There’s a quotable 800-Pound Gorilla in broadcast adver- tising sales, and his name is Dave Gifford.
“When I was a youngster, one of my teachers predicted I would either be a teacher, a preacher, or a salesman,”
Gifford recalls. “I became all three.”
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As a sales and management consultant specializing in teaching commercial broadcast radio companies, man- agers, and salespeople how to make more money, Gifford has sold millions of dollars in broadcast advertising, and is a member of the prestigious Marquis’ Who’s Who in Advertis- ing. He has practiced what he preaches in his 50-plus-year career in broadcasting, which includes stints at some of the most highly revered broadcast properties in the world. He’s a prolific article writer and has been published in several key industry publications. He has a wealth of experience as a salesperson, sales manager, general manager, managing partner, and consultant in 18 countries around the world.
If there’s one thing that Gifford has done excep- tionally well, it has been to create short, memorable, and meaningful quotes. His observations and insights on what succeeds in broadcast advertising sales have inspired thousands of reps in every corner of the globe. He’s a speak- it-like-he-sees-it, snap-you-into-shape, no-holds-barred, doesn’t-care-who-he-pisses-off kind of industry leader, and because of this, some people in the radio business don’t care for him very much.
“I don’t sugarcoat things, and a lot of people don’t like that,” Gifford says matter-of-factly. He refuses to feed people pablum and contends that nobody remembers back-pedaling and weakly-worded arguments. He thor- oughly researches his points, applies his own thoughts developed from half a century of keeping his finger on the pulse of the industry, and he lets ’er rip, critics be damned.
You want to sell more? “Ask and you get; don’t and you won’t.” That’s Giff’s advice: easy to remember, direct, and very quotable. You’re in a sales slump? “There’s only three reasons for a slump: personal problems, extenuating circumstances, or
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too few presentations. . .and there’s not a single sales problem in the world that can’t be cured by more presentations, more presentations, and more presentations!” Giff’s take on closing: “Selling is helping;
and helping is closing.” And on habits: “Winners form habits. . . habits form losers!”
He says the following about sales behaviors: “Attitude dictates behavior.”
Impossible goals? “Salespeople are experts in what cannot be done!”
Don’t like doing call reports? Giff says to do them.
Why? “Unseen is unsold is untold.”
You’re an advertiser that wants results? “What you say times how many times you say it is the only thing that works in advertising today. . .and what you say times how many times you say it is the only thing that works in radio today!”
Wondering if you’re going to make it? “You can succeed because you can’t help yourself. . .or you’ll fail because you didn’t help yourself.”
Here’s a few more of Giff’s wise quotes on success in selling, along with his logic for each of them, in his own words:
1. My father’s advice to me as a teenager: “Don’t believe everything you read in the newspaper. Much of it is non- sense.”
It was a guiding principle that I later converted into an instructional quote: “Argue with the author!”
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: A common theme of quoted individuals or companies—including Gifford—is this kind of contrarian thinking. If you agree with everyone and everything, no one will believe you have an opinion of your own worth quoting.)
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2. “Know what you’re talking about!”
Consequently, in whatever field you’re employed, you need to become a “forever scholar” with a well- honed, built-in BS detector. For example—beside the fact that none of the companies featured in Tom Peters’
1980 best seller In Search of Excellence came close to that standard—why do you think TQM (Total Quality Man- agement) and reengineering, former corporate deities, experienced such a short shelf life? Obviously, there were fundamental flaws in their recipes.
3. “If you lack experience you lack knowledge, and to lack knowledge is to lack judgment.”
Example: What kind of managers are we cur- rently developing for Fortune 500 companies? It is my conviction—despite the staggering informational yield accumulated through advanced technologies—that we are reaching a point where future CEOs may share a bal- ance of experience, knowledge, and judgment deficient of the standard set by their predecessors in decades past.
What is missing? Surprisingly, experience—real, tactile, projectable experiences—plural.
Problem: Young managers today gain most of their experience by working within project teams in a multilay- ered “filtering” progression on floors below the executive levels. The result—as they work their way through the ranks—is that their acquired knowledge has not been expanded through their own personal experience but has come rather from the input of team members, some of whom proffered widely conflicting opinions.
Is it not a plausible possibility that today’s emerging Fortune 500 CEOs—so lacking in field-tested, hands- on experience—have reason to become suspicious of
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recommendations from subordinates overly influenced by the same imprecise decision making process they were a part of? As a result, they end up tortured by indecision and procrastination. And the consequence may very well be that we are finding ourselves at the precipice of developing a generation of CEOs unable to make crucial decisions fast enough to respond to competitors executing less labored decision making methodologies.
Threat: If we are to compete globally, that prospect should evoke concern in boardrooms across America.
4. “SWOT, not!”
SWOT analysis—credited to Albert Humphrey at Stanford University (using data from Fortune 500 compa- nies for a research project in the 1960s and 1970s)—was initially and primarily used as a strategic planning tool to identify key internal and external factors to achieve a specific objective. Today, however, SWOT is more often misused for solving all manner of problems through an analy- sis of a given company’s strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities in that order. And as such this tool has been transformed into one of the most useless problem-solving formulas in the history of business management.
To illustrate: let’s say that your company is not grow- ing, and that you are personally held responsible for its top line. Are you going to solve your revenue problems by addressing your strengths first? Ridiculous! You would be wiser, would you not, to start with the threats; next, check out what additional strengths you need to eliminate those weaknesses; and finally—explore those emerging opportunities that have resulted from the reordering of the SWOT analysis sequence. SWOT not; TWSO instead!
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