Joe Polish: Selling Past Barriers (Part V)

Image courtesy of samarttiw/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The selling of how-to advice, for those that are in the info business, it’s a really interesting sort of business.

Let’s say you’re selling courses that are printed. A lot of people think, “What are the tools of the trade?” You write and you print. The tools of the trade are really marketing. The tools of anyone’s trade, to really get skilled at, is the selling and the marketing of it, because there are some of the best books in the world that I’ve ever read that have never become best-sellers, that the authors never made anything from, because they’re lacking one essential ingredient, which is the ability to sell it and market it to other people.

I always chuckle at the whole Facebook thing, “Free, and always will be.” We’ve talked about that on the episode we did on Facebook advertising, with Perry Marshall. How does Facebook make money? They sell advertising, because they’ve got to do something in order to pay for all of the investors that are hoping to become multi- multimillionaires, which they will as a result of a “free” social network.

Everything in your business world is going to have a particular cost. One of the most expensive is the actual selling it to people. I think one of the number one reasons that people do not succeed in business – there’s all kinds of reasons, from management to all kinds of stuff – I simply would say the number one reason is lack of the ability to market it and sell it.

Most people do not go out of business because they have too many customers. Not that that doesn’t happen; because, of course, it can and it does. However, what I love telling people is, “When you come into one of our programs, one of the problems we want to create for you is management problems, because we want you to have so many people wanting to buy your stuff that you have to figure out the logistics of how to better deliver on greater demand.”

But if you don’t have the demand, it doesn’t matter how good it is. The point is, another reason I wanted to read that, was the marketing that we’re actually teaching on I Love Marketing actually, in many cases, makes selling easy and ideally unnecessary. What marketing is, the type of marketing we teach – direct response – is selling in advance. If you have a free recorded message, if you have a video, if you have all of that stuff, you don’t have to go through the grueling task of doing selling in the traditional sense of face-to-face or on the phone or starting from scratch and not having any collateral materials in order to help position you properly before you actually ask people to give you money.

That is the beauty of this type of marketing and all of the strategies.

I first heard that line from Denny Hatch, who used to be the editor of Target Market magazine. He wrote a great book called Million Dollar Mailings. He’s written a bunch of books. He’s assembled things on direct marketing quotes and whatnot. I interviewed him many years ago. He was doing a presentation, and it was marketing makes selling easy and ideally unnecessary.

Not in 100% of all cases, but many cases.

We have one client who is in the drug-testing business, a handful of different industries. And they are people that, every day, are making sales from people that they physically never even have to talk to. People call up and say, “When can you do the job?” if it’s a service business, or online marketers just making sales because all of the marketing methods that we teach are being utilized, and positioning them so it makes selling unnecessary.

The best way to sell is to people that are already converted. I want to preach to the converted.