We imagine video sales pitches are a new media of today.
However on Monday, May 27th, 1957 Milt Grant made this perfect Business to Business sales pitch for his TV show: “The Milt Grant show” that aired 7 days a week.
The pitch is about selling advertising time on his show to sponsors.
View the video on YouTube (non embeddable)

The B2B pitch

Intro: the privilege for you
“Gentlemen I’m about to offer you the best television buy in the world.“
As if it is a privilege for only those who are watching. He permits you to know about his secret.

Build confidence by his assets:
- Top disk jockey
- 8 years in the business
- Large salary: in order to prove he is a professional and knows how to do business

New concept for you:
The announces the new concept: a TV show and a disk jockey show combined

Pep Talk and pressure:
“We have a winner”
The stimulating pep talk
Immediate success: “in just nine months the number one program”
Thus get in now before it is to late.

The numbers:
Then the numbers on the audience in order to show the reach, coverage and importance.

The concept:
The ingredients of the concept counting on his fingers
- Top records in order to get big audience
- Big name stars
- The live audience sampling for your clients products
It would have been better if he could have used his five fingers.

The references:
Big brand names: Motorola, Pepsi Cola, The Music Box stores.
Make sure you are not lagging behind the retail leaders.

The benefit:
The Music Box Stores have increased their business 25% (thanks to the show? No prove)
The biggest benefit of all: significantly more business.

Recapitulating:
- The concept
- The winner
- The achievements and the increasing reach
Just in order you would not forget the major benefits.
In these times replaying a movie was not at a push of a button on screen as now online.

Closing:
“Gentlemen this is a combination of sales, showmanship, audience and price that makes the Milt Grant show the best television buy in the world.”
The great success cocktail at a fair price is the best buy in the world.
How could he know about the world in those days?

Uniqueness of performance

The greatness of the pitch is also in the facts that:
- No visual effects
- No visual artifacts
- No color
- No cuts – just one shoot
- No camera movement
are being used.

Just Milton Grant and addressing you through the camera.
He is building a relationship and radiating confidence.

Milt Grant earned about $26,000 a year in 1957, what was very well paid then (about $250,000 currently), but probably owed it as he could sell his TV show and himself very well.

The great pitch and unique opportunity

During his pitch he is motivating you to buy into his unique offering:
- That feels as if it is offered specially for you, thus don’t hesitate with your decision as others will grab the opportunity.
- That is a one time opportunity allowing participating in his success story.

You could use this pitch again; just change the words, numbers and references in order to relate to your business and sell.
The video sales pitch hasn’t changed in 50 years!

Drip marketing

Drip marketing: send information by mail or email on a regular basis in order to keep potential customers aware of your progress or successes. The goal is to keep interest and make sure the lead or customer will not forget about your company or offering when he is deciding to buy.

Dripping to search engines

Instead of putting several pages online at one single time, it is more effective to publish one page at a time and wait until Google has visited again to put the next page online.

A new page is considered by Google as interesting. Search engines like websites that change.
Many new pages at one time is overwhelming and you can only produce a certain amount of content.
Thus you can’t feed the search engines anymore: they are like vampires needing blood (content) every time.

Google interprets regular updating as a busy site that is continuously creating interesting content.
This is like a blog or social website where the content grows daily or slowly.
This is why this blog is located under the domain name www.LEADSExplorer.com by www.LEADSExplorer.com/blog

If you publish all in one go, then there is no more content to be published.
And content is the most difficult to generate.

Thus less is more:
- Less content published on one occasion but regularly
- More interesting in the long run.

Making waves in search engine land

It is like making waves:
One big splash is less effective than many smaller waves that keep coming.
For every page found, a search engine needs to analyze the content and allocate keywords in their enormous data bases. These are the waves created by each page and that roll like a wave into the memory of the search engines.
If you have one big amount of content, then there is only one big wave into the system.

The search engines favor collaboration and democracy, one page at a time comes closest to this, whereas multiple pages at one time is more like dictatorship.

Collaboration:
- The internal (inbound) and external (outbound) links: you can provide the internal ones
- Participation by multiple contributors: not feasible

Democracy:
- Increase of content page by page
- Book marking and voting on social websites: your book markers need to cope with the amount of content

Collaboration: Never forget to link pages internally with 3 or 4 links by page in order to show the relations and the close relatedness of the content. Unlinked pages as considered as loose ends, thus with less value for the entire site as these are not related.

Dripping to Google, Yahoo, MSN Live is effective now, until Google & co change their algorithms as with all SEO and SEM tricks.

No cheating – no web spam

As Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is like cheating in order to get higher places on the search page results, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live will fight it forever.
In order to have the website show up higher in search result rankings than it actually would earn a place web spam is used, trying to take short cuts.

As this is a major threat to the existence of Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, they all will try to invent methods to tweak their algorithms to value the website better.

Using SEM is like a rat race, where the website owners can improve temporarily their scores but not over a long time. Google & Co will always catch up.

SEO will remain

On the other hand SEO will have its place as you have to optimize on keywords, meta-tags, have links that work and make it easier for bots to spider bots your website: but that are all basic well-known methodologies.

Value for people

The real value will be in:
- Content
- References and links from other sites (no paid)
- Linking with websites of related content
- Votes on social media

Thus you have to build a site that: 
- Has informative content
- Is interesting for people
- Is useful for people
- Addresses groups of people

If people find your website interesting, they will:
- Blog about your webpage with a link
- Send email to their friends containing your webpage link
- Comment on a social website with link of your webpage
- Bookmark it on StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Propellor, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Mister Wong, Furl and other

Search engines will favor democracy

The search engines will adjust their algorithms and harvest the Internet in order to:
- Mimic as much as possible the interests of a human being
- Retrieve information indicating the interest of people or groups of people

As search engines sell advertising they need to stay popular and convenient in order to stay on top and be selected by the advertisers, thus any cheating method will be erased as soon as possible.

Search Engine Marketing is dead, the Internet surfer will be in charge.
Just like in previous centuries when people bought books and newspapers from their own money. Thus the public decided what was popular.

The vision is a real democracy.

During a recession market research is important as explained in the previous post.
As budgets are tighter or you need to limit your expenses, you will minimize spending on market research.
In order to do so, you can start to look on and use the Internet.

1. Spying your competitors:
Look into their websites and search on the Internet in order to find traces of their new initiatives.
Compare functions and features of your competitors in a spreadsheet.
If they are traded on the stock market, listen to their quarterly earnings conference call or read their quarterly reports.

2. Investigating the market:
Search the Internet in general for conferences or events in order to gather relevant information for free. This is not the same as attending conferences, but it is at a much lower cost and requires less time.
Search for presentations from conferences or events to look into the messages inside.

3. Listen in to webinars
Signup for webinars from consulting companies in need for customers, or even web conferences from your competitors.
You can always try to pose questions which might give you answers as people always tell more than planned.

4. Spy your customers and leads on your website:
Analyze the search queries of your website visitors, in order to know what they are looking for when they arrive on your website. For this purpose additional content related to your products and services will bring more visitors, thus also more search terms used.
Organize this search data by business segment, by type of business, split up customers and leads in order to get an overview and spot a trend. (This requires a service that reveals the company names of your website visitors like LEADSExplorer)

5. Blogging for reactions:
If the company has a blog, new ideas and concepts can be explained and explored, having reactions measured if there are any comments upon your blog posts.
However these new ideas are also available to your competitors, who will be grateful for your initiative and will investigate in the reactions of the public including your customers.

6. Search social media and blogs:
Search social media for statements related to your business and the sub seeding comments.
Search blogs and review the comments made in order to grasp the tendencies and the changes in the market.

7. Generate responses on social media
Use social media, as an individual not related to your company, to:
- Pose questions
- Make interesting or bold statements
- Challenge people
in order see what reactions these generate.
Of course as comments are posted only by a minority of people, this is not always representative for the whole population. Still it can bring forward good indicators of future trends or current mindset.

8. Use RRS feed filtered using Yahoo pipes
There is too much information available on the Internet.
There are too many RSS feeds that can be interesting.
Use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate, mashup and filter out the interesting posts on keywords.
Just like this example of sales and marketing blog aggregation
That should keep you up-to-date at no cost.

9. Do not spend on industry analyst reports
By not buying reports from Forrester Research, IDC, Gartner, Butler group, Ovum, Yankee Group, Aberdeen Group, Celent, Bloor, Datamonitor, Frost & Sullivan, JupiterMedia, Patricia Seybold Group, Saugatuck Technology, Yankee Group, you will save a lot of money.
They have been interpreting the facts, figures and events just like you do and probably as biased.
On one hand they have more overview on the market, but you are in the business and you meet customers expressing their needs.

Still if you can get a copy of a research on the Internet for free then read it.

Even on no budget market research can be done in order not to miss completely on the next new or improved product or solution.
The main expense is of course your priceless time. Less is more?

Less products and solutions

During economic downturn businesses can’t miss any opportunity.
At the same time businesses will have limited resources for developing and marketing products and services. Thus a lesser variety of products or solutions will be offered.
Every one of them needs to be successful. One failing product can mean risk of survival for the company.

Market research importance

Market research is the process of systematic collecting, organizing and analyzing data and information about customers, competitors and the market.
As the future needs to be predicted for new products and solutions, market research will become more important in order to know what your customers want and need. Knowing what the market wants and needs in order to decide what products or solutions to bring to the market.
However less money can be spend on the market research due to fewer resources of money and staff.

Questions for market research

Even during a recession people and companies will buy products and solutions. The main problem is the changes of habits and the changes of decisive factors.
Other benefits will apply for selling.

- What products or solutions will you make next?
- What products or solutions will generate the most revenue, the best profit?
- What products or solutions will be in demand?
- When will these products or solutions be required?
- At what price?
- What are the quantities?
- What will be the selling point or the competitive advantages?
- What are the perceived benefits for the customers: tangible and intangible benefits?

Market research limits risks

Hence market research becomes more important than ever before as trial and error are not feasible anymore.
Launching a new product too early or too late is not possible as ironing out a late launch with a massive advertising campaign is not an option.
Once decided on the products pricing, quantities and timing have to be planned and scheduled according to the information and knowledge of the market research.
Market research is your guidance for the future.

Market research should limit the risks for your company.

Recession to increase Internet use

Will the recession increase the use of the Internet?
Probably as the Internet is:
- Free (except for the monthly subscription)
- Accessible from anywhere in the world
- Searchable: using search engines anyone can find everything
- Has no boundaries: worldwide
- Fast: finding information within minutes instead of weeks
- Unbiased
- Uncontrolled: open competition for anyone
- The world in your office

It is very likely that the use of the Internet as source of information and as reference will gain even more in importance.

The search engines have turned the World Wide Web into a 24 x 7 universal trade show, with all the convenience for the inquiring person as he doesn’t need to spend any money to find information: no travel, no telephone calls, and hardly any idle time.

The Internet and your business

Thus put your knowledge, your business specification, specialties, benefits and information online in order to make sure your business can be found in multiple ways from multiple sources.

The Internet has the advantage for you that the costs involved are much lower than any other communication media that can have a worldwide reach.

Even if you just sell locally, businesses will experience the presence of your business as a part of the trust and importance: the easier your business can be found, the higher your importance.

The Internet will be the best place to withstand the recession.
However the competition will be fierce as everyone will want to get the attention.
Thus stand out from your competitors by publishing content on the Internet.
Consider the Internet as your opportunity.

Let the Internet force be with you. Can you feel the force?

eBook as promotion for your business

eBooks are a great way to bundle your ideas, concepts and business benefits and use it as promotion for your business.
It will help convincing your potential customers and should build trust.

The big problem with eBooks is finding and addressing your audience: just making the audience aware of your eBook is already a difficult, if not impossible hurdle to take.
Additionally you need to create the desire to really read your eBook.

Of course you could advertise for your eBook, but then you are advertising for your promotion material. Whereas the eBook was meant to promote your business in the first place.

Giving away your eBook for free from your website or anywhere online will not generate interest as you are a ‘Nobody’ or your company is unknown.
Hardly anybody will ever read it even the quality of your content is high.
Thus your goal to promote your business through an eBook is getting nowhere.

Bootlegging: distribute your pirated version

Since ever people have liked to cheat or to get something free that others have to pay for.
It’s probably human nature.

If your main goal is to distribute as many copies of your eBook as possible and not the revenue of selling the eBook, then don’t give your eBook away for free:
- Put decent a price tag on your eBook and sell online
- Distribute several pirated pdf files for free

Selling eBook
Sell your eBook online at a market competitive price by:
- From your website using Paypal (no setup costs, no running costs) or similar
- Using specialized websites
- Using eBay or Amazon

Bootleg eBook
At the same you are offering the pirated version of your eBook:
- From another website, not related to you or your company.
- Upload to public websites like Scribd, SlideShare or similar.
- Upload to specialized bootleg websites
- Send out copies to your online friends, asking not to distribute it further.

People are always more interested in getting something for free that they normally would need to pay for. It enhances their interest.
The more the eBook costs in the online shop, the more interest it will get as your potential readers enjoy more the bargain they make. Just make sure your eBook is interesting and has some value.
It is just because many people like to cheat as it is almost their basic nature.

Remember your main goal is to have your eBook distributed to as many readers as possible, not to make money on the eBook.

If the pirated version catches on, it sure will spread faster than you could hope for or imagine.
Of course the title, the content and the presentation needs to be appealing.

When do you start writing your eBook for promoting your business?

There are significant differences between selling to the CEO or COO of a large corporation and the business owner of a small business.

A large corporation:

The decision takers have a budget.
The CEO, COO or CFO doesn’t care about functions and features. What would they know?
They are interested in the increase of the net income as it increases the earnings per share.
They need to please the Board of Directors and the shareholders.

In some cases intangible benefits will be considered too. Like:
- The brand name exposure
- The being ‘Green’ label
- Reducing risks
- Increasing customer loyalty

Midsized company

Budgets exits, but are more flexible compared to large corporations, especially if an opportunity presents.
The CEO and COO are much nearer to the operations, thus they are aware of certain problems their managers encounter in the daily operations.
Still they are mainly interested in more revenue or a higher net income.
Maybe an intangible benefit could be part of the decision, but that is rather unlikely.

Small companies

The founder, owner, President, CEO and even the VP Sales is 1 person.
He is the company.
It is his money he spends on your solution.
That means less money for himself.
Thus he needs to be sure there will be:
- More revenue
or
- More profit
Increase sales is favored over more profit.

Whatever you sell, you need to show more revenue or higher profit in your sales pitch; else you won’t stand a chance.

What’s your sales pitch?

The new product or service launch

1. Product Management has defined a product or solution as they noticed a demand.
2. Engineering, R&D or development has created the product with all their expertise.
3. Production manager has taken the product into production
4. The Sales team has been trained on the functions and features of the product by the Product manager.
5. Marketing has prepared the launch campaign and has spend more money than all the above.
6. The launch event is supported by a press release.
7. Then Sales is expected to sell.
As if it is obvious they will sell the new product or service.
As if sales people just should know how to sell anything.

This is how a launch happens in many cases.

Selling the new product

After the launch, salesmen need to invent how to sell the new product or solution to an existing market or into a new market.
As everyone in Sales has time pressure and limited capacity due to the budgets to be achieved, the salesmen don’t have much time to experiment by trial and error, how to sell the new product or service.

Sales failure

Thus sales people will try once or twice.
And if not successful, the new product gets no longer attention.

Then Development or R&D gets upset as the sales people don’t sell their advanced technological solution.
Product Management gets frustrated as the market isn’t demanding their product.
Marketing has apparently wasted a lot of money.
The Production manager is rescheduling production capacity and halts the purchases of materials.

Then everybody starts pointing at the other for the failure:
- The product was wrongly defined: Product management gets blamed
- The market demand is different: Product management gets blamed
- The marketing launch campaign didn’t reach the target market: Marketing gets blamed
- The product was too late on the market: Production gets blamed
- The sales people just don’t understand, they can’t sell: Sales gets blamed

Sounds familiar to you?

What Sales needs is a translation into the benefits

What Sales should get is training on and insight in, how to sell the new product or service.
The translation from the function and features needs to be made into the tangible and intangible benefits that could convince the decision makers.
Any CEO, COO, CFO, VP Sales and VP Marketing from any company is not interested in functions and features as these are not their problem. That are the problems for management.

They want tangible benefits like:
- More revenue
- Higher operating income
Or in some cases intangible benefits like:
- The exposure the brand name gets
- The being ‘Green’ label
- The smoother organization
- The more happy or satisfied employees

Who will make this translation in order not to get lost in translation?
- Sales people have no time for this.
- Product Management has no experience in selling
- Marketing can only make the market aware of the new product or service.

Who makes the translation into benefits?

If a salesman achieves a first sale more or less by accident, then he and the new product get attention from the other sales people. They will address the right companies and having the exact problems to solve and will generate sales.

In case no instant success is achieved, the product or solution will be forgotten until an accidental sale happens.

So who takes care of this all important translation?
The missing master piece of a new product or service launch?

Who makes the translation from functions and features into business benefits?
Who explains or trains you in how to sell the new product or service?

Or are you left alone with the hope you will just manage to sell it?

The current Alexa ranking: 497,914
When on July 11 it was only ranked 962,000
We know Alexa is inaccurate. Still between 1,000,000 and 500,000 there is a significant difference.

No expenses

- No advertising
- No email campaigns
- No paid links
- No paid bloggers
Not spending any money

Just content

- Content on website: about 70 pages
- Content in the blog: a page a day keeps visitors coming
- Content in comments

Where did we get this traffic?

1) Search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN: 50%
2) Bookmarking on StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Propeller: 12%
3) Comments on other blog posts: 17%
4) Direct hits: 17%
All other sources count for less than 4%

Bookmarking can vary significantly as:
- You can’t control the bookmarking at all
- The number of visitors it attires varies.
Note: Don’t ever bookmark yourself.

The Direct hits are the surprise as this means that:
- People enter www.LEADSExplorer.com directly into their browser.
- People have bookmarked the website in their browser.

Traffic is great.
However traffic isn’t leads.
And still far away from paying customers.

Double post with more or less content: as a test to see which one gets the most traffic