1. What Is Selling?

2. How many plan a career in sales? What is your image of salespeople?
Why not?
What is your image of salespeople?
Was I pushy?
What was my goal?

3. Erased de Kooning Drawing
Robert Rauschenberg

4. 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

5. 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:
Empathy
Listening
Helping another person improve their well being.
Personal
Business

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. Basic Relationship Rules
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.
They may want to be treated differently from they way you want to be treated – the focus is on them.
People like and trust people exactly like themselves.
In their family or tribe
People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care (empathy).

9. 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.

10. Thus, the most powerful sales approach is based on:
Teaching
Tailoring
Taking control of the customer conversation

11. 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

12. 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.

13. What Are Your Sales Goals?
To get results for customers
To develop new business
To retain and increase current business
Presell
Upsell
Increase customer loyalty (service)
Teach (give insights)
Tailor
Not one size fits all
Easy to buy

14. What Are Your Sales Strategies?
To sell solutions to marketing and advertising problems (“challenges”)
Complete customer focus
To reinforce the value of advertising and of your medium’s benefits
Understand the ecosystem 7

15. Strategies 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

16. Strategies To manage expectations To innovate
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

17. What Are a Salesperson’s Key Functions?
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 8

18. To manage relationships and build trust
To create rapport
To empathize
To persuade
To develop partnerships

19. Key Functions 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

20. Biggest Problem People do what they are paid to do.
Wrong incentives lead to wrong, counter-productive 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‘.

21. How Do You Start Doing It Right?
With an ethical, non-manipulative, insight-oriented, solutions-based sales approach
With the attitude that you are helping your customers get results, as they define results
With an ethical, well-organized, analytics-based, strategic, disciplined sales system
The right process that helps customers (an excellent sales experience)
The right approach (The Challenger Sale)