5-26-2015
Are you tired of always competing solely on price? Are you frustrated when your customers demand your lowest price and then request some added value to "get on the buy"?
"Added value" is not giving your client something extra for free in order to bring in the buy. Giving your client something extra for free is not selling; it is simply the act of lowering your price to the level the client will tolerate.
Added value is when you take an ordinary item and enhance it to make it more valuable to the customer and more profitable for you to sell.
The prepared salad company Fresh Express makes more profit margin by taking a head of lettuce and making it into a bag of salad. That's value added. People pay more for the convenience and Fresh Express makes more profit margin.
In radio sales, increasing your knowledge is the most effective way to begin adding value because the added value is unique to you. Companies can duplicate products and manufacturing processes, but it is very difficult to duplicate the individual who adds their own unique value to the transaction.
Become an Student in the Psychology of Consumer Behaviour
Business owners want to know how to find new customers. You can add value if you help them understand why people buy what they buy, but even more importantly, why do people buy what they buy when they buy it. Most of the time, it has very little to do with price.
You will become more valuable to your clients when you can explain to them that people enter the marketplace to buy a product or service when the prospect has a triggering event. A triggering event is something that happens in the customer's life, not your client's life. It happens on the customer's timetable, not your client's timetable, and no amount of advertising can speed that up.
Become a Scheduling Expert
Successful advertising depends on learning how to effectively schedule your client's commercials in such a way to ensure the schedule has a balance of both reach and frequency.
There are basically two kinds of advertising scheduling, call-to-action scheduling and branding scheduling.
Call to action scheduling requires more money than most of your clients are willing to spend. Effective call to action advertising requires enough money to blanket the market across all media with the advertiser's message.
Successful branding advertising is not about how much money your client spends. It is more about how long your client spends what they can afford to spend month after month after month after month.
Branding advertising is more in sync with the psychology of consumer behaviour because the goal of branding advertising is to be known before you are needed. That way, when a consumer has a triggering event, they already know that your client can help them.
Become a Scriptwriting Expert
When you become an expert scriptwriter, you will begin to develop the most important value-adding skill in all of advertising because the script is the tangible part of the transaction. It is the script the client can relate to. It is the script that binds you and your client together.
When you successfully position yourself as the creative force behind your customer's branding message, you begin to establish some insurance against your low-priced competitor stealing your account away with a lower price offering.
Chances are the competitor will tell your customer not to worry about it, they will pass the creative responsibility off to their creative department. Your customer will feel like they are losing your professional skills and guidance if they make the switch.
Take full advantage of their attention to their commercial to demonstrate you are adding value that no one else in your market is trained to do.
Even if you have been in your field for 20 years, you may only have one year of real experience but you have 19 years of practice. You can't learn less can you?
Remember, it is never too late to become the person you deserve to be.
Spike Santee is the president and CEO of Spike Santee Dot Com. He spent 15 years with Cumulus, the last seven as a senior vice president. He can be reached at (785) 230-5350 or spike@spikesantee.com
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