“Position the customer’s ‘gain’ as the direct object of the sentence,” Flint McGlaughlin taught in Headline Examples: 3 ways to load your predicate with value (https://meclabs.com/course/sessions/headline-examples/).

I thought of this lesson when I heard a lesson from this episode’s guest – “charge what it is worth, not what it costs.”

You can only charge what it is worth if the customer perceives that value. To help them perceive the value, your messaging must emphasize the customer’s gain.

So I asked our guest about this, specifically in regards to his story about using a celebrity endorser for a B2B event.

You can hear the answer to that question, along with many more lesson-filled stories, from Jeff Bradford, President, Dalton Nashville (https://daltonagency.com/), on this episode of the How I Made It In Marketing podcast.

Dalton is a $12 million agency that was founded in 1989 and has 100 employees.

Bradford is the only seven-time winner of the Nashville Business Journal’s Most Admired CEO Award. He manages a team of 12 on five accounts at Dalton. He is author of the book The Joy of Propaganda: The How and Why of Public Relations and Marketing (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-joy-of-propaganda-jeff-bradford/1142922872).

Stories (with lessons) about what he made in marketing

• Harness word-of-mouth marketing by making influential people feel special.
• Handling a media crisis begins long before the crisis.
• Charge what is it worth, not what it costs.
• The most important thing when merging companies is the two owners should understand and trust each other.
• Think big.
• Well-crafted video can shape perceptions by connecting emotionally with your audience.
• The manner in which you present your message, and the environment in which it is presented, is just as important (if not more so) than the content of your message.

Related content mentioned in this episode

The Prospect’s Perception Gap: How to bridge the gap between the results we want and the results we have (https://meclabs.com/education/Flint-prospects-perception-gap)

About this podcast

This podcast is not about marketing – it is about the marketer. It draws its inspiration from the Flint McGlaughlin quote, “The key to transformative marketing is a transformed marketer” from the Become a Marketer-Philosopher: Create and optimize high-converting webpages (https://meclabs.com/course/) free digital marketing course.

Apply to be a guest
If you would like to apply to be a guest on How I Made It In Marketing, here is the podcast guest application – https://www.marketingsherpa.com/page/podcast-guest-application