sales

Selling vs Marketing

By Christian

The mentality that selling is bad or loathsome is pervasive. The more I talk about it, the more I’m confronted with the misconceptions people have. Even blogging A-listers and well-known social media consultants proudly express their preference for marketing over sales. Sales is broadly viewed as distasteful, and that is simply unfortunate, because it spells a huge number of missed opportunities. Marketing and sales overlap in fundamental ways, and to think you can do one or the other, especially when it comes to social media marketing where personal engagement is a key component, is a big mistake that will dilute your effectiveness to no end.

Marketing Works. So Does Sales.

Marketing works. So does sales. They are different skill sets, and a business owner needs to know how to use both. Surely many businesses have operated purely on marketing in the past. And this is what has allowed a fear of sales to develop. But social media marketing is becoming more and more crucial, and the more social media becomes an indispensable component to business, the more sales skills will become a requirement for success.

That’s why I’m using Next Level Blogger to spread the word about the importance of learning how to sell while most other bloggers are still focusing on ads. This is the direction business blogging is going.

As business owners, we need to learn that selling is not manipulation. It is not some black hat, malicious tactic. It is not the act of underhandedly trying to extort our customers. What a simplistic and inaccurate way of looking at it! Sales is a skill set. Nothing more. Nothing less. It teaches you how to engage people on a personal level, effectively and skillfully matching problems and solutions to a mutually beneficial end. It can be used to truly offer an invaluable service to our customers and clients.

Sales is Not Evil, but it IS a Super Power >:-)

Like any skill set, sales skills can be used for both good and evil. It is no different than the skills an attorney learns for navigating our legal system or that which a physician learns for solving problems of the body. Any skill set can be used for good or harm. Unfortunately sales has been abused (as is the case for ALL fields of expertise, but I digress), and it has been misunderstood for many years.

Traditional business models have allowed this misconception to perpetuate. But of course, traditional business models are crumbling these days, and that is why I’m preaching the importance of learning these essential skills, which I teach to clients. Marketing works. But combining sales and marketing in a skillful manner makes you invincible. It is a super power!

Seriously though, if you know marketing you can make a great living, and that is a beautiful skill to have. But if you know how to sell, you are recession-proof. Period. And that is a killer skill to have as well. Why would you not want both?

If Sales is Evil, then So is Your Car

You can use a car to destroy property or even kill someone. That doesn’t make driving evil or underhanded. I find it ironic that sales gets a bad wrap while marketing is touted as a more ethical and honest way to conduct business. Give me a break. I’m tempted to accuse people who say this crap of being high-minded and elitist, but I know it’s not the case. It’s just that they haven’t had the same experiences I’ve had. They don’t know the power of sales. Marketing has been abused and used to convey inaccurate and misleading messages for generations. It is no less a means of distraction and coercion than anything else.

The reason marketing has become the preferred method of building a business is not because it’s “better” or “more effective”. It’s only played out this way because it allows business owners to run their businesses from a distance…without getting emotionally or personally involved with their customers. Put more simply, it’s less messy. I don’t mean to downplay the power of marketing here. But marketing does allow you to remain detached, while sales puts you in the thick of it. It’s scary, and when something is scary our minds come up with all kinds of excuses for not doing it. But excuses don’t build successful businesses, do they?

Well, the days that we will be able to get away with running our businesses without personal engagement are numbered. This means we need to learn how to engage people on a personal level and help them solve their problems. There’s a word for that. It’s called “sales”. And if selling makes me evil, baby I don’t wanna be good >:)(just kidding)

Do you avoid selling to your customers, clients or blog readers? Do you find it difficult to ask for people to buy things? Do you feel selling is selfish, unethical or rude?

Selling on Your Blog Ain’t Hard (The Art of Asking for the Order)

By Christian

Asking for the order is a key sales principle. In fact, it’s a key life principle! If you don’t ask, you don’t get! This can often come off as a “duh” kind of statement. If you want someone to buy from you, you should probably ASK them to buy from you! Agreed?

But year after year, study after study show that salespeople will often perform an entire sales presentation and fail to ask for the order at the end. Bottom line: it’s scary for many of us to ask people to buy something. So we leave them to figure it out for themselves. We do this in the name of politeness, but really we do it out of fear. As I probably don’t even need to tell you…it rarely produces the desired result.

Internet marketers and bloggers are big culprits of this as well, not just sales people in a classic, traditional sense. Most often, as much as I hate to say it, bloggers. So many bloggers want to make money yet fail to ever ask for it. They don’t want to be pushy. It’s understandable. But the sentiment is misplaced. I’ll explain in a sec…

First, it’s important to understand that asking for the order goes for making sales but also for many other things as well.

Do you want your readers to comment your posts?
Do you want people to tweet out your articles…
Link to your site?
Download your free ebook?

Tell your readers what you want. Ask for the order. If you don’t, you’re expecting them to telepathically figure out what you want, and well frankly…why should they go through the trouble? If you want to get good results as often as possible…make it easy for them!

Where to Get Confidence to Ask for the Order

Asking for what you want requires confidence. Confidence comes from three places:

Genuine Value
Technique
Practice

I’ve trained over a thousand sales people, and I can report that very few people are good at sales starting out. I sure wasn’t. Selling simply does not come naturally to most people. It is a skill set you acquire through hard work and practice. One thing about sales is very cool. If you follow the rules, you get the results, period.

Employ these three principles, and you’ll get the results you’re looking for!

Genuine Value

Genuine value is the element I mention first, because it’s the foundation. If you don’t create genuine value for your readers, everything else is a farce. There’s a difference between selling via confidence and simply trying to make money.

Selling is not the act of extracting money from people’s wallets. Selling is the act of freely and voluntarily exchanging real value. Give your reader something very valuable, and then they reciprocate. It’s a win-win. It all starts with value. If you skip this part, the exchange is empty, and you won’t be in this business for long.

This is why I mentioned earlier that the fear of being pushy is misplaced. It’s pushy to try to get something for nothing. It’s pushy to expect someone to pay for something they don’t need. It’s pushy to pressure someone to do something that’s not in their best interest. You’re not doing anything of this sort.

What you’re doing is providing highly valuable information to people who have specifically sought you out, because they want what you’re offering. And as it happens, you’re good at what you do, and you’d like to be able to keep doing it. In order for that to happen, you simply need to get results. It’s fair and necessary to ask for what you want. And your readers aren’t going to know unless you tell them what that is.

How do you create genuine value for your readers? Be good at what you do! Study your business like a mad man. Write quality, helpful content, put out good stuff. That’s the first step.

It’s important to understand that this step doesn’t work all by itself. It’s just step one of three. Many bloggers put out awesome content and still fail to make money or get results. It’s not just about genuine value, but it’s a necessary first step.

Technique

Technique is simply a matter of making sure you’re very clear on what results you need and expect from your blog, and then systematically going through to make sure every element of your site, from the opt in boxes you use to the way you manage your email marketing, is arranged in such a way that it is clear to your readers what you’re offering and what you want them to do.

There are a number of ways to ask for what you want when it comes to managing a blog. As I mentioned before, it’s not just a matter of selling products when it comes to blogging. You want people to comment on your posts, subscribe to your email list, buy your affiliate products, etc. There are likely a number of actions you want your readers to take. It’s important to ask! Try these specific steps. They are all ways of asking, and getting:

Put a line in your theme so it displays at the end of every post, asking visitors to comment.
Make sure you have 2-3 opt in boxes per page. Your opt in box should be visible from anywhere on your site.
Use a pop-up to build email subscriptions as well
Use a free gift to further entice people to subscribe
Your outgoing email messages should give valuable information and offer interaction with your subscribers, but they should also regularly offer something for sale

Use a plugin like TweetThis that makes it easy for people to share your content with others, and make sure to remind people on occasion…”Hey, if you like this post, please retweet it…” you get the idea.

Clearly, different blogs have different goals, but this list is a start. The idea is to have your goals in order, and then simply make sure your site and the way you manage it is conducive to getting the results you want.

Practice

This element is crucial as well. The fact is that when it comes to business blogging, turning your readers into advocates, customers and clients is an ongoing process. The more you practice the better you get.

I’m surprised sometimes at how often someone will ask me why they’re not making money from their blog when, with all due respect, all they’ve done is put up a dozen posts or so and install an Adsense module. Maybe a couple affiliate links. That will make you some cash…if you’re getting several thousand visitors a day. Short of that, you’re going to need to be more aggressive and tactful in your approach.

Think of your blog as a small retail shop. You’re not WalMart. WalMart puts a bunch of stuff up on it’s shelves, sells everything really cheap and then brings in massive amounts of people through. That creates sales. You’re not WalMart, so don’t follow their business model!

What happens in a small retail shop? There are fewer items for sale, and the prices are higher. But things are also very clean. There is character, and when you walk in, a friendly person walks up, smiles and warmly says “Hi! How can I help you?” Personal service. One-on-one engagement. Details…these things matter. And they also add up to you being able to make a fine living off any niche you want. But you gotta ask for the order 🙂

The Breakdown

Here’s the bottom line: sales is simple. It’s hard work getting results on a day-to-day basis. But the process is not hard to understand. It’s just a lot of work 🙂 It’s why you’ve got guys like Gary Vaynerchuk yelling at us to get our hustle on. You have to believe in what you’re doing. And you have to LOVE what you’re doing, because to build a small business that makes bank…is a lot of hard work. No magical web design, no plugin, no kick ass turnkey business opportunity is going to save you from that reality.

That said, if you’re willing to really work it, there is massive opportunity out there! And the fundamentals of sales are steadfast. They are simple, and they remain simple.

If you’re not getting results from your site…there is something broken in your implementation of the steps I just outlined. You’re either not asking for what you want, you’re not asking often enough or *gasp* you’re not creating genuine value for your readers. One way or another, your fortune lies locked behind door one, two or three! All you gotta do is go figure out which one and smash down the door!

How to Build a Massive Blogging Business With Only 10 Subscribers

By Christian

I’m a big fan of leverage, and in the internet age, it’s mandatory that we employ as much of it as possible. You need to be able to get things going quickly! You need to be able to launch an idea without delay and build it competently and efficiently, because FAST is the name of the game.

So how to you build a rocking blog with only 10 subscribers? The answer is this: make sure they’re 10 really great subscribers! Make sure they are advocates.

No matter how far you go in your business, you will always have a core business that deserves more of your focus than anything else. This will be your advocates. Even if you have 100,000 subscribers, I guarantee you that only a handful of them are the reason for the majority of your success. It’s the old 80/20 rule. Find your advocates, my friends! That is the key to success; it’s not about huge subscriber lists (although they are fun and profitable of course); it’s about quality, and my point in this post is simple…you do not need a huge amount of subscribers in order to do a huge amount of damage!

Your power is not in your numbers…it’s in your advocates!

Traffic is Not the Answer! Advocates are the Answer

My point is simple. So many of us want to focus on getting more and more traffic to our sites, and that is understandable. But a big part of me believes it’s kind of an industrial age idea being injected into a new business model. It’s natural and human for us all to want a lot of attention, tons of comments, etc. But I contend it’s just not necessary. Fun, yes. Cool, yes. Necessary to run a profitable business? No.

If I had to choose between 10 people who truly love what I do and are willing to do whatever they can to help me out or 10,000 luke warm, half-assed followers, which do you think I’m going to choose? High traffic may be fun, but it’s rarely efficient. It’s also rarely necessary.

You just don’t have to have millions of fans in order to have millions of dollars. It may be your goal for whatever reason, and if so I’m certainly not criticizing. Go as large as you want. With a blog you can take over the world. We see it happening more and more every day.

The Fame Façade

But it’s also true…and has always been true, that a lot of very successful business people are out there operating behind the scenes. Sorry to ruin the façade for everyone (I don’t really think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know), but the very well-known internet success stories we’ve all heard of are only a small sample of what’s actually going on out there. There are also a lot of famous people who are FAR from reaching their personal goals.

I’d encourage you to not look at the famous “success” stories we all hear about to be necessarily indicative of the direction we should all be going, because it may or may not be true. Fame is not a factor. It’s only an interesting an fun phenomenon that happens to some of us occasionally. Fame certainly does not require significant personal achievement, and likewise, significant personal achievement only rarely produces fame.

If it is fame that interests you, fine, but don’t equate it to success.

Blogging to the Power of 10

All I’m saying is that you likely don’t need to start the next Facebook or Twitter or Tech Crunch or whatever to reach all your financial goals with blogging and internet marketing, so don’t assume it to be so. Look at your alternatives, and one alternative is to learn to operate a very powerful operation with only 10 fans!

Of course I use “10 fans” as only an example. The point is to illustrate that many of us assume we need many thousands of people on board before we’re going to be able to do any real damage, and I’m sorry but it’s just not true.

Each Individual Subscriber Really Does Matter

What if one of your subscribers is David Letterman? Impossible you say? I’m sorry, but do you know what David Letterman’s RSS subscription looks like as compared to anyone else’s? I have no doubt that David Letterman gets online from time to time, don’t you think? And if he’s reading your blog, and you’ve written something particularly compelling to him, don’t you see how that could lead to something significant? Absolutely it could.

As of course, here is the magic: While David Letterman (I don’t know why I specifically picked David Letterman, so don’t ask!) knows a lot of people…last time I checked, a LOT of people know a lot of people. It doesn’t take having a celebrity on board in order to make your blog hugely successful and profitable. Here’s what it takes: it takes an advocate.

What is an advocate? An advocate is someone who truly loves what you do, believes in you and actively takes pleasure in helping you spread the word. A few advocates is all it takes. And an advocate can be anyone…as long as they are truly engaged by what you do.

It really does only take 10 advocates to make your blog massively successful. In fact, in many cases it only takes ONE advocate to make a big difference. I had one post recently connect with some people in my network. Several of them tweeted it out and it them got picked up by Perry Belcher, who in turn tweeted it out, and all of a sudden my traffic went up about 800% for a few days. I’ll take it! I got a lot of cool comments and about 50 email subscribers from that one flurry of activity. If I did not have advocates, it would not have happened.

How to Get Advocates

Advocates, like anything of value, must be earned. Sorry, there’s really no short cuts here, and I cannot offer you a link to a website that offers a free tool called “how to get 10 advocates for FAST and for FREE”. This human engagement, and it can only be accomplished through real personal interaction over time.

Think of it this way, which is quicker?

Build 10 significant relationships with people over time, or-
Follow thousands of people on Twitter and hope that half of them follow you back?

Of course it’s quicker and easier to build a crappy list, but the result is a crappy list, so why bother?

How many subscribers do you have now? If you have 100 subscribers, and those 100 subscribers were procured the right way, I bet you that your 10 advocates are already there. Now it’s just a matter of identifying them and cultivating a relationship with them over time. Don’t let them slip away; you’re staring at a literal gold mine!

If you’ve just started this whole blogging thing, and you only have a few subscribers…don’t look at that as a bad thing. You’re not deficient. You’re sitting on a gold mine…I promise you! It only takes a few advocates.

If you rock, they will come.

The Threshold of Success – Why Most Bloggers Never Make It

By Christian

Success is a nasty, elusive little bugger, isn’t it? Is there a topic in the business space that gets covered more often, directly or indirectly, than “how to succeed”? If you think about it, nearly every how-to tip, every list of the “best WordPress plugins to use on your site”, every tutorial on how to get more traffic to your site, etc…it all centers around the ultimate hub that concerns us all…SUCCESS. How do we become successful?

Success is Not Defined by “Them”, It’s Defined by YOU

One of the reasons success is such a troublesome topic is because it is exceedingly personal. When we accept this fact, success becomes a lot simpler. Not necessarily easy…but simpler none the less. But unfortunately, most of us have not accepted it! The problem is that most of us, understandably, look to the example of others for how to define success, when we really ought to look no further than ourselves. In essence, we look at the accomplishments of others, and make those accomplishments our own goals. This is not the way to do it.

A Lesson from Gary Vaynerchuk – Not All Goals are Created Equal

It’s important to ask yourself if the accomplishment you’re trying to emulate was in fact a goal of your mentor’s to begin with. For example, we see someone like Gary Vaynerchuk with 800,000 followers, or however many it is these days, and we say “I want 800,000 followers too. How do I get 800,000 followers on Twitter like @garyvee?”

Setting a goal is a great thing…if it’s a great goal. There IS such a thing as a goal that steers you down the wrong path, so make sure the questions you ask yourself, and the goals you set for yourself are taking you in the right direction.

The fact is that Gary Vaynerchuk has never given a damn about how many followers he has on Twitter. Getting 800,000 followers was never a goal. It just happened as an automatic result of following his business plan.

Do you want to model his follower count, or do you want to model his success? See the difference?

Maybe you should model Gary’s work ethic and business philosophy…the things that actually LEAD to 800,000 followers, instead of just trying to get 800,000 followers on Twitter.

If you truly wanted to model Gary Vaynerchuk’s success, you wouldn’t give a damn about how many followers you had on Twitter either. This is just one of many examples of arbitrary goals we set for ourselves, that sound good but ultimately don’t lead us in the direction of success.

I’m just using Gary as an example because he’s a marketer and business man who I personally agree with a lot of the time. Your mentor may be someone else, but the concept is the same.

Why Success is Elusive

My point is that success is elusive for many of us for two reasons, and the first one is because often, we set goals that take us in the wrong direction. To take care of this first concern, make sure you set goals that will truly lead YOU in the direction YOU personally want to go, not goals that you believe possibly lead someone else in the direction they went. See the difference?

The Threshold of Success – How to Cross Over and Make Your Goals a Reality

Second, success has a threshold. And many of us, while we want the things success provides, are not willing to do the work. Plain and simple. I’ve worked with a lot of sales people one-on-one and in group settings over the years. Sales training like I’ve done puts you front and center with what it takes to make a business work. It also puts you front and center with the reasons they all too often DON’T work.

No business is successful without strong sales. Whether it’s a service, a product or whatever, you need sales, and I’m hear to tell you that the sales skills I aim to teach my clients are able to be learned by anyone.

If you do the work, you will get the sales, period. I’ve seen it time and time again. When a business person or sales person wants to know how to make more sales, the first place I look is at their daily production. And by production I don’t mean sales…I mean their daily work-related tasks…the work you can actually control on a day to day basis.

You cannot control whether a person is a good prospect to buy a certain product at a certain time, believe it or not. But you CAN learn to have complete control over the following factors:

Prospecting
Lead generation
Lead follow up
Presentation skills

If you are not making the money you want to online, or wherever your business is based, there is something broken somewhere in that list. Why? Because that’s all there is. Success is simple. The plain fact is that while people SAY they’re working their tail off every day, they’re either working on the wrong things (things NOT on the list above), or they’re not working as hard as they say they are.

What is the threshold of success? It is hard work…on the right things. And bottom line: most of us just don’t want to do it.

We have things we like to do, and perhaps we just don’t like prospecting. That’s fine, but if you want your business to be successful, you need to make sales, and if you want to make sales, you have to prospect. Period. End of sentence. That’s all she wrote. And if you don’t do it…or hire someone who does…your business will fail.

The reason most of us don’t make it through the threshold of success is not because we don’t work hard. We just don’t do the work that needs to be done. Perhaps the reason “successful” people seem to be at ease is because they realize how simple it is to make their goals a reality. There are, however, only four things on the list!

5 Ways to Create Urgency

By Christian

Urgency is a staple for anyone who sells anything, anywhere. As anyone who follows this blog knows, my career started in door to door sales. In that environment, you learn immediately that the time to make the sale is NOW. Not later. Later never comes. No one ever calls you back when you’re selling stuff door to door, so you have to make the sale on the spot or just move on to the next appointment. So the ability to create urgency is mandatory.

Selling online is very much the same, but the approach is very different. If you try hard selling people online, you will be wasting your time in a big way! You will turn them away and you’ll never see them again. Yet at the same time, you need to sell things in order to make money, so what’s the solution? How can you create urgency to buy your product or service now?

How to Create Urgency

Here are the ways to get prospects to buy your product now, as opposed to later…or never:

Limited Supply – This needs to be used very cautiously. In other words, be truthful. Honesty is absolutely essential with internet marketing. If you expect people to trust you that is. And remember what we’ve said about trust. If you’re product is a digital product, how can it possibly be “only available to the next 100 people?” It is this type of claim that will make your buyer leave immediately, thinking poorly of you and your brand. This type of urgency is easier to use well when you apply it to a service. For example, I do consulting for business owners who want to get better results marketing themselves online, and it’s easy enough to say at any given time that I can “only take on 3 more clients”, because it’s true. My time is very limited, so I really can only take on a few clients at a time. If it’s true, make sure your buyers understand the supply is limited. It creates urgency.
Limited Time – Placing a time limit is one of the more common and effective methods of creating urgency with both products and services. Placing a time limit on a valuable asset (like an ebook or a service you’re offering) is very reasonable, especially if you back it up with detailed information as to why you’re doing it this way. People respect authentic boundaries and expect you to charge for valuable things. They understand you need to make money. But keep one key point in mind: make sure to follow through. Stick to your word. If you’re offering an introductory price for an information product for a specific time frame, when that time frame closes, it closes. If people catch you going back on your word just to make another sale, you’ll regret it. Remember, everything you do has a ripple effect!
Reduced Price – Price is always one of the first things people want to do to entice sales. I’m including it because it works, but it’s not one I recommend. I usually avoid it and prefer to do business at full price. I always offer full value and then some, and I expect to earn what I’m worth. I feel that if someone is only buying something from me because it’s cheap, then they’re really not an ideal customer. In other words, if the value is actually there, the real customer would have bought it at the higher price anyway, so why drop the price? This is a personal choice. It’s not an endorsement for over-charging, mind you. Charge what something is worth and leave it at that. That’s my take on it. Dropping the price and making it cheaper just cheapens the product. I prefer to increase the value. If your product only sells well when it’s cheap, you have a problem.
Added Benefits – This flows nicely out of my argument about pricing. Instead of dropping the price of something you’re selling, add more to it. And leave the price the same. I’ve always believed that people are not nearly as cheap as Wal-Mart makes them out to be. Of course if you put two pairs of jeans together and one costs $150 while the other is priced at $20, most people are going to go the $20 route. But that’s just where your business differs, right? You’re offering a unique service that no one else can compete with, right? If someone wants to get what you’re offering, they pretty much need to go to you, right? So why cheapen it? Instead, add MORE value. Constantly add to your products and services. And of course, blog about the improvements you’ve made. Tell the world. And leave your prices alone. People want value, and they are willing to pay for it, because they know it’s what enables you to keep working your tail off.
Create an Overwhelmingly Compelling Value – This is the holy grail of urgency. Create a product or service that speaks directly to your buyers’ needs in a powerful way. Create massive value, and show them in detail how you can help them create huge pleasure or avoid pain in their lives. Do this, and market it with passion, and you will create urgency by default. We’ve all experienced it…when a marketing piece connects with us in just the right way, at just the right time…it’s almost magical, and we have no choice but to pull out our credit card. Any time this happens, it is not luck. Behind that sales copy and product that reeled you in at that unexpected time is an entrepreneur who was up very late for days or weeks…or months, researching and planning, writing and rewriting, getting every detail right. And then it all came together.

Creating urgency is an art that balances reason and emotion. The successful internet marketer understands that people buy because of emotional reasons, but they back up their decision with analytical data. The successful internet marketer uses both of these elements in sales copy to make sure that the buyer has everything necessary to make a buying decision…now.