Wizard of Ads Partners

Relentless repetition was once enough to drive your message home. But it isn’t quite that simple anymore. The impact of your message in this over-communicated hour depends largely on the structural basis of your statements.

A statement is either fact-based or values-based.

By Craig Arthur 

It was not a swift painless death deserved of an icon, rather it was a creeping, slow, strangling one.

The Bulletin was first printed in 1880. It was Australia's longest running magazine.

The issue that went on sale yesterday, was the last.

Over the last few years it's readers deserted the magazine... Last September it had 57,039 sales... In the mid-1990's it had highs of more than 100,000 a month.

If you were an advertiser over that same time no doubt you would have paid extra for your advertising space even though each year you were reaching less and less people. Not a good investment. 

Scott Lorson chief executive of ACP Magazines said, "This trend is consistent with that experienced by many leading weekly news and current affairs magazines globally and is somewhat symptomatic of the impact of the internet on this particular genre." 

With the internet biting savagely into readership of newspapers and magazines worldwide, prepare for many more closures in the print industry.

Why Don't Salespeople Prospect Enough?
By Wizard Partner, Steve Clark 

Virtually every business owner or sales manager have I have ever coached or consulted has listed lack of consistent prospecting by their sales organization as one of the most damaging issues facing their company. This pervasive issue has a long term, crippling financial impact on both companies and their sales people.

While few managers would disagree that this is a major problem, most of them have little understanding of why this is a problem or how to solve it.

Why don’t salespeople consistently prospect?

Fear of rejection. Most prospecting behaviors produce a different result than the positive response sales people were hoping or expecting to get? This experience is internalized by the salesperson as some kind of personal failure. This internalization by the sales person makes no sense and only occurs because the sales person has confused external validation by the buyer with personal worth.

Solution: Help your sales person psychologically reframe their expectation of prospecting and instead of being the rejectee teach them to become the rejector.

Lack of organization and planning.

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By Roy H. Williams. Hear Memo "2008: Year of Transition."

In January of 2004 I launched a public presentation: Society’s 40-year Pendulum. Audiences from Stockholm to Sydney to Vancouver to Myrtle Beach will recall my statement, “2003 was the first year in a 6-year transition from the Idealist perspective to the Civic.”

2008 will be the sixth and final year of that transition.

Labels like Baby Boomer and Gen-X and Soccer Mom assume a person’s outlook is determined by when they were born. This is a very foolish assumption.

Look around and you’ll see that Baby Boomers aren’t Boomers anymore. Most have adopted an entirely new outlook and are becoming part of what’s happening now. By the end of 2008 there won’t be a Baby Boomer left in America. The last, reluctant holdout will finally admit that Woodstock is over, Kennedy is dead, and the Idealism of the 60’s was a wistful dream.

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By Wizard of Ads Partner, Michele Miller