Surprising Sales Lessons from Glengarry Glen Ross (Part 1)
If you know sales, you probably know Alec Baldwin’s iconic sales speech in Glengarry Glen Ross¹. Sprinkled between the profanity, along with the iconic “Put that coffee down. Coffee’s for closers only”, Blake shares his sales philosophy: “Because only one thing counts in this life: get them to sign on the line which is dotted.”
It’s philosophies like Blake’s that tainted the entire sales profession and made buyers think of sales calls like root canals — to be avoided whenever possible. Blake’s obsolete, so can anything he says contribute to honest and effective sales, marketing, or any facet of modern business?
As a matter of fact…..
Look at the right side of Blake’s chalkboard. If there’s a unified theory of sales and marketing, it’s: AIDA: the cognitive journey buyers take on the way to a purchase. Generally attributed to Elias St. Elmo Lewis, the concept dates back 100+ years. Like so many other sales and marketing pioneers of that era, Elmo Lewis worked at NCR (in his case for barely a year) before managing advertising for Burroughs (another computing pioneer).
The first A in AIDA is Attention, or sometimes Awareness. While they’re not the same — subliminal advertising attempts to exert influence without attracting attention — we’ll consider them interchangeable.
Have you heard the meme that technology has shortened human attention span to less than a goldfish’s? It makes intuitive sense, and great headlines. Except there’s no evidence to support it (it also turns out that goldfish don’t have particularly short attention spans). Yet, however long it is, there is ravenous demand for our attention — first to get it, and then to keep it.
Some considered AIDA dead because customer-journeys are no longer a straight line. Yet, that’s exactly why it’s more relevant than ever. AIDA was created in a world of non-linear buying — just as when AIDA was created, before broadcasting.
Look at the ad below. It’s by Claude Hopkins who wrote Scientific Advertising, about which David Ogilvy said: “Nobody should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times. It changed the course of my life.” ³
Hopkins ad for his own services has his two signature features:
- an enticing item to request by mail for result tracking, and
- a clip-out reminder to regain attention later because, since humans were still human in 1900, it was hard to retain enough attention to have readers complete a call-to-action.
As in modern content-marketing, Hopkins’ CTA is an interim step toward the ultimate goal of a sale. His approach is classic. He pre-qualifies readers — only those unfazed by the equivalent of a 7-figure ad budget will send away for his white-paper. He raises the uncomfortable subject of cost, gives the reader the information to justify it, and challenges them to do just that. And then, at the end, he casts asides the scary-big budget qualifier and widens his net.
The $1,000 a week headline is high-class clickbait. It gets attention — but unlike clickbait it also adds context with a ballpark high-end budget. The coupon is a reminder and call to action.
AIDA happens at every level of a purchase — it’s like a sales fractal image: (here’s a vertigo-inducing illustration— click at your own risk). If an interaction leads to some action, it will follow the same cognitive journey whether that interaction is one ad, a campaign, a presentation, and even post-purchase journeys. Phone calls and meetings also. If a conversation ends in Action, it started with Attention.
AIDA isn’t just an important template, but a unifying sales/marketing principal because nowadays online marketing is essentially selling — increasingly automating and subsuming once-human interaction. Going back to Hopkins: “Treat [advertising] as a salesman. Force it to justify itself. Compare it with other salesmen. Figure its cost and result. Accept no excuses which good salesmen do not make.”
AIDA continues post-purchase, as illustrated on the back of a napkin:
Moving from napkin to operational process requires a little added ink: Holes for inevitable leaks, and more handles to illustrate the recycling of leakage into the appropriate layer.
More ubiquitous than the AIDA acronym is its funnel diagram, which is intuitive makes for easily visualized improvement metaphors:
- Increase attention/awareness: widen the top of the funnel
- Increase conversions: widen the body — unattainable perfection would morph the funnel into a cylinder
- Increase retention/loyalty: lengthen or curl the spout (or tack on a second post-purchase funnel)
- Improvement processes: plug holes, and increase the percentage of captured and recycled leakage.
Marketing and sales might operate with separate funnels or share one. When shared, marketing typically “owns” the systems and processes above this line, and sales below it. Omni-channel media and multiple channels blur the separation — always a common point of failure — raising the risk of lead dropout.
With subscriptions, because just recovering customer acquisition costs takes months, the purchase transaction is only the beginning. Retention is critical. The telemetry data from well-instrumented software can drive post-sale communications, with declining usage signals triggering a retention process which — naturally — follows the AIDA progression. Conversely, healthy usage signals can initiate referral incentives or other advocacy/upsell campaigns:
Marketing-automation using lead scoring allows more granularity between Attention and Action — 2–4 stages or more for nurturing, and many more touch points. As an example, in a recent nurturing campaign, we featured 28 emails sent over 90 days, variably, based on persona and activity. Plus up to 10 SDR phone calls at specific intervals over 6 weeks. Every single one of those follows the AIDA model: attract attention, spur interest, create desire, and ideally drives measurable actions for via activity-based lead scoring. For example:
AI-driven conversational messaging can mimic SDRs to deliver richer lead data than traffic data and download forms. Top of funnel engagement and identification greatly improves attribution and enables revenue-focused marketing KPIs: Marketing Impacted Pipeline, Revenue, and Average Deal Size. That in turn solves marketing-sales misalignment, because instead of lead counts, marketing can be graded on revenue — just like sales.
This funnel below adds explanations and terminology for attribution and qualification via sales development reps, automated lead scoring, and salespeople.
Because B2B sales typically engage 5+ individuals, and large Enterprises can comprise many loosely or even unrelated buyers, each contact is assigned a buyer persona, which together form a “Demand Unit” (eg “opportunity” in Salesforce parlance).
Edward Deming said “In God we trust, all others bring data.” Too, Claude Hopkins was data-obsessed —he iterated continually, A/B tested, and kept detailed results. Both would be thrilled with modern marketing-automation.
Chalkboards are gone, but AIDA is going strong — and foundational in 4IR. In Part 2 we look at the other half of the Blake’s blackboard: ABC.
¹ Alec Baldwin played Blake as a favor:
² 4IR: The Fourth Industrial Revolution…we have to call all this stuff something
³ David Ogilvy: Ogilvy on Advertising. Pan Books (London and Sydney). 1983, p. 203 (without “at any level”)
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