Grant Johnson

Does the name Elmer Lynn Hauldren ring a bell?

If not, it’s because he didn’t sell bells, but carpeting. Lots of it. He was best known as the Empire Carpet Man, and he passed away at the age of 89 on April 27th, 2011.

If you grew up in the Midwest, this guy was a legend. Take a peek at one of his commercials here.

Unlike so many pitchmen, this guy was the grandfatherly type, who oozed honesty. R.I.P.

The new duck will be done by a man from…Hugo, Minnesota. Here are the details, complete with a video of the new commercial that introduces the new quacker, courtesy of USA Today.

Yes, data is critical to marketing. However, it does impact other areas of our lives. To prove it, here’s a story from MSNBC on a big credit score glitch that occurred with Experian.

It’s a good reminder of how vitally important data is in our work as marketers and our lives as a whole.

Spend time knowing and understanding your data — yes your own personal set and those of your prospects and customers. It’s that important.

Here, courtesy of The NY Times is a piece on the auditions to replace Aflac’s fired quacker.

Here’s the story from MSNBC news.

This is the final piece in the three part series of StorySelling. The first two articles dealt with what StorySelling is and why you should be employing it now. This article will show you how to turn your story telling into StorySelling.

StorySelling allows you to connect with your clients at the level where decisions are made.

Great StorySelling, like great marketing itself, begins with a goal. You need to determine what you expect your StorySelling efforts will do in terms of increased leads, conversions to sales or more referrals, among other metrics. Without an established goal, you may as well just keep cold calling and hope you luckily find the right customer.

You begin the process of StorySelling by asking lots of questions so you can truly understand what is important to your prospect or customers. Once you understand their wants, desires and needs, you can craft a brilliant, real-life story example that will resonate with them and their situation. This technique works much better than bombarding your audience with complicated charts and graphs. more