Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.

We’re going to talk about marketing today, which is my wheelhouse and probably yours as well. Many people are always in search of the next marketing secret or hack. So what do we have to say about it?

Whatever you’re doing in business, unless you’re finding customers and they’re actually making a purchase from you, you haven’t got a business at all. I’ve titled this segment “Marketing and Sales,” which may cause some dissonance for many people. Usually, the phrase is put as sales and marketing. But it’s worth bearing in mind that marketing comes first, and the sale is the end of the process.

Sales

That said, many people are intimidated by selling. Part of that is the misconception that it’s an adversarial contest in which the winner is the person who makes the sale. A good shift in mindset is to realise that as long as you’ve got an honest product that is appropriate for the customer, the actual winner in a sales transaction is the purchaser. The purchaser has got something they wanted or needed. The seller has only got money. The money’s only of genuine value to them when they exchange it for something they actually want or need.

So in that individual transaction the value should be greater to the buyer.

Yeah. So having said that, the marketing comes first. What marketing is doing is providing a stream of customers, of prospects who are ready for the sales conversation.

I have a client who says that a lead a day keeps the downturns away.

Yes, it does. Anyway, so as the sale is the simplest part, I’ll just discuss that because we can dispose of that fairly rapidly. As I’ve said, what is important is that you’ve got an honest product at a price which appears fair to the prospect, a price that feels appropriate to their circumstances and their needs. If they’ve been prepared by what you’ve done in the marketing process by the time they’re having the conversation, if they are genuinely matched to what you have on offer, the product will practically sell itself.

There’s a really brilliant book called The Secret of Selling Anything by Harry Browne (Amazon link). Although it’s a rather cheesy title, it’s the exact opposite of what you might be expecting. It’s not full of slick tricks and techniques to bamboozle or coerce people, which is how many people view the sales process. It’s basically a very detailed exposition of giving people what they want and making sure the value is highest to the buyer..

Essentially, Browne says want to conduct an honest conversation with the buyer. The best way to start is to ask them what their most pressing problem is. Presumably, if they’ve been through any kind of nurturing process, they’ll know the sort of thing that you’re offering and the sort of issues that it addresses. So they will answer in that context. Then you explore it. You explore whether the price you want for it is fair to them and whether your product actually meets the need or desire they currently lack. Then you explain how your product meets that desire or need. The sale will only happen under those circumstances.

There are a few other things. A great list called the five power disqualifiers by John Paul Mendocha. Do you remember him?

Yeah, John is one of Perry Marshall’s colleagues. I was literally just trying to pull up what the five power disqualifiers were. Yeah, from memory, it was something like, do they have the bleeding neck problem? Do they have the decision-making capability? Do they have the money to pay for it? Do they buy into your unique selling proposition?

If you run through the list of disqualifiers, you’ll save yourself a lot of wasted time by talking to people who are not going to buy for one reason or another. One disqualifier it to find out whether they really have the authority to make the purchase decision. Many salespeople spend a lot of time talking to people who are perfectly happy to talk to them, but haven’t got the authority within the business to make the decision

So the full five power disqualifies are:

* Do they have the money?

* Do they have a bleeding neck? A bleeding neck is a dire sense of urgency, an immediate problem that demands to be solved right now.

* Do they buy into your unique selling proposition? Perry says, if you’re just going into a market, the question is what big benefit will they buy into? What deal would they snatch up in a hot second? What benefit do they want that other guys are not promising?

* Do they have the ability to say, yes, we’ve just been over this. Major decisions in our house are made not by me, but by Linzi.

* Does what you sell fit their overall plans? If your service requires major brain surgery on the part of the customer. He ain’t gonna take your offer unless brain surgery is literally a lot less painful than the alternatives.

Right. Okay, so that deals with sales.

Marketing

Now, marketing really covers everything involved in acquiring, developing, and retaining a customer for repeat business.

That was Peter Drucker’s definition, wasn’t it? That marketing is everything to do with making and keeping a customer.

Yeah. So let’s talk about the arrangements we’ve got to, to harness potential customers and get them engaged with you. Obviously, a starting point for that is advertising. We’re all aware of the myriad forms of advertising that you have. An important thing to understand is the necessity of split testing.

You can come up with the most brilliant creative you can imagine. Unless you actually test it against some alternatives, you’ll never know whether what you’re putting out actually resonates with the target audience. This has been made much easier with the internet, because it’s very quick and easy to put out alternative wordings, see which gets the best response, try alternative versions of the sales page, see which gets the best response, and gradually dial it in.

This is something which really smart advertisers have recognised for over a hundred years. There are a couple of classic books on this. One is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins and the other is Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. A little bit of a caveat on that: the fifth edition of Tested Advertising Methods was totally revised by people who had no idea really what John was getting at.

Yeah, I’ve got a copy of the fourth edition.

So you want to look for a secondhand copy of the fourth edition or earlier, which is what John actually wrote.

Claude Hopkins in particular was a pioneer of the discount coupon for groceries and the like. The obvious reason for the discount coupon is to encourage people to try it at a lower price and feel they’re getting a bargain. But the real purpose of the discount coupon was to include a small code somewhere on it. When the coupons came back, and the retailer was reimbursed for the discount they’d given to the customer, it’s worth noting that this is a win-win-win situation. Assuming that the product is one that the customer likes when they try it out for whatever reason, they’re a winner. They’re a winner because they’ve got it cheaper than the first purchase, which has reduced the risk involved.

The retailer is pleased because he’s made a sale he might not otherwise have made, perhaps bringing in the customer. He’ll also buy some other things while he’s there. The retailer also wins because they get a share of the cash when the vouchers are redeemed. The supplier is winning because he’s expanding his customer base. But more importantly, he’s getting feedback and intelligence on which of the adverts he used to offer the coupon worked, because each coupon carried a code indicating which advert it was.

You could run a lot of different adverts across different media. You could see which ones were most effective in terms of the return he got on his advertising spend. Once again, this is a classic technique that has been around for over 100 years and has been supercharged by how we can deliver messages on the internet.

You can even do it for phone calls. You could have multiple phone numbers that can be tracked to different sources. Or you say, ‘ring up and ask to speak to Derek or John’, or someone who doesn’t exist. Then you know that if they ask for John, they came from that ad.

Yeah, you know where they came from. So that’s a core skill to master in this area.

Another important concept is the ladder of awareness. Depending on what your product is, it might be something the prospect is already aware of or already exists, and that’s the question. You have to move them on to: why should he choose your version of this product rather than any other?

Going back down the scale, there are some products that the customer doesn’t even know exist yet. So informing him about the product’s existence is something you do. According to what your product is and how aware they are of it, the kind of communication you need to start having with them is determined. Do you want to say a bit more about that?

Yes, I do. So if you go to Google and run a search and look at the ads, most of them speak to solution-aware people. But in any market, there might be a much wider pool of people who are less solution-aware or aware that their ankle hurts, but are not aware of ways to fix the problem. Although not even problem-aware. They’re just like hobbling around in the street. You might be able to reach them with an ad, but it’s going to be an interruption.

Eugene Schwartz did a great job outlining the different levels of awareness in Breakthrough Advertising, another book we can recommend.

Yeah. That book was out of print for a long while and secondhand copies were very expensive, which is an indication of the value they held.

I think Brian Kurtz revived it, but it’s still quite expensive. But there may be PDF copies somewhere.

Right, but it’s a worthwhile investment if you’re serious about business.

Having attracted a potential customer, there are various mechanisms that you can use to get them to start communicating with them. Popular ones are surveys or quizzes. Very often, this is the start of a process of drawing somebody into a conversation where, further down the line they’re going to reach a point where they’re ready for that sales conversation.

Yeah, there’s an app called Scoreapp that a lot of people use. Daniel Priestley developed it. Once people know you are in your world and are in the consideration phase, then it’s a great tool.

Yeah. Then of course there are mailing sequences. For all that we’re deluged with emails now, email is still a very worthwhile way of nurturing clients. Depending on what your product is and what your price point is, and how well qualified the prospects are, it’s definitely worth also considering physical mailings. They’re probably far more likely to be read than an email.

It’s also not that expensive at bulk mailing rates, especially if you compare the cost of sending someone an A4 letter compared to the cost of an average click on Google. It’s actually much cheaper to send them a letter once you have their mailing address and their permission. So the permission is still essential. This is for nurturing your inner circle, not necessarily for attracting new people.

Yeah. Once again, it wants to actually be an informative, interesting letter rather than a glossy brochure.

I send quite a lot of what is called ‘folded A3’ letters that fold down to four pages that are sent as a newsletter with a mix of articles and promotional content.

Yeah good. Of course, one of the very best things you can send people is a book.

You have one too that we co-created a few years ago, called The Letter from 2100: A Possible World for your Grandchildren.

You’ve got several books out, haven’t you?

Just one now called Simple Story Selling, which is constantly under revision.

Of course, the great advantage is that a book lends you fast credibility. We could do a fill episode on the mechanism of getting a book out and for sale on Amazon. This is something which was impossible to do without investing several thousand pounds and having half a garage full of cases of books which you might or might not sell. Whereas now it can be done effectively at zero cost on a print-on-demand basis.

There are a number of print-on-demand services, but of course Amazon is the big one. You can also buy authors’ copies at an extremely steep discount and send these out as gifts. Although a lot of unsolicited mailings go into the bin, very few people are going to throw away a book.

Of course, the whole point of the book is not necessarily to make a killing on your sales as an author, although that could be an unexpected bonus. But the main point is the book extol the virtues of your product and explains what it is and how it works, woven into an interesting narrative. You can have several calls to action, ideally one at the end of each chapter and one to round off the book, where you advise people to get more information by going to your website or taking some other benefit-driven action.

It comes back to testing as well. It’s harder to do, but you can test your calls to action. You can also switch out the call to action in your book every now and again. As long as you’ve got a steady drip of sales coming in or books that you’re sending out to people, you can start split testing different calls to action within the book.

Right. Those are all the marketing topics that came to mind for sovereign entrepreneurs. Obviously, we could run an entire conversation on marketing and sales every week for a year.

The marketing approach we’ve outlined in this conversation is geared towards expert service providers. It’s not the only marketing mix, but it speaks to the sovereign person we’re trying to reach here.

Anything else you want to say before we wrap this up?

I have a golf analogy for sales and marketing, where if you’re not doing much marketing and just relying on sales calls, it’s like trying to hit a hole in one. From a sales perspective, it’s very hard to sell to a cold prospect. Whereas if you’ve got enough marketing elements working to knock the ball forward toward the hole, your sales conversations will become much easier.

So by the time you get in a sales conversation, you’re standing on the green, ideally right next to the hole, just tapping balls in. That’s where you want to be in a sales conversation.

Very good analogy.

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