That was an actual response heard by one of my appointment setters. Why is it that no one says things like, “I’ll pay my phone bill again when business picks up,” or “I’ll pay my electric bill once business picks up”? How do you expect business to “pick up” if you don’t advertise?
Anyone who’s read a business book or gone to college should know ROI is a number derived from a simple mathematical formula.
I’ve been told by older reps how sweet it was to sell Yellow Page advertising “back in the day” (that being when phone companies had a monopoly on Yellow Pages). They tell me the typical sales pitch went something like this: I’m here to sell you Yellow Page advertising. Oh, you’re not interested? Well, you…
I just read an interesting analysis [pdf] of the “Get a Mac” ad campaign… you know, the ones with the nerdy businessman (“I’m a PC”) and the cool hipster (“I’m a Mac”) politely bantering about which is superior. The long-running commercials have won advertising awards, been praised by Mac users, denegrated by PC loyalists, and…
As the image above illustrates, consumer behavior towards any particular medium is what makes it a valuable advertising channel. For newspaper and magazines, it’s the number of people who have subscribed to the publication. For outdoor advertising, it’s the number of cars driving past a particular location each day. For television and radio, it’s their…
It’s become an online hobby for many marketing “gurus” to diparage Yellow Pages as “antiquated” and “obsolete.” They say things like, “Who uses the Yellow Pages anymore, anyway?” or they criticize the research studies yet never provide any data of their own to prove their point. In reality, all studies are done by independent media firms…
I’m conducting sales training all week, and one of my students showed me this video: The Jerk came out in 1979. Since then, however, people have become skeptical about how effective Yellow Page advertising really is:
I’m conducting sales training all this week, and one of the things I emphasize early-on is selling on value, not price. Now that’s much easier to do because we’re not selling a product that we paid amount of money for, or that the customer can get from the store down the street. We sell advertising,…
Sales and marketing gurus are always talking about value — that in order to have a successful product or service, we must “create value” for the customer. But what exactly does that mean? While the theory is absolutely correct, the concept of value is subjective and nebulous. What is valuable to one person may be completely…