The Five Ways of Selling

There are five standard ways of selling: 

• Selling on price - the traditional supermarket technique
• Promoting a benefit - the classic method of focussing on results
• Asking an interesting question - opening up the debate while leading the customer to the answer you want
• The introduction of humour - a widespread technique on TV, radio and cinema
• An appeal to emotions - the way we sell cars, clothing, perfumes etc.

Clearly not all of these are relevant to selling into education - although it is interesting that many firms insist on selling on price even though, when looked at in this way, price is hardly an appropriate mechanism for selling into such an esoteric market. (This obsession with price is probably due to a fascinating misunderstanding - so many firms now try and sell on price that teachers and lecturers have come to believe that the price is the key factor - even though the rest of their approach to education is one that concerns professional judgements on quality rather than simplistic decisions on what is the cheapest.  It is not hard to lead people in education back into the world of benefits and quality, since this is much more their natural habitat).

Overall the benefit and question methods of selling are the most obvious in education, although humour and appeals to the emotions have their place as well.

You can read more about each of these topics by clicking on the links below.

Price

Price is one of the five key ways of selling in direct mail (the others being benefits, interesting questions, humour and emotions).

Price is the most widely used of the five ways of selling into the education market - and is often used by default.  Whenever I challenge someone on price they always answers, "Ah yes but with our product we have no choice - everyone buys on price."

I do not believe this to be true.  I believe that the industries selling into education have got into the habit of selling on price, and so everyone sells on price.  Then the teachers and lecturers get the hang of the idea that everyone sells on price and so go around just asking the price.    You only have to have one person say, "Oh no I can get it cheaper at x" to send you spinning back to your campaign, urgently cutting the prices to compete.

Yet price cutting is usually a disaster.   The sums are invariably straight forward enough.

You sell a product for £10 and get £5 profit.   To get £30 profit you must sell 6 items.

You sell a product for £8 and get £3 profit.  To get £30 profit you must sell 10 items.

Which means to get the same profit as before (not more but the same) you must increase sales by 66%.  The question is will a cut in price increase sales by 66%?   The answer is normally no, especially when everyone else is selling on price too.

But the fact is that people working in education are not naturally minded to think about price.   They are professionals who value quality and professionalism.  If you tell them about price, they will think price.  If you tell them about the quality of your product and its educational good they will much more readily consider that.  Not all of them of course - some will still say, "you are more expensive" because people selling into education have trained them to do that for years and years.  But if you direct them into educational good then you will win over new clients.

I will conclude with one simple example from the publisher First and Best  - part of the Hamilton House group.   First and Best was selling books at £14.95 and worried about low sales - noting particularly that there was a rival selling at £12.95.   F&B considered going down to £12.95 or even lower, but finally decided on the opposite approach.   They took a forthcoming title, made the cover thicker, the paper thicker, the margins wider.  They called it a report rather than a book.  And sold it for £49.95.

Sales went down, of course, but profits per sale went up dramatically.   In fact sales were cut in half, but since the profit went up four fold this was a good deal.  The report was no longer seen as a rival to the £12.95 volume, the advertising was changed to reflect this, and everything was set fair because the value of the report was perceived as very high by those who bought it.  Teachers started referring to it, commenting on it, taking it as the definitive volume, in a way they would never have done for a £12.95 volume.

Benefits

Find one of those gurus who pontificates endlessly on how to do marketing and you will come across a long list of things to do - and top of that list will be "sell benefits not features".  Look at the advertising that goes into education and you'll find most of it sells features not benefits.

So, is that what is going on here?  It is probably best to start with this introductory question...  

What is a benefit?

Benefits are interesting because quite often it is possible to push the level of benefit back further and further until will get to the recipient's ultimate desires. Take, for example, the average teacher.  What does he/she want? Mostly the answers are:

So the benefit question is, when marketing into education can you offer one of these benefits?  Let's imagine you are selling a new way of teaching maths.  You can talk about the way it works and about the price - and indeed this is what most advertisements do.   

And indeed all that is ok, but if you lead by suggesting that it allows the teacher to teach long division more quickly, enhancing exam results, then you are likely to get more sales because you can then suggest that teachers who use this system will be recognised as the best maths teacher in the school.  In short you are now talking about benefits.

Think for a moment about classroom chairs.  Always sold on price, the adverts occasionally mention the way the chair is built, in terms of resilience and strength.

But what about the benefit to the teacher.  Benefits such as:

Now you can find a totally new market - at a higher price.

I don't understand why people who want to sell to teachers, lecturers and parents don't want to talk to them about their needs - but they don't.  But when it does happen (as for example when I advertised the 50 week part work "Mr Bean's Amazing A to Z of Everything" on the basis that it would make all 8 year olds who never read anything start reading) it can have sensational results.

Here's an example headline of one of my most successful advertisements into the educational marketing.  Collect a few advertisements into the education sector, and compare their headlines with mine.

How one change in the method of teaching English can raise GCSE grades up one position. 

Ask and answer an interesting question

This technique is very similar to selling by benefit, but it goes in a different direction – and it is the direction that makes it even more successful in raising response rates than selling on benefits.

You ask a question which you think could be interesting to the reader. Then you spend a paragraph or two developing the question and the issues around it. Then you answer the question. 

All the way through this you don’t say anything about your product or company name – you are having as close to a conversation as you can get in direct mail with your potential customer. Then you end up saying, yes we can do it - we can solve the issue raised here.

As an example, consider the headline, “What’s the most cost effective way of raising all your Grade D students to a Grade C?” Assuming you are writing to people who teach students and that they are all concerned about getting grade D students up to grade C, they will be compelled to read it, because it is such an interesting question.  (You'll notice it is a different version of the topic given at the end of the "Benefits" section.)

If you'd like to see this approach analysed in full take a look at the opening advert example on our solo mailings website - here you will see a question-based direct mail advert analysed from start to finish.

But please do note, these interesting questions are not the same as questions that say,

Why not take a look at....

Rhetorical questions don't count.  Nor do questions with utterly obvious answers - such as "would you like your students to get higher grades?"  The answer is so simple, that the question is seen to be too simplistic and the interest of the person reading the advert is lost.

Humour

Humour is widely used in radio, television and particularly cinema advertising but hardly used at all in education marketing.   

When using humour you need to start with gentle humour, you have to be committed to the campaign, and you need to be convinced that you like what you are doing.   If your attitude is, "I'm not sure, but I'll try it just once" you are better off not trying it at all. Humour can bring in negative comments and can annoy people - but when you get it right the level of sales increases dramatically.

A good starting point is to make yourself out to be at one with your audience, and share with them some sort of issue that annoys them. So if you are selling to a teacher you can look at their day-to-day work, find the thing that really annoys them and raise a chuckle through your awareness of that. 

When I started writing letters selling our direct mail service I knew I was only selling to people who already used direct mail – I was rarely going to convert people who didn’t use direct mail. So I wrote letters about my attempts to sell direct mail to non-believers. In the stories I always failed to make a sale, and the laugh was both on me and on the strange attitudes of people who refuse to use direct mail in their advertising. Those who were already using direct mail read my letters and gradually started switching from their existing suppliers over to Hamilton House.

Here's one other piece of information you might find interesting.   I have the job of promoting a course called the Certificate in Educational Administration.   It costs £850 to go on this course for a year, so we are not talking about something trivial. The course is sold both to administrators and their bosses in education - and this means that mostly we sell via the benefit or the question method.

But we also need administrators to feel that the course is run by good people who understand them, their needs, their wants, their position.

So I started to write a spoof diary of a school administrator.  After about 15 entries I asked administrators to tell me what they thought.  The response was overwhelming - so we kept it going.

This spoof diary with its odd storyline and crazy humour draws school administrators into the website which is there to sell the Certificate course.  In one way it distracts from the course, but on the other hand it generates a lot of interest, a lot of goodwill, a lot of correspondence, and it enhances the position of the course.  So popular did it become that a magazine then took on the rights to the story.

A final word - humour can be just jokes - but generally in sales it is far more than that.  Normally we are talking about situations that are related to the targeted audience, in which those whom the target audience find annoying or difficult are made to look a bit silly. That's all there is to it.

Anyone for emotions?

Charities do it quite blatantly as in:

Q: If I sponsor a child, what will I get in return

A: More than you could possibly imagine.

Film makers do it too.  The advert for the movie “Good Night and Good Luck” was primarily made up of a series of individual words in block caps, with the source of the word quote underneath.  As in…

  “Mesmerising”  
New York Observer 

“Compelling”   
Empire

This is a common approach for theatre and cinema adverts.

In a very real sense emotional advertising is just another form of benefit advertising.  The Nivea Hand advert that runs with the headline “HANDS THAT REVEAL YOU. NOT YOUR AGE” makes this plain. 

Thus the emotional content is often tucked inside the benefit – as with the Center Parcs advert under the headline, “And the children thought we came here just for them,” over a picture of a woman’s face, eyes closed.  (Actually the picture also has a couple of hands around her neck, but I am sure they are meant to represent a therapist rather than midnight attacker.)

Pure emotionalism without benefit does exist, of course, as in the headline MEN ARE BACK over a picture of a Peugeot 407 Coupé.   (Make of it what you will, but you probably get to the point to this is a car for real men, rather than hairdressers).

Toyota meanwhile counter with “Today, Tomorrow, Toyota” which goes somewhere quite different.

But where does this take us in terms of educational marketing?

In a real sense this takes up back to the issue of Voice (one of the four fundamental factors in educational marketing)  - the need to address the potential customer in a style that he or she appreciates.   Since virtually no one is experimenting with emotion in advertisements for teachers and lecturers, we don't have much idea how this might work, but we do know that people working in education take themselves seriously and often feel that the outer world does not.

The starting point obviously has to be gaining self-esteem and the praise of others - one's colleagues, parents, those working in other educational venues, the wider world.

I’m only occasionally asked to write something emotional, but the number of occasions in which the instruction is “write us an emotional advert” are rising.   Because I don’t see too many other people around writing emotional adverts for education I’m wandering off in my own direction on this one – maybe someone else has got a different way forward.

When approached on this topic I first offer my clients a set of headlines to see if they really do want to go down this route.   If the answer is no, I don’t want an advert that starts in this way, then we are probably not going to find an emotional advert that will work for them.   Here’s just a handful of stock openers from this weekends magazines…

• Does it matter what anyone thinks of you?
• Do you believe in love at first sight?
• Will the children you teach remember you for ever?
• How would you colleagues feel about you if you told them...

These appeals to feeling good about oneself are extremely powerful, and in fact one of these headlines gave me the highest level of improvement (measured in terms of actual sales per pound spent) in any advertisement I have ever written. 

Using emotions as a way of advertising in education thus have two great advantages.  Firstly it is a method that works. Secondly, virtually no one is using them - which makes the advert stand out.