You’re selling it wrong

If nothing else, I’m a salesman. I always have been, and—with any luck—always will be. I look around at businesses in all sorts of industries (real estate, publishing, banking, whatever) and it’s shocking to me that people are so shitty at selling their products and at taking advantage of the consumer outreach channels available to them. I’m not sure exactly why these companies miss the boat, but they’re really letting opportunities pass them by.

What I’ve found in most organizations is that people forget the most important rule: everything is marketing, and all marketing is sales. Period. I don’t care if you’re fielding customer service complaints—you work for the marketing department. If you’re a receptionist, you work for the marketing department. Any aspect of a company that has any level of contact with the public is either helping or hurting their marketing efforts. Here’s a very simple example: I can walk into a car dealership wearing either a suit or a T-shirt. If the cute girl they’ve hired to greet me chooses to dismiss me because she thinks me and my T-shirt can’t afford one of their cars, she just wasted the thousands of dollars that the dealership and manufacturer spent to get me into their showroom. Try fitting that into your ROI formulas.

That’s point number one. Point number two: why the hell are you spending so much money yelling at potential customers when you could be talking to them? If you’re running a full-page print advertisement that isn’t event-specific (a sale, for example) or is merely for branding, you’re seriously throwing away money that you might want to put into a medium where you can actually talk to your customer. (Let’s be honest here, don’t bother with creative for a branding ad, just print the name of your company and website in huge letters—it’ll work just as well.)

I shouldn’t have to say this—because it’s a pretty well established fact by now: the old way of doing business is dead. It’s not because Twitter and Facebook are the new cool things. It’s because outlets like Twitter and Facebook allow people to find what they want with user-based search features. It’s a better way to communicate with potential customers—just don’t be an asshole about it. If you’re selling insurance, don’t use LinkedIn to find the COO of a company, friend him on Facebook and then try to sell him via private messages. Do, however, find out who he is, learn about the culture of his company and whatever you can about his personality. Then you can tailor a cold-email or cold-call and watch your closing rate soar.

What’s the easiest way to identify people who need your product using new media? Set up some Twitter searches that cover your product’s features, solutions, etc. Guess what? It doesn’t cost a damned thing—but time—and it’s a great prospecting tool. I just did a search for a hash-tag that no one should be using, #carinsurance, and came up with dozens of hits from users looking for quotes. If I sold insurance, I just saved myself a hell of a lot of money that I would have wasted on direct mail in order to find 20 people who are looking for car insurance.

This stuff is easy, people. Get on it. Want more? Need help? Got a question? Think I’m totally wrong? Email me: joedinardo@gmail.com.

Introducing the Apple iPad

First thoughts…

The new Apple iPad (C) 2010 Apple

It’s official, the Apple tablet product has been launched and it’s called the iPad. At first glance it seems like a large iPhone which, I suppose it pretty much is. But think about what you could do with a larger iPhone for a minute…

Yeah you could do a lot of REALLY cool stuff and that’s exactly what Apple is hoping for. From a UI standpoint I can see why some people are upset that it’s not running a full scale version of OS X, but what kind of device would that have given us? You would have had to choose a lesser of two evils scenario: Expensive and fast or inexpensive and slow. I think Apple made the right decision to use an OS based on the iPhone OS. It’s sleek, simple, millions of people already know how to use it and you don’t need a super processor to run it well.

What really gets me excited about the iPad isn’t the fact that almost all of the AppStore’s 140,000 apps will run on it or that all the apps you’ve already downloaded for the iPhone will transfer right over (both of which are true by the way) I’m most excited about the revisions to the apps and new apps Apple includes on the device. Mainly Mail, Calendar and the Book Store.

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