PART THREE of SEVEN SECRETS OF SALES ACTIVATION

The objective of a Customer Bonding campaign is to make your name the one that people think of first and feel the best about.

When you have not successfully bonded with your customer, any attempt at sales activation is simply an experiment in direct marketing. This can certainly work for awhile if you’re good at it, but it will work less and less well the longer you keep doing it.

The world of marketing is full of people who will tell you exciting success stories about high-impact offers that made them a lot of money quickly. But have you ever noticed that all of those stories are told using past-tense verbs?

They are telling you about something that happened, but is no longer happening now.

Give that some thought.

“Have you ever done anything that worked really well?” is a question I have asked a couple of thousand business owners over the past forty years.

“Oh, yes!” they answer.

“Tell me about it!” I say with bright eyes.

After they explain to me what they did and how awesome it was, I say, “Wow, that sounds great! Are you still doing it?”

When they say “No,” (which they always do,) I wear the expression of a puzzled puppy and ask, “Why not?”

Yes, I am a tiny bit evil. But the simple truth is that I want them to realize their mistake, own it, regret it, and decide – on their own – never to do ask me to temporarily fluff up their sales numbers by resorting to the meth-laced crack cocaine of lies, gimmicks, artificial urgency, ambiguous offers, or misleading messages.

It’s just not the way to build a company.

Few business owners have the patience to win the hearts of the public.

But if you have what it takes to become the company that people think of first and feel the best about when they need what you sell, a new day will dawn for you and your business.

In golden glow of that goodwill, up to 40 percent of the ads in your Customer Bonding campaign can include happy, healthy, sustainable Sales Activation.

These are the ways to do it:

Remarkable Item, Remarkable Story.

A 30-year client, Kesslers Diamonds, recently conducted a contest among their designers with the winning designer honored by name in a radio ad.

RICK: I’m really looking forward to this.

SARAH: Me, too.

RICK: She absolutely nailed it.

MONICA: Are you talking about Jenni Sambolin?

SARAH: Yeah, Jenni and her pendant, “The Music in a Mother’s Heart.”

JENNI: [SFX Door Opening] Hi Rick. Hi Sarah. Hi Monica.

MONICA: Hi Jenni!

SARAH: Hi Jenni!

RICK: Jenni, we’re going to produce your pendant design as a limited-edition collector’s item and put a few of them in all 8 Kesslers stores.

MONICA: Congratulations, Jenni!

JENNI: Wow! This is HUGE!

SARAH: Jenni, we expect “The Music in a Mother’s Heart”to sell out very quickly.

RICK: We’ll also make a few available online.

JENNI: I designed that pendant from the memory of how my Mother made me feel when we would sing together.

MONICA: How often did that happen?

JENNI: Constantly. We would sing along with whatever was playing on the radio, or sometimes we would watch a musical on TV and sing along with that.

SARAH: At just 124 dollars, “The Music in a Mother’s Heart” is going to sell out lightning fast.

RICK: I’m buying...

Two thousand years ago, Confucius was as old to the people of China as Christopher Columbus is to us today. Five hundred and thirty-two years before the wise men followed their star to Bethlehem, Confucius wrote,

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by contemplation, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”

I agree with Confucius, but I believe it is the wisdom gained by bitter experience that runs the deepest in us. The boy who travels from village to village shouting “Wolf! Wolf!” learns things about wolves and villagers that no one else can know.

I was once a wandering wolf-shouter.

There is a red flashing light in my soul that keeps me from writing hard-hitting “sales activation” ads, not because it is foreign to me, but because I am extremely good at it.

When I was a 20-year-old ad salesman, business owners would say to me, “Show me what you can do with a small amount of money, and if it works, we’ll talk about a long-term commitment.”

Being young, confident, and stupid, I wrote sales activation ads that could only be measured with a seismograph, and my career took off like a race car in a gravel parking lot. I’m told the gravel is still flying somewhere between Jupiter and Mars.

I wore my tie draped around my neck like a scarf and I never tied my shoes. People said, “Your shoes are untied.”

I smiled and said, “Yeah. I know.”

That young fool was the diamond-ring Cadillac man. He was like Coca-Cola, baby, he was everywhere. When people called and ask if he delivered, he would say, “You want a crowd? Crowds cost money. How big a crowd do you want?”

For 3 years he was the King of Making Big Things Happen Fast. He was going in circles faster than a NASCAR driver on a Saturday night and making more money than a heart surgeon. But he didn’t like the person he had become.

He was thinking about how much he hated working with anxious, impatient advertisers when it hit him: “Every one of those twitchy little bastards is a short-term results addict and I am their dealer.”

I was writing the advertising equivalent of meth-laced, crack cocaine.

In 1942, Edwin Arlington Robinson wrote,

“The world is not a prison house, but a kind of kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.”

Realizing that I had been trying to spell success with the wrong blocks, I climbed out of the car I had been driving on the fast track to nowhere and saw what T.S. Eliot was trying to say when he wrote,

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.”

Finally standing with my feet on the ground, I looked with fresh eyes at what needed to be done, and knew the place for the first time.

I saw Seven Truths that corresponded with The Seven Secrets of Sales Activation.

These are the Seven Truths.

1. You’ll never see a bigger crowd than the first time you cry “Wolf!”
2. Anything that delivers big results quickly will work less and less well the longer you keep doing it.
3. You cannot build a strong and resilient company on gimmicks and empty promises.
4. Anything that works better and better the longer you keep doing it will deliver disappointing results at first.
5. It takes awhile to make people feel like they really know you.
6. This is why winning the hearts of customers requires months of meaningful courtship.
7. The average business owner does not have the faith and patience to build an attractive brand.
8. (This is particularly true of business owners who trust metrics more than they trust their own...

Leadership = Energy + Direction

Direction = Vision + Courage

Therefore, leaders are people of Energy, Vision, and Courage.

If you are a person of energy, vision, and courage:

(1.) I have noticed that people like you often become surrounded by wanderers who are looking for a leader. It is hard to make money when you are stumbling over puppies who gather at your feet. Resist the temptation to become a thought leader. Oh, I forgot. The new word is influencer. Don’t become one.

(2.) Do not become a zookeeper. When you find yourself among persons of energy, vision, and courage like yourself, do not try to “manage” these untamed creatures. Zookeepers diminish energy, dull vision, and punish courage. You will never meet a wealthy zookeeper.

(3.) When you see pent-up energy, unexplored vision, and fearless courage, become the friend who delivers that person from their captivity. Hire them. Unlock their leg irons. Empower them, encourage them, unleash them.

(4.) Be a leader who gives vision and direction to other leaders and encourage those leaders to do the same. Model correct behavior. Lead by example. Spread the joy.

(5.) Your life is about to become very interesting.

ADDENDUM: Lest you become too anxious as you search for world-changers like yourself, I have asked Albert Bandura to share this word of warning with you:

“Let us not confuse ourselves by failing to recognize that there are two kinds of self-confidence—one a trait of personality and another that comes from knowledge of a subject. It is no particular credit to the educator to help build the first without building the second. The objective of education is not the production of self-confident fools.”

– Albert Bandura, Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, p.65

Do not be attracted by self-confident fools.

Tinsel and glitter stand proudly in the spotlight, but true gold is found surrounded by mud.

SURPRISE! Seventeen years ago the wizard recorded a memo that reminds me of the one he shared today, so I time-traveled back to November 5, 2007 and retrieved it for you. – Indy Beagle

I thought Bill Clinton was a good president for the same reason I thought Ronald Reagan was good; both were excellent Head Cheerleaders. Their politics, personalities and characters were different, but each had a similar ability to keep things from spinning out of control.

Every organization has a Head Cheerleader. Their business card usually says “manager”. The Head Cheerleader’s job is to keep talented hotheads, sycophantic suck-ups, whining excuse-makers, moon-eyed lunatics and plodding paranoids all headed in the same general direction. They have to make everyone feel like everything is going to be all right.

Are there really people who can do this job?

Thrown into the deep water at 26, I was possibly the worst manager ever to assume the position. But over the years, I’ve had a chance to observe the great ones, and I’ve noticed an unusual but recurrent characteristic:

Great managers are rarely excellent at any of the things they manage.

Great coaches are great not because they were superstars, but because they know how to awaken the star that sleeps in each of the players around them.

Excellent don’t show you photos from their own vacation. They ask to see the photos from yours, and it makes them happy to see you had a wonderful time.

Life-changing managers look for things to praise in their people, knowing that it takes seven positive strokes to recover from each negative reprimand.

Think about it. If...