How to Say No to Blah: Can It Pass The “So What” Test?

Timing is a funny thing. The other day I read the Miles & Co What Are You Bragging About? blog post, in which Lynn Peisker finds a hotel chain’s chest-thumping less than compelling. Peisker asks this question:

Does your messaging truly reflect your above-and-beyond-brand of Shareworthy Service, or are you promising what every customer simply expects?

radio advertising sales tip: get rid of the blah
photo by chrisdorney/dpc

The very next day I received an email from a television advertising salesperson on the West Coast. She was looking for a creative idea for a roofing company. She had asked the client what made his roofing company different, and got this answer back:

“We will complete the job to the customer’s satisfaction. We are here before, during and after the job.”

That’s the company’s unique selling proposition? They’ll complete the roofing job to a customer’s satisfaction? That’s an awfully small hook to hang their hat on.

Looking for something more, I went to the company’s website, where I learned that they are “Roofing Experts”.

Blah.

Blah.

Blah.

.
Customers expect a job done to their satisfaction. They expect a the people who work for a roofing company to be roofing experts. Any of their competitors can make exactly the same claim.

Advertising Sales Tip: Say NO to Blah

If you are an advertising salesperson tasked with coming up with a strong campaign, you have a responsibility to say NO to blah. need to dig for something more.

What else can your client talk about? Do they offer a guarantee that’s better than anyone else in town? Offer a product, or installation technique, that’s unique to the area — and better than the alternatives?

What does your client do that nobody else does? What can they offer that nobody else can? Find the answer, and you’ve got your campaign.

[reminder]What’s the most interesting claim you’ve ever been able to put into an ad?[/reminder]

Can You Describe Yourself In Three Words or Less?

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?”

radio advertising sales tip: two or three words
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]

How Sales and Production Interact — a Classic Radio and TV Primer

In any organization of significant size, there’s a sales department and an operations department. There are three principles that apply:

* They need each other.
* They don’t understand each other.
* Sometimes, they flat-out hate each other.

radio sales tip: respect production
photo by iofoto, dpc

 

So it is with radio and television stations. When an advertising salesperson sells a commercial schedule, the vision of the client travels from the client through the seller to the Production Director. And although the technology has changed since this was recorded in 1995, the interaction still goes a lot like this:

Hat tip to my former-KEX-colleague-and-now-voice-man Bill Cooper for alerting me to this a while back. And a salute to Clear Channel/IHeart Production Directors past and present: Matt Jones, Bill Stevens, and Todd Tolces.

[reminder]Got a great sales-and production story? Spill it![/reminder]

Should You Burn Your Media Kit?

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.

Radio advertising sales tip: burn your 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.

[reminder]Agree? Think I’m crazy?[/reminder]

How to Be The Expert: Become Known For What You Know

Here’s how: learn something valuable that your colleagues and competitors don’t know.

sales tip: become a radio advertising expert
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]