How to Make Money with a Crappy Product or Service

Are you under the impression that you need a great product in order to get a lot of sales? Hogwash I say!

You don’t need a good product to get sales. You need good marketing. The world is full of crappy products that people buy in high volume.

Just visit your local Walmart. You’ll find shelf after shelf of thin, scraggly, scrawny, skeletal products, devoid of nearly any value whatsoever. Yet people buy this shit all day long. Why? Because we love it. Why do we love it? Because we’re slaves to our passions. And what directs our passions more than any other force in the universe? Marketing! None of us, including myself, like to admit this. But it’s just the way it is. Marketing works.

Some Finer Points on Making Money with Crappy Product…(or a great one…your choice)

1. Marketing and product development are completely separate things. Treat them as such.
2. Marketing is what sells stuff. Don’t pretend the quality of your product or service somehow overcomes the need to sell it.
3. The quality of your product is your responsibility to your customers. It’s your ethical duty as a human being to over-deliver awesomeness to your customers. But it’s not a marketing tactic.
4. Customers don’t buy your shit because it’s high quality. They don’t know any better until they’ve already bought it. They may believe it’s high quality, but that’s only because you or someone they trust has told them so. In other words, they’ve been sold.
5. When you learn to sell stuff, that’s when your whole business changes. Selling is what makes you recession proof, and it’s what makes your business viable. You can sell a totally crappy product or a totally awesome one…that’s your choice. But if you know how to sell stuff, you’ll always be able to earn a great living. The reason most business owners struggle is because they flat out refuse to learn how to sell.
6. When you deliver flat out epic value to your customers, that’s when they say positive things to their colleagues. That’s when they spread the word and send you referrals. That’s when they come back to buy from you again and again. When you take the approach of delivering high quality, it doesn’t help you to make that first sale. Instead, it leverages every sale you make into 20 more. But you still need to make that first sale. Learning to sell is what makes your business viable. Repeat and referral business…that’s what makes you wealthy.

So IN CONCLUSION…

Do you need an awesome product to have a viable, profitable business? No. You really don’t. All you need is to know how to sell stuff. When you know how to sell, you can sell anything to nearly anybody at any time. That’s the power of marketing.

Thing is, if you fail to deliver high value in return for the sales you earn, you’ll always have to hustle to earn more and more sales. You’ll never earn any advocates that way. You’ll never get repeat and referral sales. And it’s a really big missed opportunity. Some may argue it’s our ethical responsibility to deliver high value in exchange for the money our customers send us. I agree 100%. But regardless of any ethical issues, let’s get one thing straight:

It doesn’t matter how good you are at what you do. It doesn’t matter how valuable your product or service is. If you don’t know how to sell, you’re dead in the water. But as soon as you learn how marketing works, everything changes. As soon as you learn how marketing works, getting those first sales and building your client base stops being this nebulous, intimidating monster problem. It becomes easy.

And if you follow up on those sales with ridiculously high value, then you’ve changed the entire outlook of your business forever. Learning that marketing is actually a good thing is the rarest and most important lesson any small business owner can learn. If you already know this, please share this idea with your colleagues. You and I both know at least 20 people you know could use a reminder 🙂