Episode 3-73: Great Marketers Are Great Salespeople

I had an online conversation the other day and the question was asked, “Alex, if I want to get into marketing, do I also need to learn how to sell?” The answer is absolutely. In this podcast, I’m going to talk about where you should focus your education, because when you know how to sell, your marketing becomes that much more powerful. Let’s dive in. All right, so as you’re looking at your marketing efforts of going, “Why isn’t this working?” Some of it may be because you don’t know the sales triggers to get people to take action. In other words, you know how to get your message in front of people, but you may not know how to construct the message to get people to buy because you haven’t learned how to sell.

Marketing, or marketing that’s very successful, is really sales without a conversation. It’s a one way message to the audience saying, “This is why you should buy.” For that reason alone, I think learning sales, learning how to sell in general, is crucial. Let me walk through some things that you should focus on. One, as a salesperson, one of the best things that you can do is control the emotion of the conversation. What I mean by that is this, when I’m talking to somebody and I sense that there’s hesitancy, or I sense that maybe there’s disbelief, there’s a confusion, I can sense that emotion. When I’m able to change that feeling, that emotion to something of excitement, then I have them where I want them, right? Now they’re excited to move forward. How do you create excitement? You create excitement by, this is a scary word, but I’m going to use it, by manipulating emotion.

What is excitement really? Excitement is a little bit of a mix of hope and looking forward to the future, there’s a little bit of nervousness there, so how do we create that? I want to give you a couple ideas on how to create that excitement. Now, remember, when you’re marketing, you’re using either video so that they can actually see your face, so if you’re on video and you want them to feel excited about your product, you also need to express excitement. Now, if you’re writing, and maybe it’s a sales letter or a Facebook post, how do you express that excitement? Well, you can use things like changes in your tone, et cetera, but I want to give you some ideas on how to create excitement. The first big idea, I’m going to give you two, the first one is use a story about your big, the big domino falling for you on this, right?

I believe one of my most successful ads about the giveaway Funnel is successful because I tell the story about how I came to the realization that this idea is going to forever change marketing for my client and change his business as a result. People can feel the excitement as I walk them through the story of my downs, of not able to generate the leads that I wanted, and then I take them back up again to the part of the story where we all as a team come up with this idea, they can feel the emotional roller coaster, and then I take them through and I say, “Let’s start using it for you.” It’s the emotion of them going, “Oh my gosh, I have been there too on the downs, Alex got this great epiphany, he’s sharing it with me. I’m so excited to see what this looks like for me.” I’m telling a story, I’m bringing them into the story at a place where they can relate to it, and I’m getting them excited to see the end of it.

The other way that you can create excitement is by sharing what it feels like on the other side, right? What does it feel like once you’ve accomplished whatever it is, that the solution that you’re selling, right? So for me I’ll explain, what is it like knowing you have brand new leads coming in every day? What is it like seeing that your calendar is full of appointments? What does that feel like? And they’re, “Oh my gosh, that feels so exciting.” There’s an emotional attachment to what’s on the other side, and that creates excitement. So those are the two ways that I use it, I like to tell stories where I start on the down where it’s, “I was that this place, it was sucked.” Then it’s, “Oh, here’s the big domino,” and they’re, “Oh yay.” They’re cheering with you. On the other side of that, to the way to create that emotion, to kind of manipulate the emotion, is to have them imagine a future where your solution is working and they can see it being implemented.

The other thing you need to understand to become a really good marketer on the sales side, you need to know how to use logic. And what does that look like? That looks like being able to clearly articulate what your solution is, how you’re going to benefit them, and what the process is for them. Now sometimes it’s not that difficult, right? If it’s a product and you’ve come up with a better razor, there’s not a lot that you need to describe there. But if your process has a few different steps, you need to make sure that you’re able to clearly define and lay out what it looks like, because a confused mind will always say, “No.” This is where a lot of marketers, in my opinion, kind of dropped the ball on why their sales pages don’t convert, because they’re not able to clearly articulate, this is exactly what’s going to happen next. When people know what’s going to happen, even over communicating what’s about to happen when they hit that sale button.

I would rather you over-communicate than leave too much to the imagination, because when you leave a part of that sale to the imagination or a part of that process, what you’re really doing is you’re leaving money on the table. You need to make sure that when a person reads your sales page, they need to know, they need to really have all the answers laid out in front of them so that they can make the buying decision. So let’s go to the other one, which is fear. So you want to use a little bit of fear, and what I mean by that is not doom and gloom, I think fear of missing out. Fear of having to pay more. Fear of having to stay in the same place. You want to be able to use fear in your marketing. Again, I don’t believe in doom and gloom.

I’m not saying you use doom and gloom, what I am saying is that you pull that lever of, “If you don’t do this, then this is what’s going to happen. If you don’t buy now, you’re going to miss the deal. If you don’t sign up now, you’ll miss the event.” I just talked to somebody a few moments ago before I started recording this podcast, and he was going to go to Funnel Hacking Live and he waited and he waited and price kept increasing and kept increasing because that’s how it goes, and then it sold out and he missed his chance and he was so bummed because he literally lives just a few miles away and he kept waiting and never actually pulled the trigger, and so he has this huge fear of missing out. So now he’s like, “Oh my gosh, I never want that to happen again. I blew it.” And so you need to pull the lever and say, “If you don’t do this, you’re going to miss out.” Using a little bit of urgency to get people to take action.

And finally, the other lever that you want to pull is social proof. You have to use social proof in your marketing, you have to use it in your sales. People need to know that what you’re telling them isn’t just your version of the events, it’s something that people can look back at, say, “This has worked for Sarah, this has worked for Michael, this’ll work for me.” When you don’t do that, then it’s kind of he said, he said thing where it’s saying, “If you do this, this is going to happen and you just have to take my word for it.” Nobody wants that. That’s not a good close.

Using social proof in your marketing and in your salesmanship is great. One of the most common tools that pest control companies use is they’ll go next door and they’ll knock on your door and they’ll say, “I’m here to sell pest control. Your neighbor, Mary, just got it, and the good news is she’s no longer going to have any pest issues. Bad news is, is that any of the pests that don’t die from the poison will be leaving her house and then be looking for another place to go. And if your house isn’t protected, they may end up coming into your house.” He’s using social proof of, “Your next door neighbor just bought it.” And he’s using fear, “If you don’t do this, then you might have more bugs in your house and nobody wants that.” So that’s just one silly example of how to use fear and social proof to close the deal. So take this, use emotion, use logic, use a little bit of fear and use social proof in your marketing. Great salespeople do it, great marketers do it as well.

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