The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [39]
More on Education-Based Marketing
One of my clients was a multinational newspaper company that had four bad years in a row, dropping from $1.4 billion to $1 billion in annual sales (approximately $100 million per year) and going from $400 million in profit down to no profit.
Enter the strategist. The new CEO was one of that 1 percent club—the ultimate executive—who is both strategic and tactical. The man is brilliant at spotting the big-picture strategy. He is also a total master at seeing a strategy implemented at the tactical level.
I was brought in as a sales expert. I audited four of the company’s more troubled newspapers and presented my strategy for turning around advertising sales.
Before I instituted anything the company model was purely tactical. It owned more than 100 community daily newspapers in midsize cities. An ad salesperson would call up a prospective advertiser and say, “Hi. I’m with XYZ Gazette and we’d love to come and talk to you about your advertising.” If the prospect was not “buying now,” this was a very short conversation: “No thanks. I’m not interested.”
It’s the same in the circulation department of every newspaper in America: they are all tactical. “Hi. I’m with the City Chronicle. We have a special right now for subscribers.” If you’re not someone who reads newspapers, you’re hanging up on these poor tactical telemarketers. A strategist might devise an approach that would make you want to read a newspaper. But that’s another project, so let’s stick with the ad sales example for a moment.
Picture yourself as the owner of a small-town ad agency, a body shop, a haircutting salon, or a restaurant—all mainstay advertisers every community newspaper should have. With my program the call from the sales rep now went something like this:
REP: Hi. I’m with XYZ Gazette. We have a new program to teach business owners like you how to be more successful. Have you heard about this program?
PROSPECT: No, I haven’t.
REP: Well, since we rely on the success of local commerce, as do you and every one else in this community, we feel it’s our obligation to make sure local businesses are as successful as possible. So we’ve actually underwritten the cost of an educational program that shows you the five most common reasons that businesses fail. It also shows the seven ways to become the most popular [name the type of business here: hair salon, restaurant, etc.] in the community. In the next few weeks, we’re going to be showing this to every other [name the type of competitor here] in the community and thought you might want to make sure you’re learning the same things they’re learning. Would you be interested in being more successful in your business and guarding yourself against the types of things that put [your type of business] out of business?
PROSPECT: Well, duh. Of course, I would.
REP: Great. Here’s what we do. I’m one of the speakers who put on this program. [Do not call your salespeople salespeople.] I’m going to be going around to all the [type of business] over the next few weeks and presenting this information. The content takes about 38 minutes to cover and then usually you’ll have some questions, so most of these sessions last about an hour. Since this is a community program, we even come to you. You don’t have to travel. But we only do these at a time when we won’t be disturbed, so we can get in and out quickly. What’s a time when you can sit and have a good educational experience without being interrupted?
PROSPECT: Well, we start at nine and then all hell breaks loose around here—so either at eight or after five.
REP: We have another program where we buy you lunch. We call it a “lunch-and-learn.” You have to eat anyway, so you might as well learn something while you’re eating. In this case you come to a restaurant. We rent out a room. You get to sit with several other business owners, have a nice lunch, and get a terrific education on how to ensure the success of your business. Which would you rather do? Have us come to