The Gap Between Marketing & Sales (1 of 2)

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to jump back in with Dan Kennedy and learn what is the difference and the gap between marketing and sales. Now, if this is the very first time that you've touched into the magnetic marketing world, you're going to notice very quickly that Dan Kennedy sees a difference between marketing and what the average Joe or Jane may see as marketing in today's world. He is very focused on making marketing sales-focused in order to make sure that that works. However, those of us who've been around Dan Kennedy for a while, some of us may focus on one of these more than the other, and we might be getting the two mixed up. So in order to clarify and give the specifics on where one stops and where the other picks up, how do you actually build this into your business so that way, maybe you're doing a great job with magnetic marketing, but you're not actually making sales. How do you make sure that when you lift up one end of the stick, the other comes along with it? So let's jump into part 1 of the gap between marketing and sales with Dan Kennedy.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons. They're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Good morning, everybody. I really want to talk to you today about about a gap in many people's businesses, about the failure of marketing, about how marketing only gets us so far, and then gaps occur. And so when you consider sales and you consider marketing, we tend to focus a lot of our attention typically on marketing because for one thing, it's easier to control. It's easier to control what we put on a piece of paper or what we put on a website, or what we put on a TV screen, than it is to control what comes out of our mouth, our front desk person's mouth, our salesperson's mouth, what occurs face-to-face with customers or clients in our place of business or in their place of business. So it's a hell of a lot more fun to go work on that which we have direct and easy control over But when I say that marketing only takes you so far, there's a lot of things that it does well, and I'm gonna hit on those. But then selling in some way, shape, or form has to occur. Now, if you have really, really, really good marketing and you're really, really good at all the marketing stuff that we teach, you need selling less and less in order to survive. You can run a business kind of without it if your marketing is good enough. So, for example, the issue of do you have somebody dealing with customers on the telephone or not? Well, in many cases, I've— part of my mission with a client has been to reduce or eliminate their need to have a live human being talk to a customer on the phone in order to close a sale. And so by improving their marketing, we've eliminated the need for the humans. What's interesting about that though is, is that when you improve the marketing, you improve the value of every prospect coming into the business, which means you improve the value of selling if you have good selling. Furthermore, the better your selling is, the more money you can spend, the more aggressive you can be at implementing the good marketing you've got. So just as marketing makes it go— can make it go away as a necessity, It can make it an even better opportunity. So I thought this morning we'd focus a little bit on that. And look, I've been a salesperson all my life, and essentially that's what I do. At the Success events that Tom and I spoke on, General Schwarzkopf asked at the first one, he called me aside and he said, okay, he said, I get my— I'm here because I'm getting $75,000. I get it. But what the devil are you guys doing? Because he was perceptive enough to know that wasn't anybody handing me $75,000 to show up. And he sort of saw what was going on, but I said, look, let me explain to you what this is. We got 35,000 people in an arena at a Tupperware party. That's what we got, all right? Except instead of selling Tupperware, we're selling books and tapes. But fundamentally, this is a giant Tupperware party, and you, my friend, are are the free door prize drawing gimmick that got them in the door. That's all you are. I call them shamu. You're the shamu, the whale, who sucks them into SeaWorld, but all the money's made at the souvenir stand, the pearl diving thing, the hot dog place, the t-shirts. So don't be too excited about what you are, because all you are is the suck them into the room deal. And then our job is to sell them stuff. And by the way, if we don't sell them enough stuff today on Tuesday, your $75,000 check for Thursday ain't gonna be any good. So it'd be a real good idea since you're immediately before me if you finished on time. And that's the conversation that we had. Now my point about that is that I had no illusions about what it is we were doing there. And I've never had any illusions about what it is that we're doing. Nothing I've ever done in my life is like, you know, curing cancer, at least not directly. I mean, I get it, but if a bunch of us don't sell enough stuff and pay a lot of taxes, then the research grants don't go to the guys who are trying to figure out how to cure cancer. So, I mean, what we do is important indirectly, not directly. But I always got that the sales part of this function was extremely important. I've seen a lot of clients and members kind of lose track of it, get away with it. And get so good at the other parts that they are letting this slide. So I've started to turn my attention back to that. So let's talk a little bit. Here, so the first thing is relatively few businesses are engineered to prosper with no human contact with customers and prospects. There are businesses that do it. There are, for example, pure e-commerce businesses, vulnerable by the way because they are pure e-commerce businesses, but pure e-commerce businesses that prosper with no human contact at any stage of the game. With the prospect or the customer. And if you have one of those and you're able to grow it, I'm all for it. But you hit a growth wall usually where you can't go any further without adding humans to the equation. Now, I've never liked this fact. I don't like having humans around. I find them troubling and annoying. They don't like being around me, et cetera, et cetera. So I have great empathy with everybody who raised their hand about their frustrations with their people. However, I don't have much empathy for somebody who, once they make the decision that they're gonna have them, doesn't do the things necessary to optimize their value. And if you're gonna bite the bullet and you're gonna let humans interact with your customers, then here's the 3 things that I think are important to get a grasp on. One is you gotta recognize that they're all salespeople. They're all salespeople. So Susie at your front desk who answers the phone, she's a salesperson. The guy who takes out the trash, if he bumps into a customer and talks to them, he's a salesperson because he is either positively or negatively affecting the the outcome of your sales process either immediately or over time. Now Disney gets this. So Disney, for example, spends a lot of time training their street sweeper guys who are out there picking up gum on what they're supposed to say to the public if the public speaks to them, and if they see a person who looks like lost and confused, how they are supposed to stop sweeping the street and go over there and proactively help that person. If they see a lost child, what they're supposed to do about that. So they get that that guy in the orange jumpsuit with the broom has a sales function to perform. So that's the first thing. If you got humans and they interact with your customers in any way, shape, or form, they're salespeople. Now that includes you, 'cause there's a whole lot of people who don't define themselves in this role, but this is the role you're in. Second big thing. They gotta know they're salespeople. Now that's a biggie, 'cause they don't think of themselves as salespeople. So Susie at the front desk, who's answering the phone, stuffing envelopes with the newsletter to go out this month, and filing records, say she thinks those 3 jobs are the same, and she actually thinks the phone call is an interruption to getting the real work done of the other 2 jobs. So she don't know she's a salesperson. Now, if you educate her that she's a salesperson, there's at least a 50-50 shot she runs from the building like hell and you never see her again. She's gone in a puff of smoke. But that's good, not bad. Because the 50% who stay, now you can work with them. Because they've got to know that they are an integral part of the sales process and that the sales function is what's going on here. Then third, you've got to insist on appropriate skill development and performance in selling for yourself and every person around you. If you ignore this gap— just leave it blank for a second, Trace— if you ignore this gap, then what you're doing is you're using your advertising dollars and your marketing dollars and you're using Paul Hartunian free PR, you're using all those things to get so far, and then you're leaving a bunch of unplugged holes in a bucket through which money falls back out the bottom. I'll show you that in a second. Put the next slide up. So most people have the wrong attitudes about selling. First is a lot of business people believe it stands alone. So they have it disconnected. So over here— and of course big companies do this. That's one of the reasons I say the bigger they are, the dumber they get— is because they start to so compartmentalize everything they no longer have a process. They have departments. Departments. So I was watching a rerun of The Apprentice last night, and I knew I was no longer interested in the show when one of the guys was introduced from Batten Barton Durston and Stupid, whatever ad agency it was, as their chief creative officer. See, this guarantees you stupidity has run amok if this is the job title. You know, I have no interest in his opinions. But they have lined up departments. Over here is the advertising department. And over here is the marketing department, and over here is the trade show department, and over here is this department, and over here is the sales department, and over here is the customer service department, and they're all completely disconnected. And a lot of people view these things as disconnected. You don't want to do that. You want to view it all as part of a process. Second attitude is— second attitude that's wrong about selling. Is a lot of people think selling is about service. Selling is actually about control and about power. Social work is about service. Service, the word comes from the word servant. That ain't what you want to be. So that is not a good synonym for selling or salesman. Selling is really about power and about control. It is about guiding somebody to a decision, often in a way that they would not ordinarily arrive at a decision. Now, I'm not suggesting there's not value. I'm not suggesting you sell crap. I'm not suggesting you abuse the privilege. But I am suggesting you understand that selling and the process it is a broader part of is about taking control of a person's thoughts and emotions for a period of time in order to optimize their spending. That's what selling is, all right? So all kidding aside, to be very frank, the reason there's water and Cokes and food on breaks has more to do with its impact on your buying mood than it has to do with anything else, okay? Because strategically, we're selling. That's what we're doing. Third, a lot of salespeople think selling is about making sales presentations. This is like having a website and thinking it is about visitor count, or buying advertising and thinking it is about circulation numbers. Selling is not about making sales presentations. Selling is about making sales. Selling is about an outcome. Not an activity. A lot of salespeople get the two confused. And so it's not about the presentation, it's about the result. The last attitude that's wrong is that a lot of people think that ultimately the results are controlled by the prospects. And so this is everything from two salespeople, one doing well, another one not doing well, insisting that the other one's getting the best leads. You know, if you've seen the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, You know, that's sort of a classic, okay? But there's the broader view of this is anybody who blames the customer for the outcome of their process is immediately sabotaging their ability to get better results. So anytime you hear yourself or anybody around you in any way, shape, or form blaming the customer— oh, our customers are cheap, our customers are stupid, our customers are old, our customers don't have good credit, our customers. As soon as you let anybody start doing that, you have given up total control over your outcomes. And it's not true. Selling is totally about the sales process and the salesperson, not the prospect. Here's the proof. Routinely, in a sales organization, a manager can take a prospect who has already been thoroughly worked by salesperson number 1, given up on, turn them over to salesperson number 2, and salesperson number 2 makes the sale. The prospect didn't change. The salesperson is the thing that changed. So it's not about the prospect. W. Clement Stone said that the sale is contingent upon the attitude of the salesperson, not the attitude of the prospect. That's true as far as it goes, but it's even— it's truer even broader. The sale is contingent upon the attitude and the aptitude of the salesperson and about the entire process that wrapped around the sale. It is not contingent upon the prospect. You can take the same audience, put two different platform salespeople on the stage, one does well, one doesn't do well, it's the same audience. We didn't change the audience, we changed the salesperson. So you have got to take full responsibility for this. Tom last night, you know, his last year in real estate, he sold a property a day. Which in real estate, by the way, is phenomenal. See, I didn't know that when I started speaking. I told Tommy this story. I started speaking by running around speaking free in Phoenix where I live, and at the time sales meetings could be made compulsory, not optional like they are now. The law changed. And so every real estate office had a sales meeting, and agents had to be there. Now they didn't have to like it, but they had to be there. Sales managers didn't want to do the meetings, so getting booked to come in and speak free at a real estate office is like was like the easiest thing you could ever do. It takes a phone call saying, "I'm a speaker." The sales manager says, "Great, be here at 10." He don't care what you're going to speak about. He don't care if you're any good. He just doesn't want to do the meeting. So, getting booked was easy. Well, I knew nothing about real estate. I mean, zero. And so, I'm doing 4 or 5 of these things a day. And one of my first paid gigs for $500 was the awards meeting for a company called 50 States Real Estate, which actually had only 4 offices in Phoenix. And so fortunately I didn't do it on stage, but before I went up to work, I'm standing next to the president, the vice president, the sales manager guy, and up front they're giving away their awards to their top performers, right? And like the top performers sold like 55 homes, you know, last year. And I turn to these guys and I go, "What's wrong with these people?" Right? The guy says, "What do you mean?" Well, I came out of a direct sales culture where our slogan was "A sale a day," right? I'm thinking the point is you're supposed to sell something. 50 to me sounds like abysmal, you know? I said, "How come they ain't selling something every day? What are they doing?" If they're salespeople, by definition, what do you do every day? Sell something! That's what you do. If you're a street sweeper, you don't like show up for work 200 days out of the year and sweep only 30. You're supposed to sweep every day. If you're a sales guy, aren't you supposed to sell something every day? And they had to patiently explain to me the realities of the real estate business, which of course are realities that they accept, not necessarily— So, I have a client, in come prospects to this client's business, and I've had this conversation with chiropractors and dentists and stuff too, you know, so in comes this prospect, he's a preconditioned prospect, run through a good process, he's coming to this place of business presumably to buy this thing, he now gets a sales presentation and the salespeople and the managers and the owners of the business are bragging that they're closing 68% of the sales. I'm going, huh, why not 100? They came in here to buy this thing. They didn't— it ain't a Starbucks. They didn't come in here to socialize. They came over here to buy something. That's why they came. They ain't the mall. They didn't come to spend the day, eat caramel corn, bore and window shop, they came to this specific business that sells this specific product in order to sit across from a sales professional and get a sales presentation, and then they didn't buy. And you guys are bragging about 68%. Anything less than 100%, you're unselling the guy. That's what you're doing, right? It's not— it should be 100%, right? How could it be any less? But the answer, by the way, is, well, the industry average is 62%. Oh, zippity-doo-dah, you know? How bad they are, what does that have to do with how good you're supposed to be? So people have real sort of dysfunctional attitudes about what should happen when marketing delivers a prospect to the point that they're supposed to be sold. So take a look at this. Here's what marketing can do. And can do well under the right circumstances. It can replace prospecting. And by the way, my point about this is if you have a sales professional doing prospecting work like cold— here's the phone book, dig somebody up in order to tell your story to. Here's doors, go knock on them in order to get somebody to tell your story to. Here's a trade show. Go stand in a booth with no plan and wait for somebody to tell you a story. If you have your sales professionals, and if you're the sales professional, you count. If you have your sales professionals doing this, this is like you being a hospital administrator, having your cardiac surgeon washing the windows and opening the door in the morning. Your sales professional, if he is in fact a sales professional, should be spending all his time selling. Your surgeon, if in fact he's a great surgeon, ought to be spending all his time cutting and pasting. You don't want him cleaning up the operatory, right? So good marketing can replace prospecting. Good marketing can find appropriate prospects. So marketing can be designed to repel as well as to attract, thereby leaving only the most appropriate prospects. That's what it should be designed to do. That requires courage. You have to design marketing to tell certain people, "Go away." But marketing can generate leads. Marketing can qualify leads. Marketing can create first-step responses from prospects, meaning not only can it get a prospect identified, it can get a prospect to take a first step toward you, whatever you decide that first step is. Schedule an appointment to meet with you at the trade show booth instead of just showing up. That's the first step. Call up and request information sent to review at home or at office. That's the first step. Okay, this is important. Marketing can help not-yet-ready prospects to mature. Not everybody's ready to buy the minute they raise their hand and identify themselves as a prospect. Some are ready to buy right now, some aren't going to be. It's going to be 3 months, it's going to be 6 months, it's going to be a year, it might be 5 years. It it might be 10 years. Good marketing can keep talking to them without using up human capital so that when they mature and are ready to buy, you're there. Good marketing can develop a certain level of trust. It can precondition the prospect to view you as something other than a merchant, a vendor, a seller, and it can develop a certain level of trust. It can desensitize price and eliminate sticker shock, so it can prepare people to expect a certain level of price from this particular business or this particular prospect by the very way that it markets to them and what it says. It can pre-sell to some extent. It can move the person along the line to being ready to buy, ready to buy from you, ready to buy now before they get there. 11, very important, it can make salespeople more efficient and more valuable because marketing replaces their other functions and allows them to sell. What it can't do with rare exception, is replace selling. It can't do that. That's asking too much of it. You need a sales part of your process. Now, that might be a human salesperson. It might be a teleseminar or teleseminar series. It might be a group presentation. In our business, in the information marketing business, as the industry has matured, as niche industries have become more competitive, where once there was one of us, now there's 20 of us, the sales part of the process has become increasingly important. If you go back a decade, hardly any of the info marketers I worked with and launched in the business had salespeople. Many of them, no customer, nobody talked to anybody. They didn't have salespeople on the road. If they did group presentations, it was them taking a speaking gig, but that was it. If now marketing after selling also has a role, right? So marketing can do follow-up. Marketing can make a sale stick. It can reduce a refund. It can make a sale stick. It can again help the not-yet-ready prospect to mature. It can help turn a transaction into repeat business or recurring business. Somebody comes to your restaurant for the first time. Somebody comes to your dry cleaners for the first time. Somebody, uh, somebody comes into your bank for the first time. Somebody comes into whatever business for the first time, a good marketing sequence can be designed to make sure that we acknowledge the fact that they were the first time and to get them back within 5 days for a second time and to get them back a third time so it becomes a habit. Marketing can expand usage. You're using 4 of our products, but you're not using these other 4 of our products. Good marketing can now cross-sell to you. You only come in for breakfast, we never see you for dinner, good marketing can cross-sell for you. You've only got auto insurance with us, but but you don't have life insurance with us. You have auto and life, but you've never bought an annuity. You have auto, life, and an annuity with us, but you got a kid and you don't have a college savings plan. Good marketing can— we can introduce upgrades. So, good marketing can go to the salesperson who bought the exercise device that has 4 functions and upgrade them to the exercise device that has 12 functions. It can introduce new products and service. It can improve frequency. It can keep poachers at bay. This is really important. It can form the bond and maintain the relationship with the customer after the sale, and it can stimulate referrals. But what it still can't do, with rare exception, is eliminate the sales part of the process. And here's where a lot of bad things happen. You put the next slide up. So what, what is happening in a lot of businesses, including quite possibly yours, is marketing delivers good prospects to you and/or to your salespeople who don't really deserve them because you don't have a system to handle them. And who quickly destroy their value. Number 1, the absence of a system and systems within the system. Those of you that were with me on Renegade Millionaire Day saw a lot about this. The absence of a system and systems within the system for handling a prospect. So you got all this advertising, you got all this marketing. At some point, Billy Bob calls your office. At some point, Billy Bob walks into your place of business. Is there a true system for what happens moment by moment by moment, step by step by step for what happens to Billy Bob and is it the same every single time? If it isn't, you got a hole in your bucket that you're pouring money into and it's falling right out the bottom. Second, lack of top-down commitment. If you don't take this seriously, and you don't invest time and money and energy in it, then the holes will always be there. They will not fix themselves. People— your people won't fix them for you. You may not even know what you're losing. You may think what you're losing is a perfectly acceptable number. 3: Negative first impressions and negative last impressions. Your mama told you, very hard to overcome a bad first impression. So you spend all this money and you design all this clever marketing and you're sending out all this mail, and it's got lumpy stuff in it, and it's got cleverly designed envelopes, you've got Scott Tucker's brilliant tear sheets, which are something to be seen and viewed in awe. I mean that seriously. I'm not being a smart aleck. You got all that working for you, right? And then all somebody's got to do is say the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong tone, and you blew it all. You wasted all all that effort to get that person to that point, and right out the hole they go. And I gotta tell you, they don't like write you a letter most of the time and tell you what just happened. All you got is a stat. Okay, oh, this direct mail campaign is no good because it produces crappy prospects. Why? Because 60% of them book appointments and don't keep them. Well, was it The prospect? Oh, let's blame the prospect. Was it the direct mail campaign? Or was it what happened to them when they went to book the appointment? Odds are a little of each, but a lot of the third. Oh, these are lousy leads, they don't close. Well, was it the lead? Was it the disconnect from marketing messages and prospects' expectations. So that's why everything has to be part of a process, because at any time something is dramatically wrong— so for years, gee, 19— I don't know, the '70s, I've been trying to get chiropractors. Rodney and practice management taught them the same thing. What's a patient's expectation when they come in? Well, they think they're coming to a doctor's office. They have a certain picture in their head of what a doctor's office is supposed to be like, okay? Some things about that picture have to be congruent for them to be reassured and not mentally and emotionally back out the door, even if they physically don't back out the door. So like, if the front desk staff, and even worse, the doctor, is in Hawaiian shirts and sneakers, this is not good. That was not their expectation. They expected white coat, name, stethoscope. That's what they expected. Now, doc does the best, he does everything else right, don't make any difference. They clicked him off when that happened. If your marketing message says one thing and something else says another, any place along the line, no good. Slang use of product. So your marketing message is all about having superior technology. We got the best— this thing is the most advanced, sophisticated NASA thing Think the Sleep Number or Tempur-Pedic bed pitch. All right? So those bed pitches, if you see the TV show, you see the infomercial or you see the commercial, either one of them, a big part of the pitch is about this being the whiz-bang technology, right? The stuff was used by astronauts and it was developed by engineers, yada, yada, yada, yada. Now you go to the store. So now you call up and you get the package. You watch the DVD. All that reinforces that message. Now you go over to Fishbuying Furniture where they sell Tempur-Pedic and the guy calls the foam stuff. Alright? Oh, let me show you a sample of that foam stuff. Everything that was done up to then, all the money spent on TV to get the lead to raise his hand, all the money spent sending him the package, everything that led up to then just turned to crap. Because that person, not necessarily consciously, but subconsciously, just switched off. They may not even be able to come back and enunciate to you afterward, "Billy Bob, why didn't you buy?" He may not be able to tell you. Because it happened to him on a subconscious level, not a conscious level, but something was wrong. So you gotta make sure that you don't have a disconnect anywhere through your process from prospect expectations. Now you want to plus them. So my chiropractor office where I want everybody in their white jackets and their nice uniforms when they greet them. No, I don't want the same crappy medical form. I don't want the same language. The first thing that's said is, "Here, take this clipboard, go fill out this form." I'd like something better said, okay? But I don't want to be so jarringly disconnected from the expectation the new patient has that it is non-reassuring and it is frightening and terrifying and makes them paranoid and uncomfortable so that they click off. Absence of effective language and scripts institutionalized. Every word or phrase, and we'll talk about scripting a little bit, but every word or phrase said either reinforces or undermines the sale. Now a lot of people have a whole big thing about scripting. So here's how it undermines a strategy. So let's take a really simple strategy. So let's assume you own a restaurant, okay? A real simple strategy is ask them if they want dessert, because there's a lot more profit in dessert, by the way, than there is in the main entree. So in order to bring the margin up, you got to sell dessert. Most people want dessert, by the way. Look at us, right? So it ain't like this is is all that difficult. But if you want to get optimum results, then every nuance matters. There's a best way to ask that question in a particular restaurant to a particular demographic. There's only one best way, okay? And once you figure out what the best way is, then everybody ought to be using the best way. Not 10 waitresses doing 10 different things, whatever the hell they feel like doing. Not you saying it 10 different ways during the day. No, there's one best way. Now as copywriter, see, that's what we do. We agonize over words. We script. So should we with our personal performance. I sat in on a training meeting at a very high-end restaurant and they did 30 minutes on when you go up to the table in this particular restaurant at lunch, you do not say, "Let me tell you about today's special." "Does your restaurant have specials?" The trainer said, "Denny's has specials. We have $30 lunches. We don't have specials. We have the chef's feature of the day. And we play baseball here." So they say, "If we catch you not saying 'chef's feature' once, twice, three times, you're gone." 'Cause it's that important. We can't go to all this trouble to get people in here to this high-end restaurant, create a certain environment, a certain experience, we want them to come back, we want them to tell their friends, and have you screw it up with your language. Language matters. It matters dramatically. Your battle of turning transactions into lifetime customer value is a battle of language. In a jewelry store, there's a certain way to take a ring or a watch out of a case and present it. You don't throw it on a counter and say, "Here, take a look at it." Well, that's kind of obvious in a jewelry store, isn't it? Not so obvious maybe in your business, but just as important. Okay, so there's sales presentation techniques. There's how now you present yourself, your product, your service, your language.

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