A West Coast Toyota dealer delivered a great lesson to a TV salesperson recently. And I got to watch.
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]
Becky has 30 prospects in her pipeline. Her closing percentage is 10%. She closes one deal. How many prospects remain in her pipe?
At first glance, the answer seems easy – she had 30, remove one, now she’s got 29? Right?
Wrong.
As Blount points out, the real answer is 20.
Here’s the math. Becky has a 1 in 10 probability of closing a deal. That means on average she will close only one deal out of 10 prospects she puts in her pipeline. The net result is when she closes one deal, the other nine are no longer viable prospects. This means her pipeline will be reduced by 10 prospects rather than one. She must now replace those 10 prospects to keep her pipeline full.
This is why when you get on a hot streak and close a bunch of business in a month, you wake up the following month with nobody left to close. Your prospect pool has suddenly evaporated, and you wonder where everybody went.
[shareable]The ball doesn’t lie in basketball, and the math doesn’t lie in sales.[/shareable]
Closing a sale creates new responsibilities: credit apps, production forms, creative meetings, collections. It is easy, when you are busy, to put off prospecting. You take a look at your pipeline, figure you’ve got plenty left, and stop making new business calls.
Here’s the problem: making a sale doesn’t just take one prospect out of the pipeline. It takes that one, multiplied by the number of active prospects you need, on average, to close one sale.
The next time you have a quiet moment, do some calculating.
How many proposals does it take, on average, to close a sale?
How many proposals do you have under active consideration right now?
How many prospects will each sale take out of the pipe?
The ball doesn’t lie in basketball, and the math won’t lie on your prospect list. Run the numbers, and then get on the phone.
[reminder]What’s the biggest struggle you have in keeping your sales pipeline full?[/reminder]
As I write these words, my iPhone can do nothing except make telephone calls and send texts. This is a good thing.
Photo by Focus Pocus LTD/dpc
Product Review: Freedom Web Blocking Software
I’m using the newest version of an app called Freedom, and for the next 59 minutes it has cut me off from the Internet.
In my time management war, the Web is my ISIS. If I can get to Facebook, I’m going to Facebook. Then Deadspin. Then Gawker. On too many days, I’ve looked up and realized that two hours has gone by and I’ve accomplished nothing.
Lacking the intestinal fortitude to just stay away, I’ve turned to technological aids to assist with the battle.
The best of them were 80pct Solutions’ original Freedom and Anti-Social apps. They’ve been helpful, but had crucial limitations. Now, the company has come out with a new combined version that does a very good job of addressing those limitations.
The idea: sometimes you need to get off the web entirely, and sometimes you need some access but need to block out the most distracting sites.
The original Freedom blocked the internet in its entirety. Download the app onto your Windows or Mac computer, engage it, set the timer, and your desktop or laptop was an internet-free zone.
It’s an awfully blunt instrument — either you’re completly connected or completely blocked. The same company made another product called Anti-Social to block specific sites while preserving access to the sites you needed.
This approach worked reasonably well for me, but had two downsides:
1. I have different “anti-social” needs at different times. For example, when I am researching a client’s marketing, I need to have access to Facebook and YouTube. Once the research is done, I need to stay as far away from those sites as I can. This meant that I had to re-set the “block list” every time I engaged Anti-Social.
2. Neither app worked on iOS devices, which meant that I had to stash my iPad and iPhone on another floor to keep myself in check. This may say more about me than it does about the product, but I yearned for something that would block sites on my i-Devices.
The new version, which is sold on a cloud-based “freemium” subscription model, tackles both of those issues.
The company has now combined Freedom and Anti-Social into a single program. The basic free version allows you to block two sites on one device. There’s a middle version middle version ($24 per year at this writing) with more functionality, and a Premium level ($45/year) that has a mobile app and, for the first time, works on iOS and Android.
Needing all the help I can get, I went for the Premium version. (Note: My mobile devices are Apple products. I have not tested the Android version.)
Once you’ve signed up and downloaded the apps onto your devices, you create Blocklists — listing the sites that you want to block yourself from. So far, I’ve made two:
“Working” blocks pretty much every site I can think of that I enjoy. Facebook, YouTube, Deadspin, ESPN.com, NYDailyNews.com — so far I’ve put 14 sites on the list.
My other list is called “Research”, and it allows me to get to Facebook and YouTube when I need them for work reasons.
There’s also a third option: “Block Everything”. Engage that option and the entire Internet goes away.
The big news here is that I can set it to block the sites on my desktop computer, laptop, and my iPhone and iPad simultaneously. When I set that option on a mobile device, my smartphone becomes a dumbphone.
There are still a few minor downsides:
1. On iOS devices, the effect is not quite immediate. It takes around 5 minutes for the block to show up.
2. For security reasons, I use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) when I’m on public wifi. Freedom uses its own VPN to block sites on iOS devices, which means that my regular VPN is turned off when Freedom is on. So I have to switch to cellular data for the duration. Not a huge deal, but a pain.
3. At the time of this writing, it doesn’t work properly with iOS 8. Their tech support tells me that they’re aware of this issue and are trying to fix it. It’s fine on iOS 9.
4. The process of putting mobile apps on a blocklist is a bit cumbersome, and I have not yet figured out how to make it block the iOS Facebook app. I will update this when I hear back from their tech support.
5. At $45 a year for the full meal deal, it’s a little spendy.
If you have the self-discipline to stay off those sites (I don’t), you can save the money. As Dirty Harry Callahan put it so well, a man’s got to know his limitations.
The new Freedom helps me work with my limitations, and is a huge step forward.
[reminder]How to you keep yourself on track?[/reminder]
“Why isn’t the service contract campaign working?”
Photo by Syda Productions/dpc
The question came from a television station Account Executive in the Southeast. He was working with an HVAC contractor who wanted to promote maintenance service agreements. The commercial had been running for about three months and had generated very few calls.
I’ve met with more than a few heating and air dealers and auto repair shops who have done very well with service plans — they are a terrific source of predictable, ongoing revenue.
But the most successful ones have told me that the general public isn’t particularly interested in a service agreement. The best source of leads for such plans are existing repair customers.
People don’t buy prevention, they buy a cure for their existing problem.If you want to sell it, it’s much easier to sell it as part of a cure than trying to convince someone who’s never had the problem in the first place.”
This applies many categories:
When are we most likely to sign up for automated computer backup? Right after our computer crashes.
Many of us don’t make the effort to exercise or eat right… but we’ll pay for the gym membership or diet plan to get rid of the weight we gained through poor nutrition and inactivity.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans will not bother to get a flu shot… but they’ll head right to the doctor and demand antibiotics once they get sick.
As we strategized about the heating-and-air campaign, I gave the Account Executive some advice that a very smart HVAC guy once gave me:
The best time to sell a service contract is when we’re in the customer’s home, working on their broken air conditioner.”
The best way to generate more service agreements? Go after emergency repair customers. That’s the advertising target.
How do you get yourself to make sales calls when you just don’t want to get on the phone?
Photo by xavier gallego morel
Not long ago, I sent out an email asking my readers what they’re struggling with. Among the replies were two very short, but to-the-point responses. From a radio AE in the Midwest:
Call reluctance. Not because I lack the tools (I read your emails to improve my skills and learn, learn, learn!) but because it’s one of the least favorite things to do.
A Director of Sales on the East Coast had this to say:
My sales team struggles with call reluctance. It’s an every day battle.
They’re not alone. We all have days when we know we need to make calls to drum up some business, but we just…don’t…want…to. So the delay tactics start:
We check our email.
We go through our production orders to make sure everything’s been filled out and turned in.
We reorganize our desk.
We go online to do some “research.”
We post a couple of things on social media.
We check our email again.
It’s easy to kill an hour or two this way, feel busy and accomplish nothing. The problem hasn’t gone away. We still need that new business.
How do the best salespeople conquer call reluctance?
Some of the best advice I’ve seen on the subject comes from a blog post by Rory Vaden, author of Procrastinate on Purpose.
Among other suggestions, Vaden recommends starting each day armed with a list of people to call on.
…before you stop working on any given day make sure to choose the first person you will call on the next day. Going door-to-door 80 hours a week for five summers I always had significantly fewer butterflies on days where I knew exactly what my first house would be.”
Sometimes it’s a reluctance to contact complete strangers, but on other occasions the issue is someone we know but can’t bring ourselves to call. Radio sales trainer and consultant Jim Taszarek calls these “Chicken Accounts.”
Taz used to publish a great newsletter called Quota Busters. The newsletter’s gone, but much of his wisdom is preserved in the book The Best of Quota Busters:
We don’t like to talk about them, but we’ve all got them. They are the accounts that we’re just afraid to call on – for any one of one million reasons.
It’s a normal sales phenomenon called “Call Reluctance”. Everybody’s got it to some extent. We say that the accounts are “too big,”, they are “newspaper only,” they “said no” repeatedly, or we’re just afraid of them. What to do? Sit on them? No way. Try this – it’s easy and you’ll love the results:
Confront them by writing them down. Write ’em down – make a list of our Chicken Accounts in one column, then look at them (Sales Managers, if you ask your staff to do this exercise make sure you emphasize that the list is for the AE’s personal use only. The list will be shared with no one. Not turned into management. No role-playing, no open review of the accounts. That will have the opposite effect of what were looking for. Got it?)
In the 2nd column, write a comment next to each account, answering the big question, like, what’s the barrier? Why are we reluctant to call on them? What’s the big reason we hesitate when we think about calling on them?
In the 3rd column, write a dollar amount of what they be worth to us if we could pop a hefty little schedule out of them.
Then call on one of them a day or a week. And not a halfhearted call either, go for it – the real thing. But just one a week. Or one a day. Depends on you. Then what happens? You’ll connect with one of them. It’ll turn out that there’s a person who listens to you and they’re interested. And they’re not such jerks after all. It turns out we can cut those suckers down to size – if we do them one at a time. And, this is important – remember to reward yourself.
…They’re bigger in our head than they are in reality. Your Chicken List will disappear. Congratulations.
During my radio sales days, I beat call reluctance by establishing a ritual.
I aimed to start the process with a list of 10-20 people to call. I’d set a cup of coffee on the left side of my desk, the list in the center, and the phone on the right. I’d pick up the receiver and say the following incantation:
“Time to make the donuts.”
The line came from an old commercial (direct link here):
For me, “making the donuts” meant getting down to business; once I recited the incantation I made my first call. I can’t tell you why it worked for me, but it worked.
The secret to call reluctance is this: once you make that first call, it’s a whole lot easier to make the second, and the third, and the fourth. You’ve got to get started.
If you can get yourself to start making the donuts, you’ll be on the road to making some dough.
[reminder]What’s your secret to beating call reluctance?[/reminder]
