Remember the classic Saturday Night Live sketch?
Is it a dessert topping? Is it a floor wax? It’s both!
This week, we’ll look at two seemingly very different sides of the marketing and persuasion coin.
One side features traditional sales and marketing techniques; the other shows a more educational, audience-building angle — sometimes called a “soft” marketing approach.
They seem like opposites, but in fact, each side benefits and supports the other. Smart marketers will use both … hopefully with a little more grace than a combination dessert topping/floor wax.
Asking for what you want
One of the cornerstones of traditional sales and marketing is making the “ask” — sometimes known as the call to action.
On Monday, Pamela Wilson shared an excerpt with us from her new book, all about the nuts and bolts of crafting effective calls to action. This is a technique you can pick up fairly quickly, and it will make a major difference in how your audience responds to your offers.
(Also, I was lucky enough to get an advance review copy of Pamela’s new book, and it’s insanely useful. You can pre-order now at Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and independent bookstores.)
On the audio side of the house, Sean Jackson and Jessica Frick of Members Only talk with Chris Voss, best-selling author of Never Split the Difference, about a more advanced way to ask for what you need — the art of negotiation.
Voss was an FBI hostage negotiator … and has some counterintuitive