Getting Marketing Lessons from All Corners: Only A Game
One of the benefits of living in a teeny state with many colleges is that there are often a lot of interesting people speaking or talented artists singing at places just a drive down the road - all without worries about traffic, parking, ticket price (usually free) or available seats (usually plenty). Aaah.
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of listening to Bill Littlefield, the host of NPR’s Only A Game, speak to an audience at Middlebury College. He read from his newly released book (also, Only A Game) and answered a lot of good questions. Needless to say, one of the things I have always loved about his show is that it covers so many random sports (he mentioned pumpkin carving and belt sander races as two examples) and that he’s got so many great contributing reporter/writers.
After buying his book, I walked up to Littlefield to get his signature, and asked him if the show’s balance of contributors had changed since its inception in the early 1990s, or if he’d ever had any trouble making sure to have a good representation of male and female reporters covering that wide variety of sports. He said that right from the very beginning he’d had a lot of women involved because he had hunted, first, for good writers - and then asked them to write about sports. It just so happened that a lot of the first great writers he came across were women.
Now, I think there is a “selling to women” lesson here that is worth repeating, and that is: a gender balanced sales force is refreshing and realistic. It reflects the average consumer’s daily life. Men aren’t the only ones who can report on sports or even on “men’s” sports. Female salespeople are very good at selling “women’s” products like cosmetics, but they can also find great success selling traditionally “male products” like consumer electronics or financial services. In both cases (and vice versa for those cases), the listener or consumer is likely very appreciative of the differing voices and approaches available.
Like Bill Littlefield and the Only A Game contributors, if you start out with people who are amazing at their sales or marketing jobs, they can quickly learn to sell anything to anyone (the Brooklyn Bridge is currently a deal, I hear…)
October 19th, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Andrea
Great article. So true. I hope sports departments everywhere realize that women are very capable beings and can do numerous things equally or better than their male counterparts.
Women make excellent salepeople of cars, consumer elctronics, financial services, healthcare, home improvement materials, tools and much more.