Jill Konrath | Selling to Big Companies

Sales Tip #4 From the Political SPIN Meisters

Hindsight is wonderful. All the pundits are busy pontificating why Bush won and Kerry lost. It's time for me to add my two cents again today, so here it is.

Tip #4: Create and mobilize evangelists.

Evangelist extol your virtues when you're not around. They passionately believe in your mission and work on converting others to their beliefs. They even forgive you when you do something dumb or sound stupid. One evangelist can deliver lots of votes.

The Bush's campaign proved far superior to Kerry's in this aspect. They targeted Evangelical Christians as a market segment, aligned their "message" with what this demographic needed to hear and actively pursued relationships with key leaders in these communities. As a result, these religious leaders became avid spokespeople for the Bush campaign. From their pulpits, they preached the Bush message to their flock and delivered the vote.

What can sellers and marketers learn from this? Look for evangelists in your midsts. Support them like crazy and help them build the buzz. An excellent book on this topic is called "Creating Customer Evangelists" by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. It's an excellent read.

Sales Tip #3 From the Political SPIN Meisters

With the election finally over, we can finally look at the strategies implemented by the "winning" sales meisters. Here's one technique the Bush people used to their advantage from the beginning of the campaign.

Tip #3: Define your competition before they define themselves.

Bush's spin meisters were all over John Kerry before he had a chance to define himself with the American public. In painstaking detail, they reviewed his government record looking for anything that could be used against him. What did they notice? As a Senator, he voted for some bills and against others - on the same issue.

From their perspective, why he did it was entirely irrelevant. The spin meisters needed a quick and easy way to convey this to the American public. After experimenting with various terms, "flip-flop" emerged as the clear winner. From that moment on, John Kerry was on the defensive. It didn't matter why he'd changed his mind. He was a "flip-flopper."

How can sellers use this same strategy without losing their soul?

Sales Tip #2 From the Political SPIN Meisters

With only one more day before the election, here's another valuable tip you can learn from those ever-present spin artists working on the campaigns:

Tip #2: Use sound bites.

Unfortunately, the majority of today's voters don't study the issues at all. They hear a few sentences of the candidate's message on television or scan the headlines in their newspapers.

As a result, they only hear the snippets of a politician's speech that have been pulled out by the media to stress an important point. The entire context of the quote is missing and it's left to be interpreted as a stand-alone phrase. The media loves these catchy, well-written sound bites. They play them over and over, hammering the message home to our lazy populace.

How does this apply to sales? Many of your buyers are very similar to voters. They don't have time to think because they're so busy putting out fires. In order to catch their attention, you need a great sound bite that they can't ignore. It has to scream, "Listen to this." And it has to be easily repeatable.

The best sound bite in today's marketplace is a strong value proposition. Think about how you can succinctly state the outcomes a client gets from using your product or service. If it takes you forever to spit out of your mouth, it won't work. Stress the business results in a catchy, but bare-bones manner for the highest impact.

For more info on this topic, check out this article on my website called "Is Your Value Proposition Strong Enough?" http://www.sellingtobigcompanies.com/free-sales-stuff/articles/valuepropstrength.php . Or take a look at my CD on the same topic at: http://www.sellingtobigcompanies.com/sales-tools/audio/index.php .