The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [129]
There were two major challenges I faced in getting national advertisers to advertise with us: First, we were a vertical market publication, meaning we reached only one profession, lawyers. Companies like Xerox, which was front and center in my Dream 100, typically followed a strategy of horizontal marketing. They advertised in magazines like Business Week that had a national circulation reaching businesspeople in all fields. They were already reaching doctors, lawyers, dentists, and zookeepers all over the country, so why would they want to spend a lot of money to go into a vertical market publication?
The second biggest challenge was that we were a regional publication. Large companies don’t buy advertising in regional vertical publications. Some of those big companies might spend a small part of their budget on vertical markets (doctors, lawyers, architects, etc.), but they surely weren’t going to buy into those vertical markets state-by-state when one or two national vertical publications reach lawyers or doctors in all 50 states. From a strategy standpoint, it was a sale that simply couldn’t be made.
In fact, many of these big companies had already decided that specific vertical markets were not worth the trouble. An advertiser that had already decided it was not interested in the lawyer vertical market was definitely not interested in California Lawyer, no matter what our unique selling proposition was. I could tell them over and over again that we were the highest-circulating magazine for lawyers in California, but was I going to get them to advertise? Never.
Clearly, our unique selling proposition would get us nowhere, so I focused all of my efforts on establishing our other ultimate strategic position (USP). Using each of the 12 core skills you’ve learned in this book, this is how we outthought the pants off the competition.
First, we went totally generic and offered a presentation called “How to Succeed in the Legal Market” based on all the core story research we had done. The research was amazing. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, lawyers are the largest daily producers of words. They put out more data every day than any other business or profession. This, and their high income and profits, made them an excellent target for technology companies. So the first part of the sale was not to sell our magazine at all, but rather to educate companies on why they need to be interested in the legal market.
But now, even if I were to make the first sale—that of getting large companies to take an interest in the legal field as a fertile vertical market—my regional publication was not a viable place to advertise. If they went in California alone, what kind of thinking would that be?
So the next part of the sale had to give brilliant justification: it had to set the buying criteria. We had all this data on California as “the state that leads the nation.” At the time, the average state had 18,000 lawyers, while California had 143,000 lawyers (today California has more than 200,000 lawyers). Huge difference. California led the nation in cutting-edge legal initiatives and thinking. In fact, more precedent-setting law comes out of California than any other state. One third of all the nation’s largest corporations house their corporate counsel in California. The data went on and on, effectively showing that if you really want to make it in the legal market, first, you must have a stronger position in California than anywhere else, and next, you could test the legal market in one state before spending larger dollars to go national.
So let’s break this down into steps:
Step 1: What is your best possible strategic position? In our case, we established our position as part of a market that was superworthy for them to go after.
Step 2: Next we established our position at the top of that market so they knew that of all the