Christopher S. Penn – Marketing AI Keynote Speaker

Author: Christopher S Penn

5 old sales tricks made new again

5 old sales tricks made new again

Anyone ever take one of the old sales trainings from back in the day – Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, etc.? There were tons of interesting tips and tricks for sales folks from a time when sales people had to work insanely hard with terrible tools (or no tools at all) and still make their numbers. No Salesforce.com or Zoho CRM to remind you who you forgot to call, no social media or SEO to bring prospects to your door, nothing but your leather binder, day planner, telephone, and a suit & tie.

Some of the tricks from those old trainings can be modernized, though, and some can be brought back as huge differentiators in the digital world. Here’s a few:

1. Thank you cards. This is something Ziglar was absolutely punishing on. You had to send thank you cards. No surprise, in the age of electronic automation of everything, a handwritten thank you card to a closed sale makes a huge impression because it’s so out of the ordinary.

2. Thinking about you. Want to know a really silly simple trick to stay top of mind with someone you’re trying to win over? Set up a Google alert for their top SEO term (check their web site, and if it looks like they have no SEO, take your best guess) and then when news articles and alerts pop up in Alerts, check them for quality and forward them. Back in the day, Hopkins would recommend taking the local newspaper and sending clippings to prospects. Google Alerts and Google Reader make that much, much simpler.

3. Thinking about you part 2. “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” -Dale Carnegie. Monitor your best prospects and their company names and send them stuff about them as you can. There are actually paid services that do nothing but clip stuff out of papers and magazines and try to resell it to you at obscene prices, especially after you’ve won an award. “Wouldn’t you like a nicely framed version of your article?” crap. Do it yourself for your best prospects. If there’s someone you want to blow away, frame it yourself and send it over for free. For everyone else, send them at least an electronic “clipping”.

4. Fedex to the door. Email gets filtered. Postal mail gets shredded. Shipped boxes tend to get delivered and opened in case there’s something important inside. Got someone (Fortune 500 CEO, etc.) that you absolutely positively have to reach? Pay the $10 or so to ship a letter, CD, DVD, etc. via Fedex. Obviously, you’d only do this for a shot at a huge deal, but what a shot it makes.

5. Flip cam, iPhone cam, webcam. Back in the day, Hopkins would recommend trying to record yourself on the phone in a very awkward manner by holding a giant tape recorder (does anyone even remember those) up while you spoke so that you could listen to yourself on a call. These days, recording technology is incredible. Make use of it. Set up a little Flip cam, phone camera, whatever you’ve got that can record audio and video, then watch and listen to yourself on the phone. This is killer for public speakers too – don’t record just yourself! If budget and venue permit, record your audience and watch how they react. If you call using services and software like Skype, you can record both sides of the conversation (make sure you notify the person you’re talking to as it’s illegal to do so otherwise in some states).

There’s no shortage of old ideas that can be made new again if you’re willing to do some creative thinking and apply them to the best practices of yesteryear for results today. As my teacher Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center says, “on ko chi shin” – study something old to learn something new.

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July 28, 2010
Squeezing the webinar juice
Do you ever ask these questions?
- What should I blog about?
- What should I be doing in social media?
- If I wanted to write a book, what should I write it about?
- How do I become a better public speaker?
If the answer is yes, then your next step is a webinar on the topic of your choice. Why? Webinars are absolutely incredible, amazing content platforms. Let me walk you through the process of how to squeeze the juice out of your webinar strategy.

Does your content suck?

Before you consider hitting the public speaking stage, a webinar is the fastest and easiest way to judge whether you’ve got anything worth saying. It’s super-low risk to you as a speaker – you can focus on content and delivery. It’s super-low risk to your audience, especially if it’s free, because it means no travel and expenses and no time out of the office besides an hour behind a closed door or in a conference room.

Conducting a webinar will tell you very graphically whether you’ve got anything worth listening to. Create a hashtag in your Webinar and monitor which items get retweeted and make a note of those. Answer questions and use those questions to diagnose parts of the presentation where you are unclear or fuzzy.

Trading up

Once you’ve conducted a few webinars and polished your presentation to the point where it’s valuable, record and publish it. Now you’ve got video on demand on your web site. Use this demo as part of your speaking kit so that conference organizers (particularly for smaller events) can judge that at least the content you’ll be presenting is worth hearing.

Polishing some more

Get in front of an audience? Good job. Record yourself and your audience as you speak and watch the recording to see what points resonate with people’s non-verbal body language. Applause and questions are two verbal metrics to watch, but look for people leaning back, nodding off, leaning forward, shifting to the edge of their seats, and scribbling furiously on a notebook to see where the juice is in your presentation.

Oh, and the recording of you, if it’s any good, can be edited and parlayed into more speaking opportunities that you can then use to keep refining your content and monitoring for feedback.

Breaking out

Let’s say you’ve got 50 slides in your presentation. I guarantee that audiences never truly capture the depth of meaning behind any one of them because you’re flinging a massive amount of information at them in a very short time. You could probably expound on any one slide at considerable length, providing supplementary notes, commentary, and additional resources for people to look at…

… which makes a great blog post for your blog. Guess what? That’s 50 blog posts – 5 weeks of Monday-Friday posts that are content rich for your blog. Commentary from readers of your blog will help you learn more about each slide in your presentation, helping you to refine it some more and be a better presenter.

Publishing

It takes no great leap of imagination to say that your 50 slides, now fully expanded, commented, and annotated makes for… a great eBook! Ask great commenters on your blog posts if you can include their commentary in the eBook as well, and you’ve got yourself a stellar piece of work that’s ready to be published and distributed electronically… and if it gets hot, really hot, you might even get a jingle from a dead tree publisher asking to turn your eBook into a full-length paper one.

This of course creates the virtuous cycle where you, as a published author, can now take your presentation to more events, get more feedback, refine it more, and make followup blog posts, some of which may include ideas for your next webinar… and the cycle continues.

Side plug: I just published my 21st Century Email Marketing webinar and I’m psyched about how nice it looks in Adobe Captivate. If you’re in the mood to see (or re-see) this event, hosted by Blue Sky Factory email marketing (my employer), check it out here. As you can guess based on what’s written above, you know what’s happening next with this material!

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July 27, 2010
We become the company we keep, part 2

In part 1, written last summer, I encouraged you to use the nearly unlimited power of social media to build the kind of inspirational network you need as a foundation for success. We tend to become the company we keep, so why not use social media to find the examples of success and happiness that you want more of in your life?

The flip side of the coin is that we tend to become the company we keep. If we surround ourselves with bitter, angry, uninspiring people who do nothing but urinate into our mental pool, we go that route too – and unlike positive, inspiring people, it doesn’t take much. As Tony Robbins once quipped, you don’t need to drink a gallon of poison to have an effect – just a little is more than enough.

Go open Twitter or Facebook right now. Take a look at the people who put stuff into your head ever fleetingly, 140 characters at a time. Is their stuff good for you or bad for you? When you read what they have to say, do you feel better or worse? When you hear them speak, do you feel energized and excited or cynical and dismissive? Do they use their social media channels to inspire with stories about people in their lives who have helped them or whine about the poor service someone gave them?

It’s easy to tolerate negativity and incredibly poisonous to do so. Sometimes you feel socially obligated to if it’s a close friend or someone you care about. Here’s a nifty, somewhat sneaky antidote to those people. First, create a network with a lot of people in it. Tons. Follow everyone that you can that’s inspiring to you. This increases the probability that whenever you do open a social network, the chances are good that someone will be saying something that brings some positive energy to your day. Next, to the extent that a social network permits you to, create a private list of positive, powerful, inspiring friends, folks who seem to always have something good to bring to the table. Finally, prune out those friends who don’t necessarily bring good cheer to you from that private, secret, quiet list of those that do, so that you don’t have to hurt someone’s feelings by cutting them out of your network, but you don’t have to put their baggage in your taxi either.

You have enough negative forces in your life without voluntarily adding more to it with social media. Unlike a workplace or home, you have complete freedom to choose who you listen to in social media, to choose who you allow to influence you.

Choose wisely for you become the company you keep.

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July 26, 2010
What the martial arts teach us about marketing basics

DJ Waldow asked:

We talk/preach a ton about “advanced email marketing” yet so many folks are stuck on basics. Refocus conversation? Thoughts?

And Amber Naslund also commented:

I wonder how much of our quest for “what’s next” is really centered in our uncomfortable misunderstanding of the basics.

These are closely related. In the martial arts, the basics are so much more than just simile exercises. The Japanese word for basics is kihon, which means both basics and foundation, as in the foundation of a building. Starting martial arts practice with strong basics is like starting a building with two foot thick concrete and two inch thick rebar – a rock solid base on which to build. Skipping the basics or trying to hurry past them is like pouring the flimsiest foundation of cheap concrete. How large a house can you build on that?

Where the martial arts (good ones, anyway) differ is the continued emphasis on the basics. We learn the basics but constantly revisit them to refine our understanding and improve them. As our basics get stronger, the “advanced” material (which is comprised of basics strategically arranged and put together) improve as well. Because advanced material relies on the basics, if we stop refining them, our advanced skills and techniques suffer as well.

Why don’t we like the basics? Why do we ignore them or skip past them? It’s human habit. We have a tendency to view knowledge as a discrete container. How to cook an egg? I know that. How to send an email campaign? I know that. Because of the way our education system works, we assume that once we know something, we possess that knowledge and don’t need to revisit it. Geometry? Learned that in 9th grade. Algebra? Learned that in 8th grade. As a result of this educational framework (which is learned), the habit of thinking that we’ve learned something persists into adulthood and our professional lives.

Think about it this way. You once learned how to cook scrambled eggs. Has it ever occurred to you to research that simple breakfast dish some more and see what other ways you can make them? For example, you can add a touch of milk or cream to slow down the protein setting, giving you more control over cooking time. You can use an immersion blender to aerate the mixture and make your eggs lighter and fluffier. You can add salt in advance to give a more even flavor, or a small dash of truffle oil before cooking to increase the umami flavor. Ask a thousand ordinary non-chef folks how often they go back and revisit their scrambled eggs and the number wil be a very small minority. Yet if you are constantly and consistently improving your basics, is breakfast at your house going to get better or worse?

Without rock solid, continuously refined basics, we won’t get the results we want. We’ll get folks stuck, as DJ says, or we’ll get folks who are discontent as Amber says.

So how do you improve and refine your basics, instead of getting frustrated repeating the same thing over and over again? Well, repetition is where you start. You watch a master teacher demonstrate the basics, and then you work for a really long time to get your basics to that level. Along the way, your teacher will probably show you variations on the basics to help you better understand their essence. A teacher might show you, for example, what an egg scrambled in a cast iron pan tastes like vs. a non-stick pan. Once you’ve mastered the basics and distilled down their essence by practicing many, many variations, you’ll understand that essential core of the basics and be able to translate it to other things. For example, once you truly and deeply understand the chemistry, physics, and culinary aspects of scrambled eggs, suddenly things like mayonnaise and Hollandaise sauce become simple to grasp and simpler to make.

What if you don’t have a teacher? Find one. Again, in the Japanese martial arts, the word for teacher is sensei, which literally means before born – someone who is farther down the path you’re on and can help you around all of the mistakes they’ve made blazing that trail. They’ll show you where they went wrong and if you’re a good student, you’ll make fewer of the mistakes than they did. They can help you recover from mistakes faster and with less harm than they incurred (which is why teachers are so respected – they’re saving you tremendous pain) than if you were flailing around blindly.

If you feel like the basics elude you or that you’re discontent with the basics, whether it’s marketing, cooking, or martial arts, go find a good teacher and learn from them. The path always gets easier and more fun when you’ve got a great guide.

If you’re in either the metro Boston or Dayton areas, be sure to check out my teachers, Sensei Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center and An-Shu Stephen K. Hayes of the Dayton Quest Center.

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July 25, 2010
What World of Warcraft: Cataclysm can teach you about appreciation

The third expansion pack to the World of Warcraft franchise, Cataclysm, will be coming out this year. Everything that players have known and loved for the last 5 years is on the table for a re-write, from how characters work to the virtual places and hangouts where players have spent their time for half a decade. It’s Blizzard Entertainment’s way of rebooting the franchise, changing up how it will work, and theoretically giving them room to continue growing the franchise.

From a story perspective, the virtual world of Azeroth is going to be struck by a massive disaster that will shatter it, completely changing things and causing a lot of mayhem. Here’s what’s different about this disaster: we all know it’s coming some time this year.

Some people are preparing by gathering up materials in game to sell later, anticipating shortages. Other people are touring the world of Azeroth as it is now, taking pictures and recording their favorite spots, many of which will no longer be available or will be changed beyond recognition. Some are running through dungeons and other parts of the game they’ve missed or never gotten to in five years of playing. Some are trying to maximize their characters’ gear and abilities so that they’re ready to experience all the new parts of the game the moment it hits the shelves.

So here’s the food for thought part: if you knew with 100% certainty that a major disaster was going to befall this world, the real life world, in the next 5 months (but probably before November), and that you’d survive and have access to the basics like food and water, what would you do now to prepare? If you knew that everything from favorite restaurants to the mountains and seas themselves would be different somehow, what would you do differently today to get ready?

Unlike World of Warcraft, we don’t get the luxury of a grand creator notifying us in advance of a major disaster (or allowing us to beta test life in it).

Now that you’ve got an idea of where you’d go and what you’d do, how much of that is stuff you could do today?

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July 22, 2010
Newsletter drop at 1 PM ET

My personal newsletter will be dropping at 1 PM ET today. If you’re not subscribed, now’s the time.

In this issue, a blogging tool you probably haven’t heard of, a productivity tool you have heard of, a career-boosting trick that yields huge rewards for 5 minutes a day, some stuff about McDonald’s french fries, and the winner’s of last month’s Stuff You Did column.

If you’d like to get in on the action, you have until 1 PM ET to subscribe here.

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July 20, 2010
How much too much is it?

One of my absolute favorite sales closes is the how much too much close. It’s a recession. Times are tough, budgets are tight, resources are constrained. We get that. I’m sure you get that many, many times a day from everyone you talk to who’s a potential customer. The trick with objections over price is amortization of the price.

Let’s say you’re a web designer. You make beautiful web designs that cost $1,500 and perform very well for your clients. You know that a client with a good internal sales process can make that back in weeks, if not days, with a design that converts visitors to qualified leads.

One day, you’re pitching a potential new client. You’ve established your credibility and demonstrated that you’ve got the chops to do what they want to do. There’s no question that they believe you can handle the work, and there’s no question in your mind either. It’s a home run…

… until the first thing out of their mouth at the proposal stage is a price objection. “It’s too expensive” or a variant of that phrase. Rather than cutting your prices immediately (which is the most common tactic for a rookie salesperson), get specific.

Mr. Penn, how much too much is the design? Are we a dollar over your budget? Help me understand where you are.

The object of this close is to get them to name a number: it’s $500 too expensive for me. It’s$ 100 too expensive for me. Whatever the number is, that’s what you need to get out of them. Once you have the number, go to work. In this example, let’s say the site is $500 too expensive. You’d amortize that at a daily rate over a year (500/365=1.37), then you might say something like:

Mr. Penn, I understand how you feel. We’ve agreed that a new web site design could do wonders for your business, haven’t we? We’ve agreed that if it brings in even 1 new customer a month, your business will grow beyond your current plans and expectations, right? Think of your web site as an employee who never sleeps, who never calls in sick, who is always working for you day and night.

Mr. Penn, do you have $1.37 right now? Yes, on you at this moment. Mr. Penn, that’s how much a day too much you’ve said your new web site is. Tell me, Mr. Penn, is$ 1.37 a day too much to pay for such an incredible employee?

Then shut up and wait to see what they say.

Is this close guaranteed to work? Of course not. No sales close ever is, despite the marketing materials of the sales trainers out there. But as a tactic to help you sniff out whether price is the true objection and how far off the mark your proposal is, the how much too much close is invaluable. For green sales staff and freelance consultants with no sales training at all (like many, many folks I’ve seen consulting in social media), this close saves you from the gut instinct of cutting your worth (price) right off the bat – a useful tactic that could save you and your company thousands or even millions of dollars over time.

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July 19, 2010
Ben & Jerry's, thank you for surrendering

I read with great interest about another company forsaking email marketing – this time, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s. Good. Thank you very much!

Why am I thanking them? Here’s the thing about marketing in a global digital economy: you’re not competing with your regular competitors. Ben & Jerry’s isn’t just competing with rival ice cream maker Friendly’s. Ben & Jerry’s is competing with me. They’re competing with you, too.

In the digital age, attention is the most prized commodity we can possibly have. Every message you receive has the potential to consume your attention for a split second or longer. A well-known, trusted brand like Ben & Jerry’s will automatically command more attention than a message from you or me. Think about that for a second. Ben & Jerry’s is known for doing lots of good things and for being generous. If there’s a message in your inbox with a free ice cream cone from them, chances are anything that you or I have to offer is probably going to pale in comparison.

Happily for us, they’ve put themselves out of the running for attention in the inbox, clearing space and attention for the rest of us, and so I thank them.

If you’re a competent marketer in the digital age, understand that you compete with everything and everyone for attention. Use every channel and avenue at your disposal, or risk losing share of mind with your prospects and customers.

Disclosure: I work for an email marketing company. My viewpoint had better be biased or I’m doing it wrong.

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July 16, 2010
More customers doesn't make you a better company

I’ve been shopping around the past few days for a terrific lead automation system for the day job, looking at all of the different vendors out there. One thread that’s been common among all of the comparison discussions on LinkedIn, on blogs, etc. that baffles me is this argument:

“We’re better because we have 42x more customers than any of our competitors, which shows that clearly we are the LEADER in our space!”

This argument makes no sense to me. More customers doesn’t make you a better company. More customers just means you have more customers. In fact, it might make you a worse company. If you and your competitor both have 60 people on staff but you have 42x more customers, all that means is I’m 42x less likely to get customer support when I need it.

If more customers were the benchmark of excellence, we’d all shop only at Wal-Mart for everything in life. They have more customers than anyone, right? Are they the best? If absolute numbers of customers were the mark of truly excellent service, logically wouldn’t the IRS (which has every taxpayer as a “customer”) be the best organization in the country to deal with?

What’s at work here is a bit of Robert Cialdini’s bandwagon influence techniques (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Amazon link). The hope of these marketers, I suppose, is that by seeing lots of people doing business with a company, I’ll be persuaded that it’s somehow better, in the same way that social media “experts” try to convince you that because they’ve got 20,000 followers, they’re somehow more knowledgeable about social media.

Sorry, gang. I’m not buying it. In this day and age when service, support, and care is needed more than ever, more customers as a sole metric of your worth means you just have less time for me.

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July 15, 2010
My upcoming webinar: email marketing for the 21st century
I’ll be doing a webinar on July 23 at 2 PM Eastern on 21st century email marketing, put on by my employer, Blue Sky Factory. In the webinar, I’ll be going over the 5 things every email marketer wants:
1. More audience
2. More delivery
3. More opens
4. More actions
5. More/better metrics
In terms of value, I’ll be covering a lot of new material, including what things you should be testing (we all talk about the importance of testing but no one ever helps you judge what should be tested in the first place), new ideas for content, and nearly instant ways to measure ROI.

I’ve given previous versions of this talk at marketing conferences that charge hundreds or even thousands of dollars to attend. This webinar will be almost-free. There’s no out of pocket monetary cost, but in the spirit of full disclosure and setting expectations, you’ll get email and probably a phone call from a sales rep afterwards. The price of attendance is your attention, time, and a little bit of disk space for the email and voice mail message. If you think that’s a good value, then please feel free to sign up by clicking here.

Lame FTC disclosure: Blue Sky Factory is my employer and thus your attendance at this webinar provides direct financial benefit to me. If I don’t suck at what I do, it should provide indirect financial benefit to you, too via making you a better marketer.

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July 14, 2010

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