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?”
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]
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.
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.
Here’s how: learn something valuable that your colleagues and competitors don’t know.
photo by waldemarus/dpc
Here’s one example:
Every state has consumer protection laws designed to shield the public from deceptive advertisers. Many small business owners don’t know the laws, and can’t afford to pay a lawyer to keep them on the right side of the law. During my radio advertising sales days, I became that expert.
One day, I saved a client several thousand dollars with that kind of knowledge. He was the General Manager of a local auto dealership. He had worked for a long time in the Portland car business, moved to California for several years, and recently returned to Oregon.
He emailed me because he was planning to launch a new used-car promotion. He had a selection of pre-owned vehicles priced at half their original MSRP, and wanted to feature them in his radio advertising.
What he didn’t know is that while he’d been in California, the state of Oregon had made it illegal to compare a used vehicle’s price to the MSRP in an ad. The official commentary accompanying that section of the law (technically an Administrative Rule) explained that MSRP is a term reserved strictly for new vehicles. Because so many factors (mileage, wear and tear, accidents, etc) affect the price of a used car, the revised law prohibited using an MSRP in any way when referring to anything pre-owned.
I knew this because a little more than a year before, I’d been the only Portland broadcast rep to drive to Salem for a seminar on the new laws. So I was able to warn my client away from a strategy that would have earned him a substantial fine from the state.
My automotive clients knew I’d taken the time to learn the rules, that I had copies of all the relevant consumer protection laws, and that I checked with my contacts at the Oregon Department of Justice if I wasn’t sure of something.
They also knew that my competitors hadn’t gone to the seminar (I’d been known to bring that up in conversation), and didn’t know the law as well as I did. So I got phone calls, and business, from advertisers who might otherwise take their money to another station.
These days, I train advertising salespeople to do their jobs more effectively, and automotive remains a huge advertising category. In every state I travel to, there’s a crying need for someone who knows the consumer protection laws and can advise their clients on how to keep their marketing legal. It’s rare that I ever see anyone try to fill that need.
Can you be that expert at your radio or television station?
[reminder]What do you know that your competitors don’t? Where can you be the “go-to” expert?[/reminder]
“If you put together a program that drives traffic to your client’s website, and that traffic never turns into money, you have failed. Don’t just shrug your shoulders and blame the advertiser. You are an Account Executive. Your job is to execute. If the campaign fails and the client cancels, it’s on you.”
Rod’s reply:
Is it also on the AE if his radio or TV ads bring traffic to the store, but the traffic never turns into money because: a) the store doesn’t have the merchandise; b) store employees aren’t doing their job; c) anything else that isn’t directly under the AE’s control causes the prospect to take his money elsewhere?
Of course not.
The AE’s job is to execute the actions for which he is directly responsible. Holding him accountable for the client’s failure (to convert traffic into sales, or whatever), when he hasn’t been given the authority or resources to effect the necessary changes, seems a bit much. Of course a conscientious AE is going to call attention to problems he spots and suggest solutions, but in the end, it’s on the advertiser.
I believe that the salesperson needs to be actively looking for ways that things can go wrong, and taking pro-active steps to make sure those issues are dealt with before the campaign hits the air.
Here’s a story of a time that I failed to do that.
In 2006 I was a salesperson for Clear Channel Radio (now iHeart Media) in Portland, Oregon. I stumbled onto a great summer auto dealer promotion idea in a newsletter, and took it to one of my biggest clients, Beaverton Mitsubishi.
The idea: on a designated weekend, everyone who takes a test drive gets a free half-gallon of ice cream.
The logic: many buyers — especially used car buyers — spend an afternoon on Auto Row, going from dealership to dealership test driving the cars. It’s frustrating to spend significant time with a customer only to have that customer wave and head for the lot across the street. Give them a carton of ice cream, and they have to go home and put it in the freezer. Your lot is the last one they visit for the day.
The store GM loved it and we scheduled the promotion for a weekend in July. I told the general manager to tell the salespeople to give everyone the ice cream after a test drive, whether they asked for it or not.
This wasn’t really a traffic-driving promotion — even though we ran radio ads, I wasn’t convinced a lot of people would make a special trip to Beaverton Mitsubishi just to get some ice cream. The aim was to change the behavior of every customer who took a test drive, not just those who responded to the radio.
The GM promised he’d let his sales managers know, and they’d tell the salespeople. That sounded fine to me.
Big mistake.
I found a company to rent us a freezer and had it delivered to the dealership. The GM was supposed to buy the ice cream, but a couple of days before the event he asked me to do it because he “didn’t have time.”
Warning sign. I missed it.
I picked up 25 half gallons of ice cream, brought them to the store and stocked the freezer. I showed them to the GM and told him to call my cell phone if he ran low and I’d pick up some more.
The weekend came and went. No calls from the store. On Monday I went back to the store, and there were 20 half-gallons of ice cream still in the freezer. The manager told me that the promotion had bombed.
It turned out that the managers hadn’t really explained the concept to the salespeople. Some of them had no idea why there was a freezer in the back office, and the ones who knew about the promotion thought they were only supposed to give the ice cream to people who mentioned the ad.
Whose responsibility was that? It was mine. Looking back on it, what were the odds that an auto dealership manager was really going to take the time to explain a radio promotion to his salespeople? Slim, at best.
I could have shown up at a dealership sales meeting, played the commercial for everyone, told them exactly what to do, and explained how they would benefit. I could have shown up on Saturday morning, taken a few minutes to talk with the salespeople, made sure they remembered that this was the weekend of the big ice cream promotion, and gotten them enthusiastic about it.
I didn’t. The GM had told me he would let everyone know, and that sounded good to me. One less thing for me to worry about.
It would have been easy to blame the store for not executing the promotion properly. But I was the Account Executive. Responsibility for execution was mine.
NINE YEARS LATER
Beaverton Mitsubishi is long gone, but I still drive by the lot on Canyon Road every now and then. Each time I do, I think about the ice cream promotion, and I wince.
Next week I’ll be in the Midwest, and one of my meetings is with the owner of a chain of weight loss clinics. The advertising drives people to their website, where they are supposed to sign up for a consultation. I looked at the site, and found that it takes several unnecessary clicks to get to the signup page, and once I got there the instructions left me confused. People who are confused often do nothing. The website doesn’t pass The Mom Test.
I could just shrug and say, “The TV is doing its job — it’s getting people to the site. It’s not my fault that the site is screwed up.” But I know that’s a cop-out. Next week I’m going to pull the site up on my laptop, show the client exactly where her prospects are getting lost, and tell her what changes she needs to make before her ads go back on the air.
The success of the campaign is our responsibility.
THREE WAYS TO APPLY THIS TO YOUR BUSINESS NOW
1. Spend a few minutes reviewing the upcoming campaigns you’ve sold. Ask what has to happen to make each campaign successful. Is the product in the store? Do the front-line employees know about the promotion? Can the advertiser’s website pass The Mom Test?
2. Begin including a “To Do” list with each presentation. Give the client a list of tasks that must be performed. Agree, in writing, on who will perform each task. Follow up to make sure everything gets done.
3. Start a discussion with your peers. Share this on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
[reminder]Agree with me? Want to argue?[/reminder]
Some reasons to ponder come courtesy of a Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memo essay, from way back in 2008. Read the whole thing here. Every point he makes is still valid today. Here are a couple:
2. reputation.
Consider the people who don’t buy from you. Are they buying elsewhere because they haven’t heard about your company, or is it because they have? I’ve never met a business owner willing to believe their company had a bad reputation…
7. media myths.
Are you anxious to find a more effective media? If so, you’ve got really bad ads. I’ve never seen a company fail because they were using the wrong media or reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen thousands fail because they were saying the wrong things. A powerful message will produce results in any media.
Photo by Aurelio/dpc
In my advertising sales/consulting practice, I meet with about 200 local businesses each year.
They hear from television advertising salespeople, telling them to get out of radio because radio doesn’t work.
They hear from radio advertising salespeople, telling them to get out of newspaper because newspaper doesn’t work.
They hear from social media “experts” telling them to get out of radio, newspaper and television because traditional media doesn’t work.
Here’s the dirty little secret I pass along to them:
There are plenty of potential customers who watch television, listen to the radio, read the newspaper, and consume media online every single day. When I hear that the advertising isn’t working, it’s generally one (or more) of three problems:
1. They didn’t get the message right. You’ve got to tell a story your audience cares about, and give them a good reason to do business with you.
2. They aren’t delivering the message often enough, or consistently enough. Customers will buy when they’re ready and not a moment before. You need to keep reminding them.
3. They don’t deliver on the promises their advertising makes, and the audience doesn’t believe them.
If you tackle the issues above, you’ll get the advertising to work. If you don’t, switching media isn’t going to help.
