Have you ever noticed how the world seems to stop on Sunday at 1pm? Once summer ends and falls begins, my Sunday routine has been breakfast, church and football. I believe this began at birth and has not changed. Nearly everyone I know follows a similar pattern. My wife, who could care less about football, even builds her routine around the event. Completing her preparations for the week at school (she is a teacher) during the games at the other end of the couch where I set up camp. For avid sports fans like myself, its very simple why we love football. Its awesome. But the intriguing part for us sales and marketing folks, is how has it become so pervasive and successful? When I has 5 years old, I knew everything about Joe Montana and very little about Ronald Reagen – why? My contention is that this is because the NFL is a group of marketing geniuses.
Football is a fun and exciting game, but it was not always America’s passion. The NFL has cultivated the product, consistently making refinements and adjustments to make it more enjoyable and user friendly. Simple ideas like maintaining a regular schedule makes the product easy to find and plan around. More complex changes, like the challenge rule, could have impeded progress – but the league and networks have made challenges exciting and entertaining. Its hard to make a Universal Life policy or a Garage BOP exciting, but you can always continually improve and refine your product to make it more easily embraced by your user. Does your client know his business income coverage is ALS? Or that his life policy has an LTC rider? Because those are definetly concepts you can make exciting and use to deepen your relationship.
Not to pick on my wife, but she has no idea how many Super Bowls Tom Brady has won. However, she knows who he is romantically involved with and that he was in a minor car accident last week. This is because the NFL leveraged his early achievements(how many times have you seen this photo?) to turn him into a like-able guy who overcame challenges to reach the pinnacle of success. He was not dating supermodels and actresses prior to winning Super Bowls. Most of us do not have a Tom Brady on our team, but we all have people with significant achievements that we can build into heroic attributes. My CEO has been on the Inc 500 list. I share this with all my prospects to show them that we understand how to help businesses grow. Was your agency featured in Rough Notes? Did your star producer lead your target market in Worker’s Comp sales last year? Whatever the positives are, parlay them into useful stories – like the NFL did by showing us how a late round pick becameSuper Bowl hero. (Disclaimer: I am not a Patriots fan, I am actually a Steelers fan.)
The NFL has used effective sales and marketing to build a multi-billion dollar business. I believe that taking a few concepts from their strategy and applying them to our businesses will help us become more successful and effective.
I have received several inquiries asking for a more specific explanation of what I meant by “The Game Plan to Win” in Monday’s blog entry. This could blog post could be a mile long, but I will try to focus on a few select steps. Following our athletic theme, lets use Peyton Manning as our example of someone who enters each game with a clear plan for success.