Category: Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with

Guest Post by Gerardo A. Dada

Sucharita Mulpuru wrote a blog post about Facebook commerce that turned out to be quite controversial. Sucharita’s previous post on the topic was aptly named 500MM users.. so why can’t they show you the $$. A bold quote from the post “No one’s revenue will come from Facebook”, along with a recommendation to stop wasting time chasing F-shiny objects, and focus on fixing the basics (like search and ratings & reviews) which have proven results.

My thoughts are pretty aligned with Sucharita, in the sense that no one seems to be making money from Facebook other than Facebook, Zynga and a few agencies – in the gold rush the money was made selling picks and other mining tools. I see brands confused about how to even think about Facebook and chasing meaningless metrics such as number of fan “likes”. When marketing leaders share their goal for social marketing this year is to get to 100K or 1 million likes, I ask them what they will do with the customers that have liked the brand, usually resulting in blank stares and confusion.

So I want to share my humble opinion on the role of Facebook for marketers.

One of the principles I feel strongly about is that social media is only a set of tools to help you achieve business objectives. Then, let’s start with the basics and think about how can interactive marketers leverage Facebook to achieve business and marketing goals. “Social media goals” don’t count, unless they are leading indicators in the context of a broader strategy. Think about it: the main reason marketers care about Facebook for one simple reason: there are over half a billion potential customers using it every day. As I wrote in aprevious post, you have to fish where the fish are – but you have to bring them home (your site) to cook them (make money). It was the same with video and other new tools available to marketers.

Sounds logical, yet, brands continue spending millions of dollars in media sending customersto Facebook. The traffic should flow the other way around.  Getting customers to respond to an ad is difficult enough to send them to a site where you have little control with the hopes they will “like” your brand and maybe someday somehow and up on your site or buying your product.

A couple weeks back I saw an online ad for Sierra Mist Natural, curious to learn more about the new drink I clicked on the ad, which took me to Sierra Mist’s Facebook page. Not only was this not the experience I was expecting, I was unable to learn more about the product, learn what makes it natural (is it using Stevia for sweetening, natural flavors or something else?) and landed on a Facebook page where a couple customers had quite negative comments on the product.

To sort through all the confusion it could be useful to think about Facebook as four discrete opportunities:

1. Encouraging fans to advocate your brand on Facebook

This is the most basic, but also the most powerful Facebook tactic so far and it’s free. I haveblogged about this extensively. People trust recommendations from their friends. Chances are their friends are on Facebook too.

If your brand has 50,000 fans (Sorry Facebook, “likes” does not work as well), and if you can get one of every five to tell their friends how much they like your brand, you would have 10,000 people advocating personally to an about 1.3 million potential customers about your brand. 1.3 million customers you probably can’t reach through your traditional marketing efforts. Your customers can advocate on Facebook without even having to “like” your brand. You don’t even need a brand page on Facebook – customers can advocate directly from your website.

2. Your brand’s presence on Facebook (brand page) and “Likes” associated with it

Most brand pages on Facebook are quite boring and expose visitors to customer service issues or provide irrelevant information to customers. It’s time to get creative and map a proper brand experience on Facebook. The possibilities are endless, but don’t create siloed microsites or just copy your website in the Facebook iFrame.  Do something useful like providing reviews, Q&A, links to your site and resources that will engage customers in a social context. There are so many things a brand can do here that it would be impossible for me to provide best practices, so I won’t try. This is an area where a good agency can help.

3. Facebook commerce

To clarify, with F-Commerce I mean not only adding your product catalog to your Facebook page but actually enabling transactions within it: you can complete an order without ever leaving Facebook. I think it makes sense for a few select use cases: buying tractors on Farmville, buying a song using iTunes credits, etc.  However, I am really skeptical this will be mainstream – ever. For a couple of reasons:

  • Leaving Facebook to complete the transaction on the brand’s main site is easy. It takes seconds and can be completely transparent for the user.
  • The user experience will probably be better on the main site. Brands have invested millions on content management systems, search capabilities, interactive features, social capabilities and other elements that give customers a better on-site experience than what is possible on Facebook.
  • Many consumers probably consider most brand sites to be more secure and reliable than Facebook. With the news about Facebook security and privacy issues I guess people would rather share their credit card number with an established business than with a social network that has no good track of protecting personal information.

Alvendia (now 8thBridge) shared the total sales on Facebook across all the brands they serve peaked at $100K in December. That’s less than $3 million per month, a number that is largely insignificant for their client base. Brands should still make their product catalogs available on Facebook to encourage advocacy and sharing, with an easy link to the product page on the main site.

4. Advertising on Facebook

In the end, Facebook is not a social company – it’s a media company that makes money by selling advertising. Advertising on Facebook should be evaluated like you would consider advertising on any other media outlet: based on audience profiles, advertising formats, targetability and ultimately, click-through rate. I am not an expert, but it is common knowledge that CTRs for Facebook are pretty low compared to industry averages. Maybe because when customers are in “social mode” they are not so interested in ads. The risk is that customers start mentally ignoring the ad space on the right most like most of us ignore banner ads on most web sites.

Then again, for the right reasons, with the right strategy, advertising on Facebook may be the right thing to do. Back in 2004, I was one of the first to advertise on Facebook when we were promoting the Imagine Cup. That particular campaign yielded decent results.

Conclusion

In conclusion, if you start with your business goals in mind (and not with “let’s do something on Facebook”) then go on to evaluate the four ways you can leverage Facebook for your business in the context of a customer experience journey, Facebook can be a really powerful tool that produces top-notch results.

[Editor’s Note: This originally appeared on Gerardo’s fascinating blog, The Adaptive Marketer. I thank him for permission to reprint.]

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

If you’re in the marketing world, you’ve probably heard people say “I want this to go viral” or even “I’m going to make a viral video.”

The problem with that is that none of us can control what takes off in the public imagination, or even in the imaginations of enough of a cult that something goes viral within a niche.

Sometimes, the deliberate efforts of creators are successful. I am guessing the “Will It Blend?” ad series was designed very carefully to be passed around a lot. But other times, all the careful design in the world still results in only a few thousand pass-alongs. I’d say the vast majority of projects designed to go viral achieve very little traction—because the market recognizes when it’s being manipulated, and most attempts at deliberate “virality” contain a strong, obvious commercial element

And yet, the ones that really do go viral often don’t try to make any money. I am quite sure that Susan Boyle never dreamed that her video audition for “Britain’s Got Talent” would be seen by more than 86 million people (the combined view stats for just the first two out of 1,460,000 results for a Google search on “susan boyle britains got talent”). I just watched it again, and am still amazed by not only the power of her singing, but the contrast with her frumpy appearance and clueless personality. How could you not fall in love with that video?

Thinking about this today as I look over the comments for two recent blog entries: My 10-year reflection on 9/11 and the lost opportunity for peace, posted September 11, and a guest post by a conservative Christian friend, Steve Jennings, reflecting on his friendship with me—an unabashed progressive—despite our huge political differences, posted September 15.

I had some hopes in writing the 9/11 piece that it might go viral: posted on the tenth anniversary when everyone was once again talking about the attacks, talking about the better world that could have been created had we been blessed with visionary leadership instead of the small-minded vengeance of George W. Bush and his cronies. I tweeted the link a few times, a few other people picked it up, and response was very positive—but very limited. It did not bring me new audiences, though was reasonably popular among my existing readers. It has so far earned four comments and a bunch of retweets. and it somehow managed not to draw even a single attack from the right-wing lunatic fringe.

Steve’s post, which I didn’t promote as heavily, drew a number of retweets (which are, oddly, not showing up on the blog page), though only one comment. Again, uniformly positive, though not big numbers.

Steve’s post was not tied to a particular day and will be timely for many years; it may yet build more comments over time. The 9/11 article, other than from those reading here, is not likely to draw much attention now that almost a week has gone by.

Of course, I never had any dream that my 9/11 post would get as big as Susan Boyle, or even as big as “United Breaks Guitars” (10 million+ views). I’d have been thrilled if a couple of thousand people read it and a few dozen commented, because I’m just trying to get my ideas into the world, and I’m not using sound, video, or even pictures to do it. I still believe in the power of words.

If you find that either of those posts (or this one, for that matter) inspires you to say something, I hope you’ll share it on the comment page, Like it on Facebook, etc. Meanwhile, I’ll keep sharing my ideas, and hoping they make a difference in at least a few people’s lives.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Publishing Tagged with , , , ,

Guest post by D’vorah Lansky

Video is the most effective way to connect with your online audience because they can both see and hear you. This medium permits viewers to get to know you and find out more about your book. Adding video to your website and marketing campaign is one of the smartest things you can do. Video captivates your visitors, provides them with a warm welcome and keeps them on your site longer, so they are much more likely to take action.

Creating Web video might seem intimidating but the truth is that it can be easy, affordable, and even free. Creating Web video can also be a great deal of fun. You can either record your message with the camera facing you or you can create a screen capture video, using a free software program such as JingProject.com, and record something that is displayed on your computer screen. The technology has advanced to the point where it is easy to record a video, even if you are not a technology expert.

How Authors Can Use Video to Market Their Books

There are unlimited possibilities as far as what you can create videos of. Here are a few suggestions for you to draw from:

Create a video book trailer. Market your book by creating a video book trailer which you can post on YouTube and on your website. A video book trailer is a short video or multimedia presentation that helps to promote your book. Typically, it is less than two minutes, and a thirty-second to one-minute video can have even more impact, as people are more likely to watch it all the way through. The goal of your video trailer is to get people emotionally involved in your book by identifying a pain or a challenge and sharing a solution.

The simplest way to create a video trailer is through the use of images, PowerPoint slides, video clips, voiceover, music, and sound effects that paint a story that invites your viewers to get emotionally involved in your book. An extremely simple way to create a video trailer is with an online program at Animoto.com. Simply upload images, select an audio track from a wide selection available on the site, click a few buttons and upload your video to YouTube.

Read a chapter of your book aloud. This is a wonderful way to connect with your audience as authors have been doing readings in person at bookstores for decades. You are simply keeping up with these technological times to reach a much larger audience of prospective buyers. You can either face your webcam or you can narrate while displaying PowerPoint slides to create a delightful presentation.

Record a video interview. Have someone else ask you a series of questions related to your book. Create a webcam video or a PowerPoint video of you sharing an aspect of the book, why you wrote the book, and how people can benefit from the content in your book.

Create a video book. We’ve all heard of audio books. What about creating a video book? You can create an abbreviated, separate video for each chapter and take your reader on an audio-visual journey through your book. This also provides you with an upsell product and/or a special give-away for those who purchase your book during your book launch or through a special promotion. At the same time, it is a teaser opportunity to get them to buy and read the entire book.

What ideas do you have?

Hopefully these ideas have stimulated some ideas of your own. What ways can you see yourself using video to share the message of your book? 

 

About the Author

D’vorah is the bestselling author of Book Marketing Made Easy: Simple Strategies for Selling Your Nonfiction Book Online – Visit her book blog and check out the full virtual book tour schedule at: www.BookMarketingMadeEasy.com.

D’vorah offers programs for nonfiction authors interested in growing their brand and their book sales through online book marketing practices and strategies. You can purchase her book on Amazon at: www.BookMarketingMadeEasy.com/amazon

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Politics Tagged with , , , , , ,

The thing Obama and the Democrats don’t seem to understand is that the ublic would have their back if they knew the facts. And thus, the Democrats need to articulate the facts: clearly, concisely (a challenge, I know), and consistently.

They would not have to give in at all on issues like Medicare, matching debt reduction with spending reduction dollar-for-dollar, and refusing all new revenue if they would put it out to the American people the way Lou Dubose did in the little-read but much-respected Washington Spectator of July 15. You can read the article here, if you happen to subscribe to that wonderful little newsletter.

So let me summarize some of Dubose’s points:

  • Under George W. Bush, the government raised the debt ceiling eight times—something that had not had to be done in the last three years of the Clinton administration, because Clinton turned the Reagan/George H.W. Bush deficits into a surplus.
  • George W. Bush’s first tax cut cost the government $1.3 trillion in lost revenue. His second tax cut added another $350 billion to the deficit. And his Medicare prescription bill (wildly considered a giveaway to the pharmaceutical giants) was an unfunded mandate of more than $600 billion.
  • These huge additions to the deficit don’t even count the enormous cost of our illegal and very expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; according to the National Priorities Project, the cost of these two wars is more than $1221 trillion as I write this, and escalating rapidly every second. You can actually watch the numbers jump at its Cost of War website.

Dubose quotes economist Chad’s Stone’ testimony at a Jont Economic Committee hearing June 21:

The economic downturn, tax cuts enacted under President Bush, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq explain virtually the entire federal budget deficit over the next 10 years.

The tax cuts alone, Stone concludes, represent 6 percent of GDP right now—but if they are not reversed, public debt will be an unimaginable 95 percent of GDP by 2019—not a legacy we want to saddle our children with.

So if I were Obama or Pelosi or Reid, or any Democrat who wants to win his or her next election, I’d be out there every day, telling the press and the public:

  • Spending cuts on programs for the poor and on economic stimulus measures like energy conservation programs make no sense when you’re trying to bring the country out of a big recession
  • Bush and the Republicans squandered the surplus on wars and tax cuts; that was a failed strategy and now it’s time to do it differently
  • The poor and middle class have already sacrificed far more than their share, including the shriveling of their investments, while billionaires and huge corporations have done very well of late
  • Public servants are actually paid far less than they would get for jobs with similar levels of responsibility in the private sector; they are dedicated teachers, firefighters, police officers, etc., who keep society functioning, and who deserve to be treated better than to be the whipping boys for government spending zealots
  • If you want to look at spending cuts, look at the military—that’s a lace with a lot more fat to cut
  • A one-sided set of demands with no room for negotiation is not a compromise, and is not acceptable.
  • Revenue growth has to be part of any deficit discussion
  • These deficits are of the GOP’s own making, as is the financial crisis that resulted from combining the big tax cuts with nearly complete lack of oversight under Bush—doing it again won’t solve the problem
  • We need good, clean jobs to rebuld the econmy, and the way to get them is through a Marshall Plan-style effort to get us off carbon and nuclear and into safe energy and deep conservation (I’ve written about this several times; see, for instance, my blog posts “Where is the LEFT Challenge to Obama?” and “Why the Democrats Lost: Failure to Be Bold”)

Etcetera.

In short, the Dems (and I’ve said this before) have to get much better at framing and messaging. They should study George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant. They need to understand that politics is about marketing, and the reason they lose so often is because they don’t have a clue about marketing. And they need to identify Republicans as the bad guys concerning why the American people have NOT gotten so much of the “Change” mantra that got Obama elected. Otherwise, he will deserve to lose next year.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

Allow me to deviate from this blog’s usual fare of sustainable energy, business ethics, reasons to oppose nuclear power, and progressive vs. conservative politics—today’s post is about mice. The four-legged kind.

We live in a very old farmhouse, built in 1743, surrounded by our neighbors’ corn and hayfields. There have always been lots of mice around, but until a few months ago, the cats and dog kept them to manageable proportions. However, between December and April, all three of our animal companions died. We’re looking to get another cat, maybe two, in the fall, but meanwhile, we’re petless.

So, a couple of months ago,we invested in two lightweight plastic no-hurt traps, baited them with peanut butter, and started hauling a series of mice back out to the field. And I noticed very quickly that different mice reacted very differently to the experience of being trapped, and then released. Microcosms of the human experience, in fact.

Here are a few of the characters we’ve encountered:

  1. Optimist: “Top of the morning to you, Sir, and if I had a hat, I’d tip it. Thanks for letting me into this beautiful green field with lots of goodies to eat.”
  2. Terrified: “It’s so dark and claustrophobic in here that I’m going to pee all over myself with fear.”
  3. Angry: “How dare you put me in a little box all night!”
  4. Klutz: “Darn it, I closed the door while I’m outside and the peanut butter is still inside.”
  5. Burglar: “Heh, heh, heh, more peanut butter! I’ll just tiptoe in so gently the trap doesn’t spring. I didn’t bring calling cards but, I’ll leave some poop to show I was here.”
  6. Escape Artist: “If I rattle this thing enough, I’m sure I can get the door open.” (We’ve learned that it’s a really good idea to stop what we’re doing instantly and carry the trap outside when we get this type.)

Finally, there was today’s mouse, with an attitude I have never before encountered—and ’twas he that inspired this post: “Hey! Im not done eating yet! I’m going back in the trap.” Perhaps I should call him “the climate-denying CEO.” 😉

How would you market to these different types of mice?

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

Last year, I set myself up with Cinchcast: a nifty free service that lets you record anything and post it. In the beginning, I was recording my blog posts.

But I’ve gotten lazy. I haven’t made a new Cinch since late November. Then, thanks to this page of tips on repurposing content (mine is #10, BTW), I discovered Odiogo.com, which automatically records every blog post (it even went back several weeks when I set it up). And then it feeds in to iTunes and other  good streams. Even offers a revenue share on ads.

Odiogo promises bloggers “’Near-human’ quality text-to-speech.” Well, maybe if your idea of human speech is some very nervous person reading a presentation in a near-monotone. It’s got a long way to go before it sounds human to me.

But then again, I know people who read books on their phones. So the quality isn’t great, but it’s there and I don’t have to do anything. I’ll still try to be better about Cinching, but at least those who prefer to consume my blog in audio don’t have to wait for me to remember to record.

I invite you to compare for yourself. Links to both my Cinchast page and my Odiogo page are in this blog post.

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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Green Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Just back from a few days in Istanbul, Turkey, where I spoke at a conference and then got to play for a few days.

As with all my trips, I keep my marketing eyes open. Here’s some of what I noticed:

  • Turks are  maniacs for food freshness (and the food is WONDERFUL!) to the point where packing dates as well as expiration dates are common on packages (which I have seen occasionally in the US) and the packing dates are extremely recent (not very common in my own country). I walked into a very small supermarket in kind of a backwater neighborhood on the Asian side and bought a bag of nuts that had been packed just one week earlier. And they tasted amazingly fresh. That tells me that supermarket turnover has to be very fast, and that the customers are looking at those packing dates and rejecting anything too old, if even this small and uncrowded market had food so fresh. If I were marketing any product in Turkey, food or otherwise, I’d think about how to include a freshness campaign.
  • Like many tourist destinations, Istanbul has an army of men (I didn’t see any women doing this) whose job it is to get the tourist into a particular shop (especially carpet shop) or restaurant. In Turkey, they were really personable, and often started by meeting tourists on their way into an attraction, giving some useful pointers, and then saying they’ll meet you at the end and escort you to the shop (and all of them kept those promises). At least the “like” part of the know-like-trust formula is very much a part of doing business. However, most of them lack any discernible USP (Unique Selling Proposition—a reason to do business there rather than with someone else). One that did told us that his partner would give us a discourse on the history of rug-making, which was accurate (I’ll be posting an article soon based on that fascinating conversation).
  • Most of the Turks I saw had dark hair and a medium skin tone, darker than Northern Europeans but lighter than Arabs or Greeks (kind of like my own skin tone, in fact). I did meet several fair-skinned blondes and redheads. Yet if you look at the ads, you’d think half of Turkey is blonde. I could interpret this as blondes having higher status (as they seem to do in the US as well—remember “Is it true Blonde’s have more fun?”), or as rejection of the principle that marketing should use images that resemble your market, or as something else I wasn’t there long enough to understand. Whatever it is, I don’t think it’s coincidence.
  • For green marketers especially: if you want to move society to go green, make the green alternative much more attractive. Public transit in Istanbul is cheap, fast, easy to navigate—and extremely heavily used. Car ownership, by contrast, is expensive and full of hassles from icky traffic to high fuel prices to very limited parking in many areas. The result? Only 1 in 10 Istanbul residents have a car. I’m betting that once the rail connection between the Asia and Europe sides is complete (my understanding is that a tunnel is being constructed), public transit will become even more popular.
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By Posted on Posted in language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

In an attempt to regain control over e-mail, I’ve been unsubscribing from dozens of publications.

And I notice—a LOT of them thank me for this!

As a marketer, I find this puzzling. It makes a lot more sense to me to thank an unsubscriber for having been a subscriber, not for leaving. Still, I’d rather be thanked inappropriately then to get a gruff, cold “you have been unsubscribed.”

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

I just had a very unpleasant experience buying a ticket on Delta Airlines’ website. And since, in writing and speaking about creating green, ethical, and expectation-surpassing business success, I often address customer service issues, I’m going to transform this crappy experience into a no-charge customer service consultation to Delta. I get a blog post; they get free advice. Deal?

1. Thou shalt prepopulate your required telephone “country code” field with the United States country code, especially if the passenger has a U.S. address. Most Americans have no idea what our country code is, and if they do know, they’ll type a 1. +001? You’ve got to be kidding.

2. When thee kickest back my form for not having the country code properly, thou shalt remember my preference on whether I want travel insurance, and not subsequently kick it back out because YOU unchecked my preference.

3. Thou shalt load pages in a reasonable time. If I can read one to three e-mails every time I wait for my page to update over my broadband connection, you have a service delivery problem. And when the session requires 20 or so pages because of all those ridiculous kickbacks for the country code or the insurance, you have a frustrated customer spending half an hour of forever-gone time and computer eye fatigue in order to complete a transaction that should have taken under ten minutes.

4. Thou shalt not tell me my session has timed out while waiting for YOUR page to load, and then not really mean it, causing confusion. Fortunately, I’ve seen this before and just hit the back button several times until I got to a screen that remembered I was actually still logged in. I’d have been pretty annoyed if I had to log out and relog in.

5. Thou shalt not try to route me from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale via New York. It would be faster to drive! If you have to send me in the wrong direction, how about someplace a whole lot closer?

6. Thou shalt not try to take 40,000 of my hard-earned miles for a measly domestic flight from New England to Florida. That should get me to Europe!

7. Thou dost earn my gratitude for a reasonable fare when I switched to cash, and thou didst receive my business as a result.

8. However, thou shalt NEVER raise the fare between the time I click the Purchase button and the time you process my credit card! That, if you had been a human and not a computer, would be called an illegal bait and switch. That is also a way to get customers really mad at you and badmouth you publicly over blogs and social networks. If it says $230 when I hit Purchase, you should honor that price and not tell me, oh, by the way, we raised the price while you were having trouble with our webform. (Your exact words were “Due to changing availability, the fare you selected is no longer available. Here’s the lowest fare for your flight(s).”) Yeah, it’s only ten bucks, but it’s absolutely inexcusable. It’s one thing to raise the price if I come back a day or even an hour later, but I had initiated the transaction at the offered price and you didn’t honor it. Your computers should simply not be allowed to do that (and airline sites in general should not be allowed to present ticket options that are no longer available).

9. Thou earnest back a few karma points for ease of seat selection. Thank you.

10. But thou losest them again for not telling me whether any of the flights serve meals, and if so, allowing me to state my dietary requirements. It would be easy enough to indicate meals, snacks, or no food, and if meals, to indicate needs.

OK, there you have my personal 10—not commandments but suggestions—that would improve your customers’ attitude toward you, deliver a much more positive experience, and create fans instead of reluctant buyers. If you want more, I recommend my award-winning eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. I’ll even give you (or anyone else who registers a purchase a the site) $2000 in extra bonuses for buying a $21.95 book. See, creating a good customer experience isn’t that hard.

In addition to his award-winning books, Shel Horowitz also writes the Green And Profitable (for business) and Green And Practical (for consumers) monthly columns.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

Got a sales call this afternoon that was soooo pathetic, so 1980. The poor schlep wanted me to schedule an appointment with his field sales guy. Pretty much the first thing he said after telling me his name and his company (both unfamiliar to me) was that the rep would be in my area Thursday.

I politely replied that my time was very precious, and before I scheduled in in-person sales call, I wanted to find out “if it was a good fit for me.” And the first thing I wanted to know was what he was selling.

Turned out to be a credit card processing service. He offered me a free terminal if I would schedule the appointment to tell me about his “favorable” merchant processing rates, depending on the volume.

Well, first of all, I already own my own credit card processing terminal. Second, I’m a pretty low-volume shop, processing a few tickets a month for consulting and a few more for book orders that come to me directly (most are going through traditional book sales channels these days)—so I’m not likely to benefit much from his volume-based rates. And third, when he asked me yet again to set the appointment, I asked for information in writing so I could evaluate the rates. It would have been as simple as giving me a URL to type, but that thought did not occur to him, and probably not to his boss either. In fact, it didn’t even occur to this guy that he could mail or fax the information and then follow up later. (I actually switched to my current merchant processing company because that rep did exactly that, and his rates were in fact substantially better than what I’d been paying.)

Instead, he ended the call.

Well, I’ve got three pieces of advice for people using this selling model:

1. The customer or prospect is in charge these days. I don’t have to bow down to you and be sold to the way you happen to prefer to sell me. You have to offer me the chance to buy the way I want. If you want an in-person appointment and you haven’t shown me the value in it, I won’t meet you. If you want me to sign up over the phone and I want to see the terms in writing, you’ll provide the terms or go away empty.

2. We live in an empowered era. Your competitor is as close as a mouse click. If you won’t people research you, they’ll research, and do business with, somebody else.

3. It’s far more effective to build long-term customer relationships than to go for a quick one-time sale—and these tactics don’t build that relationship.

Of course, I could give them a lot more advice—in the pages of my award-winning books, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and Grassroots Marketing.

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