Car Sales Tactics with Terry Bradshaw

Today’s post is a bit of a departure from the usual posts about technology training and best practices, to tell a story of an experience I had last week with a producer for a TV show called “Profile with Terry Bradshaw”.


I’ve been in the business of selling training for over 10 years. In that time, I’ve seen many different methodologies and sales tactics. There are two practices in particular that I feel are unethical, and should never be used by any legitimate salesperson: the Bait and Switch, and the Takeaway Close.


The Bait and Switch a tactic where the salesperson offers a particular product at a discount (or free) to get the prospect’s interest, and after assessing their level of interest, pulls the discount to offer a higher priced product. Personally, I also consider a salesperson to be pulling a “Bait and Switch” when they fail to disclose fees for goods or services up front. I’ve seen this personally with vacuum cleaner sales people when they send a college kid door to door offering a “free room cleaning” to demonstrate the features of a vacuum, only to have the salesperson walk into your home and try to intimidate you into buying a vacuum cleaner or they won’t leave. Oh, and they don’t clean an entire room, either.


The Takeaway Close is used when a prospect is not completely committed to the sale, and the act of “taking away” the product or service instills a fear of loss in the prospect, forcing them to make a decision. I’ve seen this at car dealerships when negotiating the price of a car, and in order to “meet your price” the salesperson removes a feature that you indicated you wanted.


More on these tactics later.


We were contacted last week by a representative from the TV show “Profiles With Terry Bradshaw”. I took a look at the website for the show, and found that it is a program that considers small business success to be vital to our nation’s growth, and that Terry Bradshaw profiles “Fascinating business stories to hear first-hand candid insights from entrepreneurs of various industries.” According to the person who contacted us, Terry Bradshaw was running a series on the importance of business training in the current economy, and their research team had thought that our company’s story would be interesting to profile on the show.


As a small business, that level of exposure certainly appealed to us. After all we have just launched the world’s most comprehensive and user-friendly training search engine, boasting over 140,000 scheduled courses across the U.S. and Canada, and it levels the playing field, portraying small local training companies side-by-side with technical training giants such as Global Knowledge and New Horizons. Our story certainly seemed compelling to us, and we were thrilled that Terry Bradshaw might want to interview us on TV!


We set up an appointment with an associate producer, who called me the next business day to interview, and gain more insight into our story to make sure we were a good fit. During this interview, he did quite a bit to pump up my ego with congratulatory statements, and we set an appointment with a “senior producer” to flesh out the details and make sure all of their questions were answered.


Then, after all of that was set up, the associate producer told me that there would be some fees involved. “OK”, I said guardedly, “What kinds of fees are we talking about?” This was news to me, as we hadn’t had ANY discussion of fees up to this point.


Turns out, the costs involved are for production and editing, to get the clip ready for airtime. The fee for this “service” would be $24,800. I asked how much air time the final interview would be, and he said it would be about 5 minutes.


Um, excuse me? You build up this experience, play off of our emotions and hopes as a small business looking for exposure, and then whack us with a $25k price tag? I said that there was no way we have that kind of budget for a single 5-minute TV spot with limited visibility, and thanks but no thanks. He asked if we should cancel the appointment with the senior producer, and I said “absolutely, please cancel.”


Now, after talking with our PR person, it turns out that this sort of TV arrangement is very common. The TV shows aren’t owned by a particular network, so to float the cost of the show, they charge the people appearing, and the show is shopped out to different networks, who are looking to fill airtime. They don’t make much money from the networks, so they need to charge the people appearing.


Fine, but disclose that up front! This is where the bait and switch comes in: offering a televised interview with a major media icon and sports figure, where he will voice over our story and tell it in a really compelling way, and the team will even shoot on location. We’re not in the TV business – we don’t know how the business works, so failing to disclose those fees up front DEFINITELY qualifies as a bait and switch in my mind.


As a last ditch effort, the associate producer used the “Takeaway Close”, asking if he should cancel the meeting with the executive producer. Sir, when I said “there’s no way we have the budget” I meant it.


Terry Bradshaw, by all accounts, is ridiculously successful and charismatic. He’s one of those people where everything he touches turns to gold. He’s had an incredible career as a sports figure, motivational speaker, TV analyst and announcer, actor, and author. We found it more than a little disappointing to find that a media organization with this amazing person at the front would use these kinds of sales tactics on the small businesses that are critical to our economy, and our nation’s growth. It’s a betrayal of the very reason the program exists.


Terry, you may want to reconsider your choice of business model and organizational structure.