Using radio to sell radio

I thought this might be appropriate. My friend Phil Bernstein, formerly with Clear Channel's Portland, OR cluster, now with Jim Doyle and Associates, in a recent blog post, quoted the late Jim Williams (one of radio's truly great sales trainers), on the use of demo tapes:

What we’re doing is a thing called demonstration selling… it ranges from the tiny nibble of peach at your outdoor farmers market by the peach vendor to the one-ounce tube of shampoo they hang on your doorknob to the showy exhibition of all the uses from slicing and dicing of those famous knives on TV.

When you test drive a car, slip on new shoes and walk about or study the floor plan of an unbuilt home, you are involved in one of the many forms of demonstration selling.

When you enter your client’s office and play a cassette tape as part of your presentation you are doing demonstration selling. The words and sound that come from your tape recorder, regardless of content, are a demonstration of how radio works.

Thoughts come out of a small electric box and into the brain of the listener. That is the essence of radio. You are using radio to sell radio.

As Phil pointed out, "The tools have changed since Williams recorded those words. Cassettes are gone, replaced by digital files you can play for your client on an iPhone. The principle is the same in the Age of the Smartphone as it was when we operated on tape: use radio to sell radio.”