Ryan Dohrn explains the "law of loud": when a client cuts their ad budget, competitors' higher spending can drown them out. He advises matching, exceeding, or strategically positioning below competitors while emphasizing a clear value proposition and strong retention efforts.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here, your Global Sales Coach. We're answering your listener questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. Thanks for all your questions. They're really good questions, by the way. All right, next question comes from Nellie in Seattle. Great place, Seattle. All right, Ryan, I'm having some issues with renewing clients this year. For some reason, they're wanting to spend less than they did last year. Any help is appreciated. Well, Nellie, it really kind of depends upon the business that you're in, as a lot of you know. I spend a lot of time in digital media, print media, selling advertising. So Nellie, I imagine that you're one of those people that we've talked about media sales, but not always, just kind of depends. Here's what typically happens. If you've got 2 people in a marketplace, this person is going to come in with a bit of a lower spend. The problem is if this, their nearest competitor stays about the same, there's a gap that's created. And when this gap is created, just by the law of loud, is what it's called, whoever's loudest tends to win. So if these competitors last year were spending about the same amount of money, this one's coming in lower and this one's staying the same, the law of loud, I don't know where I came up with that at, but the law of loud would say this person's volume is higher, so they're going to be heard more. So I always just kind of want to point that out. Or, or you could say, make sure you're always appreciative for whatever they're going to spend. You could say, Hey, so I really appreciate that you're going to spend $30,000 with us. I know that's down from $50,000, but I want you to know I'm really appreciative of that $30,000. It's important though for me to share with you that there's a lot of other companies out there like you that are evaluating some of our newer products. And if they evaluate those and end up buying those, what's going to happen is they're not only going to come in at what they did last year, which is going to be higher than you, it's going to be even a little bit louder out there. So you're turning your volume down, which I understand, maybe there's something going on, but let's talk about what else we have going out there because my concern is that they're turning the volume up, you're turning the volume down, and because of that, you may just not be heard as well. Now I call it the law of being loud and it comes from being a parent. So you'll hear a baby in the next room that's crying, obviously take care of the baby, obviously, but in this example, the baby's crying, so that's a competitor. And you, as someone that competes against them, turns the volume up just loud enough so you don't hear that baby crying. Now, the baby's still crying, but you've turned your volume up just loud enough so you can barely hear the baby. When you think about advertising, when you think about competition that's out there, you can either play the same competitive game, you can play below, or you can play above. You need to make the choice, and it's incumbent upon us as salespeople to try to point that out and really kind of figure it out. So Think about the law of loud. The law of loud— usually the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Normally the person that's the loudest gets the most attention. Now, if you're in a different circumstance than advertising sales and people are renewing less than they did before, it might be a value proposition situation. Maybe the overall value that you're trying to present is just not vividly clear. So focus in on that value proposition or Maybe you didn't do a great job retaining that customer last year. So that's something you want to look into. What did you do to keep them really happy? What did you do for that customer to really fall in love with you? So remember, there's 3 stages in the sales process: prospecting, selling people, hosting really good meetings, and then retaining customers for a lifetime. If that third piece, if you've kind of missed that, that could have a little bit of impact on renewals as well. Great question. I think we kind of went all over the place with that one. But hey, I hope that's helpful advice to you. I love sales, if you can't tell. I love the marketing business, and I want you to fall in love with it too. Don't forget, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. And they're not. We're not crazy. We found careers that'll feed our families for a lifetime. Hey, find out more about what I can do to help you and your team over at ryandohrn.com. We'll see you next week.
