Get Smart

Get Smart

My friend, Howard Christensen, once said to me, “Have you ever noticed that the smartest people you know think just like you?”

Think about it. It’s true! The smartest people you know think just like you. In fact, people who don’t think like you are often dismissed as idiots…..well, I may be overstating my case a bit.

But here is my point. Your clients will think you are the smartest marketing consultant they know if you can think just like them by aligning your proposals with their thoughts, beliefs and visions.

How can you write a presentation that demonstrates you think just like your prospect? Here are a few tips:

  1. Ask thought-provoking questions to uncover your prospects’ underlying motivations, and document their answers carefully.
  2. Fly some “trial balloons” during your questioning process to make sure you are interpreting their thoughts correctly.
  3. Look around their office to see what books they read and what marketing “gurus” or business leaders they follow so your presentation will align with their beliefs.
  4. Deliver a trade article or blog about advertising or about marketing their business and then ask for their feedback.
  5. Prepare your presentation with their long term vision or dream in mind, rather than simply solving this month’s short term problem.

When you become the smartest marketing person your prospects and clients know, you will be surprised how much they will pay you for thinking just like them!

 

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The Mastery of Fear

The Mastery of Fear

      We received a ton of comments about last week’s ENS on Sales about mastering the fear of rejection. This week we’ve added a few more methods you can adopt to handle the daily rejection faced by busy sales executives.

Mark Twain said, “Courage is mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

Here are a few mastery techniques you’ll find helpful:

1.)  Know your product. – Your prospect only dabbles in marketing while trying to run her business, hire staff, order merchandise, deal with taxes, accommodate customer complaints, renew her lease and fight with banks. Knowing that you are a full time student of marketing gives you more expertise on the subject than your clients.

2.)  Be comfortable with the “what if” – What if your prospect doesn’t buy? Knowing that you have succeeded up until now without your new prospect’s business helps you to accept the “what if” in stride. You lived before you met them, and life goes on without a hitch after the rejection.

3.)  Be sincere and have integrity – Make sure, based upon your expertise, that what you are proposing really does deliver value to the client. Knowing you are doing what’s best for the client increases your confidence level and selling is often merely a transference of confidence.

4.)  Understand the steps – If you know your closing ratio, and the steps involved in your selling process, you’ll understand that each step takes you one step closer to a sale. For example if you know your closing ratio is one in ten, then you can train yourself to become more excited with each rejection. At rejection number 9 you’re one presentation away from making a sale!

5.)  No doesn’t mean “no” -Understand that client’s needs and strategies often change. A prospect who says “no” to one idea or presentation, may see the merit in another idea or strategy in your next presentation.

 

Knowing What Counts

Knowing What Counts

So you had a great month! Congratulations! Enjoy the fruits of your labours and the accolades. But never lose sight of how you got there. The fruit you are harvesting today is really the result of seeds you planted months ago.

It’s taken months, if not years, for you to build the skills, expertise, reputation and relationships you have in your market. The combination of continuous learning, multiple valid business contacts, and tools like our SoundADvice have been the seeds that grew your success.

It’s a common mistake for sales people, and for advertisers, to measure results based upon the fruit they collect this week or this month. But marketing and selling are a process, not an event.

New seeds grow new trees which eventually grow new fruit. The best marketers measure the seeds they plant, and when they do collect the fruit, they trace the origin of that fruit to those seeds.

Your commission or bonus structure is probably focused on your harvest. You need to find ways to motivate and reward yourself for planting the seeds that are responsible for your harvest.

At the end of each day, counting the seeds you planted rather than the fruits you’ve harvested, is the only way to ensure continuous bountiful harvests in your future.

What seeds are you planting this week?

My Website Sucks!

My Website Sucks!

My website sucks, my Facebook and LinkedIn pages are dated and an embarrassment and my attempts at mobile marketing are non-existent.

We are marketing experts and we certainly recognize the value of websites, social media, videos and mobile media. So why don’t we practice what we preach?

We’ve been trying to upgrade our web site since June, 2012. Alysia Taylor, our Integrated Media Specialist, has been working on a social media strategy for us since late last summer. We still have no new web site or productive social media strategy.

Why am I exposing our marketing weaknesses?

Because ENS Media Inc. is a small business, I can certainly empathise with the challenges of other small businesses. We’re so busy just doing a kick-ass job for our clients that our own marketing goes to the bottom of the pile every day.

And I’m sure most of your clients and prospects are in the same boat. Just running their businesses and serving their customers is a full time job. And keeping up with the ever-increasing and fragmented media choices is downright bewildering.

This exploding new media syndrome creates a huge opportunity for broadcast marketing professionals….creative marketing experts who know how to help increase their advertisers’ sales.

Your biggest competitive advantage isn’t your media, your format, your signal or your ratings. It’s your expertise and turn-key solutions. All a local business needs to do to increase their sales through you is say, "yes".

You will conduct the needs analysis, create the strategy, write and produce the campaigns, schedule the ads and increase your clients’ sales. All they have to do is run their business, deliver the advertised promises and make more money. You’re a God-send!

Never under-estimate the value you deliver beyond the "spots" you sell. Turn-key one-stop marketing solutions for harried business owners are worth their weight in gold!

 

Don’t Wait Until it’s too Late

Don’t Wait Until it’s too Late

A station manager called our office last week requesting a hurry-up presentation of our Winning in the New Media Economy advertiser seminar.

One of their largest local advertisers had just cut their radio and TV in favour of printed flyers. Ouch! The horse was already out of the barn. Marketing experts know that the best time to reach and influence people is before they’ve made a decision, not after.

Our Winning in the New Media Economy seminar has persuaded hundreds of local advertisers that it’s the Electronic Age, an age when the only media advertisers need are a strategic mix of broadcast to inspire and internet to inform.

Spending hard-earned cash on forest lots, lumber jacks, truck drivers, pulp and paper mills, printing press operators and delivery people makes no sense in this new media landscape of faster less expensive electronic alternatives.

Our seminar has done more than convert hundreds of local advertisers from print to a broadcast/online combo. I’ve actually had existing radio and TV advertisers approach me after the seminar telling me that prior to the seminar they were thinking about cutting their broadcast in favour of print……to me saving an existing client is as good as selling a new one.

In three such cases they told me they were going to increase their broadcast buys instead of cutting as a result of what they learned at our seminar. (There were probably more saves than three, but three actually thanked us and told us.)

Don’t let a surprise cancellation happen to you! We still have some dates left in 2013 to schedule your Winning in the New Media Economy market survey and advertiser seminar to convert current print advertisers and to save current broadcast advertisers.

Email [email protected] to learn how you can educate clients about the new electronic media mix before it’s too late.