Joe Polish: Selling Past Barriers (Part VI)

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From the eyes of a marketer, I am constantly amazed by the perception that people have of the artificial God-like status of certain celebrities.

I was talking to my friend JR, who is a former Make-A-Wish kid, earlier, before this call, and I was talking about how it’s amazing to me that there’s people that work – mothers, people that work at hospice centers, business people that do things on a daily basis that are more noble, more interesting, more a lot of things than a lot of famous actors, celebrities, musicians, artists.

I’m not doing a slam on those industries. What I’m saying is obviously there are many individuals in all fields that do incredibly awesome things that are amazing. And there’s a ton of people that do amazing awesome things that no one ever sees. The main reason is because of the media.

When someone is positioned and plastered all over television or magazines or radio, you name it, the internet, have a giant Twitter following, whatever, people tend to think that these people are absolutely incredible because of all of the social proof.

Now, the lesson behind that is there are a lot of people that frankly, in my opinion, don’t deserve a damn bit of recognition but get a shit-load of it because they’re “famous.” In a lot of ways, a lot of them are scoundrels.

And there are other people that do amazing things that aren’t positioned well at all, but it really is a marketing lesson. The marketing lesson is it’s about positioning. It’s about setting things up so by the time someone comes to you, they’re pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and pre-disposed to give you money, pay attention to you, watch your movie, whatever it is. It is still simply a marketing thing.

Going back to selling, marketing makes selling easy and ideally unnecessary. There are certain people that, if they get the right sort of media or they position themselves, look at Jersey Shore. You don’t need to be a highly-intelligent person, although many people that look stupid on television and have huge shows are not, some of them are very smart people, although the way they’re portrayed may not be in the best light because of the sound bytes and the editing and everything along those lines.

There’s so much to be learned from just thinking about that. Both me and you, for instance, going back to my original thing, and hopefully my tangent here is making sense, if someone listens to 55 hours of me and you, they actually, in their minds, consider me and you a who, because they’ve listened to 55 hours of us. Then, when they meet us, they have a certain level of knowledge and, in many cases, respect or, in your case disrespect, because most people don’t like you because of your personality, your corrosive personality that you give off, versus my pleasant, non-judgmental, non- opinionated. You know what I’m saying here.

When they actually meet us, or you, or me, there’s a certain positioning that exists. Why? Because we put out a podcast, and we talk about marketing things. If people resonate with it, they like it, and most people we meet treat us differently if they’ve listened to a bunch of our stuff versus if we ran into someone in a grocery store or ran into someone in a gym who doesn’t know who the hell we are.

What does that have to do with your life and your business? It has everything to do with it. Hopefully, that made sense.

The strategy of thinking to ask your clients why do they not buy from you, determining what their barriers to success are, their barriers as to why they’re not doing business with you and addressing those barriers in different ways. You can even create your own version of an audio like you’re going to hear, that we post up.