Why You Should Be “The Salesperson Who Can Write Copy”

Recently I got an email out of the blue from a real estate guy in California, looking for help with a radio script.

salespeople should know how to write
photo by aleksandr/dpc

I’d never met him before, and asked how he found me. It turned out that he’d Googled “Best Real Estate Radio Ads”, and that took him to a video testimonial I’d recorded years ago after attending Dan O’Day’s Radio Copywriting Masters Class in Los Angeles.

I’d forgotten about the testimonial, but I’m reminded almost every day of the benefits that coming with being “The Salesperson Who Can Write Copy”.

5 Reasons Why You Should Be “The One Who Can Write Copy”

  1. Your competitors can’t do it.  Face it: there are a whole lot of advertising salespeople. Every day your clients and prospects are hearing from other radio, television, digital, print, and transit/outdoor sellers. If you learn to write an effective advertising message, you are likely to be the only one who does. This will immediately set you apart.
  2. It changes the conversation. While everyone else bores your client with rankers, graphs, and fire-sale packages, you’ll be talking with them about something they care about — telling their story and making more sales.
  3. Better Copy = Better Results = Renewals. You will talk to a lot of business people who have tried, and cancelled, lots of different media… because it didn’t work. If you bring them something that actually delivers results, they’ll stay with you forever. Renewals are where you make the real money.
  4. Other doors will open for you. Your clients will refer you to other businesspeople they know. And the competition will think of you when they have openings at their properties. Even if you’re happy where you are, it never hurts to have other options.
  5. It may bring you some outside income. As I became known around town as The Salesperson Who Could Write Copy, outside opportunities to write for money came my way. I was careful not to take on jobs that represented a conflict of interest — at the time I was, first and foremost, an employee of Clear Channel Radio — but over the years I picked up some nice checks on copywriting projects.

These days my time is limited, but I still take on freelance projects from time to time…because I can.

Listening to that testimonial (Dan interviewing me), I was reminded I’d spent over $2500 out of my own pocket — tuition, airfare, and hotel — to attend that class. I made a profit within a week of my return by presenting a script idea to a Portland real estate firm and banking the commission on an $18,000 new direct sale.

I’m still making money with those skills today.

You can listen to the interview here — it took place in 2007, when I was still a salesperson for Clear Channel:

copywriting masters youtube

[reminder]What are your best sources for copy ideas?[/reminder]

 

Is The Marketing Director Wasting Your Time?

A few months ago, I wasted several hours in a very nice Midwestern city.

Shocker: You can't sell if they can't buy
Photo by Igor Gromoff /dpc

 

A television station salesperson had set an appointment for me with the Marketing Director of a large medical practice. The AE assured me that this was the person who made all the advertising decisions for the practice.

To put it mildly, this turned out not to be the case.

It turned out that Marketing Director’s role was to gather proposals from advertising salespeople, and show them to the Controller. From there, if the Controller liked a proposal, it would be shown to the partners at the practice.

How did I find this out?

Simple. I asked.

Rookie media sellers often fall into this trap. They are introduced to the “Marketing Director” and assume, that this is the person who can make the decision. About half the time it’s true — many Marketing Directors do run their own ship.

But in other cases, this person’s authority is very limited. A significant number of people with big-sounding titles have to get approval from someone — and often several someones — higher up the ladder.

This scenario is common with larger companies, and extremely common in health care organizations.

[shareable]If they can’t buy it, you can’t sell it. You’ve got to find the person who can buy.[/shareable]

In the medical practice we were calling on, the Marketing Director could say no, but she couldn’t say yes. She could refuse to show our proposal to the Controller, but she did not have the authority to buy it.

The Controller could say no — he could refuse to show it to the partners — but he couldn’t say yes.

The real decision-makers were the partners. And the partners were two levels above the Marketing Director.

How can you know if you’re in front of the real decision maker?

Ask. Carefully.

Don’t ask, “Are you the decision-maker?”, or “Who makes the advertising decisions here?”

A question this direct can put your prospect on the defensive. An insecure customer might claim to have the authority whether they do or not.

The question I asked at the medical practice was: “When someone shows up with an advertising idea and wants you to make an investment in it, what’s the process for evaluating the idea? Who else besides you gets involved in those conversations?”

The Marketing Director was very open about the path from her office to the Controller to the doctors.

A good rule of thumb is this: If your proposal has to go more than one rung up the ladder from the person you’ve presented it to, you should be presenting to someone else.

With health care, you often have to start at the bottom and work your way up. It takes patience and perseverance, but over time you can get in front of the doctors. Just don’t kid yourself before you get there.

If they can’t buy it, you can’t sell it. You’ve got to find the person who can buy.

[reminder]What’s your best technique for qualifying a prospect?[/reminder]

 

 

What a Mattress Guy Taught Me About Advertising In the Dead Times

This conversation happened nearly 20 years ago, but it fits 2016 just fine. It’s a radio story but it applies perfectly to television advertising… or newspaper advertising… or transit advertising… or digital advertising.

Mattress advertising sells mattresses all year long
Photo by Pavel Losevsky/dpc

 

There is a large mattress chain on the West Coast called Sleep Train, founded in Sacramento by Dale Carlsen. They were a customer of mine when I worked in Portland radio.

When Sleep Train first came to Portland — probably in the mid to late 90’s —  Dale used to buy the media himself. Once a year he would fly from Sacramento to Portland and meet with every station in town. He would choose the stations he wanted to work with and negotiate a 52-week contract with each one.

You either got 52 weeks or nothing. I always got 52 weeks. As a commissioned salesperson, I liked this arrangement a great deal.

It took me two years to work up the nerve to ask him a question. He was in town and we were having lunch.

I asked him what the store’s worst month of the year was.

He answered, “December. We can’t compete with Santa Claus – December’s always horrible.”

I screwed up my courage and plunged ahead. “You’re going to be on the air every week in December, just like the rest of the year. Why do you do it if customers aren’t buying mattresses then?”

His reply has stuck with me for nearly two decades:

“Our research shows that people buy mattresses every 7 to 10 years. They’re usually ‘in the market’ for three days. They wake up one day and their back hurts… out of town visitors are coming and they need a bed for the guest room… they are moving into a new home.

“Whatever the reason, they’re going to buy a mattress from someone within three days. If it’s not my store, I have to wait another 7 to 10 years to have another shot at them. I want to talk to them every single week, so whenever they decide to shop for a mattress their car drives to Sleep Train by itself.”

That’s the value of advertising of advertising “out of season” – advertising makes an impact even if people are not in the market right that second.

I’ve long since lost touch with Dale Carlsen, but last year I read that he’d sold Sleep Train for $425 million. Not bad for what started as a single store in Sacramento, with Carlsen delivering mattresses in his pickup truck.

Not everyone has the money to do 52 weeks the way Sleep Train did, but many can be on the air consistently, 12 months a year. You just need to give them a good reason to do it.

Making a car drive by itself just might be that reason.

What to Do When They Hate Your Idea

Recently I presented a carefully-thought-out campaign idea to some people who run an auto dealership. They didn’t like it.

radio tv sales tip: you can recover if they hate your idea
Photo by DDRockstar/dpc

It was at the end of a week in which I’d already made 16 presentations, and gotten a positive reaction to my recommendations on the vast majority.

But I missed on this one. Big time.

The head of the dealership politely but emphatically explained that my idea did not fit the personality of his stores. It did not project the image that he wanted the public to have of his already-very-successful-business.

I was offering a strategy to aggressively go after new markets. He was happy with what he already had, and didn’t want to mess with a winning formula.

Sales Skills:
What Do You Do When The Client Hates Your Idea?

It’s never fun when your idea bombs. But there are steps you can take to get the conversation back on track:

Ask some questions to make sure you fully understand the objection. It’s not enough to know that the client doesn’t like something. You need to know what they’re not comfortable with, and why. This will help you determine if your idea can be tweaked, or if you need to start over.

Explain the rationale behind the strategy you chose. If you still believe in your idea after you’ve probed the objection, take a moment to defend it and show how it fits for them. Sometimes it turns out that the client didn’t understand your initial explanation.

Seek common ground. It might be possible to modify your idea in a way that addresses their concerns and still delivers the right result.

Don’t get defensive, and don’t argue.   Jeb Blount, author of the book Fanatical Prospecting, puts it this way:

Scores of salespeople try to argue their prospects into changing their minds — to prevail with debate. This is why prospects lie to us. They expect when they say no that they’ll face a battle and be disrespected.

…Overcoming doesn’t work. There is a universal law of human behavior: You cannot argue another person into believing they are wrong. The more you push another person, the more they dig their heels in and resist you.

Be willing to look for another solution. The fact that your client disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re stupid. The concerns may have merit. There may be another way to attack the problem. As Jeb Blount recommends, “If the horse is dead, dismount.”

Recognize that sometimes “No” gives you the tools to get to “Yes.” There are cases where the fastest way to learn what clients want is to first find out what they don’t want. In Ask, his book about online surveys, Ryan Levesque discusses a struggle we’ve all been through:

Think about the last time you and a group of friends were hanging out and thinking about where to go out to eat. You are all sitting around and someone says, “Hey, anybody hungry? What you all feel like doing for dinner?”

What’s the most common response? “I don’t know, what do you want?”

Sometimes that conversation goes around in circles – endlessly.

Why? Because, at the end of the day, people don’t know what they want.

However, if you’re hanging out with that same group of friends, you can ask a different sort of question: “Well, is there anything you don’t feel like eating for dinner tonight?”

Interestingly, people are much better at answering that type of question.

Your friends might say, “I don’t feel like pizza because I’m trying to eat gluten-free.” Or “I don’t want to do sushi because I’m allergic to shellfish.”

People are really good at telling you what it is they don’t want.

Similarly, you can also ask each of your friends one by one, “What did you have for dinner last night?” People are also very good at answering that question as well.

The reason why is because people essentially are only good at answering two basic types of questions when they don’t know what they want: what is they don’t want, and what they’ve done in the past.

 

In the end, that’s what saved my meeting with the car dealers.

Learning what they didn’t like opened up a conversation that offered us some strong clues on what they would like. The head of the store and one of his managers tossed out several suggestions that made a lot of sense. We are working on crafting those suggestions into a new strategy to put in front of them.

When the meeting’s over, see what you can learn from the experience. I’ve gone back through my notes of the initial needs analysis, trying to figure out what I missed. I’m convinced that there’s a question or two I could have asked at the first meeting that would have taken me down a different, and better, path.

[reminder]How do you handle it when a proposal bombs?[/reminder]

5 Great Articles for Media Salespeople: The Friday Five #4

great reading for radio and tv sales tips
photo by zphoto83/dpc

 

  1. “They seemed interested at the time. You were certain they were going to buy. But when you leave a message for them, all you hear is ‘crickets.’” Jeffrey Gitomer offers some look-in-the-mirror reasons why customers stop responding to you in  “I Can’t Find the Buyer Anymore!” Here’s Why…
  2. Another possible reason why prospects don’t return your voice mails: you may be leaving bad voice mails. If you’re wondering how you sound when you leave a message, Paul Castain’s got a great way to find out, and get better, in three minutes a day. Enjoy  The 3 Minute A Day Phone Workout.
  3. “For thousands of salespeople, picking up the phone and calling a prospect is the most stressful part of their life… Any excuse—and I mean any excuse—to do something else takes priority.” Once you’ve got your voice mail technique honed, here’s a question to ask yourself: are you calling enough people, often enough? Jeb Blount, author of the compelling new sales book Fanatical Prospecting, points out that Nobody Answers a Phone That Doesn’t Ring.
  4. “Despite how it seems, busy people do not have an impenetrable force field separating them from the ‘normal people.’ But they are more selective about how they spend their time ” If you’ve been wondering How to Connect With Busy People, Ramit Sethi has some actionable strategies to deploy.
  5. In case you’re thinking that you can safely talk and text while driving if you use one of those new hands-free systems, think again. AAA’s recent study shows us that Hands-Free Car Systems Still Distract Drivers. The data is scary. My advice? Shut up and drive.