Susan Marot

If your business sells directly to consumers then at one time or another I am fairly confident that you have thought about TV advertising. You would be daft not to have at least considered it. However, I am also confident that you probably dismissed the idea as “too expensive to be considered with my marketing budget.”

However, with the introduction last month of local TVm this form of advertising is finally an affordable option as Estuary TV went live to great interest from advertisers. Part funded with government money, with the rest coming from advertising, the cost for TV advertising is about to drop dramatically. So should you get your wallet out?

We all know that prime-time slots between popular programmes command a high price for advertisers. It has recently been reported that the most expensive advertising break on British television this year will cost £200,000 for just 30 seconds during the X Factor final. In America, the Superbowl final commands an eye watering $4m tag to their half time ad breaks.

Why do some companies happily spend up to 7 figure sums on TV advertising? Well the answer is simple – they work. So if TV advertising works for the big boys, then in theory it should work for the little guys? Again yes, but the numbers need to stack up.

Firstly, an SME cannot afford to spend large sums of money on just one form of advertising. In today’s digital age there are many advertising options that can get you closer to your future customers. My advice is to sit down and review the whole of your sales strategy, not just your marketing one.

Consider the following:

• How does your business sell at the moment?
• How well do you know your customers?
• How does the market around you affect your business?
• What do your competitors do?
• What is the real impact of sales and marketing on your business in terms of sales and costs?

This process will help you work out where you need to invest to get the return on investment your business needs.

A great example is the Lincolnshire Kitchen programme starring local TV chef Rachel Green, which features local food producers and is sponsored by the Lincolnshire Coop. Based in Grimsby, ex Simon Cowell producer Julia Thompson from East Coast Pictures has just produced “Lincolnshire Kitchen” for Estuary TV, which aired for the first time on December 6. Supported by really affordable TV advertising, this programme is promoting local goods and services within the local area that I am sure will deliver an excellent return on investment.

So if like the Lincolnshire Coop your sales and marketing strategy indicates TV advertising might work then you need to calculate the potential costs to produce and get your business on air. The cost of TV advertising around this type of programme depends on where your product is placed and how much you want to spend on production. Remember, George Clooney is not cheap.

Production costs

With professionally produced company profile videos starting from as little as £800, the costs of producing quality TV adverts are probably lower than you might think. Cleverly made so they can be reduced in size to several 10 or 30 second adverts, your business could produce a series of adverts for around £1000 plus VAT. However, if you wanted to test the market with something simple and low cost you could be looking at under £500.

TV advertising costs

According to their website, packages of 12 x 10 second spots with ITV in the Yorkshire Belmont region start from £2,856. Local network Estuary TV broadcasts to over 350,000 homes across North Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire with introductory prices starting from as little as £10 for a 30 second slot with a minimum spend of around £300.

Just like the Lincolnshire Co-op, a business could also become a programme sponsor or pay to feature their product prominently. By offering a location or some expertise for free, you or your business could also gain valuable exposure in a really cost effective way.

TV advertising works

Pricewaterhouse-Coopers undertook a 10 year econometric analysis of over 700 brands in 7 markets and found that, on average, a £1m increase in TV investment yields a £4.5m increase in sales, the highest return on investment of any medium. You don’t need to spend £1m, but the numbers speak for themselves.

Estuary TV is the first local TV network in the UK covering the Humber region, but don’t delay considering TV advertising as part of your sales and marketing strategy. Notts TV is coming in 2014, which will cover Nottingham and the surrounding areas.

We are nearly at the end of 2013 so a perfect time to dust off your sales and marketing strategy to see if your business can be a TV superstar. In 2014 it is certainly going to be more affordable than it used to be.

Yet again, this week’s column has been inspired by a comment from one of my customers. We met up to work on a marketing piece, but ended up discussing ways to get one of his clients to pay an outstanding bill.

It’s always a tough conversation to have with a customer, but by being honest and up front you can make it work for both of you. Whoever within the business is responsible for that client should ideally be the one who has the conversation about settling a bad debt. The sales person should know the client best and if they don’t, then they need to quickly understand the reason why the bill is unpaid.

Here are a few questions a sales person — or anyone in a business who sells — could use to get the conversation going.

• “Did you receive our invoice dated X?”
• “Have you any queries on the invoice that’s preventing you from not settling the bill?”
• “Are you happy with the service/product we provided?”

These questions will flush out if there is a real issue that’s stopping them settling, or if they are just trying to stretch payment terms out to the max.

Often there is a simple misunderstanding, which left too long can easily be blown up into a bigger issue. If there is nothing really wrong with the way the product or service was delivered and the invoice is as described in the proposal, then its time to hand back to credit control to take further steps. This is the point when sales people need to step back from the issue.

My theory is that credit control should only be really necessary when a client has money issues that are nothing to do with the seller. Selling is a chain of commerce, which ends in a buyer exchanging their cash for your goods or services. So if the sale hasn’t been completed, then the sales person is still responsible for influencing that client’s decision to buy.

The reason many sales people often get this wrong is they consider the deal done on the order being placed. They think that once the order is in, then it is someone else’s responsibility to deliver the goods, and if the client doesn’t pay then it is credit control’s responsibility to chase for money.

I really only became successful in sales when I worked out that if I could prevent my clients having problems then I would be able to spend more time winning new and repeat business and therefore make more money. These are some of the things I started to do.

• Clearly state what the client was going to get and by when
• Make sure clients understood my payment terms before they placed an order
• Checked they knew what they were doing by offering the opportunity to ask questions about the sale
• When they placed the order I always thank them for doing so and again take the opportunity to mention payment terms

However the most important thing I started doing was to qualify the sales opportunity as early in the sales process as possible. Where possible I started to ask both myself, and my potential customer, if they could afford to buy. If the answer was no, then I would quickly move onto another prospect. If a client can’t afford to place an order then they certainly can’t afford to pay for it, so why encourage them to buy in the first place?

Remember the sales person’s responsibility is to bring money into a company, not orders. Therefore a certain element of their role must be credit control too.