Understanding Body Language

Body language is a mixture of movement, posture and tone of voice. Research indicates that in a face-to-face conversation, more than 70 percent of our communication is nonverbal.

Our body language reveals our deepest feelings and hidden thoughts to total strangers. In addition, nonverbal communication has a much greater impact and reliability than the spoken word. Therefore, if your sales prospect's words are incongruent with his or her body language gestures, you would be wise to rely on the body language as a more accurate reflection of their true feelings.

Be mindful of your own body language gestures and remember to keep them positive by unfolding your arms, uncrossing your legs and smiling frequently.

Create harmony by "matching and mirroring" your prospect's body language gestures. Matching and mirroring is an unconscious body language mimicry by which one person tells another they are in agreement.

The next time you are at a social event, notice how many people are subconsciously matching one another. Likewise, when people disagree, they subconsciously mismatch their body language gestures.

An effective way to begin matching your prospect is to subtly nod your head in agreement whenever your prospect nods his or her head, or cross your legs when they cross their legs, etc.

By understanding the meaning behind your prospect's body language, you will minimize perceived sales pressure and know when it's appropriate to close the sale.

7 Paradoxical Sales Principles

Recognizing and acting on these 7 paradoxical sales principles is critical to your long-term success.

1. To win more sales, stop selling.
When people feel like they're being sold, they react negatively and put up barriers. Focus on helping your prospects achieve their business, professional and personal objectives -- not making a sale.

2. To speed up your sales cycle, slow down.
The more quickly you push to a close, the higher resistance you encounter. Go one step at a time. When your prospects know you want to help them make the right decision, not a rash one, the process moves faster.

3. To make decisions easier, offer fewer options.
When you increase the complexity of the decision, you decrease the likelihood of winning the sale. To help your prospects move forward, give them less to choose from. Keep it simple -- always.

4. To be more natural, prepare like crazy.
Today's customers suffer no fools. If you're not ready with the right message, questions or presentation, you'll stumble or be stilted in your meeting. When you do prepare, you can be your best self.

5. To get bigger contracts, start smaller.
When you pursue the "whole shebang," decisions are more complex and costly, making it much tougher to get approval. Reduce the risk by starting small and proving your capabilities. Then, it's easy to grow.

6. To speed up your learning curve, fail fast.
It's inevitable that you'll make mistakes. So don't wait till you've figured out the "perfect pitch" before moving forward. In sales, there is no failure -- just lots of opportunities for experimentation, learning and growth.

7. To differentiate your offering, become the differentiator.
That's the biggest reality in today's market. Your products, services or solution are secondary to your knowledge, expertise and the difference you make for your customers. Invest time in yourself.

Sales Tip: Rushing to Judgment

As a salesperson, you should work to focus all of your attention on your customer and his/her needs. It's all too easy to swoop in to present a solution instead of listening to your customer's complaints and the specifics of his/her situation.

In this rush to cut to the chase, you're in danger of coming across as arrogant, and your customers end up feeling their input is unimportant and unappreciated. This understandable mistake happens for two reasons:

* You want to come off as the "expert" or "hero," showing off all your knowledge by providing the solution before your customer even has a chance to finish her thought.
* You're in a hurry and don't have the time and energy to devote to your customer.

For example, let's say you're about to leave for a week's vacation when a prospective customer calls. He starts to go into a long story about his business and all the problems he's encountered in the last five years. You realize that you have heard his story -- or at least a similar one -- many times before, so you interrupt him to give your answer to his problems. You try to end the call as soon as possible so you can leave for vacation.

In this case, even though you might have given your prospect a good solution, chances are he won't feel satisfied with the conversation. He didn't have an opportunity to tell you about his business, so he feels shortchanged.

What should you have done? Next time, embrace any information your prospect gives you, whether you believe it's valuable or not. If you truly didn't have time to talk at length with this prospect, you should have requested the opportunity to call him back after you returned from vacation. Otherwise, you should have put down your briefcase, closed your office door, and listened to him for as long as he needed.

Remember, even if you hear the story all the time, it is unique and personal for each customer. Instead of interrupting your customer with your standard solution, let him have the floor and explain his problem. Only then can you proceed with the process of finding a solution for whatever ails him.

Sales Tip: Who Gets Past Gatekeepers?

A recent survey asked gatekeepers how they determined who gets through to a decision-maker. The top answer was, "People I like."

Treating gatekeepers with respect is in the salesperson's best interest. This person is very close to the decision-maker, and has a lot of valuable information.

So work with him or her to establish a friendly rapport. Use a conversational, yet confident tone of voice. If you were standing in the lobby of his or her office, the gatekeeper would first size you up based on your appearance and the way you sound.

Early in the conversation, ask for the gatekeeper's name. Use it, put it in your notes and greet the screener by name on your next call. You will seem much less like a stranger on subsequent calls.

You won't believe how big TV still is!

The study, conducted with ad targeting firm Simulmedia, contains plenty of insights, but among the most striking is the size of either industry. Nielsen rarely pulls back the veil on exactly how big the TV and video worlds are (they do mint the currency in the former, after all), but here it is in black and white: There are 283 million television viewers monthly (the population of the United States is 313 million), each watching an average of 146 hours of TV. Compare that with 155 million online video viewers averaging just shy of six hours monthly on mobile and almost six and a half hours over the Web. So while TV’s audience is still almost twice that of digital video, the amount of money in digital isn’t even 5 percent of the mammoth $74 billion chunk of change in television. What’s going to bring about growth in the former, said Amit Seth, Nielsen’s evp, global media products, is equivalency.

ABC already offers digital options for audience deficiency units (ADUs, or makegoods), and Fox said last year it would provideHulu inventory for the same purpose (neither network was able to provide comment by press time), but Seth said he foresees greater porousness between digital video and TV. The company isn’t just hoping for that—Nielsen’s DPR product, which measures non-mobile streaming video, is set to finally launch in the spring after a delay. Nielsen also will be continuing to refine a tool that other third-party data miners are already selling: purchaser data that gives a measurable ROI to advertisers. “We have access to 90-plus percent of credit card transactions, anonymized through a third-party data provider,” said Seth. “Do you shop home improvement? If so, do you shop at Home Depot or at Lowe’s?” Nielsen now knows.

Content producers likeNBCUniversal have pioneered similar initiatives, but it’s impossible to overstate the importance of third-party measurement as the analytics world gets more complicated. Lest this sound like too much progress too quickly, Dave Morgan, founder and CEO of Simulmedia, says not to worry. Business as usual will probably continue apace for a while. “The silos aren’t coming down anytime soon,” said Morgan. “There’s a Silicon Valley expectation that there will be a desilo-ization of TV imminently, and nobody who took part in these dinners and discussions, not even the most ardent online people, thinks that’s the case.”

Morgan and Seth agree that the industry’s best hope is in more granular data. “The fuzzy intermedia metrics can lead to nothing but more debates at the ARF and the 4A’s and the NAB and forever,” said Morgan. “But what you can’t argue with is what happened after they saw the ad. What happened at the cash register?”

4 Warning Signs That Your Sponsorship Proposals Suck

I've lamented on a few occasions about the bad news I often have to give to sponsorship seekers. A lot of it has to do with the quality of the sponsorship proposals they're creating, so I've decided to do this little self-diagnostic to see if your sponsorship proposals suck.

There are a hundred ways to get it wrong, but these are the big ones, and if you stay away from these warning signs, you'll do a lot better.

Search-and-replace

Do not EVER re-use a proposal for another sponsor simply by searching for one sponsor name and replacing it with another. It's a dead giveaway to sponsors that you a) don't know what you're doing; and b) don't give a crap about what they need to achieve.

Don't even do it for potential sponsors in the same category. Virgin Atlantic and British Airways don't need the same thing. Neither do Bupa and Medibank, Brother and Canon, or Kellogg's and Uncle Tobys. Their jobs as marketers are to differentiate their brands and encourage preference and loyalty in their target markets. They don't do that by marketing themselves in the exact same way as their competitors, so at the very least, sending the same proposal is counterproductive, and you could well be burning a bridge. Plus, more often than not, you'll miss one.

More than 25% is about you

If you're saying to yourself, "Of course it's about my event. What else would it be about?", you need to pay close attention here. You should only include enough background information about whatever it is that you're selling so that the proposal has context -- usually no more than a couple of pages. After that, the entire proposal needs to be about the sponsor, including...

• Who your target markets are, why they care about what you're doing, and how the sponsor can add value to that experience.
• How the sponsor can achieve their specific objectives -- research, research, research -- with this sponsorship. That's right, you need to include creative ideas for leverage.
• Fully customized benefits list and the investment required.

You use the term "general audience" or "broad audience" 

Sponsors don't want to reach a huge audience of people who don't really care about what you do, but might cast their eyes on a few logos. They want to connect with an audience that is passionate and involved, as those are the people who will be receptive to win-win-win leverage activities and achieve big results for the sponsors.

"It's just a teaser" 

I see a lot of uncustomized, often search-and-replace, proposals and letters. Often, the lack of effort put into these unsophisticated offers is dismissed with "It's just a teaser." Here's a bit of insight for you: Sponsors don't respond to teasing. They're not going to request a meeting. They probably won't even respond to your calls. They surely won't say "yes."

The mindset behind this is somewhere in the vicinity of wearing sweatpants to your first job interview, with the intent to wear a suit for the second interview. As with job interviews, you get one chance. You need to do your homework and put in your best effort the first time.

Tracking Data Boosts CPMs on Ad Exchanges

Online ad exchanges command higher rates when they have access to data about other Web sites that consumers have visited, per a Digital Advertising Alliance study.

"The results of our econometric analysis corroborate and extend an emerging body of empirical work documenting the value of information sharing in online advertising," authors Howard Beales of George Washington University and Jeff Eisenach of Navigant Economics write in a study commissioned by the trade group Digital Advertising Alliance. "Our estimates indicate that advertisers place significantly greater value on users for whom more information is available."

For the study, the researchers examined 3 million transactions conducted by two companies that run ad exchanges. One of the companies had cookie data for 89% of the impressions, with an average cookie lifespan of seven weeks. The other company had cookie data for 96% of ads served, but the average life of the cookie was just eight days. The study took place during a one-week period in August.

Overall, ad exchanges were able to command between three times and seven times higher cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) rates when serving ads to users with tracking cookies than without them, according to the study. Companies paid the highest CPMs to reach people with older cookies, the researchers reported.

The average CPM for all ads examined -- those served with and without cookies -- was 29 cents for the company with the shorter-lived cookies, and 47 cents for the company with cookies an average of seven weeks old.

The study only examined rates for ads sold by exchanges; it didn't look at how those rates compare to ones for ads sold directly by publishers.

Lou Mastria, managing director of the DAA, says the organization commissioned the study as part of an effort to quantify the impact of consumer data on the online ad industry. He says it shows that publishers can command more ad revenue when they have data about the types of products consumers want to purchase.

"Understanding whether someone's in market for a car, or in market for a vacation -- those are the things that are going to be important toward monetizing content," he says.

(Source: Online Media Daily, 02/10/14)