Category: Phil Bernstein

On a recent Tuesday morning I met with an insurance company executive who had a gripe to share.

I told your competitor a month ago that I wanted a weather sponsorship without commercials. Just 5 seconds that says, “This weather report is brought to you by [name of the agency].” I didn’t want any commercials — just the mentions. He came back with a big package with a bunch of commercials. It’s like he didn’t even hear me. So I sent him away.

Two days later I heard a variation on that theme from a home improvement company owner:

We’re a franchise, and we’re required to use our home office for everything we do online. I’d love to run on your station, but all I need is TV ads. If you try to add your “digital package” [at this point she made air quotes with her fingers] I’m just going to make you take it out, so don’t waste my time or yours.

I told her it sounded like she’d been through this before.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I tell everyone who comes in that we’ve got online covered. It doesn’t matter what I tell ’em. All the radio people… and the TV people… and the newspaper people keep trying to push their ‘digital solutions’ on me. They don’t listen. Drives me crazy.”

Are you listening when your client talks?

The best salespeople learn to negotiate with two separate parties to get a sale done: the client, and station management.

• Your company may have a policy that “every pitch has to include digital.” Can you convince your manager to make an exception in an exceptional case? Don’t assume — try before you go back.
• Maybe your standard weather sponsorship package always includes commercials. Is there a way around that? Find out — if you don’t ask, you don’t get.

On his company blog, Jim Doyle recently wrote about a very successful attorney he interviewed.

…this attorney talked about his impressions of sales reps over the 20 years he’d been advertising. He said, “The best were the ones who really paid attention to what I said and didn’t try to sell me stuff that didn’t fit with my target or challenges. The worst never seemed to ever pay attention to what I had told them was important in my business.”

I get it. Sometimes your management won’t budge, and you simply won’t be able to deliver exactly what the client asked for. What then?

Some AE’s are scared to deliver bad news. They just show up with their standard package and hope that the customer doesn’t remember what they asked for in the last meeting. Some don’t go back at all.

Both are losing strategies.

Your best approach is to deliver the news in person as quickly as you can, and openly acknowledge the discrepancy.

Look the client right in the eye and say, “I know exactly what you asked for last time. I heard you. Unfortunately, we can’t deliver it just that way — and believe me, I tried. Here’s how close we can get, and this is how you’ll benefit if you do it this way. I hope it’s close enough, because we want to earn your business. If it’s not, I’ll understand.”

Who knows? Maybe the customer will surprise you and agree.

Even if the answer’s no, you’ll preserve the relationship, and the client’s respect… as one of those rare salespeople who listens.

[reminder]

During a trip to Florida a while back, my wife sent me to a McDonald’s with a simple set of instructions: return to the hotel with three Egg McMuffins and three orders of hash browns.

I walked up to the counter to place my order.

Me: Three Egg McMuffins and three orders of hash browns, please.

Woman at counter:  Egg McMuffins are $2.59 each or two for $3.00.

Me: In that case, give me four.

Woman: Hash browns are a dollar each or two for $1.50.

Me (struggling): Umm… okay, I’ll just take two.

A few minutes later, she beckoned me back to the counter.

Woman: We’re short one round egg, and cooking one will take a few minutes. Or you can have a folded egg now.

Me: I’ll take the folded egg.

When she brought out my food she told me she’d put a couple of apple turnovers in the bag for free… “for the inconvenience.”

Two thoughts occurred to me as I returned to the hotel:

1. I had just gotten a screamin’ deal: four Egg McMuffins, two orders of hash browns, and two apple turnovers for about nine bucks.

2. The next time I’m in Orlando, there’s no way I will go back to that particular McDonald’s.

The woman behind the counter probably believed that she was helping me by offering the discounts.

Instead, she was making my life difficult. I wanted a nice, simple transaction, and she gave me something complicated.

The experience was still fresh a few days later when an aesthetic medicine doctor asked me to evaluate her television commercial. The ad suggested two possible actions: call on the phone for an appointment, or log onto the practice’s web site.

I advised the doctor to simplify her message and give viewers a single call-to action — instruct them to call on the phone. Advertisers often find that just making this simple change significantly increases the response from the campaign.

The strategy seems counter-intuitive, but here’s why it works:

A viewer faced with a phone number and a web address in 30 seconds won’t have the time or mental bandwidth to write down both. Faced with a decision about which one to remember, many people wind up remembering neither.

In The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, Barry Schwartz described a series of studies in which car buyers were offered an array of choices:

Even though their decision was purely hypothetical, participants experienced substantial negative emotion when choosing between Cars A and B. And if the experimental procedure gave them the opportunity, they refused to make the decision at all. So the researchers concluded that being forced to confront trade-offs in making decisions makes people unhappy and indecisive.

Participants in these studies showed the pattern of reluctance to make trade-offs whether the stakes were high or low. Confronting any trade-off, it seems, is incredibly unsettling. And as the available alternatives increase, the extent to which choices will require trade-offs will increase as well.

What, then, do people do if virtually all decisions involve trade-offs and people resist making them? One option is to postpone or avoid the decision.

This also applies to in-person sales presentations. Many old-school  trainers advocated offering the client three choices. Early in my sales career, my presentations generally included a “Conservative” option, a “Moderate” option, and an “Aggressive” option. The hope was that the customer would choose the middle option.

Too often, I found, the client chose to do nothing. They just wanted the expert to tell them what to do.

The last thing you want  for your prospect to postpone or avoid a decision. Though it may seem paradoxical, offering a single choice will increase the likelihood that your prospect will actually take action.