Phil Bernstein – Page 46 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Ex-Radio Salesperson Makes Good

We in the media sales business are not, as a group, the most imaginative of folks. When we change jobs, we either go to a competitor, open an ad agency in our house, or find something else to sell.

My old KPOJ colleague and fellow blogger Randy White has bigger ambitions. He’s out to change the world, one local community at a time.

Enjoy this Oregonian article on his new venture, Bright Neighbor.

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FedEx Wins Some Christmas Day Word-of-Mouth

In my office, our main overnight delivery service until recently was DHL. It was cheaper than FedEx, and reasonably reliable. But the word around the office was always that if you were serious about getting a package to someone overnight, you should spring for FedEx.

DHL is gone now. On Christmas Day FedEx took a big step in reinforcing its reputation in the consumer’s mind as the most reliable choice overnight delivery. While UPS gave all of its employees the day off, FedEx announced that it would keep all 665 of its Express Centers open on Christmas morning.

A huge portion of the country has experienced really rough weather in the week before Christmas. Heavy snow and ice created havoc in air, rail, and ground transportation. Here in the Pacific Northwest, many roads are still iced over. Some packages — including many holiday presents — just couldn’t be delivered on time.

FedEx understood the disappointment that would cause, and decided to give parents one more chance to put the presents under the tree. This undoubtedly cost them a considerable amount of money, and created inconvenience and hardship for some of their employees. They did it anyway.

So if you were expecting a Christmas present via FedEx, you may be able to get it today. If it’s coming UPS? Sorry, you’ll have to wait until they get back on Friday.

Customers of both companies will remember what happened, and how each company responded to the challenge. So will all the people they talk to, and millions more who hear about it in media reports.

Which company will they choose when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight?

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.

Seth Godin Helps Me Get Over Myself

I took a “no” yesterday from a client who should have said “yes.”

Spent a good part of my Saturday fuming about the considerable 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 gone ahead with what I’d proposed, it would have been a profitable investment for him.

The income I lost when he turned me down may have also entered my thinking.

So Seth Godin’s post on “Two Ways to Deal With No” was both timely and beneficial. Shortened, fair-use versions of the options he presented are:

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.”

Seth expands significantly in his post, which you can read in its entirety here. I’ll add one other thought — advice I’ve given many times to newer salespeople, and which I’d forgotten in my own frustration yesterday:

Never blame the customer for not buying. Most of the time you’re wrong — in the course of the sales process, you have choices in how you present your proposal.

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 much better invested in thinking about what adjustments you’ll make in your presentation the next time you get a chance.

Seth’s second option will go a long way toward ensuring that the chance will come again.

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Could Newspapers Go Web-Only?

My dad was for many years a highly-respected law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He also had a thriving side business as an arbitrator. At one point in his career, he took a leave of absence from the university to see if he could arbitrate full-time.

A year or so later, he went back to teaching. He later told me that arbitration jobs became much harder to get when he was no longer a university professor. Once he was back on campus, the demand for his arbitration services went right back up.

It turned out that in the arbitration community, “Professor Bernstein of Washington University” was a powerful brand. It gave him a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace.

I thought of that story today when I read Jeff Jarvis’ suggestion on Huffington Post that it may be time for the Los Angeles Times to turn off its printing presses and go online-only.

His reasoning is that the Times’ web revenue is apparently now greater than its newsroom payroll costs. Eliminate all the costs of printing and distributing a physical product, outsource the national and international reporting to the big national papers, (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc), focus all of your efforts and resources on local news, and you’ve got a profitable digital news operation.

As an advertising guy, I see some big questions:

1. How much of that online revenue will disappear when it’s not part of a print advertising package?

2. How important would the LA Times website be, as an advertising vehicle, if it’s not tied to LA Times, the paper? Will readers still go to that website if there’s no physical product to remind them? Will merchants still pay to advertise there if they’re not in the paper, too?

In my radio-and-online world, our websites are becoming increasingly important, to listeners and advertisers. But at least right now, it’s the “on-air” that drives traffic to our sites online. Much of the value advertisers see in being on www.1190kex.com is tied to the reputation and reach of KEX Radio, 1190 on the AM dial; and most of our online advertising is purchased in conjunction with an on-air radio campaign.

If you take away the physical paper, does “LA Times Dot Com” become a thriving online source of local news? Or is it just another web site?

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Click this link to subscribe to Portland’s Finest Advertising and Marketing Blog.

Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein at 503-323-6553.