The Technology of Advertising

Personal selling and business-to-business advertising; how they differ, where they coincide

In an ideal world, your sales force would be calling on prospects so regularly, they would always “be there” when something starts to brew up in the way of a serious need. They would not permit the prospect ever to forget what your company sells, and why it’s a better buy than anyone else’s and the first brand that should be considered.

Since it’s not an ideal world, sales people tend to devote their 2,000 or so working hours per year to the reasonably hot situations where they can smell a near term sale. That’s OK; that’s how they define their job. They don’t often define it as sifting through, much less calling on, dozens or even hundreds of companies that comprise the served market in order to uncover those in the “maybe” category. Time simply does not permit it.

Advertising performs that particular job very well, and at a far lower cost than would be possible with personal sales calls. An ad campaign or publicity in a given journal will reach every plant manager in all the process and manufacturing industries in the US that employ more than 100 people. Another journal delivers every design engineer, another, every CFO. Circulations range from over 200,000 readers for broad-reach trade journals to about 2,000 readers for very small industries.

Just as your sales force represents a bridge to and from the prospect, so does your marketing communications program. Understanding this will help to create really effective advertising , especially if you keep this picture in mind : Imagine that when your sales person makes a sales call, they merely repeat a few platitudes and chest-thumpers about how wonderful your company is, and flashes an irrelevant photograph. We doubt he’d get a future appointment. Sadly, that’s just what a lot of advertising today does. And the readers respond by simply turning the page.

When developing an ad, we feel it’s best to keep focused on this: What can we tell and show the reader that will offer him a way to do a better job for his company? And how can we entice him into reading that message with a promise or statement that is credible, meaningful and supportable?