How to sell in today's marketplace

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, author Daniel Pink notes in his new book To Sell Is Human, 1 out of every 10 Americans works in sales. Is that less than before? Certainly. But have the Internet and online shopping brought the sales function to the precipice of extinction, as so many have predicted? Not quite, Pink writes. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data (replicated by corresponding statistics in other developed countries) vastly understates the amount of "selling" going on when we consider what selling, according to Pink, really entails: "persuading, influencing and convincing others."

This is what he calls "non-sales selling." Most people, Pink explains, are involved in non-sales selling, no matter what their profession. Examples cited by Pink include physicians who sell patients on a remedy, lawyers who sell juries on a verdict, teachers who sell students on the value of paying attention in class, entrepreneurs selling to funders, writers selling to producers and coaches cajoling players to play their best. In fact, it’s no longer completely accurate to see producing and consuming as the two most important economic activities, Pink writes. "Today, much of what we do also seems to involve moving," he explains. "That is, we’re moving other people to part with resources — whether something tangible like cash or intangible like effort or attention — so that we both get what we want."

Why Sales Is So Important

Why are so many people devoting their valuable time to selling when the practice is allegedly in decline? Pink offers three reasons:

1. Entrepreneurship. The past few years (thanks in great part and a bit ironically to the Internet) have seen the rise of small entrepreneurship — small shops or one- or two-person enterprises selling, as Pink writes, "services, creativity and expertise." For these small-business owners and micro-entrepreneurs, there is no dedicated sales force to bring in the customers; they are their own sales forces.

2. Elasticity. Once upon a time, Pink writes, "if you were an accountant, you did accounting." However, intense competition and economic conditions have forced organizations to go "flat" — or at least flatter. As a result, functions are no longer rigidly separated as in the past. Job descriptions are broader and usually involve some kind of selling.

3. Ed-Med. Education and health are among the fastest-growing industries, and as the examples of the teachers and physicians above demonstrate, much of education- and health-related work involves non-sales selling. "Of course," Pink notes with characteristic humor, "teaching and healing aren’t the same as selling electrostatic carpet sweepers. The outcomes are different. A healthy and educated population is a public good, something that is valuable in its own right and from which we all benefit. A new carpet sweeper or gleaming Winnebago, not so much."

The New ABCs

When selling is mostly "moving" people, the old rules of selling no longer apply. After making his case for the predominance of non-sales selling in our lives, Pink outlines the different strategies for 21st-century selling. He begins, in the second section of his book, by showing how the traditional mantra of selling, "Always Be Closing," has been replaced by a new set of ABCs: Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity. Attunement is to be in harmony with those around you — which is why, Pink writes, extraverts are not the best salespeople. They don’t take the time to become attuned. (Introverts aren’t necessarily the best, either, Pink notes.) Buoyancy is knowing how to always be "afloat" in a difficult world of constant rejection, thanks to one’s resilience and optimism. Clarity, in Pink’s approach, refers to the art of problem finding — different from the traditional emphasis on problem solving. Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity are the attributes of the new successful salesperson. In the final section of the book, Pink outlines the three core abilities — knowing how to pitch, how to improvise and how to serve — required to succeed.

Pink, a best-selling author whose books include Drive and A Whole New Mind, has once again expanded his readers’ perspectives on how the world really works, with insight and humor bolstered by solid research.

So what does this mean to marketing and PR?

From what we can tell, marketing and PR becomes even more important when we're not involved in the heavy sales cycle.  Need to persuade? Need to motivate? Need to build credibility? You need PR.

Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity are the attributes of the new successful salesperson.

And if you need Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity you need PR.

PR messages and what your brand stands for

We often work for clients and develop their PR messages based on their brand. Our first question is, what does your brand stand for?

If you tell me about service and quality and customer focus, you haven't answered my question, because a hundred other brands stand for that. If you are what others are, then there's nothing here to own or protect or build upon.

Compared to what? Compared to all those that you compete with for attention, for commerce, for donations and for employees, what do you stand for? Are you one of a kind or even one in a million?

Hyatt, Marriott, Hilton... they don't actually stand for anything, do they? They can't, because they stand for precisely the same thing. Puma vs. Adidas vs. Nike... They all want to stand for winning. How substantial are the differences?

Make a list of the differences and the extremes and start with that. A brand that stands for what all brands stand for stands for nothing much.

One you understand what your brand stands for, you can actually develop your PR messages.

PR Multiplying or Dividing?

There was an interesting story we tweeted about a few days ago originally written by our friends at PR Newswire that suggested there is some disagreement about the skill set PR pros need to succeed in today’s environment, and there are three points of view emerging:

• The traditionalist, who values the ability to write, build relationships, isolate and convey key messages and build publicity strategy above all else.

• The digital enthusiast, who values social media acuity, digital content production and editing and coding skills highly.

• The quant, which focuses on data, analytics and how PR integrates with business processes.

At NettResults we like to think of it as multiplying and dividing.

If you have a list of 1,000 subscribers or 5,000 fans or 10,000 supporters in a social media world, you have a choice to make. You can create stories and options and benefits that naturally spread from this group to their friends, and your core group can multiply, with 5,000 growing to 10,000 and then 100,000.

Or you can put the group through a sales funnel, weed out the free riders and monetize the rest. A 5% conversion rate means you just turned 5,000 interested people into 250 paying customers.

Multiplying scales. Dividing helps you make this quarter's numbers.

So it is with PR.  You want to ever increase your sphere of influence, or put another way, you want to increase the number of journalist you can call up.  At the same time you want to concentrate your time on the 5% (or is it another 80/20 rule?) that don’t just passively receive your news stories, but actively read into them, converse with you and find the story they can report on.

This is why an intellectual rivalry between traditional PR pros and digital enthusiast PR pros is a loose/loose battle.  To be good at PR in today’s rapidly evolving media market, you need to be both a traditionalist and a digital enthusiast.  Gone are the days when having one Millennial digital evangelist in your PR agency’s office was enough – today each of your teams need to be made up digi-traditionalists.

Oh, and they better be able to measure that success. Results are king.

PR pros and journalists - conjoined twins that constantly squabble

Public relations and journalists have always had a love-hate relationship; simultaneously relying on each other for their professional livelihood while at the same time holding untold (and sometimes voiced) resentment.

They are like conjoined twins that constantly squabble.

Both professions are miss-understood by the general public, but well understood by the other.  Today, the facts are that there are becoming less professional journalist and more public relations professionals. And the trend is getting more dramatic.

In their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism Robert McChesney and John Nichols tracked the number of people working in journalism since 1980 and compared it to the numbers for public relations. Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found that the number of journalists has fallen drastically while public relations people have multiplied at an even faster rate. In 1980, there were about 45 PR workers per one hundred thousand population compared with 36 journalists. In 2008, there were 90 PR people per one hundred thousand compared to 25 journalists. That’s a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped, better financed.

Oh, and that was 2008 – in the USA.  One can only imagine how those stats have multiplied in the past 4 years taken at a global level.

The researcher who worked with McChesney and Nichols, R. Jamil Jonna, used census data to track revenues at public relations agencies between 1997 and 2007. He found that revenues went from $3.5 billion to $8.75 billion. Over the same period, paid employees at the agencies went from 38,735 to 50,499, a healthy 30 percent growth in jobs. And those figures include only independent public relations agencies—they don’t include PR people who work for big companies, lobbying outfits, advertising agencies, non-profits, or government.

Traditional journalism, of course, has been headed in the opposite direction. The Newspaper Association of America reported that newspaper advertising revenue dropped from an all-time high of $49 billion in 2000 to $22 billion in 2009. That’s right - more than half. A lot of that loss is due to the recession. But even the most upbeat news executive has to admit that many of those dollars are not coming back soon.

So, do PR folks and journalists even need to play friendly.  My father was a serious journalists having worked in several countries and eventually settling in the UK writing for The Times and The Sunday Times.  I’ve been involved in public relations (both client and agency side) for over 15 years, so maybe my view is bias, but even in the day of citizen journalism and hyper blogging, the scope of a PR pro and a professional journalist rely on the skills, contacts and reach of each other.

Assuming they have to play in the same sand box, how do PR and journalist folks reconcile the difference in number and budgets to hand?

Well, the number game is not so difficult.  With the ever-increasing efficiencies of technology, there is not only the ability to communicate with multiple people at once (it was only 15 years ago when the best way to do this was to print and envelope stuff your press release), but we can use these tools to understand and build stronger relationships.

One of the age-old truisms for a PR pro is to understand the media and the journalist’s contributions before pitching.  Only ten years ago a PR agency would have piles of newspapers and magazines going back at least a year.  Of course there in no reason for this any more.

So we can speak quicker, to more people, with more meaning and at a deeper level then ever before. This goes for PR pros and journalists equally.

What has caused the budget differences?  In other words why the increase in PR?  I think that is relatively simple.

1 – Globalization.  More companies are conducting business outside of their home city, so need to have a PR strategy in place to speak to their potential and existing customers.

2 – The cost to offer PR services has decreased.  Therefore more PR agencies can offer the service (it’s still a relatively low cost business to start) and more companies can afford to use these professionals (or carry the function in-house).  The fact that there are less traditional media outlets doesn’t really matter – the fact that are so many non-traditional media available just increases the requirement of the PR agency.

3 – Those larger companies that were already implementing an integrated marketing program have spent the past 10 years shifting their expenditure within the marketing functions – money coming from the advertising line item and flowing to the PR and social media line items.

4 – More media is now consumed by more people.  So what if there are less newspapers in existence? How many people did actually read multiple newspapers who were not directly involved in the industry? If you were the type of person who read a newspaper in yesteryear, there are still plenty to choose from. And the number of people logging in online to news / views from newspapers, blogs, twitter, facebook etc etc far exceeds newspaper subscription rates in the past. Oh, the fact that so much media is actually free to consumers doesn’t hurt either.

So yes, the PR pro needs the journalist, and for a journalist to act professionally and profitably (they are of course producing and writing more stories, quicker, than ever before) they need the PR pros.

The technology allows for greater communication and sharing of knowledge.

Now all we need to do it get the remaining children to stop squabbling in the name of better media for all. 

The Public Relations Control Center

There are a lot of things going on at a PR agency.  In the days of old (back when we actually put a physical press release in an envelope) there was the creative team and the account management team.  That model has clearly been outdated for some time.  Now, all account members need to have both skills.  Of course they need the skills to work with clients, build strategy, write, interact and influence the media, and show results.  So far this in not rocket science.

Then the economy changed, and there were less people doing more.  Lean was mean and that meant profitability which lead to job security. Suddenly we were dealing with multiple countries, in multiple languages and over different time zones.  Soon technology was pulled to offer our knowledge workers better accessibility than the fixed line servers in our offices as these were superseded by other more efficient cloud solutions.

When it comes to managing PR across multiple teams - for a client or an agency - there really are not many solutions out there.  At NettResults we live and bread cross-boarder PR and were constantly frustrated by the online tools available.  We could find media databases and distribution/monitoring solutions and we could find project management solutions, but there was nothing that the PR industry could call their own.

If you can't find it, build it.  So we did.  We developed the Public Relations Control Center (PRCC) which is used across our organization, as well as with many clients and partner agencies that we work with.  This was recently showcased on Intranets Today.  To read that article - you can link here.  And if you'd like to have a demonstration of our system, please call us today.