder]

Why You Can’t “Ease Into The Advertising” Anymore

Is anyone still paying attention?

addicted to smartphones — Photo by Kaspars Grinvalds /dpc

A while back, I met with the Marketing Director of a home improvement company in Texas. The company had been around for two decades. For most of that time, they’d had great success with an image campaign. Sales had been good, and customers mentioned how much they liked the commercials as they filled out the paperwork.

A few years ago, that started to change. Response to their messages had taken a huge drop. Showroom traffic was down, sales were down. The economy hadn’t helped, but even when it came back up the numbers had hardly budged.

They showed me a recent commercial they had done for windows. For 20 seconds, as pretty guitar music played, the screen showed kids in a backyard, playing in the leaves. The camera slowly panned back back to show that we were looking through a window.

Eventually the store logo and address showed up, and a pleasant voice came on with a slogan — “Windows never looked so good. Life never looked so good. We’re at [location]. Don’t forget to ask about our Best Value Guarantee.”

Fade to black. Commercial over.

After a moment, I asked the client: “Does anyone ever ask about your Best Value Guarantee?”

“No, she said.”

She was baffled. Her strategy had been successful for nearly two decades. What had changed?

[bctt tweet=”In the Age of the Smartphone, marketing fluff is deadly. Make your advertising a fluff-free zone.”]

The answer may involve the way we now process information. In 2010 the New York Times ran a series of articles called “Your Brain on Computers”, detailing the effect of information overload on our thinking process.

One installment discussed the effect of multitasking — working with multiple screens delivering a constant stream of information:

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists.

In the five years since that article appeared, it is likely that the problem has gotten significantly worse.

In 2010, approximately 17% of Americans had smartphones. Pew Research Center reported in April that the number is now 64%.

What do you do about this? How do you generate results in the age of digitally-rewired brains?

* Get to the point fast. Nobody’s going to stick around while you “ease into it.”

* Offer a direct, measurable benefit that comes when they do business with you. It’s not enough to make your target feel good about your brand.

* Tell your prospects exactly what they should do. Pick one action you want your prospects to take, and tell them — explicitly — to take it.

* Offer a reward to take the action, and include a deadline. Make the deadline specific. “This deal ends Friday at 8pm” is much more powerful than “Hurry, this offer ends soon.”

Here’s one way to make sure that your message opens on a strong note. I learned it years ago at a Dan O’Day copywriting seminar:

Write your script, and go through your standard editing process.
Delete the first sentence.
Does the message still work? If it does, leave the first sentence out and begin the commercial with Sentence 2.

It’s amazing how often the first sentence of the script turns out to be unnecessary fluff.

In the Age of the Smartphone, marketing fluff is deadly. Make your advertising a fluff-free zone.

[reminder]