The Very Foundation of Selling

If there’s only one thing you can do to sell, what would it be? If there’s one unfair advantage you can have over any of your competitors, what would you wish you possess?

Is it scarcity? Authority? Social influence? Or any of those sales ju-jit-su?

When it comes to selling, most people immediately assume there’s some kind of weird background influence tricks that marketers employ to get them to buy stuff. So when they want to sell stuff themselves, that’s what they go looking for: The behind-the-curtain secrets that only a bunch of round-table marketers use to control the minds of millions.

They go about using fancy scripts to use the count-down timer thing. They flawlessly implement scarcity by warning their visitors that this is a limited quantity only offer and yes, they intend to keep their word. Then of course they included pages and pages of testimonials. They did everything right but yet no sale came through.

It’s how well you know your customers that is making the difference, not how well you employ sales tricks.

What happened?

I hate to be the one telling you the secret but there really is NO SECRET. If selling is as easy as implementing sales ju-jit-su, everyone would be rich by now. Sales ju-jit-su is the easy part… and it works only if you get the foundation right. What’s the foundation?

The You-Attitude

It’s something I like to call “the you-attitude”. I’ll be discussing the concept in my upcoming book “Sales Copy QuickFix v 2.0″ in-depth but here’s a little preview.

The you-attitude is all about knowing your customers. Who are they? What do they want? What are their core needs? What do they THINK they want? Why do they want what they want? These are but some questions you should already know the answer to.

When you address their core needs is when you create desire. And desire, in turn, creates motivation to act. How intense that desire - and therefore motivation - is, can be manipulated by sales ju-jit-su. But if there’s no desire in the first place, there’s really no need for ju-jit-su.

That’s why no matter how many “tricks” a marketer use, he’s not going to sell you a sewing machine if you’re not interested in buying one. Successful marketers stick to the very basic element of selling - that is bartering a solution to a problem for money. You have to have something valuable to your prospects and show them that you have it.

It’s how well you know your customers that is making the difference, not how well you employ sales tricks that makes the difference. The better you know your customers, the easier and the more you sell. That’s the law of nature that is never going to change… That’ how it has been 5000 years go and that’s how it is today.

That’s why Zig Ziglar once said, “You could have anything you want only if you help people have what they want.”

Easy enough right?

Yet if your sirf around the net, you’d see that most people don’t know what they are doing. Their websites are all about themselves as an expert, or their product as the leader in the market, or their service as the best.

It’s never about their customers! That violates the very law of nature!

No one cares if you’re an expert or just another junkie. No one care about how well crafted your product is. No one cares about how good your service is. They care only about what you can do for them.

Let’s use the eczema industry as an example. Eczema is a kind of skin disease that turns skin dry, red and itchy. There are mainly two types of websites that exist when I first entered the market a few years ago:

There are several websites promoting the services of M.Ds. Those websites talk about how well-qualified they are, a picture of them and their contact details. Obviously they should stick to medicine and let marketers do the marketing.

Then there are websites that promoted alternative solutions like cleansing, essential oils and other stuff. Again, most of those website are about how their product is 100% organic, hand made and “made of highest quality…”. Then there’s a big picture of the product and a huge banner on top. But they do have before and after pictures that showed results. No immediately noticeable words that communicate the “you-attitude” though.

I think the only reason they survived is because eczema is an extremely painful disease. If they were in the internet marketing industry, they would have sold a single thing!

So what I did is I built a simple, sales letter type website that communicates I understand what they are looking for. No fancy graphics. No fancy flash websites and no fancy product shot. What happened? Let’s just say I still make a significant amount of my living from that site!

Now, I’m sure you can think of examples of websites that don’t “get it”… these sites tend to be e-commerce sites taking the supermarket approach. They assumed that if people landed on their site, that means they want to buy something… just like they would in a supermarket… so all they do is display their products.

You should know better by now.