A Categorically Wrong Sales Approach

I receive around 10-15 phone calls, and about 50-60 emails daily from people who do nothing all day but try to leach the banking industry with their goods and wares. They tout, “We work with 100’s of bank to help them __________. ” Great, so nothing you offer is going to be unique to my brand, my message or my approach?

To quote Randy Jackson, “Yeah, that's a ‘no’ from me dawg.”

This isn’t unique to the banking industry. This happens in almost every industry. My daughter is a freshman at state school in Iowa and over the last year we have been inundated with direct mail and emails and none of them stood out from the next. As a marketer, I explored why that was and actually read around 20-30 direct mail pieces from cover-to-cover, hoping to uncover awesomeness, but ultimately discovering disappointment. Change the logo and the colors of the schools and College A could say the same as College B. Turns out there are a handful of companies posing as ad agencies that focus solely on college recruitment. So, what happens when three or twenty-three of these universities all use the same “agency?” A sea of sameness emerges, and nothing differentiates.

The laziness demonstrated by marketers that fall victim to this "join the herd" mentality of thinking is an embarrassment to the marketing industry. The marketer’s job is to find that point of difference that makes them unique to their competitors, and furthermore, provide proof points that support that point of difference in their campaigns and content. Selling out for what 400 other industry related companies do checks a box, but ultimately gives your brand unoriginal thoughts and cookie-cutter marketing. Aren’t you better than that? Don’t you want to be better than that?

That should be a ‘yes’ for you, dawg.

Marketers should aspire for more. Marketers should aspire for fresh thinking. I’d rather have an agency or marketing team member that knows more about marketing strategy, creative, messaging and building engaging cultures for clients and team members than someone who created a cool checking account product once, and then reproduced that same checking account for 400 other banks.

The more time I spend on the client side of the desk, the less enamored I am by a sales approach that touts category experience. This is a fundamental shift from just three years ago when I sat on the agency side of the desk and thought that having category experience in certain areas of focus was not only a key selling point, but my most important selling point. When my calls and inquiries touting this point often went unanswered, I’d ask myself, “Don’t these prospects see we have great experience in the (insert industry) and understand (insert industry audience) better than others?”

Let me back up for a second and say that category experience has its merits. Understanding industries and audiences can increase the learning curve between industry and agency, or marketing director and new team member. It can provide insight and nuances you might not otherwise know. But why would I pay for that if I can get one of 275 of my fellow bankers on a Zoom call right now?

Yes, category experience has value, but it’s no longer an effective approach to winning my business.