If you are like most managers, when it comes down to it, you are downright scared of being direct and to the point and telling your CEO in no uncertain terms, “I want more money for marketing!”

Think about it.  There’s a conspiracy that encourages people to bury their most important wants and desires. Many management consultants advise using probing and consultative questions to draw people out.  They say to avoid being direct and straight-forward.  People hem and haw and they are even afraid to ask you what they want to ask you the most. They feel vulnerable about being honest and up-front. It petrifies even the best of us!

Yet when it comes to being successful in business, being frank, open and clearly asking people to give you what you want is what wins the day.  

John Baker, a veteran Fortune 25 management and leadership consultant and author of the new book The Asking Formula – Ask For What You Want And Get It, says the world would be a better place if marketers were totally up front and said “I’m selling windows today; are you buying?”

Is asking for a bigger marketing budget at the top of your to do list? If so, here are some tips on how you can ask your CEO for a bigger budget.

Baker spent several years studying the fears and trepidation people demonstrate in situations across the whole spectrum of human interactions. He concluded that people do not know the best way to get what they want. He then documented the simplest tactics and strategies that he observed in the people who were getting exactly what they were after.  His discovery was absolutely earthshattering in simplicity.

Very simply, the most successful people ask for what they want. Then they give the three very best reasons that explain why it makes perfect sense to say yes.

Here’s an example.

A company intrapreneur has worked for months with the target top executive, created a devastatingly beautiful project plan, addressed scheduling and pricing issues, developed an integration plan, customization plans, a communications strategy, etc.   After all of the time, effort and energy he knows that he has overcome the financial, technological and even the human issues with flying colors.  What he doesn’t know is if the executive will commit the marketing money needed to set it all in motion.

Even the most experienced, young and old are often stumped over asking someone for a clean and final decision. They stumble and bumble their way through touchy feely talk about their hobbies, the weather, their pets, family or weekend plans, anything but what they are really after.

Oh sure, all sorts of experts tell you that it’s important to build a relationship, or you have to draw out the prospect, or listen for buying clues, and any number of other items, but the crucial, bottom line issue is that they never get around to asking the big question.

Yet the quickest and best way to ask for the answer you need is to go right up to his client and say:

“Will you please approve the marketing budget now? I‘ve answered all your questions. You’ve seen the correlations between multiple repeat tests and predicted results.  You’ve expressed support for the all the ideas and everyone is standing by.  You’ve seen how everything works, how well integrated it will be, that it’s going to make a real difference. How about it?”

“It is crucial,” Bakers says, “to identify the exact most important request, and brainstorm before you decide on the best reasons. Each reason needs to be carefully selected from a larger number of options and be backed by three important facts.”

It’s about that easy, and the power of this strategy is more than a little amazing. Baker has shown that this method can be successfully used to penetrate difficult accounts, close difficult sales calls, shorten a sales cycle, protect price margins, reduce meeting time, speed up Powerpoint presentations, structure personnel reviews, sales letters, company communications with suppliers, corporate memos and even email messages.

What’s more it is proven to be quite helpful in corporate and business personal interactions with personnel, especially with supervisors and staff.

And it really helps if you put your money here your mouth is:

“Let’s implement the plan as follows. You approve the budget today. I’ll meet with your top three Directors by the end of the week. We’ll finalize the deployment, assign responsibility for the action items, identify the start date and set the implementation schedule, and document the action planning on the company-wide calendar. Then we’ll kick things off and monitor the progress and the results each day. And it will happen in less than a week!”

“Conversations are clearer and there is less misunderstanding and I earn lots of points for being thoughtful”, he says.

Baker’s formula has three key rules:

1. Only offer information that is meaningful.  The rest is trivial.
2. Get to the point and ask for what it is you want.
3. Be quick about it.

Building a relationship is great, but taking responsibility and delivering the results is what builds trust. The biggest problem with never getting a direct answer, is that it gets in the way of the real progress. It’s pointless. It wastes time and effort. It allows for procrastination. It enables people to avoid rejection. After all, if you are busy probing the needs of the prospect you don’t have to risk actually doing the work.

Can you image a vendor at a ballpark consultatively selling you a hot dog:  “On a 1 – 10 scale rate your level of discomfort with your hunger?”  “Tell me your main objective with the hot dog?” “When you had a hot dog before, how satisfied were you with the mustard and ketchup ratio?”

Isn’t he more effective when he just yells:

“Hot dogs, hot dogs, come and get your hot dogs!”

Just give me the damn hot dog!

John Baker has held top leadership positions in sales, client service and operations in Fortune 25 companies for more than 25 years.  John is a graduate of the University of Minnesota with BA and MBA degrees. He is a member of the National Speakers Association, a noted speaker on topics of leadership, leader development, and building winning organizations. John lives in Minnesota with his family. His new book The Asking Formula – Ask For What You Want And Get It is scheduled for late fall 2011 release. For more information visit www.theaskingformula.com

Are you interested in re-visiting a McDonald’s marketing case study to see if you can apply their techniques to your business?

By far, one of the most popular videos on the 60 Second Marketer YouTube channel is about how McDonald’s invented the Happy Meal to attract kids and their parents. If you’re interested in learning more about this classic marketing success story, this video is worth checking out.

But first, I’d like to share a though with you about McDonald’s. I know it’s very popular to come down hard on fast food chains for all the unhealthy food they’re serving. Some of the criticism is warranted.

But if you’ve been to a McDonald’s lately, you’ll notice a lot of positive changes. Oh, sure, they still have the Big Mac and the Quarter Pounder, but they also recently introduced fruit smoothies, side salads instead of fries, sliced apples, smaller meals (e.g., chicken wraps) and a whole bunch of other innovations.

Is McDonald’s perfect? No, and they’d be the first to let you know that. But are they trying their best to provide healthy, innovative meal options for Americans of all stripes? Yup. And that’s not such a bad thing.

Okay, all that said, here’s one of the top 10 videos on the 60 Second Marketer YouTube channel. Check it out and see how you can use McDonald’s marketing techniques for your own business.

In Go Mobile, the book I’ve written with Jeanne Hopkins from HubSpot, we review a list of the 14 most powerful words in marketing so that readers can use them in their mobile marketing campaigns. This post gives you a sneak peak at the list that’s included in the book. Enjoy.

Have you ever bought a product that you didn’t really need? You know the kind — they’re often found in the aisle displays at Lowe’s, WalMart or Barnes & Noble. You grab it off the shelf, pay for it, then get home and say, “Why did I just buy something I didn’t really need?”

What are the most powerful and effective words in marketing? Interestingly, "sale" isn't one of them.

Or, you may have been told about a deadline to buy concert tickets, join a health club or even buy a car for 0% interest. The sheer power of the deadline or the false sense of scarcity get you to pull out your wallet to buy the tickets, join the club or drive off in the new car.

What’s up with that? Why does our brain buy stuff that we don’t really need? What powerful triggers are being used to get us to do that?

This week, I’ll be posting blogs on this very topic. Partly because how the brain works is very interesting to a lot of people, and partly because, as a marketer, you should know how to use these trigger points to increase demand for your product or service.

Below, you’ll find the 14 most powerful and effective words in marketing. I first came across these in a book called 2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success (affiliate link). These are the 14 words that direct marketing agencies (like BKV, who sponsors the 60 Second Marketer) have known about for years. They’re based on decades of A/B split tests that have proven which words get people to buy stuff and which words don’t get people to buy stuff.

I’ll cover this entire topic in depth when I speak at the SXSW conference.  With that in mind, here are the 14 most powerful and effective words in marketing:

• Free
• Now
• You
• Save
• Money
• Easy
• Guarantee
• Health
• Results
• New
• Love
• Discovery
• Proven
• Safety

After decades of testing, these words have proven to be the ones that are the most persuasive at encouraging people to choose Brand A over Brand B.

What do all these words have in common? Each and every one of them taps into an emotional trigger that originates from Sub-Cortical and Limbic areas of the brain. These areas are more commonly known as the “Lizard Brain” where our deepest and most instinctive impulses originate. (We’ll be talking about the Lizard Brain in a post scheduled for later this week.)

In addition, these words tap into the 13 Most Important Emotional Triggers for Consumers, which is what we’ll be talking about in tomorrow’s post.

How should you use these words in your marketing campaigns?

For starters, I’d encourage you to do an A/B split test with a paid search, direct mail or email marketing campaign. Use words like Free, New and Proven in one of your ads, and don’t use them in the other one. Then compare the results and you’ll see how much more revenue you generated from Version A vs. Version B. Will there be a huge difference? That depends on your product or service. But I can guarantee there will be a difference.

I hope you’ll come back tomorrow where I’ll be writing about the 13 Most Important Emotional Triggers for Consumers. That’s going to be a fun post to write and to read.

Posted by Jamie Turner, Founder of the 60 Second Marketer and co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile.” He is also a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.

A lot of the folks who stop by our blog may not realize that we have a free weekly eNewsletter that includes tips that aren’t discussed in the blog. These tips are typically quick, short ideas that you can use to grow your sales and revenues.

Interested in getting insider marketing tips not available on the 60 Second Marketer blog? Click here to sign up for our free weekly eNewsletter with additional tools, tips and techniques for marketers.

For example, here’s the eNewsletter content from today’s blast that went out to thousands of subscribers across the globe:

“A few weeks ago, I talked about how A-1 Steak Sauce allegedly changed a minor line of copy on their labels and grew their sales significantly.

What did A-1 change? They put “Refrigerate After Opening” on the label.

Why did that grow sales? Because for every one time people open their pantry, they open their refrigerator eight times. As a result, they were in front of hungry consumers 8 times more frequently than before they changed the label.

It’s a great example of how paying attention to small details can sometimes make big changes in your marketing program.

(Special thanks to Alex Van Winkle for sharing the A-1 story with me a few years ago.)

1. Don’t try to change behavior. Preach to the converted. It’s easier to sell worms to a fisherman than it is to sell aspirin to a fisherman.
2. Study your sales data. All the qualitative and quantitative research in the world won’t teach you as much as sales data.
3. There are only 4 reasons people don’t buy your product. The four reasons are: I don’t need this, I don’t have time for this, I don’t have money for this, or I don’t trust you. That’s all. Just 4 reasons.
4. The subject of any good campaign isn’t the product or service. The subject is you, the consumer. Anyone who ignores this maxim is doomed.
5. People buy from faces more readily than they buy from corporations. Just ask Martha Stewart. Or Betty Crocker. Or Aunt Jemima.
6. Write copy as though you’re writing to one person. It changes the tone from one of selling to one of friendship.
7. Think backwards. Get inside the mind of your consumer. What’s their pain point? What problem is your product actually solving? (Special thanks to Jerry Brown who taught me that trick.)
8. It takes hard writing to make easy reading. First said by Robert Louis Stevenson. I wish I had more time to craft my blog posts and emails. I don’t. So please forgive me, Mr. Stevenson.”

If these tips are the kind of thing you think you’d be interested in receiving, the I’d encourage you to subscribe to our weekly eNewsletter. It’s a great way to stay up-to-speed on the latest and greatest techniques in marketing.

Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer, the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine for BKV Digital and Direct Response.

Not long ago, we asked Raphael Ravilla at BKV Digital and Direct Response to tell us what he knew about Behavioral Targeting, one of the newer and more interesting aspects of online marketing.
Raphael wrote a post for the 60 Second Marketer, which is summarized below. We used what he taught us about this new and innovative technique in a 60 second video, which is also included here.

Here’s what Raphael wrote for the 60 Second Marketer a short while ago:
“Have you ever shopped online at a particular site and noticed that, after your visit to that site, you’re seeing that company’s banner ads everywhere, almost as if they’re following you?

More likely than not, they are following you. If the store has a robust behavioral marketing strategy, then you’re being presented ads that are related to the pages you visited on the previous site you visited. They may also present ads to you based on what you may or may not have purchased on the site.

How does this work? The company has placed numerous “action tags” across its site—in category pages (or store isles) and through the shopping cart process. They know what you browsed, and if you bought the product, or if you abandoned. They can then serve you ads encouraging you to reconsider the product you didn’t buy. They can even serve you ads that are related to the products that you have just purchased.

The ads that you see are visible on their site, and throughout the web. If it’s a large corporation, they’ve probably purchased billions of impressions used to re-market to people like you for upsell and cross-sell purposes.
Do you have a site and want to do the same thing? The conversion rate lift is quoted by some at over ten times regular non-behaviorally-targeted ads.

Here’s how to do it:
Identify pages in your site you want to “tag.” Usually, it is the homepage, the category top-pages and sub-pages and finally, the entire shopping cart process. You can overlay and mix/match the tags to define audience buckets. You can use either a third party action tag, or an action tag from an ad-network.
Now, you’ll need traffic: Use all forms of media to drive site visits and you will soon be collecting “cookies” that you can segment and re-market to.”
How do you re-market? Go through the ad-network that supplied you the action tags and they can help you create your behaviorally-targeted campaigns.”
Behavioral targeting is one of the newer ways marketers can supercharge their marketing campaigns. What are some other new tools? Let us know and we’ll write a post about it.

Posted by Jamie Turner, Chief Content Officer, the 60 Second Marketer, the online magazine of BKV Digital and Direct Response.

Over the past year, the 60 Second Marketer team have written almost 200 blog postings designed to give you the tools, tips and techniques necessary to grow your sales and revenue through marketing.

We thought we’d share links to some of the most popular posts we’ve uploaded over the course of the past 12 months.

Hopefully, by re-visiting some of these topics, you’ll be able to supercharge your marketing program and grow your sales and revenue.

Here goes:

16 Tips on How to Think Strategically

51 Low-Cost or No-Cost Ways to Promote Your Business During a Recession

The Top 18 Things to Measure in Your Next Email Marketing Campaign

10 Tips on What Makes a Great Businessperson

The 6 Most Common Social Media Mistakes

The 13 Top Social Media Tools, Tips and Techniques

Did we miss any of your favorites? Let us know — we’re always interested in your feedback.