Selling, Sales and Sales Pitch

Selling and Sales

This is the first chapter from our new book, the second edition of The Death of Late Space, Your Guide to Success in Media Sales, published this summer.

By Bob Morrell

The History of Selling

Most sales teams have an individual who proclaims his experience above all others. Selling as a commercial art form has only been around for 150 years. Set against 200,000 years of evolution your best sales person is still actually a novice. We’re now going to explore our heritage as sales people. Mr Caveman is exchanging arrow heads for food – bartering is a different skill – he needs food to survive just as the other tribe need the weaponry to hunt and protect themselves. This exchange of provisions of one type or another is the core of modern commerce in that the transaction is based on need and surplus – not a desire to own something.

When industry started to mass produce products that more people could afford, manufacturers had to find ways of getting those goods into wide areas of countryside and towns. The only way to do this was to give a supply to a travelling salesman. It was his job to develop an engaging live sales pitch to sell his goods. This gave rise to the first form of sales pitch which is known as Music Man.

Music Man is an entertainment-based pitch. A salesman would walk into a village and as the populace gathered round him he would put on a show to display all the different products he had to sell, demonstrating their attributes, their benefits, how wonderful these new-fangled products were, and their price. The audience would enjoy the performance, and this would stimulate enthusiasm to purchase the products.

It was often the women who saw the salesman, as the men were either at work in the fields or away from the town or village (soldiers, sailors, etc.). The salesman would often show-off and be a little bawdy which gave rise to the idea of the cheeky-chappie cocky salesman, and that view of sales has established itself firmly in our culture. There is an element of naughtiness about the selling process, as if it is something not entirely trustworthy. You can still see this in evidence in television programmes such as Only Fools and Horses, where Del Boy does pitches at the market using humour, entertainment and fun to sell poor quality, mass produced products. This is a one way process, the customer doesn’t have to respond, neither have they made an appointment to be sold to. What’s significant is that the early salespeople realised that to have an engaging personality helped them to be successful and this requirement certainly hasn’t changed. Having said that, there are many salespeople who are far too serious. This Music Man technique is still used at exhibitions: As a young man Jeremy went to the Motor Show at Earls Court in London. There was a large red Pontiac parked at an angle on a stand with one man polishing it and the other man talking into a microphone explaining exactly what was happening. The product they were selling was a small tub of car polish and the pitch lasted 15 minutes, at the end of which, both men moved among the audience holding tubs of the cream which they sold for £5 per tub and they sold hundreds! It was a short, well rehearsed and highly polished presentation that was funny, and made it seem easy to be able to get the same results on your own car. What was even more extraordinary was that both men changed roles and many of the audience came back to appreciate the different presentation styles. You can be thinking about how ‘Music Man’ applies to you and how you sell. Perhaps elements of your own pitch can learn from this, the first type of sales approach.

The second type of sales technique is Animated Catalogue. This came to prominence in the thirties and forties in the United States, where North Americans were buying 75 per cent of the world’s most expensive manufactured products used in the home. The USA produced most of the cars in the world, also vacuum cleaners, televisions sets and other household appliances. The salesman would meet with the potential consumers, often in showrooms, and instead of looking them in the eye he would skilfully turn their attention to the product. Rather than handing over a brochure he would bring the product alive and highlight all the features, advantages and benefits. He would also show them how it worked; because all these products were brand new, nobody knew how a television, a food mixer, a refrigerator, etc. worked, and they needed an explanation before they could make an informed decision to buy. The face-to-face relationship that was built between the salesperson and the consumers was far more effective than any commercial advertising or marketing at that point, and, in terms of media, television was a mass-marketing communication that had only just been invented. This technique is still very much alive today. When Bob bought his first PC in the nineties the salesman in the PC shop showed him exactly how everything worked. In those days everyone wanted to get on the internet and he explained, as they looked at the machine, how Bob could do this. If you are selling a technical product or service it is important to demonstrate how things work in a clear and exciting way. Many sales people forget to sell the product as comprehensively as they could.

What emerged at the same time as Animated Catalogue was the development of the third type of sales pitch, Magic Formula, which was adopted by the world of advertising. The idea that Hai Karate talcum powder in the 1970’s would make you irresistible to women was something that Bob as a young boy really connected with! More recently Lynx body spray made the same claim by using extreme images of Amazonian women chasing young, average looking men. Although the advertisements were over the top and funny the concept still worked and resulted in phenomenal sales. In 1928 A. Stein and Company, (North American makers of garters for men to keep their socks up!) ran a highly successful campaign which showed a woman and a man on a sofa, with the man’s socks around his ankles displaying his bare shins, and the woman turning away from him. The headline read ‘And he wonders why she said no!’ The paragraph below went on to say:

‘Could he have read her thoughts he would not have lost her – a picture of neatness herself, she detested slovenliness. And not once, but many times she had noticed his ungartered socks crumpling down around his shoe tops. To have to apologise to her friends for a husband’s careless habits was too much to ask. So she had to say no – and in spite of his pleading, couldn’t tell him why. ‘No Sox appeal without Paris Garters.’ The final line is ‘Dress well and Succeed’. So be warned, to have loose socks could actually mean the death of your sex life!

These concepts fed back into the sales process so salespeople weren’t just explaining how products worked, they were building pictures in the mind of the customer, making them believe their lives would be transformed in a magical way.

Jeremy knew a salesman who sold cable television when it was first launched (mid-eighties). Instead of spending time talking about the technological aspects and the remote control equipment customers would use, he focused on how their access to a whole range of comedy, film, sport and children’s channels would change their lives, as everyone in the household could watch television that was far more personalised. His territory was the council estates in Oxfordshire for this fairly expensive product. In these areas he was able to paint a vivid picture that would show how the product would help customers escape their everyday environment.

The USP and Where it Comes From

Perhaps one of the most famous theorists to stand against the importance of Magic Formula was Rosser Reeves. In his book Reality in Advertising, published in 1961, Reeves defined the idea that every unique feature needed to be put across wholeheartedly to the consumer or the business buying the products. They needed to be shown the ultimate advantage and difference that this product would give them, and also the difference that the product had over its competitors. He called this the Unique Selling Point. In his day he coined the phrase ‘M&M’s melt in your mouth and not in your hand’ and he also came up with ‘I Like Ike’ for Ike Eisenhower’s Presidential Campaign. He was also notable for attacking John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist and thinker who said, in ‘The Affluent Society’ that ‘Advertising’s central function is to create desires to bring into being wants that previously did not exist.’ Reeves responded, ‘If the product doesn’t meet some existing desire or need of the consumer then the advertising will ultimately fail.’

Dyson’s ‘100% suction, 100% of the time’ puts across very clearly their advantage over other vacuum cleaners. Andrex toilet tissue is ‘Soft, Strong, and Very Long’. No fancy copy, just absolutely what Andrex offers above other brands. Others MAY be ‘Soft, strong and very long’ – but they’re not saying it. This is why many companies struggle to develop their USPs due to saturated marketplaces and low cost manufacturing. The ‘Me too’ markets – somebody producing the same product but able to sell it at a lower price is dominating the start of the 21st Century, making it very difficult for any product or service to be untouchable and truly unique. There are so many similar products and services vying for our attention. In our parents generation there may have been only a handful of companies mass producing loaves of bread, at a supermarket recently we counted 26. With the ability to create a USP becoming more and more difficult perhaps the secret is to explain the magic of what you do. One company that has harnessed the Magic Formula and the USP is Innocent Drinks. They make much of the fact that they use fruit and nothing else, and tell you the exact quantities, but also put across the magic of what they do through lots of fun and inspiring copy and childlike (innocent) imagery.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century business grew substantially through technology, and we entered the high-tech age. Companies had to find new ways of selling more of their products to their current customers, and acquire new buyers. One of the greatest issues for companies since the end of the Second World War is the massive rise in competition from direct competitors, and from other economies able to manufacture at lower rates.

Technology companies decided they would illuminate us to the fact that everybody had problems. These may have been problems we didn’t realise we had in the first place. However if you create a problem it has to be solved. The Problem Solver was the salesperson that would deal with those issues for you – and make a sale in the process. Problem Solving is turning a negative into a positive. Many software solution companies use this technique. A business may have difficulties in co-ordinating large numbers of people together or disseminating information to employees in the right way. Software companies delight in developing bespoke solutions for these issues. Even very small businesses believe they have problems in capturing customer data and accounts information, so the ‘off the shelf problem solver’ software solution is a very popular one.

The ‘Problem Solver’ sales technique is particularly appropriate to the advertising market. Over the last three decades media has advanced beyond recognition. A company that published one magazine thirty years ago now publishes a magazine, has a website, produces complementary supplements and directories and may organise events, exhibitions and award ceremonies, all running under the same brand. ‘The Engineer’ magazine, a publication for engineers, has been going since 1856. In the Seventies and Eighties the publishing house who owned it spawned a number of sub-category publications such as; Design Engineering, What’s New in Industry, Electronic Engineering, Metalworking, and later Microwave Engineering. Alongside these niche publications was an Engineers Buyers Guide (a directory), an awards ceremony ‘The Manufacturing Industry Achievement Awards’ and a series of supplements and packs of product cards. Later the titles all launched web sites. So if I, as an advertiser, need to hit the Manufacturing marketplace then ‘The Engineer’ can offer me lots of different ways to do this so that I am guaranteed to be able to reach the elements of the industry I want through a selection of media – or a ‘media mix’.

So as a media salesperson one of the most important things you are trying to do is define a buyer, and if you are able to determine the problem (the reason that an advertiser is not getting these buyers) you are then able to specify the right media for the advertiser to reach them.

Another example of ‘Problem Solver’ comes from our own market – training. When we sit down with a new client, they generally tell us the problems they have with their sales teams. These could be low morale, poor staff retention, declining sales and low profitability. Our training offering should demonstrate that we can help to solve these problems for them. Good training works at improving all three of these areas and usually with results measured in the same order. Once engaged it is up to us to inject a little Magic Formula and Music Man into our training process.

We’d like to introduce two terms, the first a True Relationship Builder or, alternatively a Critical Friend. Critical Friends are people with whom you associate in business and who you trust in terms of their advice and what they sell you. So you listen to criticisms and observations they make about you and your company because you know that those criticisms and observations are offered with the best possible intentions. Costa and Kallick in 1993 have described a critical friend as a ‘trusted person who asks provocative questions, provides data to be examined through another lens, and offers critiques of a person's work as a friend. A critical friend takes the time to fully understand the context of the work presented and the outcomes that the person or group is working toward. The friend is an advocate for the success of that work."1(2) 49-51

How do you become a Critical Friend? How does a salesperson differentiate themselves from the other salespeople who are promoting their products and services to a business or consumer? The best salespeople have attributes of all of the different sales processes that we have talked about so far, and that’s one of the ways that you become a Critical Friend. You have been entertaining, you have demonstrated product knowledge, you have shown them the magic formula, you have solved their problems; but to become the Critical Friend you have built a relationship that is based not solely on your agenda of selling.

The Critical Friend – an example

When Jeremy was at Yellow Pages he was selling advertising to a large Garden Centre. On arrival in the car park, he noticed a woman struggling with a heavy bag of compost to her car. In the sales meeting he suggested that the bar codes for compost bags were kept at the till to be scanned and that the compost was kept right by the exit where it could be loaded directly into the boot of the car. He was critical about their current method of selling compost but acted as a friend by suggesting a better solution and one that would ultimately allow the garden centre to sell more compost. As you can imagine this strengthened the relationship considerably and made it clear that Jeremy was not just there to sell advertising – he was there to help them sell more. In the next chapter we’ll show you how to become a ‘marketing savvy’ critical friend.

This is the first chapter from our new book, the second edition of The Death of Late Space, Your Guide to Success in Media Sales, published this summer. Reality Training Books has details on it.

>> Other pages and topics you may also be interested in : The Elmer Wheeler Close | Group Sales Training | Sales Training | Management and Leadership Development