It means a lot of different things to people depending on where they are standing. But in this chapter, my goal is to first make sure we are standing in the same position before extracting the actual value I want to share with you.
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You are reading this book because you are trying to build a business or organization of some sort right? If that’s the case, keep reading.
In the last chapter, we talked about “the person(s)” as one of the pillars we must clearly identify before trying to set up marketing campaigns in the digital era. A failure to do this will simply defeat the purpose; which I am hoping is partly the benefits of tracking down every penny and making sure it doubles itself.
You also learned how my 500 and change in credit score saved me from early life bankruptcy. Personally, I’ve had some ups and downs naturally in the type of risky and non-conventional journey I chose to embark on; becoming an entrepreneur. But it’s never gotten so bad that I had to file for bankruptcy. Thank goodness.
More importantly, you also learned how lack of proper market research and competition analysis can result in losing your life savings and/or capital; $10 at a time. We reviewed the dangers of passion-driven biases, the greatest market research tool which is free, seed keyword and keyword phrases, the role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in market research and more.
Last and definitely not all and for sure, not the least, we talked about the two different categories of your ideal customer and client and the four stages they have to travel in order to not just maximize profits for your business but to deliver value.
And speaking of value, I became dangerous and over-valued for the 9-5 world since I learned what you are about to discover in this chapter.
It was 2014 and I had been helping quite a few people I met in the internet and network marketing world make their first $100, $1,000, $200,000 and even $4 million completely online. Not just that, I did very well with my business too.
But the honest truth is that I had not fully grasped the magnitude of the value in what I had learned. On my best day ever, I was able to use written text and words to convert complete strangers into a $15,000 sales. And I did it multiple times over. Somehow, I had acquired a skill set that could collect such an amount of money in exchange for a digital product without being physically present to sell.
Before that, my best day ever was back in real estate when I closed a deal that created a net profit of $82,000.
But let’s put things into perspective right? There are a lot of things that go into the process of closing real estate deals and it wasn’t easy to say the least. I could potentially sit around for months and not close another deal.
In addition to that, a whole real estate property belonging to a person or a family is involved. It’s a big deal in terms of vested interest involved when a decision is made to buy or sell real estate in comparison to an online transaction; especially back then.
But these days, people are more comfortable with purchasing a whole car online. So it’s actually gotten a whole lot easier provided you are able to communicate the value proposition effectively.
I will forever be grateful to gentlemen; Mike Dillard and Ben Settle, for learning these skill sets from them as far back 2009/2010. I do not think they know who I am at all. But it doesn’t matter because you are about to learn the skills more than 10 years later.
Sales is hard for an average human being. Most people are only comfortable selling a resume. And to be honest, it’s because of the dependency on the credentials and the experience to do the selling for them in a non-confrontational way.
It’s actually similar to why an estimated 77% of people hate public speaking. According to many studies, people actually fear public speaking more than death. They get bombarded by panic and a paralyzing fear of guess what; rejection. I personally still hate the feelings of being rejected.
When you pay close attention to what I just said, it’s not the actual rejection. It’s the “feeling” of being rejected that paralyzes people to avoid sales, public speaking or being in any position where the ultimate desire is to be accepted. It’s fascinating to know.
So many people fantasize about the idea of a big business. But then the fear of being rejected becomes a huge huddle in their way directly or indirectly.
Even if you are a person who is naturally okay with sales, it's a challenge to build a sales team with a decent attrition rate which is the rate at which people leave your organization or team. People find it a lot easier to use a resume or CV to sell their time in exchange for less than $50 per hour than to sell even air to breathe.
You can invent the best product in the world. If you are terrible at communicating the value in it to a prospect, you won’t be able to afford its production sooner or later.
Another struggle is the inability for a lot of people to know the difference in personal values and the value in a product for prospects.
Why do people window-shop? I’ll tell you why. A prospect can want a product and not be able to afford it. Sometimes, it’s just the wrong timing. But that’s not the reason why people are not buying your product or services.
The reason why people chose not to purchase from you is because you failed to transfer enough value in a way that it’s valuable to them. It was a negative choice against added value for your business.
Value in this context is in the eyes of the user or consumer and not in the eyes of the producer. Value is absolutely not an objective truth; it’s subjective but only until you learn what I want to share with you right now.
So it’s one thing to know the benefit of your product or service, it’s completely another thing to know how to transfer the value of those benefits to the prospects in order to buy now.
I am sure you have probably learned about the differences between features and benefits before. Well, this is an additional layer to the madness. But when you master this skill set, you will become dangerously profitable as your competitors drown in debt.
Oxford dictionary calls sales the exchange of a commodity for money but it also calls it the action of selling something. But then what is selling? If you are able to transfer value to your potential customers and clients at scale using written words, what would that mean for your business?
According to INC magazine, a Harvard professor says 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious. I personally learned a long time ago that 85% of sales are initiated emotionally and they justify with logic later.
So while you may present with all the facts and figures to back up your own version of the value that the product and services offer, you will fail 85%-95% of the time because you are selling the wrong value to the wrong side of the human mind. It’s a hard pill to swallow.
Have you ever heard the saying “Facts tell but story sells?” Storytelling is a highly profitable skill to learn and no amount of facts, data and statistics can engage the human mind like a good story. It’s not necessarily the easiest thing to do but it’s non-negotiable when we create an offer.
The key in successfully transferring the value to your prospect or dare I say, sometimes manufacturing value out of thin air in a way that is perceived by your prospect, is to tap into their real motivation to buy. I promise you. It has nothing to do with doing the “right” thing.
Why do people buy? Seriously, why do people buy into anything, ideas, ideologies, belief system, a product, a service or anything? What motivates them to buy? By now, you should get the gist. It’s not logical.
Is it because they need it, they want it, can afford it? Let’s be honest. People buy things they can’t afford all the time, right?
In fact, for every time you engage unnecessary empathy around the decision of a person not buying from you for affordability reasons, they probably just spent ten times your price on a ten times worse competitor’s product or service. So affordability is rarely even a motivator to buy a product or not.
There are many motivation theories from numerous studies and I love them all. But allow me to share a few with you and then I will share my favorite.
Maslow’s need hierarchy theory is based on people's basic five need-levels namely; survival, safety, love or belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization. I personally would add “a sense of” to each one of those because people don’t even assess those things logically. They are mostly based on feelings at an emotional level.
Also, there is Herzberg’s motivational and hygiene factors. Have you heard of McClelland's human motivation theory which states that every person has one of three main driving motivators: the needs for achievement, affiliation (sounds like belonging again), or power. These are all mindsets.
People would buy things just because of a sense of belonging even when it directly offers no tangible value to them. So when designing a marketing and sales message around your product and service, you have to be careful with your definition of value.
The key thing to always remember is that it’s in the eyes of your prospect and rarely ever about your personal belief system. While you should be absolutely confident about the value you feel your product and service offers, you need to remain aware that it’s about making that confidence contagious enough for the prospect to feel that level of confidence, pull the credit card out and buy now.
So you have managed to come up with a good product in your opinion. People are checking it out but they are not buying. In fact, you know a few of these prospects personally and you’ve deemed their excuses legitimate enough to keep looking for the right customer.
NEWSFLASH: It’s either you haven’t made an offer or you’ve got a bad offer. What is an offer and how is that different from a product?
An offer is a presentation of a product beyond just the product. Some kind of tangible or intangible element has been added to make the product compelling enough to make them buy now. In essence, a product is just a product but “buy and get one free” is an offer.
The product will always be available but there is no guarantee that the offer will be available if you do not buy right now. As for intangibles, the same can be said about “a limited time” discounted price. Again, the product or at least an indirect competition to the product will always be available but there is no guarantee there will be a discount at a later time.
But these are the obvious ones you’ve encountered at a mall before. Let’s get back to using text and words to make a prospect buy from you now and not later. It’s nothing other than your ability to communicate the value proposition with the subconscious mind.
My favorite of the motivation theories is said to have been birthed by Sigmun Freud but it was made famous by Abraham Maslow. I discovered it through Tony Robbins.
The six basic human needs are love or connection, variety, significance, certainty, growth, and contribution. If you are able to stimulate a sense of these needs at a subconscious and emotional level inside of your prospects mind, you will damn near print money on-demand.
What it looks like is to spell and trace out an emotional journey from discovery to feeling absolutely stupid for not figuring out a way to buy now. Sure there will be situations where a buyer is unable to buy. But what you want is your prospects sending messages expressing their fear of missing out on an offer.
If you can craft a message in a way that they feel left out if they don’t buy, the idea of buying is exciting, they can feel a sense of a certainty in the promised transformation into a desired state of some kind of advancement, they feel even more important, and feel like your offer will make them create a desired impact on society, then your product will have a chance of delivering the value it was intended for.
A good product or service solves a problem, answers a question or replaces pain with pleasure or relief. Stating out the features, benefits, problem, solution, question and answer is not enough.
You will create more customers and clients in your business when you spell out the pain, the desired pleasure or relief especially when you are able to qualify them from a place of feelings or emotions.
Can you use words to communicate the expected transformation? Can you imagine what the pain of the present state of your customer feels like? When you can communicate the emotional state after the transformation that your product and service has delivered, you will dominate your market.
As I told you towards the end of last chapter, your customer will travel through four main stages namely:
Discovery Awareness Consideration and… ConversionThe transition between each one of these stages is a conversion and you are responsible to persuade your prospect through each one of these transitions and segments. In digital marketing, we use a mix of words, images, videos and creatives to compel them to advance to the next level or segment.
This is what I want you to do in order to put a seal on the secret you just discovered in this chapter. There are some copy elements I want you to start paying attention to in the various marketing messages that you encounter henceforth. I promise. You will start noticing them on all your favorite social media platforms now. You probably found this book through one of my ad creatives and copy.
For the rest of this book, we may refer to the front end discovery level marketing message as creatives. It simply means the actual visuals that you see first, be it words, images, videos, slides, etc. The idea is to get you to a space where you are absolutely intentional on how you craft the message.
Most of the social media platforms land you on a news feed as soon as you login. That space is one of the most valuable spaces on the whole internet and the platforms are very aware of that. That’s why they sell opportunities to post your messages on the news feed for a fee.
It’s the same concept of the newspaper selling ad spaces inside a newspaper and other news channels since the ancient Roman times. When you manage to get your message on these pages, you have three seconds or less to capture the attention of your ideal audience and sell them on advancing from discovery to awareness.
It’s in your best interest to learn the art and sciences of using words and text to persuade your audience to take the actions you desire on your creatives. It’s called copywriting and the elements in it are called ‘copy”.
You can also use the same skill set in presentation to capture the heart of a c-suite panelist and get them to buy your offers. In fact, this understanding will be responsible for your ability to create irresistible offers.
When your prospect resists your offers, they will lose sleep over it and will not have peace until they come back and buy your product and services. It has nothing to do with the actual product. But it has everything to do with how owning your product or using your service makes them feel.
When you see a post with a label “Sponsored” next to it, become obsessed with the “copy”. Can you see how the copywriter was able to capture your attention? What color combinations are used? What solution is being offered to solve what problem and how are they promising some kind of relief to what pain?
Go ahead and save as many sponsored feed posts as possible, review and study them like your life depends on it. They will become a swipe file of creatives to model your execution after when we get to that stage.
In the next section, we will start talking about the processes and how you can automate more than 90% of it to get more leads, customers, clients and more deals. We are going to start with the process that connects the persons as discussed in chapter 2 with the value as we have just discussed in this chapter.0
