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The Pawnshop Chronicles: Street Wisdom for the Business World by Jack E Rossin Chapter 9 Effective Messaging Starts with Trust A murder happened in our little town of Chester, PA. By our standards, it seemed like the crime of the century. I was a witness. It was a case of a husband who had gone crazy and viciously killed his wife. I was called to testify. It was the trial the press covered every day in every detail. I had a ringside seat. It was 1964. A blond, spacey woman started coming into the pawnshop. She came in frequently and hocked lots of stuff. She often had two or three of her young kids with her. She pawned so many things—typewriters, toasters, radios, jewelry, clothing, a rifle, cameras, and more—that we had an area set aside just for her belongings. Her husband made lots of money. He worked on an oil rig in the North Atlantic. He earned a small fortune in return for six months of solitude. His employer sent his payroll checks directly to his wife in Chester. Unbeknownst to the husband, she signed the checks and sent them directly to a West Coast TV preacher with whom she was infatuated. After half a year in the North Atlantic, her husband returned home. He walked into the living room to discover a house with little furniture. Most had been used for firewood. There was no food in the kitchen. All of the other valuables were at the pawnshop. Two of her kids were locked in the upstairs bedroom because they tried to run away from these awful conditions. According to the police, what the husband first saw when he entered the house shocked him. He asked his wife what happened. Apparently, her answer didn’t satisfy his curiosity. He reached into his duffel bag, took out a pistol, and shot her six times. Murder mania gripped the city. The husband’s lawyer (who frequently hired me to baby-sit) wanted someone from the pawnshop to appear at the trial as a material witness. He wanted to make the case that the deceased constantly needed money, even though she received thousands of dollars in the mail. I was chosen to represent the pawnshop. I stammered my way through the questioning and then got the hell out of the courtroom. The case ended happily for two of the participants: the defendant was found innocent because of temporary insanity; and I received a very generous tip the next time I baby-sat for the lawyer. That wasn’t my only trial experience. We frequently ended up with some piece of stolen property for which I had to go to a line-up or magistrate’s hearing to identify who pawned it. Even if I hadn't handled the transaction for the stolen goods, my bosses would tell me who had brought it in, and I would go over to the courthouse and testify accordingly, or point them out in a line-up. This travesty of justice sounds much worse now than it did at the time. We knew all of our customers quite well, and if one of them wandered on the slippery side of town, we knew him by name. I was involved in these legal proceedings so often that I thought seriously about a law career. That summer I read Louis Nizer’s bestseller My Life In Court. I never became a lawyer. But, a career in business has similarities to the trial process. In either case, you’re trying to persuade some jury (either a jury of peers or a jury of customers) that your client deserves their support. Persuading a jury requires a lot more than just presenting the facts and hoping that common sense will reign. Research shows that jurors sometimes decide between innocence and guilt during each lawyer's opening statement. Jurors don't always wait to hear the witnesses or see the evidence. They frequently make up their mind right at the start of the trial, and then bend all of the evidence to fit their preconceived notion. If the juror likes one attorney's tie more than the other's, that might be enough to get the vote. It's probably fair to assume that customers arrive at their buying decisions in much the same way as jurors do. They hear a little bit of evidence and then come to a fast conclusion. Their decision-making process is heavily affected by little things they see or hear. Perhaps they notice your delivery truck on the road and it's filthy dirty. Or they meet your salesperson and don't like the firmness of his handshake. I lost a pitch once because the client disliked my partner's suit. He thought it conveyed too slick an image. Think how often you draw conclusions based on the first few seconds of meeting someone. Obviously, it's impossible to control everything that might cause a perspective customer to draw a conclusion about your company. But, there is a lesson here from the lawyer's opening statement. The jury wants to trust the attorney. They want to like him, admire him, and believe in him. They want the attorney to make their job easy. They want to accept what he says as fact. Your prospective customers want to trust you. They want to like your product or service. They want to believe in it. They want you to make their decision-making job easy. The way to convey this is in the tone of everything you do. It’s in how your marketing efforts relate to the customer. It’s in how friendly and user-friendly the process of dealing with you is. It’s in how clear spoken and understandable your company literature is. It’s how you convey that you're good people to do business with. Marketing is about building relationships with customers. It's a lot more than just presenting the facts and nothing but the facts. Your company has a trial date set with customers every day of the year. Make sure your opening statement wows them, and don’t forget to smile. Effective marketing starts by building a relationship with your customers. Until they trust you, they have no interest in learning about your products or services. Jack Rossin is a marketing consultant who specializes in Presentation Skill Training. For more information how he could make your team present more dramatically and more successfully, visit his web site at www.jackerossin.com or call 617-527-0265. To Chapter Ten
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