My day job has me doing a wide variety of tasks, from desktop publishing to web development to systems and network administration. Occasionally, I get called on by other managers to consult on projects they’re working on and review things from a technical perspective. It was on one of these consulting gigs where I came across the ultimate anti-sales-pitch.
The project itself was a type of community portal focused on local businesses, and had been in operation for a few months. Things were going swimmingly and the site was starting to take off with nearly a thousand local businesses registered. This got the attention of two local SEO (Search Engine Optimization) firms who desperately needed work (or at least, that’s how they ended up coming across). The salesman from the first firm was offensive to the point where the project manager simply refused to repeat the conversation they had and will only reference them by referring to them with a nickname. The second one, though, I got to hear the story of.
Mid-afternoon, the project manager gets a phone call from (as we’ll call her) Diane. Diane gets straight to the point. “I don’t want to offend you,” she starts, already oozing marketing slime through the phone, “but I don’t like your site. It’s going straight to search engine hell.”
Here’s a Pro Tip for those of you in the marketing/sales industry: If you have to start off by saying “I don’t mean to offend”, you’re going to, and the potential customer won’t appreciate it.
“See, when I search for <name of our region>, you’re nowhere near the first page on Google. With my help, you can be for local and global searches! I don’t know who made the site, but they screwed up, and we want the contract!”
Another Pro Tip: Research, research, research! The name of the developer is plastered all over the site, and was featured prominently during a news spot on the local news a few days prior, so if they had bothered to even look at the site they would have know who to call out. Secondly, had they bothered to look a little further in to the purpose of the site, they would have seen that global positioning of the site on search engines wouldn’t be a priority anyways, as the primary means of driving people to the site is via local advertising or by searching for keywords/the name of the business and the region, which already results in first-page rankings for the businesses in the directory.
The rest of the conversation went downhill from there. She attacked branding, overall design, and basically made an ass of herself. When the project manager finally got her off the phone and came to ask me if there was any merit to the criticisms. I did a quick review of the site, did some sample searches, and showed that the site lived up to all of the expectations and that the designers followed proper SEO techniques when building the site.
The SEO lady eventually sent a few followup emails which, thanks to her ‘marketing techniques’ were moved immediately to the trash.
So, for those of you who are tempted to start out a sales call by pointing out each-and-every flaw in the potential customers product: Stop. Don’t “don’t mean to offend”. And research. Then, if you are nice enough and craft your pitch well enough, you just may be able to skip the “???” step and jump right to “Profit!”.
