Sales And Marketing Lessons From Barack Obama

Our current President possesses some extremely impressive skills, and all the way at the top of the list BY FAR is his skill at persuading Americans (he does, after all, hold the record for most votes ever received by an American political candidate – despite an almost complete lack of experience, a scandal-ridden administration and an extremely underwhelming track record).

I admire his stubborn persistence to continue trying all kinds of sales and marketing strategies to sell his signature piece of legislation to the American public.

Some outspoken critics of Obamacare scoff at the various marketing campaigns, proclaiming nonsense like, “If something is good and useful, you don’t have to sell it” and “A good product sells itself.”

I wholeheartedly disagree. As does every successful business person.

(Will someone please let Apple, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Disney, Honda, Rolex, American Express, etc. etc. etc. know that they should stop all of their marketing efforts?)

In last week’s post, I wrote about Jay Abraham’s famous pronouncement:

If you truly believe that what you have is useful and valuable to your clients, then you have a moral obligation to try to serve them in every way possible.”

I’m convinced that President Obama and other progressive liberals actually believe that Obamacare is a good law. So even though I completely disagree with that belief, I admire their commitment to fulfill their moral obligation by trying everything they possibly can to sell and market it.

But despite all of his skills of persuasion, and all of the creative and persistent marketing being done by him, with him and for him, his attempt has been doomed to fail from the very beginning.

And that’s not just because Obamacare itself is a complete and utter train wreck of a law (as I first wrote about here), but because of four universal marketing principles that even The Leader Of The Free World cannot overcome:

Sales And Marketing Lesson #1 You Should Learn From Barack Obama (if you didn’t know it already):

People don’t buy what they NEED – they buy what they WANT.

When Obama and his fellow progressive liberals campaigned and pushed for the passage of Obamacare, they repeatedly claimed that it would be the solution to the problem that 46 million Americans didn’t have health insurance.

The latest fuzzy figures released by “the most transparent administration in history” say that 5 million people have signed up for healthcare since the infamous launch of Healthcare.gov. Of course, we don’t know how many of those qualified for medicaid, or how many of those actually completed their purchase of health insurance by paying their first month’s premium.

But let’s use a figure that even the law’s most fervent supporters wouldn’t dare and project that by the enrollment deadline less than two weeks from now (more on that later), a total of 8 million previously-uninsured people will have obtained health insurance thanks to Obamacare.

That would still leave about 38 million Americans still without health insurance – or about 83% of the group that Obamacare was specifically designed to help.

In other words, only about 17% of those whom Obama and the progressive liberals claim “need” health insurance will have proven willing to buy it. The other 83% or so just don’t want it, and all the slick and creative sales and marketing our Commander In Chief can spend our tax dollars on won’t get them to buy it.

Because people buy what they WANT – not what other people think they NEED.

TIP: You may think you have a product or service that people NEED, but you will likely get very frustrated (and possibly go broke) trying to sell it. Find out what people WANT instead, and then offer it to them.

Sales And Marketing Lesson #2 You Should Learn From Barack Obama (if you didn’t know it already):

“Leads” are not “sales.”

Perhaps Obama’s most-famous and most-effective strategy to market his ironically-named “Affordable Care Act” was to film a 6:30 “Funny Or Die” video of a mock interview with comedic actor Zack Galifianakis a few of weeks ago. The video was released to the public last Tuesday and immediately went viral, tallying over a million views in just its first three-and-a-half hours and breaking the 3 million mark in under six hours. Yesterday, it broke the 19-million view mark in its first week.

Within hours of its release, the White House promoted the fact that the video was fulfilling its intended goal of driving a tremendous number of hits to the Healthcare.gov website (although “the most transparent administration in history” characteristically neglected to share any details about the actual number until nearly a week later, when Senior Advisor to the President Valerie Jarrett said it was about a million in the first day alone).

That immediately made me think of the saying that sharp marketers have:

“Hits” stands for “How Idiots Track Success.”

Does anyone in their right mind believe that a million previously-uninsured Americans (or even a meaningful fraction of that number) watched this video and then immediately purchased health insurance as a result?

Remember: “Leads” are not “sales.” (On the internet, that translates to: “Hits” don’t mean “sales.”)

TIP: Don’t be fooled into focusing on “traffic” or “leads” or “hits” – focus on the only thing that actually matters: RESULTS.

Sales And Marketing Lesson #3 You Should Learn From Barack Obama (if you didn’t know it already):

Selling “prevention” is a monumental, difficult, expensive undertaking.

In a “town hall meeting” last week, President Obama actually showed how little he knows about effective marketing when he tried to convince young people to buy health insurance instead of cable TV and cell phones, saying:

“If you looked at their cable bill, their telephone, their cell phone bill… it may turn out that, it’s just they haven’t prioritized health care.”

That’s right, Mr. President. And they never will. Because they’re humans.

Newsflash: Health insurance is not a priority for healthy human beings.

TIP: Even if you do sell “prevention,” you should come up with a way to present your “prevention” as a “cure.”

*NOTE: That was the original plan to sell Obamacare: By purchasing it, previously-uninsured people would avoid having to pay a tax penalty. Unfortunately, this was an inept strategy, because the penalty is FAR less than the cost of buying the thing that uninsured people don’t want – insurance. (Not to mention that not only do young, healthy people not want to buy health insurance, but many of them also don’t want to be used to subsidize the needs of older, less healthy people just so that the whole system doesn’t fall apart.)

Sales And Marketing Lesson #4 You Should Learn From Barack Obama (if you didn’t know it already):

As I wrote in this blog post:

There is tremendous power in a deadline.

*I won’t type everything out again, because you can easily just click on that link above and go re-read that post (and take ACTION on what I teach in it!).

Pay attention over the next couple of weeks, because you’re likely to see not only a flurry of marketing by our federal government, but also the best enrollment numbers since Obamacare’s launch (not that we really know the true details).

TIP: You should do the same:

1. ALWAYS set a deadline to go along with every one of your offers; and
2. Ramp up your marketing efforts as the deadline approaches, because that’s when people are most likely to take action.

Here’s the bottom-line…

The Leader Of The Free World (and quite possibly The World’s Most Persuasive Man) is having tremendous trouble – you could say “failing miserably” – selling his signature law designed to provide something that tens of millions of Americans supposedly “need,” despite the backing of dozens of major celebrities and athletes and almost all of the nation’s mainstream media, the help of some of the most creative advertising minds in the world and a budget of nearly $700 million of your tax dollars at work.

Can YOU afford to make any of the many major mistakes that Barack Obama is making with his beloved Obamacare when it comes to the sales and marketing of YOUR product or service?