Author: admin

When you’re in a sales position of any kind, prospecting is probably one of the most important things you can do. Yeah, that seems obvious. But ask yourself how many friends of yours are salespeople? Do you know what they sell? Do you run into other people that might need what it is that they sell?

If you sell for a living, can you honestly say that you let everyone know what it is that you do or sell?

Do 80-90% of the people you meet walk away with your business card?

Most importantly, do you consider yourself to be your own brand?

In this day and age, virtually everyone has a chance to brand themselves.

Whether it’s showing up on a regular basis for local chamber networking events and meetings like BNI, or maximizing your free social media potential, there is hardly an excuse for why your friends and associates do not know what you do or sell for a living.

What if you could sell an extra unit or two a month? Or perhaps 3-5 a month in a year’s time?

The mere notion of getting in front of people on a weekly or monthly basis and telling them what you’re looking to do can swing a HUGE hammer.

I know many salespeople who would crush it if they would just wrap their heads around face-to-face networking. The disconnect happens when they find out that networking is an ongoing process and can take a considerable amount of time. People like to refer you when they know you and know you’re going to treat their friends or family well.

Like any relational branding effort, proper networking takes time and consistency.

On the social media side, I run into a people that “don’t understand” or “don’t like the whole social media thing” that has permeated just about every aspect of our lives since 2006. Look, you can say that you hate it all you want. The reality is that it’s here and has just about all of the planet’s attention.

Even hiring decisions are now made with one of the decisive factors being whether or not you have an updated and active LinkedIn profile. Or a questionable pattern of behavior on Facebook or Twitter.

You have a tremendous opportunity to build your personal brand just by using networking and social media.

The gatekeepers that have traditionally had a say as to who gets how much exposure have been made virtually irrelevant.

Your potential market can and will decide if you are deserving of their attention. Ultimately, it’s all about using the spheres of influence that you have at your disposal.

Here’s my challenge to you: This year, think about ways you can get in front of people either face-to-face or online on a weekly basis with a consistent “ask”.

Don’t sell to them. Just say who or what you’re looking for or looking to do.

I bet you will start selling 1-2 more units a month almost immediately just by talking to the people that already like you, both online and off.

Seriously. Try it. Let me know how it works out.

Jim has been a writer, producer, marketer/advertiser, voice over dude, video producer, ad campaigner, and all around content creator since 1997. Sometimes they give him awards for his stuff, but he finds the greatest reward in making money for those who hire him to do so.

I saw a post this morning while going through my Facebook feed. Here’s a small snippet of an otherwise lengthy and angry rant:

• Wife: Had an 8am appointment to drop off car and get loaner.
• Service Guy: We don’t have any loaners. Weather probably has a few folks keeping them.
• Wife: Would have been good to know before I came for the appointment. How long is this going to take?
• Service Guy: Probably 3 days.
• Wife: What do you suggest I do?
• Service Guy: Maybe call Enterprise.

Hmmm. The service guy probably should have offered to call Enterprise for her and offer to reimburse her for the expense. Maybe his manager should have anticipated the weather having such an effect on today’s business and put forth some sort of a plan. Maybe the service guy was simply overwhelmed with other customers in similar situations. Perhaps he reached his human limit of empathy and was just trying to put out fires.

Sure, there are many other ways the situation could have been handled, but the fact remains that this experience is now public and is part of this particular business’ legacy.

Then the pile on begins in the comments section:

“Yep – Our 2nd XXXX we went with XXXX – just awful!!! Treated us like step children – my 3rd one we went back to XXXX – amazing difference – and yes, the limited options don’t help…it’s like they know and they don’t care!!”
As a business in cases like this, you are and will always be wrong. Because…the internet.

We’ve all had bad customer service experiences. Most of us probably grumbled about it and moved on vowing to never do business with them again. Some of us went back and did business with them again anyway. —>Guilty.
Then there are those of us who will climb to the highest mountaintops to scream at the top of our lungs how badly we were treated somewhere.

Yep. They’re the ones you have to watch. But how do you know who they might be?

When I buy stuff online, I look at reviews of the product and I generally sort by 4 stars or better. In some cases, there might be a 1-star review dwarfed by the multitude of 4+ star reviews.

But there it is.

Standing amongst the throng of sunshine and unicorns saying, “you’re just aching to click on me to find out why this didn’t live up to my expectations.” It may just be an anomaly, but I would click on it anyway and I bet you would too.

There’s always someone who just won’t be happy.

As humans, we’re not going to be able to please everyone. It’s impossible. So it’s probably best to treat every customer like they’ll nuke you online if you don’t treat them as best as you possibly can.

Hmph. That’s actually not a bad practice to have anyway. Your business’ online legacy will depend on it.
Jim has been a writer, producer, marketer/advertiser, voice over dude, video producer, ad campaigner, and all around content creator since 1997. Sometimes they give him awards for his stuff, but he finds the greatest reward in making money for those who hire him to do so.

On the second episode of the commute, Regie and I discuss the state of modern songwriting, the Bee Gees and I forget the name of one of Regie’s biggest songs. I once forgot the name of a band I was introducing…at one of Regie’s shows. Hey, I just have one of those funny brains. Gary Vaynerchuk​ and Rich Redmond​ get some love in this episode too.

Follow Regie at www.regiehamm.com

I’ve been experimenting with Periscope and Facebook Live Streaming while I voice my sessions lately. To have the world looking in on you while you work makes for some funny outakes and flubs.

I’m a guy who likes a good phone conversation in the car. So I figured I would make a new webisode series about the conversations I have with friends in my car. Similar to that Seinfeld guy, just without the comedians or the President.

Here’s the debut episode with my pal Mike Mercurio who sells one of the best brands on earth, Porsche. Since we met while working in the car business, our conversations usually revolve around it. This time is no different.

Mike and I talk about interest rates, the joys of informed customers and one solid way to buy a car.

Who knows? You might learn something.

In my 20 years of creating/writing/producing/shooting/voicingvariousadvertising content onvariousmediums for clients invariousindustries, I have come to the conclusion that you can really bake ads of any kind down to two types:

Transactional and relational.

Relational adsare the ads you encounter that nurture some kind of a relationship with a business over a long period of time. Yep. They can also be considered as branding campaigns. These ads don’t have to be all about the business beating its chest with all the things they service or sell. I prefer to write them to be more about the prospective customer and how the business can offer something of value when the time is right. Essentially, these are campaigns are like a dating process. They simply begin some sort of a relationship with prospective, new and even existing customers.

Transactional adsare all about immediacy, call to action and what can you (the business) offer to me (the customer) today, tomorrow, this weekend, etc. It may be $500 off aging inventory at an automotive dealership or 0.9% financing until the end of the month. They’re all about WIIFM.Other than that, there’s hardly any substance. The relationship, if you want to call it that, is shallow.

Most businesses are guilty of transactional ads on both mass mediaandsocial media platforms.

But hey, our budget is minuscule!

I’m not saying that transactional ads are all that bad. If you’re working with a limited budget for a short-term campaign on mass media, a transactional ad is probably a good way to go. But if you’re in for the long game with a relational campaign, then your strategy needs to be one of courting the prospect and getting them familiar with your business. Plus you need to keep in mind that relationships only happen with consistency and time. There’s really no problem with mixing in a transactional message here and there either.

The good news is that even if you have a limited budget and want to create that long-term”dance” with your prospective customers and possible referral partners, you can execute it quite effectively with a Facebook ad campaign.

At Magic Apple Technology, I have been running a Facebook “like” relational campaign since August of 2015. We have gone from only having a little over 100 likes to 524 likes at the time of the writing of this blog.Go ahead and like us here.We have spent less than $100 a month and have had a few leads come in from our efforts. In a business where we are completely B2B with a product that has a somewhat lengthy sales cycle, my strategy has been one of “seed planting”.

As long as I continue to correlate Magic Apple Technology with business phone systems in a long term, relational ad structure, we will get to be a part of more phone system conversations taking place around Middle Tennessee.

Now that we have passed the 500 like milestone, I am going to shift gears and change our strategy to a website drive campaign using one of the many options that Facebook has at my disposal.

Social Media vs. Traditional “Mass” Media.

I always try to write an ad that engages with our audience in some way. While you may think that to be common sense, it’s not very common considering what I see and hear every dayon any given platform.Mass mediahas a “push” model.There’s no interaction from the audience other than changing the channel/station when the ad comes on.Your business can push whatever message it wants out there and roll the dice for results.Social mediaputs almost all of the control into the hands of the public. Using a weak transactional ad within a traditional mass media “push” model on social media is about as effective as whispering to someone during a concert.

Unless you have an absolutely mind-blowing transactional offer, your best bet is to nurture a relational ad campaign for social media platforms.

Social media demands that we really have to put more thought into how to engage and interact with our audience. Even the traditional way of writing a relational ad has to be reconsidered because the social platforms are all about interaction and conversation.

Good and juicy content will generally resonate and the public will decide how much it resonates.

If you’re in business for the long game, treat all of your ads like they’re at a networking mixer or cocktail party with your audience. Greet, engage and nurture. Go for the relationship with a little offer mixed in here and there.

Jim has been a writer, producer, marketer/advertiser, voice over dude, video producer, ad campaigner, and all around content creator since 1997. Sometimes they give him awards for his stuff, but he finds the greatest reward in making money for those who hire him to do so.

I can always tell the companies that truly believe in their medium. They’re the ones who have gone “all in” with their chips on one or two radio stations. You hear their ads just about all the time. Well….
There’s one company in particular that advertises in the Nashville market that is in almost every commercial break on one of the stations I frequent. It’s a company that helps with…um, “men stuff”. Let me know if you know who I’m talking about.

They really believe in repetition and owning their medium which I think is a great strategy. Where they seem to go off course is with the content of their message. It brings awareness to a growing (no pun intended) male problem, but it will absolutely make me not want to contact them about it. I would instead google a place that takes such a problem much more seriously than the aforementioned company does in their ads.

If you own a business that believes in spending money on a robust schedule, make sure your message resonates with your audience in a real way. Simply answering the questions, “who are you?”, “who is your customer?” and “why should they care about you?” are great ways to start writing an ad campaign.

Everyone’s BS meter is as sensitive as ever these days. Just keep it real, especially with an ad that will likely be heard numerous times throughout any given day.

Jim has been a writer, producer, marketer/advertiser, voice over dude, video producer, ad campaigner, and all around content creator since 1997. Sometimes they give him awards for his stuff, but he finds the greatest reward in making money for those who hire him to do so.

Occasionally I’ll hear a radio spot playing in Nashville and think to myself, “I think I can do better”.
So this is me….doing just that.