Peter Lamb’s August 13 webinar, “Who is winning the revenue war, and why?”, packed a tremendous amount of valuable information on sales best practices and new revenue ideas into a 45-minute presentation.
His direct, practical approach was delivered with a level of confidence gained after more than three decades of sales and marketing experience, consulting with some of the world’s largest media companies to make them more efficient, more competitive, and more profitable.
Lamb focused on delivering a few “nuggets of information”. How can we utilize sales best practices and new revenue ideas as the country is recovering from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and how to be memorable to your clients.
“When you are memorable, you can get past the gatekeeper and have no problem getting an appointment,” said Lamb.
The basis of his process starts with TLC, not tender, loving care but think like the customer. Pretend the customer is next to you. Think about what you have done since March, is it to make money or for the customer?
Lamb believes that customers want to hear from you but they want it to be on their terms. You are their trusted partner and link to the outside world but they do not want to be sold. They want the ability to vent, you to listen, and provide options to address some of their challenges through Covid-19 and beyond. This can be a teaching moment for you to educate them about what’s going on at your company and in the world of advertising.
The next part of the process, which works in person or through a video meeting, is LADDER:
- Look them in the eye
- Ask questions
- Do not change the subject
- Do not interrupt
- Empathize
- Respond
A sales call with existing customers during this time is about making it personal, letting them talk, and leveraging the relationship you’ve built. This is the time to ask questions like:
- Given everything going on with COVID, what takes up most of your time?
- What have you done since March to increase, grow, or promote your business?
- Going forward what are your top two or three marketing challenges?
- What have been your top-selling products or services for the past four months?
- Given the past four months, what charities or causes do you subscribe to or endorse?
End the call with, “I appreciate your time. I will meet with my team of experts and come up with some options to meet the challenges you are facing.” Then take out your phone, whether in person or on a video call, and start looking at your calendar for dates. The customer will usually do the same thing and you conclude with your appointment booked to come back with a proposal.
Prospecting during this time is about finding out as much as you can about the prospect. Lead off with a survey to determine the impact of COVID on local businesses and how your company can assist. Ask for a couple of minutes of their time to do the survey and then ask a quick personal question like, “How are you and your family doing during this crisis?” Then shut up and listen to them talk.
For prospects ask these questions:
- What have you done since March to increase, grow, or promote your business?
- Did you manage to retain your most valuable customers?
- Who are your most valuable customers?
- Going forward what are your top two or three marketing challenges?
- When people talk about your business what do they say they like?
- Given the past four months, what charities or causes do you subscribe to or endorse?
End the call with, “I appreciate your time, and if you don’t mind me asking what inspired you to start your business?” Let them talk and before closing and ask if they have any questions for you. Let them know your team of experts will come up with some options to meet their challenges and either you or someone from your team will reach back out to them with the information.
The first thing you do when putting a proposal together for the prospect is review any relevant market data you have access to like Pulse Research or Borrell. Figure out how the date applies to their situation when putting your proposal together.
Think about including branded content or events as part of your proposal. These two revenue generating ideas are being used around the world today by media companies.
Lamb uses a 12-minute proposal format he likens to the McDonald’s Happy Meal.
- Step 1 – Address the needs you discovered during your previous meeting with the customer in four or five points.
- Step 2 – Why use us? Walks the customer through four or five bullets about your company and coverage and emphasizes that the most important point is getting you as a representative who will take care of them. Give examples of other customers and how you have helped them.
- Step 3 – This is the “Happy Meal” part where you present the package options.
- Step 4 – You present the monthly investment, not cost, for package options.
- Step 5 – Go for the close or set-up next meeting.
Remember to listen, let them talk. The more you talk at this point the more likely you are to lose the prospect.
So what are the traits of a great sales representative according to Lamb:
- Passionate about your business.
- Product confidence.
- You love objections.
- Frequently request field rides, or video-call sit-ins with your manager to observe you and get their feedback.
- You win every contest.
- Always fight for good ad copy to make sure the ad will work.
- Make 30 calls a day, which leads to 3-4 conversations, which leads to 2-3 proposals.
There are more valuable sales best practices and revenue ideas to learn by watching the recording of the presentation.
Lamb is doing a follow-up presentation geared towards publishers, ad directors, and sales managers on Thursday, August 20 at 10:30 am. Register here for the event. Peter Lamb can be reached at lambps@aol.com.
Harsh words in presidential campaigns: Protected, nothing new
So, you think the already harsh language in this year’s presidential campaign is the worst ever?
Probably not — and additionally, political speech, vulgarities, mocking nicknames, claims of incompetence and criminal conduct and a host of personal attacks all are protected by the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.
gpolicinski@freedomforum.org, or follow him on Twitter at @genefac.
The high legal bar for public figures to successfully sue for defamation, combined with a historical judicial reluctance to intervene in political campaigns, allows candidates and their surrogates to sling the most vituperative verbal assaults.
And throughout our history, they have.
Historian Rick Shenkman, author of “Presidential Ambition: Gaining Power at Any Cost,” has said, “Our first two elections were pretty clean, but after that they became dirty … Even George Washington (who ran unopposed in his first election, in 1788) complained he had to endure more attacks than Emperor Nero.”
The first real presidential contest, in 1800, produced what many historians might rank as number one in personal attacks, as then-President John Adams faced off against Vice President Thomas Jefferson.
From the president of Yale University, an Adams supporter, came the warning that if Jefferson won, “We would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.” A newspaper in Connecticut declared that Jefferson would establish a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”
In response, Jefferson’s advocates wrote that Adams was a liar, a would-be king, repulsive and a “gross hypocrite” who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character.”
A cartoon in 1800 shows a kneeling Jefferson about to place the U.S. Constitution into a fire built on a pedestal labeled French “despotism,” already ablaze with papers labeled as American patriotic essays.
Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams, was both target and attacker in the presidential elections of 1824 and 1828 when facing Andrew Jackson, who lost to Adams in the first contest and won four years later.
“American President: A Reference Resource” by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, notes that in those contests, Adams called Jackson a “corruptionist, an aristocrat and a budding tyrant in the model of Caesar or Napoleon,” whose election would mean the end of the new American nation.
Adams’s opponents spread the unjustified charge that the president had arranged a sexual liaison between a young American girl and the Russian tsar during Adams’s time as U.S. ambassador to Russia. On the lighter side, they also published reports that Adams did not wear underwear and went barefoot to church services.
Jackson suffered through attacks in the 1828 election on his wife, Rachel, who it was said — apparently with some justification by historians — had not yet divorced her first husband before marrying Jackson. She died of a heart attack after Election Day but before Jackson’s inauguration, and at her funeral, the president-elect blamed his campaign opponents for her death. “May God Almighty forgiver her murderers, as I know she forgave them,” he said. “I never can.”
While social media may have energized today’s political exchanges — for good or bad — use and abuse of new means of communication are not new, either. In the presidential election of 1928, eventual winner Herbert Hoover ran against three-term N.Y. Gov. Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated by either major party. Smith’s religion was a major factor in the campaign, just three years after the Ku Klux Klan held a major parade in the streets of Washington, D.C.
“News photos” were manipulated and false claims spread that New York City’s just-completed Holland Tunnel was in fact a secret passage not to New Jersey, but to Vatican City — to be used by the pope, who would prompt Smith to take over the United States. In similar fashion, a political cartoon titled “Cabinet Meeting — If Al were elected” appeared in the “Fellowship Forum,” an official publication of the Klan. It shows the pope and other Catholic clergy at a table in the White House, with Smith in a servant’s uniform holding a whiskey jug. A news report says “more than 100,000 copies were intended to flood” southern states days before the election.
(Smith, soundly defeated, had a last laugh: In accounts by both his supporters and opponents, who no doubt had differing views on its meaning, Smith is said to have sent a one-word telegram to the pope after losing: “Unpack.”)
Some political opponents have a much more serious response to what they see as scurrilous or defamatory political speech. In 2010, an Iowa state senator won a lawsuit and more than $230,000 in damages against his opponent over a political ad he said falsely linked him to a company alleged to have sold a dangerous drug to children.
But the Iowa Supreme Court overturned the jury verdict, saying “The result … is not to imply actual malice cannot exist within the rough and tumble Wild West approach to negative commercials that have seemingly become standard discourse in many political campaigns. … but the high standards established under the First Amendment to permit a free exchange of ideas within the same discourse must also be protected.”
President Trump has said multiple times that he wants to “open up” libel laws, which could affect future campaigns by weakening free speech protections resting on a landmark 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision, New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. It reinforced those protections when public officials (later expanded to include public figures) are involved.
Justice William Brennan wrote that the decision was rooted in a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open and that it may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”
Whether offended by Trump’s impolitic use of derogatory nicknames for his opponents, or by “Saturday Night Live” Trump parodies on TV, that commitment to “uninhibited, robust and wide-open” debate on issues and even candidate personalities is a hallmark of American democracy — even if, at times, we might cringe at how it’s carried out.
Politicians get their say during campaigns. Government stays out of the way. And we get to respond at the ballot box.