Did you ever lie to a sales person? Think about your answer carefully.
Of course you did!
How about the last time a carpet cleaning salesperson phoned you at home? Didn’t you say something like, “Sorry, someone just cleaned my carpets last week.” It wasn’t true, but you politely dismissed the sales person’s pitch.
When an insurance agent cornered you, have you never said, “I just renewed my insurance last night, but you can call me next year”? Or, how about telling a salesperson on a car lot, ..Just looking”.
You lied! But that’s really not such a bad lie, if you understand the motivation. It’s called, “reciprocal empathy” or the fear of rejection.
Everyone fears rejection, and you, as a salesperson, understand rejection like no one else. You are basically a decent person, and because you have empathy, you do not want to outright “reject” the carpet cleaning solicitor or the insurance salesperson. Instead, you would rather tell little white lies to get rid of them, gently. When the clerk asks, “May I help you?” your immediate response is, “Just looking,” even though you went there to buy.
Your clients are no different. They lie to sales reps every day. I mean that in the nicest possible way. They don’t want you to feel rejected, so they have perfected the three biggest lies which always work. When I say, “work,” I mean these lies get rid of 90 percent of advertising salespeople without making them feel personally rejected.
The three biggest lies told to advertising salespeople are:
1. Business is too good. I couldn’t handle any more.
2. Business is too bad. I can’t afford to advertise.
3. My budget is all gone, or, my plan for the year is complete.
These “lies” are not a rejection of you or your company. They haven’t said “You’re too expensive” or, “You have the wrong audience”. Instead, they have internalized the rejection, putting the blame for not buying, on themselves. These lies work because you still feel good and you don’t have to defend yourself or your company.
I submit to you that these are ALWAYS lies, however. Everyone in business wants more business. And, if they believe you can help them get it, they will add to their capacity, change their media plans or even borrow more advertising dollars from their own mothers. Always.
Author Archives: ensonsales
Shouting Outside the Box
In “Twelve Causes of Advertising Failure”, by Roy Williams, he identifies “over-confidence in qualitative targeting” as one of the primary causes of advertising that fails.
Nowhere is “qualitative targeting” more misguided than in business-to-business marketing. Many business-to-business marketers forget that business people are people too… they follow their favourite sports teams on the radio, they listen for weather reports, and they each have their own musical tastes.
The internet has totally changed where businesses are located. The old days of targeting “business zip codes” to reach businesses have long passed. Technology has made it possible to operate more businesses from home than ever before.
The “qualitative targeting” misnomer has also resulted in the misguided pursuit of “the decision makers”, creating marketing campaigns which bypass the decision “influencer”.
Consider a printing company trying to attract more business accounts, for example. They’ll often target the person who signs the cheques in an organization, but when that individual needs more business cards, more often than not, they’ll ask a receptionist or executive assistant to get three quotes.
It’s that executive assistant or receptionist who chooses which printers get to quote on the business cards.
Imagine the impact of a radio campaign that says “The next time the boss asks you to order a printing job, consider ABC printing….we’ll make you look like a hero.”
The best marketers use the element of surprise to create unpredictable campaigns. There is an element of surprise when a “non-traditional” business-to-business advertiser tells their story on-air.
The ENS Media Inc. advertising success formula is:
Share of voice = Share of mind = Share of market
A whisper can be the dominant share of voice, “outside of the box”, if everyone else is shouting in the box.
When You’re a Believer
Some broadcast account executives have a misguided understanding of why they conduct CNA’s, Customer Needs Analysis.
The purpose of a CNA goes beyond simply discovering your prospects’ unique competitive advantage and uncovering their objections so you can overcome those objections in your presentation.
The deepest purpose of your CNA is to uncover your prospects’ beliefs….their deeply held emotional beliefs. And once you’ve accomplished this, your mission is not to try to change those beliefs, but rather to find a way to make your proposal align with and compliment those beliefs.
Far too many reps try to counter their prospects’ objections with logical arguments when in reality they need to dig deeper to unveil the belief at the root of that objection. Emotions are seldom trumped by logic.
In fact, most people will only seek or accept the logic or reasoning that justifies their previously-held beliefs.
Marketing masters have developed the art of demonstrating how their proposal meshes perfectly with their clients’ beliefs.
Contact [email protected] to inquire how our Becoming a Master Questioner© Sales Workshop can help your group get to the root of their prospects’ beliefs and build sustainable long-term partnerships
Marketing Automation?
Have you seen the Jimmy Kimmel interviews where he asks people how they feel about “Obama Care” versus “The Affordable Health Care Act”?
When asked, interviewees who were opposed to Obama Care positioned it as “socialist” but were in favor of The Affordable Health Care Act. …. by the way, if you weren’t aware of it, “Obama Care” and “The Affordable Health Care Act”, are the same thing.
Opponents of the Affordable Health Care Act have skillfully and successfully labelled it “Obama Care.”
My point is, the words we choose have a powerful influence on the perceptions in the marketplace.
I, for one, have always been offended by the term Marketing Automation. I consider myself to be a pretty good marketer, but I have never seen marketing happen “automatically”.
“Automatic” is defined as “starting or functioning by itself” or “Started, operated, or regulated by a process or mechanism without human intervention.”
Wow….marketing with no need for human buyers or sellers?
Another term that irks me is “real time”…can someone explain to me what “artificial time” is or why anyone would use anything but real time?
Ahh… then there is,”new media.” How much longer can something on the internet, which originated in the late 1950’s, be called “new”?
Then there is “social media”, implying other media are not social, or are anti-social.
Where am I heading with this? Your choice of words is critical in influencing your clients and prospects. None of your prospects are in a hurry to buy anything labelled as old, traditional, or legacy media…..they all want the newest shiniest thing.
In our ‘Winning in the New Media Economy’ advertiser seminars, we are able to convert former print advertisers to a broadcast and online media mix with our careful choice of words.
Through a series of carefully chosen words, research and stories, we’re able to convince advertisers this is “The Electronic Age.” Anything broadcast or online is “electronic media”, and anything that involves cutting down trees, paying for pulp and paper mills, printing press operators and delivery people is “old media.”
We still have a few seminar dates available in 2014. Contact [email protected] to learn how we can help you to convert hundreds of thousands of local print budgets in your market to a powerful on-air online mix.
Why Marketers Need to Re-evaluate Radio, the World’s Most Popular Medium
Did you catch this important article in Advertising Age about the Radio Renaissance?
(Source: Benjamin Palmer, co-founder and CEO of The Barbarian Group, in Advertising Age, 10/01/13). It’s the Perfect Platform to Combine With Emerging Applications and Innovations
Over the past few years, digital marketers have been so focused on display, better ad-tech and creating experiences on the ever-expanding list of social platforms that we’ve managed to largely ignore a traditional medium that’s becoming increasingly sophisticated right under our noses (well, our ears): radio.
Radio is ripe for a renaissance. Major advances in up-to-the-minute distribution and segmentation, as well as innovation from the likes of Spotify, Pandora and Apple make radio — or radio-type service — a good bet to add scale to campaigns at efficient cost.
To better understand the opportunity, it helps to know the broader context. In the early 2000s, radio’s significance as a leading advertising channel started to wane — or at least the perception of it did — as attention, and then dollars, shifted to digital.
The result? Many bad jingles and poorly executed direct marketing. And while TV and digital may be advertisers’ media of choice when it comes to branding, it’s worth mentioning that radio retains its place as the most widely used mass-communication channel in the world. The 13,000 radio stations (about 8,800 FM, 5,000 AM) broadcasting across the U.S. together reach over 94% of the U.S. population 12 years and older each week.
Radio has also evolved a lot to compete with digital platforms like Pandora and iTunes. On-air jokes turn into trending topics, rare tracks are purchased at red lights and rural backchannels make Reddit’s front page. There’s an interesting media merge that needs to be explored.
As much as we talk about the phone being the second screen to TV and how our audience is multitasking, it’s more plausible to think about looking at your phone and listening to the radio at the same time. It’s also a lot more interactive than TV. You can call in to shows, do shout-outs, make requests — pretty interactive!
As formats like Vine, Instagram Video and Cinemagram show, even with zero time restraints, people still are attracted to digestible nibbles of content, a fact that should only make 10-, 15- and 30-second radio spots more enticing.
Our agency grew to appreciate this when producing a recent radio and digital campaign for the AdCouncil and Environmental Protection Agency. The initiative, which promotes preventative measures parents can take against asthma attacks, is delivered in a series of 30-second pop songs.
Another recent example was Little Caesars’ “Do Not Call,” an integrated radio and online campaign by Barton F. Graf 9000 that explored customer curiosity and reverse psychology, relying on radio to do a lot of the awareness legwork in the beginning.
And of course there was the popular “Dumb Ways to Die” campaign by McCann Australia, a cause-marketing effort — for preventing injuries on the country’s rail system — at the root of which was an original and catchy song.
The success of that campaign, which won McCann Melbourne a Grand Prix Radio Lion at Cannes, among several other awards, was proof positive that creatives need to reconsider radio as a medium for their clients, too.
Instead of radio being an advertising afterthought, it can be a pretty great source of inspiration. In the age of social media and composing tweets and six-second Vines, radio doesn’t seem quite so limiting.
And contrary to the production costs and time associated with TV, radio creative can be executed for a fraction of the cost and in a significantly faster timeframe, giving advertisers the flexibility and agility to adapt campaigns on the fly.
Finally, there’s a strong argument to be made on the metrics side, as broadcasters continue to develop credible audience-tracking metrics, in addition to products that support digital advertising and allow for increasingly targeted messaging and data collection.
Similar to the best digital campaigns, marketers are now able to tie metadata with GPS, enabling customized, targeted radio ads and content. And while this is obviously easier in digital radio, terrestrial radio is coming along.
While digital agencies have been focused on capturing the essence of every emerging platform, we may be missing opportunities to combine new platforms with existing ones. We’re in the business of investing in new ways of storytelling, so let’s reconsider the value of radio in the marketing mix.
P.S. Our Winning in the New Media Economy advertiser seminars can now partner with local digital experts in your market to persuade local advertisers to invest in radio as the driver to more success online. For more information, contact [email protected]