An Ode to Dog Whistle Sales and Marketing Content

For everything that is innovative or leading edge, there exists that which serves a purpose or is economical. Those products and services need sales and marketing love too.

I brought fifteen years of B2B sales experience into my role as president of Lion’s Way, our content services agency. During my time as a sales professional, I learned that adequate, cheap, or easy to install could be just as special as the most groundbreaking and disruptive snowflake. Unfortunately, I was never allowed to say cheap, easy, or disruptive out loud in front of a prospect. Ever.

The trick was always finding a message acceptable to management—one that matched such a product or service to the prospect who recognized its value.

Unfortunately, I was never allowed to say cheap, easy, or disruptive out loud in front of a prospect. Ever.

If it was easy, they wouldn’t pay you so much.

I sold everything. Dial tone, stainless steel ferrules, radio spots, and interactive voice response systems. Regardless of the widget in question, I recognized early on that they paid you more to sell the profitable “bread & butter” stuff. I also learned quickly that trying to sell the wrong thing to the wrong prospect was a short ride to the unemployment line.

If you think about it, the challenge is daunting. Find prospects who want your non-sexy, not-quite-a-commodity doohickey and get them to buy it without explicitly stating the obvious—It’s a nickel cheaper than the competition or will replace the receptionist.

Sales is Now Marketing

Getting the message out hasn’t gotten any easier, even with all the keen new technologies available. Sales used to have the tough job of finding prospects receptive to the product or service value proposition, but now that task has largely been dropped in the laps of the marketing team.

Previously, the sales crew was responsible for finding and qualifying prospects, then relying on the support of technical resources to convert them. Now, in many cases, the cannon fodder sales people that spent their time looking under rocks have been replaced by marketing campaigns and the technical resource has been re-labelled a sales engineer or director of business development.

Directors and engineers are expensive resources there to convert prospects, not dial for dollars. That means the folks in marketing are on the hook for making sure the right message is being heard where it needs to be. Qualified leads only result from the marketing content conveying the right message to the target audience.

“We don’t want to lead with price.”

There are plenty of valuable products or services that aren’t innovative, end-to-end, or enterprise-level solutions. Chances are, they’ve been around awhile, have a fair amount of name recognition, and may even have a reputation—good or bad. So, finding the right message is no small feat.

Assuming there exists a usable, properly curated database, the marketing team has the rather formidable task of getting the word out without actually saying things like:

• It’s cheap!
• Buy this and you can fire Bob.
• Force technophobes to use computers.
• Never speak with a human again.
• Work from home in your tacky bathrobe!

Basically, the job is to make something interesting even if it’s, you know, not. This is where the content creator can shine. For example, you deliver an asset that tells the target audience how to automate mundane tasks and, if you’re lucky, the reader sees it and says to herself, “Hey, if we buy this, I can fire Bob. Sold!”

What About Bob?

Set aside being complicit in ruining Bob’s life for a moment and consider how often marketing content says one thing while telling us something completely different. I mean, when doesn’t that happen?

Direct TV, like Burger King in the 70s, offers entertainment “your way” which means, “Cable is expensive and it sucks, so try this instead.” If I’m being honest, had Direct TV just run a commercial that simply said, “Cable sucks.” I’d have already stapled a dish to the side of my house, HOA be damned.

Southwest Airlines touts “transfarency” which is just a fancy way of saying, “It’s cheaper flying in a cattle car and we can prove it!” Again, with full disclosure, I’d ride a pestilent burrow bareback to Santa Fe before I’d board one of their planes.

I’d cite more examples, but I’m not going to come up with anything funnier than riding a smelly donkey from Oregon to New Mexico. Point is, as much as we all like writing stories and drawing pictures about the most special of snowflakes, our profession offers us a lot of really challenging opportunities to find a new way to deliver an old message -- and that’s pretty exciting.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to writing some copy for a product that’s going to make Bob very unhappy.