Beggars Banquet Marketing

We’re going to travel back in time today … all the way back to 1968 and the release of the album “Beggars Banquet” by The Rolling Stones.

Why? To understand a little bit more about sales and marketing. You see, when something like a song becomes a classic, there’s a very good reason why. It’s because it strikes a chord with us. It tells a story. Imparts great knowledge.

It contains ideas that fit neatly into the collective consciousness.

Finding Success in Success

The formula goes like this: It takes a certain mindset to be successful (and The Rolling Stones have been very successful). And so, anything that comes out of a successful person’s mind has the great potential to create more success.

Knowing that, I’m going to take the first four lines of the song “Sympathy for the Devil”, and apply them to sales and marketing …

1. Please allow me to introduce myself

Okay, pretty straight forward. If you don’t network, if you don’t get out there and knock on doors, you can’t make any sales. Sitting and waiting for customers to magically appear just doesn’t work. You have to go out, introduce yourself, and create the opportunities for others to buy from you.

2. I’m a man of wealth and taste

And when you’re introducing yourself, you want to put your best foot forward. The old “pity pitch” never built a million dollar business. People want to be associated with success and they want to do business with other successful people … sort of like “birds of a feather, flock together”.

3. I’ve been around for a long, long year

When you’re marketing yourself, your products, your services; you need to have answers. Potential customers will have questions. It’s your experience, your preparation, and your creativity that’s going to get you through smoothly. Trying to make a pitch and getting bombarded with questions you can’t answer can quickly turn into a sweating session that makes you look like you just got water-boarded.

4. Stole many a man’s soul and faith

Knowing your competition and what they have to offer is essential. Because, you’re basically competing with them and everything your customer knows about them. You’re competing against another brand, another deal, pricing, extras … and your job is to find the sticking points that bring the customer closer to you, and the deal-breakers that move them further away from your competition.

So there you have it. You can find successful strategies in many instances of success. The more examples you find in the world, the more overlapping patterns you’ll find that just always seem to hold true.

And just for the record. No, I’ve never been to St. Petersberg.