If you grew up in the 1980s, you'd know that double glazing was all the rage. The double glazing gold rush was pursued vigorously and competitively by an army of double glazing sales people who used each and every technique in the book to win those sales.
As their market started to contract, their sales tactics got stronger and more erratic. The consumer affairs programme Watchdog was awash with complaints about strong arm sales tactics, calling on vulnerable people unawares, and generally becoming a nuisance to society.
This kind of sales pest behaviour is well documented, and broadly disliked. But despite that, some organisations and industries persist in maintaining this sales approach.
Take my job, for instance. I'm one of those strange people who spend their life developing and delivering marketing plans. This means I spend time looking at the market, identifying key messages, setting marketing objectives, finding suitable communication mediums, setting budgets, spending them, and delivering against that plan.
I find this delivers results.
Advertising sales people, clearly, assume that I do something completely different.
Judging by their bizarre behaviour, they must think I sit at my desk with a big pot of money waiting on the last minute, must buy advertising opportunity to plonk right into my lap. Relevant or not.
This baffles me.
Some advertising sales people have got it right. Every January I have meeting after meeting with sales reps from outdoor advertising companies and radio stations. They ask what we have coming up for the year, I tell them. They show me the range of their products, they share their pricing mechanisms with me. They give me data on their media and its effectiveness. Occasionally they bring goodies - nothing ostentatious - but my spoils from these meetings have included packets of biscuits, boxes of chocolates, post-it notes and mugs.
They see their job to assist me in the all important planning and budgeting stages. The outcome of this clever and well thought out sales process is very simple: they have a higher likelihood of being included in my marketing plans.
Print advertising sales people (in the main, and there are a few exceptions) seem to respond to seeing other media or adverts and call me. Daily. Incessantly.
And the truth is, they haven't got a hope in hell of placing a sale - because the budget and media plan is already set. They have missed the proverbial boat. And not just by minutes. It sailed weeks ago.
I am not alone in being caught in the grip of the onslaught of advertising sales. Our clients are sick to death of it. As a result, we offer them this promise as part of our service: Let us deal with them.
And we do.
We route all our calls through a call answering service so it's easy to analyse the impact of advertising sales calls on our business.
Last week 61% of the incoming calls we received were from advertising sales people. Each and every single one of them believed they were the only advertising sales person to call me that day.
Only one of those calls was from a sales person from whom I was actively trying to purchase. One person called 5 times. In one day. And refused to leave a message. She will assume I don't know that she called that many times, however our system tells me everything I need to know. Imagine the negative impact on that publication's brand before she even gets through to me.
This erratic and seemingly desperate behaviour is indicative of an industry in turmoil. Readership figures are dropping, prices are increasing and their sales teams are panicking. If they see a poster in a train station on their way to work, they call that company that very day to see if they want to buy advertising. Their not so very clever assumption is that because we have already spent money on advertising, we must have money for advertising.
I know this to be true as, in our plan, we have the "in charge" dates of outdoor advertising sites I've booked, and every time we have a billboard or a poster go up in the outdoors, we brace ourselves for a flurry of advertising sales calls from daily newspapers. It's almost laughable. But it's really not that funny.
Print publications need to sort their advertising teams out and get back to the basics of selling. Know their market, know their needs and meet them. Otherwise they are in grave danger of becoming the double glazing sales people of the business world.
You have been warned.
Great point, in a good blog; funny and yet at the same time useful. Ys I can still remember when I moved once and had 10 double glazing sales people within one week, all insisting they needed to show me their wares.
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting how many people are trying to sell in the only way they know how (in fact that's not true, in the only way they've ever unrestored, although they know it doesn't work). Many business owners seem to fall into the same trap, desperate for buisiness and revert to things they say when they were younger or that annoy them now. More thought through strategies and aligned actions, much more effective.
Yes, I think the days of buying just because you can are long gone. Now everything must be justified and justifiable and quite rightly so. And if the ROI is not there then they seriously have to look at what they are selling and try to make it better.
ReplyDelete