The other day while sitting in our weekly marketing brainstorming session, an old sales lesson (from my days as a door-to-door salesman) came to mind. I used to sell product that, quite simply, sold itself. At the time I found that my job was not so much about convincing the prospect of the product’s superiority but rather it was to convince the prospect to take a few seconds to physically hold the product. Once the prospect started playing with the product “demo,” it was pretty much smooth sailing from there…
You can have the best possible pr and marketing campaign in place, a team of sales all-stars hammering the phones day in, day out, but without a good product, you can only work your sales magic or “sell the sizzle” for so long before you have to answer for the quality of your product or service.
Our sales and marketing team is really fortunate in that we have a very good product to sell (and by no means is this meant to be a pat on our back; rather it is a kudos to the Z2H community members who are posting up quality story pitches). From our perspective, once we direct a journalist or even a web surfer, for example, to check out the various pitches posted by the community, it doesn’t take much selling on our part to convince them that there is really some good content on the site — and that there is a very strong product, overall.
As you can imagine, this makes our job on the sales and marketing front that much easier….
GZ
Leave a Comment