Teaching as Selling Ideas

Recently at one of my online seminars a participant asked me the question, “As a High School teacher, how do I sell an idea to my class?” And I thought I would repeat my answer here for the benefit of the teachers.

As a Coach I also am a teacher and I face the same difficulty and I understood her problem. Selling an idea to a class can be difficult, especially if its youths who  are very cynical, but the process is no different to selling a knowledge product or service to a customer.

As I say in my seminars “In todays knowledge age we are all sellers of ideas!” As knowledge workers we work with information to produce and distribute knowledge products and services.

Thomas Friedman says in his book “The World is Flat” that in this knowledge age the competition is global competition between individuals.

Yes, a teacher today is a seller of ideas in competition for the mind of her students against all the other idea sellers out there- the Internet, Facebook, movies, television, peers and the local drug pusher.

So as teachers how do we sell our ideas? We follow the selling process (i) Making the customer feel at ease (ii) Understanding the customer’s needs and problems (iii) Presenting our ideas as solutions to these specific needs and problems (iv) Proving that they are effective solutions (v) Closing the sale

The selling process is a sequence of activities. We do not move on to the next stage before we have adequately covered a step. And if we do prematurely move on we return to the incomplete stage and complete it.

So in stage (i) The teacher is required to make the student feel at ease by gaining his/her confidence. In this first stage we recognize that the student is suspicious of our motives as teachers, anxious and probably intimidated or in some cases distrustful. Before we can proceed to sell any idea we must first gain the students trust. This is done by showing genuine concern for his/her well being and welfare. You must show that you have their best interest at heart.

This calls for dedication and integrity because students are particularly turned off by what they see as double standards or selfish motives. It is often repeated by delinquent students that they joined a gang because the members understood them and cared about them more than their teachers.

Once you have gained their trust you move on to the second stage (ii) Understanding their problems.

I’ll continue with this topic in another episode. Until then - Happy Selling!!

Believe in Your Service

Recently a participant at one of my seminars said to me “Coach I am not doing well in Sales because I am too honest. My Sales Presentation goes well but when it comes to closing the sale I speak the truth and often it results in a lost sale. My peers do not tell the truth and succeed in closing the Sale.”

I could see the anguish and look of hopelessness in her eyes and I was moved by her pain. My immediate response was to use the opportunity to correct an often mistaken belief, that selling is trickery and deception. It is true that some less than honest individuals and companies deceive customers but I do not call them sales persons or sales organizations but crooks. Deception is short lived and cannot sustain customer loyalty.

A true salesperson on the other hand solves a client’s problem with his product or service. All products have strengths and weaknesses. And a master sales person communicates how his product or service’s strengths can solve the customer’s problem. He focuses on the benefits of the service and explains its value and proves it can solve the problem or meet the need. A master sales person, if required, communicates how weaknesses of the product or service can be compensated for with additional service.

In this case my participant had a problem and even though it was in a seminar with others I was determined to solve her problem with my solution. I explained to her that more likely it was either a weakness in her closing skills or a lack of total product knowledge. Either way we would deal with these skills during the course of the seminar. Later during the respective parts of the seminar I paid special attention in helping her build those respective skills. I am glad to report that she left the seminar more knowledgeable and confident in her closing skills.

A successful sales person believes in her product or service. And believes she is truly selling an appropriate solution. If she doesn’t believe the service is a solution its normally because she does not have sufficient product knowledge. I believed in my service and was confident that I could help her overcome her mistaken belief.

If you’re serious about dramatically growing your sales then you must truly believe in and know your product or service and believe that you are truly helping solve the customer’s problem.

Improving sales confidence is one of the areas I deal with in my seminars and workshops. If you would like to dramatically grow your sales then email me at coachbengo@gmail.com or coachbengo@mac.com

Caribbean Business Opportunities

I have just returned from 2 weeks in Guyana and Jamaica not holidaying but doing business. These two islands have a combined polulation of over 3 million, in fact the English speaking Caribbean hosts a population of 6 million with over 2 million tourists a year.

The population is very much part of the world economy with demand for most modern day consumer products. The governments are stable and democratic pursuing capitlism policies. The problem is there are not enough private business investments to lift the economies to developed status.

Both Jamaica and Guyana have been experiencing stagnant economic growth over the past 5 years. One businessman in Jamaica told me that there have not been any real new private investment for the past 15 years.

I believe the solution is the SME sector (small and medium size enterprises (usually family based). There are considerable opportunities for entrepreneurs in this sector who are willing to think out of the box.

Our business Sandee Communications Ltd. offers services in assisting in the setting up and growing such businesses. We are hosting two upcoming seminars Oct 23 rd Trinidad and Nov 9 in Aruba interested parties can contact us at coachbengo@gmail.com

Talk about Cutting through the clutter

Today as the competition for the consumer's attention is getting fiercer by the hour it takes a great deal of creativity to cut through the clutter and get noticed.

Gillette known for its sharp cutting edge did just that in a recent campaign in Singapore. They had to find a way to get the target market (shaving males) to pay attention to their product during the morning commute rush hour.

They did it by "shaving off" a diagonal strip across the front page of the daily newspaper, creating a picture of a Mach 3 followed by a white strip across the front page news. Talk about cutting through the clutter.

The activity attracted lots of coverage in the press and helped the new product exceed its sales target by 20% in the first two weeks of launch. This campaign also picked up a Bronze Effie.

One up for Al Ries and his promotion of publicity as the marketing tool for reaching today's consumer.

Podcasting and Blogging now Marketing Tools

Hi Marketing Associates, I can’t help but be fascinated with the way in which Marketing is developing, hence my last two blogs, “Future of Advertising and Future of Marketing.”

Apparently the new generation (under 30yrs) is going to revolutionize communication.

We are already in the midst of the death of Mass Marketing, not only is the fragmentation of media splintering the target audience but this group does not consume media as the +30yrs olds. Welcome to the new media generation, they are into media experiences and interactivity and most of all peer to peer advice.

But apparently this is not the end, now we find two additional marketing tools, Podcasting and Blogging.

Far from viewing workday blogging as bad thing, IBM sees it as the next big thing for marketing.

Other companies have fired people for blogging, but IBM is encouraging it, said Christopher Barger, Big Blue’s unofficial blogger in chief.

The company now has 15,000 registrants on its internal blog, with more than 2,200 of those employees maintaining external blogs.

Its embrace of digital marketing also extends to podcasting, with the company creating podcasts around cultural tech themes such as the home of the future, the car of the future and the store of the future.

Marketers should look at blogs as a real-time cheat sheet on how to be relevant with customers, said Intelliseek's chief marketing officer, Pete Blackshaw. The name of the game is to be as conversational as possible vs. being static. ... It’s a bonding technique with your consumer.

Podcasting, last year so nascent a technology that few marketers had even heard about it, is this year a topic of avid interest, being tested by marketers as mainstream as Volvo, General Motors Corp. and Warner Bros.

The new medium that combines the audio format of radio with the download and global distributon capabilities of the Internet and iPod/MP3 players was the subject of an Ad:Tech session entitled "Podcasting's Future in the Marketing Mix."

Infant field
Podcast content ranges from slick programs developed by professional radio stations to kitchen table banter recorded by individuals. The use of advertising in podcasts is a field in its infancy, but it's marked by one clear tactic: Avoid being intrusive so as not to upset what is generally a small but very targeted audience.

The Future of Advertising

Just when we thought building a brand could not get more difficult along comes a CEO of a major advertising agency (Roberts: CEO Satchi & Satchi) who says, the advertising business has become a place where "there are no rules, there are no formulae, there is no best practice" and nobody has a clue about how to effectively market products to the masses.

Mr. Roberts suggested that the reality of the new age of marketing all boils down to the word he has used for the title of his new book: "sisomo." he explained that "sisomo" refers to the combination of sight, sound and motion as experienced on digital screens.

"The future belongs to those who can make emotional connections in the market," Mr. Roberts said. "What all of us have to do is to realize that we are in the game now of creating loyalty beyond price, beyond attribute, beyond benefit, beyond product, beyond form, beyond process, beyond technology."

The only truisms are , he said, include a good story well told, emotion, humor and music -- in other words, sisomo. The idea is that "you’ve got to be entertained as well as informed,” he said, “thinking with the heart and feeling with the brain.”

"Next year communications spending [in the marketing industry] will go past a trillion dollars," he said. "We'll spend a trillion bucks on communications in all its forms. Most of that trillion is money down the toilet that's completely wasted because it based on rational, reasoned information that consumers are just letting it go wang! wang! wang! right past them. They don't care.
"The winners in the attraction economy will be those who get to that emotional future first and fast," he said.

Future of Marketing

Hi Marketing Associates this is an interesting article by Jonah Bloom, executive editor of Advertising Age. I think it gives a good insight into where marketing is evolving. As Prahalad the marketing guru said in his recent book, the future is co-creation by consumers. Apparently so is advertising.

There is a wealth of consumers -- particularly those under, say, 25 -- whose primary source of information, entertainment, even community is an open conversation they co-create. The ability to own and control a brand, which many marketers regard as their core job function, has surely joined mass marketing in the how it used to work chapter.

Peer-to-peer power
Yet clearly many are already managing to move beyond the one-dimensional, where-do-we-put-the-ad approach to the blogosphere and word-of-mouth. What they are grasping, and others will be forced to, is the power of peer-to-peer conversations, not only to yield invaluable consumer insight -- as Garfield outlined -- but to communicate messages to and, most importantly, with them.

The open forums for registered users to discuss anything from QuickBooks itself to their business travails are very informative. Intuit uses the posts to learn how to improve its existing products and spot new opportunities. Not only that, but its software developers blog about their work so users can see what’s coming down the pipe and even suggest tweaks.

Open-source business
The creation of these kinds of communities is increasingly common in the sector, partly because they’re culturally familiar and even comfortable with the concept of an open-source business world.

What’s more surprising is the speed with which companies in other sectors are joining the conversation. Smart agencies, too, are changing their output to create more messages or content designed as shareware and strategically seeded to spread virally across peer-to-peer networks.