Our friends in digital media have been much more effective at harnessing the power of words than we have.
While we had ‘ratings’, they introduced ‘big data’ making our mere ratings seem pitifully small.
While we merely ‘reach’ people, our digital friends claimed to ‘engage’ them. Can you see the difference? I learned very early in my career that simply ‘reaching’ an audience did not necessarily mean you influenced that audience. ‘Engaging’ people just seems like such an endearing term compared to merely reaching them.
While we only had audiences, which the dictionary defines as spectators, listeners or viewers, they claimed to have ‘followers.’ The dictionary defines followers as ‘devotees or admirers of another person or a group.’
You have a myriad of sales tools available at your fingertips today, but in the end, all of those tools resort to the use of words; from PowerPoint to ratings, and from prospecting to presenting, it’s the effective and sometimes subtle use of words that ultimately make the sale.
Yet those of us in traditional communications are surprisingly ineffective at using the most relevant words when attempting to persuade, convince or sell.
At ENS Media, we critique hundreds of sales presentations every month to help our clients create more effective presentations, and we still see the careless or lazy use of words in most of those presentations.
For example, many presentations refer to ‘costs’ or paying a ‘price.’ The best presentations position your rates as “an investment” not a cost. Most entrepreneurs like to invest, while most are trying to reduce costs.
We still see presentations trying to sell ‘spots.’ Spots are something that have no perceived value, and in fact, we send our clothes to the cleaners to remove spots. There is much more perceived value in selling messages, commercials or announcements, than in spots.
And we still see way too much use of “we or I,” in presentations versus “you or your”. It’s much more effective to say “Your campaign will reach 100,000 of your prospects” than to say “we reach 100,000 listeners.”