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Chapter Thirteen continued...

REVERSING THE WEIGHT OF RESPONSIBILITY

When a radio station sells a company some of its airtime to play the company's commercial, the station's commitment is pretty clear. The commitment by the radio station ends when the commercial runs. The only thing that the station has promised was to run the commercial. If the commercial was not persuasive, no problem. That was the company's ad agency's responsibility. When we brought radio in-house and dramatically raised the rate putting Al's career on the block, there was a massive shift of responsibility.

Our responsibility wasn't to just air the commercials.

Our responsibility was to somehow, someway make Safeway's sponsorship successful. The way that we could make Safeway's sponsorship successful was to have the promotions increase sales. In the process, we wanted to make Al a hero at Safeway.

MAKING THE CLIENT A HERO

Making the client a hero takes a whole different spin on selling. This different spin is an important jump-start element.

Sure, it might seem easier to just train a sales staff in hand-to-hand combat to get new business. I think in the short term that "hammer and tong" sales techniques work. Generally, these techniques create almost an adversarial relationship between the salesperson and the customer. However, after the short term, this type of company would need to Jump-Start itself again just to replace the customers gained-and-lost from the hammer and tong approach.

When a company takes on the philosophy of making the client a hero, then the principles of Jump-Start marketing produce results that can be staggering. New business is built on top of renewing business.

Making a client a hero guarantees that you'll have a friend for another year. A company making all of its clients heroes guarantees that they'll have lots of friends for another year. Now that's something that a company can really build on!

Once we developed this concept, it worked wonders for us in Portland. We would rarely lose a sponsor. We layered new heroes onto "renewing heroes." And sponsorship sales grew in geometric proportions:

I took this concept "Making The Client A Hero" with me when I went to the New Jersey Nets. This concept was a major contributor in our sponsorship growth. New business being built on top of renewing business.

DOING A TERRIFIC JOB MAY NOT BE ENOUGH

Have you heard this before?

"We bust our tail off for our clients and they don't appreciate us."

Or, how about this?

"We did everything we said we would do, but we don't get the renewal. Some company comes along and undercuts our price and they get the business."

When I hear this, I usually ask a question. "Does the decision maker at the client know this?" In some cases, the decision maker would be the purchasing agent. In other cases it might be an executive of the company. In advertising, the decision maker might not even be an employee of the client. It might be the client's advertising agency. In many of the cases, however, the decision maker is not the person working on a day-to-day basis with your people.

The response to whether the decision maker knows what a terrific job the company is doing is usually, "Well, uh...no."

Then I?ll ask another question. "Who would tell the decision maker what a terrific job that you're doing?"

"I assume his people must be telling him."

"His people? What if 'his people' screw up something? Do they take the blame or do they shift the blame to you?"

"Blame us."

Once that sinks in, I'll ask two more questions.

I'll ask, "If the company isn't working with the decision maker on a day-to-day basis, how are they going to make that person a hero?"

Instead of waiting for an answer, I'll ask, "Does the boss of the decision maker know what a terrific decision that the decision maker made?"

It's not enough to just do a terrific job for a client.

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