The News at 5

“All the research shows that if we cut marketing at such times, the impact is damaging and it takes longer to get back to where you were,” Darmstetter told the Dominion Rotary during the January meeting.

“A study was done in the 1980s that showed that the companies that invested in marketing and sales in the down times had a 250 percent better chance than their competitors after things came back.”

His major points to the Rotarians: first, articulate what your line of work is, otherwise, you have no chance for sales success; and, secondly, ultimately everybody sells.

“I asked my wife one day how much she sells and she looked at me like I was crazy and said ‘about 5 percent,‘” Darmstetter said.

“And I said, ‘You’re not trying to get our son to do this and our daughter to do that?’”

Darmstetter said a good seller needs to start with a really good 10-second elevator pitch. During the lunchtime meeting, he offered free barf bags for Rotarians, who might encounter salespeople who talk for 45 minutes, then leave their listener clueless as to what they were selling.

Darmstetter, a Rotarian himself, has traveled the world for the club and has run into folks who can articulate and folks who can’t.

He said he’s had an issue with the latter since childhood.

“My mother would start on a story and 17 minutes later, she didn’t know where she started from,” he said. “Some of my methodology was built out of frustration. The biggest thing we have today is the problem with clarity.”

Business cards, for example. People need to understand in less than three seconds what the owner of the card is selling.

“You need to articulate your message briefly and at a fifth grade reading level,” he said.

“It’s not that we’re not smart enough to understand. It’s that we have so many things in front of us every day.”

In addition, a business needs to have something over and above what‘s expected.

A dramatic difference greater than 70 percent is what counts, he told the Rotarians.

“Do you know how many restaurants just went out of business in the last few weeks around the Huebner Oaks, 1604 area? If you want to stay in business, you have to have something over and above,” he said. “It can’t be salt and pepper.”

If a business has an overt benefit, there is a 300 percent chance of success, according to Darmstetter.

With one of his clients, the Texas Military Institute, happy faces are that overt benefit.

“My high school, not so much the same with the cheerful mugs,” he said. He told the Rotarians businesses need to give more than their competitor, to hand out T-shirts if the competition is handing out pens.

“Make it a giant difference, not just a little bit of difference,” he said.

“Sometimes you might not be able to hand out 1,000 of those things, instead, you hand out 10, but it has to be something that makes people remark because they’re remarkable.”

Words can help sell, hip words like “environment,” he said.

Conversely, other words, such as “execution” can scare people away from a product. Ultimately, the word must be understood.

“A study was done 20 years ago and a study was done today. The No. 1 problem in sales and marketing is the showing up and throwing up,” Darmstetter said. “The not getting your point across.”