| And Thou Shall Buy My Widgets – The Myths of Sales, Marketing and Advertising |
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How often do you dismiss ideas that you think will never work? Say, about 10 times each day? We all have mental shortcuts and heuristics that help us make decisions every day. But ask yourself, how many of them are actually true? In this article, we will address the question of sales myths: common knowledge, principles and rules that we go by without pausing to think whether they are actually true. One of the most common mental shortcuts of sales is the rule of one. It goes something like this: “You get one shot for each person. Reach them. If you don’t, they will never be yours. Do not waste your resources on someone who did not notice you the first time”. People who like the rule of one also like the wide-reach limited exposure advertising methods such as radio, direct marketing (such as massive e-mail or snail mail attacks), etc. The idea is pretty much the same everywhere – quantity. Reach as many people as you can once, and the sheer numbers of your reach will pay off. This myth is hard to disperse as the large reach numbers do look good on reports. However, there are ways to reach those people who missed your sales pitch the first time. The answer is simple. Reach out to them again. With a different medium. As in grade school, repetition is often the key to committing something to memory. Why not your company’s name? Another frequent myth of sales goes thus:”You have to be an excellent talker, an assertive, sometimes even pushy person to be able to sell.” Is that really true? Are many of us who are shy and prefer not to be too imposing on others never going to make a sale? Well, that depends. Not on how many words per minute you can ejaculate out of your mouth, but on how well you did your research. All the talk in the world will not be enough to persuade someone to buy your products, especially in our world of informational over saturation. My favorite myth of all is the “Need to Invent New Wheel for Each Day”. Must you really? Is the new, sensational, innovative advertising required for each day? Not really. Some of the most memorable campaigns of all (recall Absolut Vodka, Volkswagen Beetle, and Altoids) lasted for a long time and are still popping up in magazines and TV. They are well liked, recognized in an instant and occasionally are collected as a form of art. (I recall a dorm room in my alma mater covered exclusively with Absolut ads.) Of course, running the same phrases and images over and over again might get old really fast, but the key is to not just rerun every single campaign for years to come, but to identify that memorable, bright, effective occasion when you truly loved your ads and either resurrect it or stick with it for a while, occasionally tweaking it along the way. The results might be more surprising than even you might expect. Need help implementing a new sales or marketing program? We've got two suggestions:
a) Check out our free marketing templates and tools on this site. There's ton's of them. You might want to bookmark the site now, you could be here awhile.
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