What Is Selling?
• How many plan a career in sales?
– Why not?
• What is your image of salespeople?
• Was I pushy?
• What was my goal?
Erased de Kooning Drawing
Robert Rauschenberg
• Human beings are social animals.
• Human beings are born with an urge to be
cooperative and help others.
– Gather nuts
– Help an old lady across the street
• To try to influence and persuade people is also
human.
– People spend about 40% of their time trying to influence
and persuading others.*
* To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink
• The Internet has changed the information symmetry.
– From old-fashioned selling when the sellers had
information asymmetry in favor of the seller.
– To information symmetry with a tilt toward the buyer.
• To sell in the current environment requires:
1. Empathy
2. Listening
3. Helping another person improve their well being.
•
•
Personal
Business
Selling Basic Assumptions
• People are complex and basically trustworthy.
–
Can’t have a peaceful society if you believe the
opposite.
• Selling is a worthy craft.
–
Helping people
• The media are highly visible, important for an
informed, ethical society and under attack,
especially from the right.
What Is Selling?
• Selling is about getting customers and keeping
them.
• It involves a process of helping customers get
what they need. Often they don’t know what
they need.
• It is not a manipulative process in which
salespeople get prospects to do things they
don’t want to do.
• Selling is about helping prospects, and is guided
by three basic relationship rules.
Basic Relationship Rules
1.
Do unto others as they would have others do
unto them.
–
–
Treat them the way they want to be treated.
Slight update of the Golden Rule.
–
2.
People like and trust people exactly like
themselves.
–
3.
They may want to be treated differently from they way you
want to be treated – the focus is on them.
In their family or tribe
People don’t care how much you know until
they know how much you care (empathy).
•
But relationships are not necessarily the key to
success.
–
–
Insights are the key to success.
Research from the Corporate Executive Board, as
indicated in The Challenger Sale, shows that in the
current business environment, customers don’t
always know what they don’t know and crave insights
that can help them run their businesses more
effectively and efficiently.
• Thus, the most powerful sales approach is based
on:
1.
2.
3.
Teaching
Tailoring
Taking control of the customer conversation
What Is the Purpose of Your
Business?
• To “create a customer” Peter Drucker
• “To bring our audience and advertisers
together” - KOMC/KRZK, Branson, MO
• “To help people sell more Fords,” Lowry Mays,
former CEO Clear Channel Communications
What Is the Purpose of Your
Business?
 The purpose of a media sales department or
division is to maximize revenue by getting and
keeping customers.
 You don’t keep customers unless you get results for
them, as they define results.
What Are Your Sales Goals?
1.
2.
3.
To get results for customers
To develop new business
To retain and increase current business
–
–
4.
Presell
Upsell
Increase customer loyalty (service)
– Teach (give insights)
– Tailor
•
–
Not one size fits all
Easy to buy
What Are Your Sales
Strategies?
1.
To sell solutions to marketing and advertising
problems (“challenges”)
−
2.
Complete customer focus
To reinforce the value of advertising and of
your medium’s benefits
−
Understand the ecosystem
Strategies
3.
4.
To create value for your product
To become the preferred supplier
− To establish, maintain, and improve relationships
at all levels of the client and agency (keep agency
informed)
− To provide insights and ideas
Strategies
5.
To manage expectations
−
6.
Underpromise and overdeliver
To innovate
−
−
−
−
−
New insights
New packages, new products, new promotions
New creative approaches
New technology
“The only functions of an enterprise: marketing and
innovation.” Peter Drucker
What Are a Salesperson’s Key
Functions?
1.
2.
3.
4.
To help customers improve their well being
To position your product to have a differential
competitive advantage
To align the features and advantages of your
medium and you offer with an advertiser’s
objectives
To give insights
5.
To manage relationships and build trust
−
−
−
−
To
To
To
To
create rapport
empathize
persuade
develop partnerships
Key Functions
6.
7.
8.
To educate
To create a sense of urgency
To communicate effectively internally – up,
down, and across
•
•
To keep your management and coordinator
informed
From the street, to bring back market and
competitor information
Biggest Problem
• People do what they are paid to do.
• Wrong incentives lead to wrong, counterproductive behavior.
– Wall Street and bankers had the wrong incentives,
and the sub-prime mortgage debacle led to The Great
Recession
– Paying salespeople based solely on commissions on
their revenue makes them focus on their interests not
customers‘.
How Do You Start Doing It
Right?
1.
2.
3.
With an ethical, non-manipulative, insightoriented, solutions-based sales approach
With the attitude that you are helping your
customers get results, as they define results
With an ethical, well-organized, analyticsbased, strategic, disciplined sales system
–
–
The right process that helps customers (an excellent
sales experience)
The right approach (The Challenger Sale)