Marketing Lesson: Why You Should Never Go For The Sales (And What To Do Instead)

Let's not sugar coat it - marketing is hard.

I've learnt a lot of marketing lesson(s) in my 16years long career.

Even though I have developed controversial yet astonishing effective marketing systems and strategies that has generated sales, grown revenue and profits for our clients, there's still so much to learn.

Marketing is the most important skill you need to grow your business, but also the hardest to master.

Why?

Because it's always changing.

My #1 lesson when it comes to marketing is a simple one...

Helping people is a prerequisite if you want them to buy from you.

Think all my content that you consume.

I have two goals, maybe even more:

1. To genuinely help you, by sharing my absolute best advice
2. To position myself as a trusted authority and expert

When you help people solve hard problems BEFORE selling to them, you stand out in your market.

Why?

Because everyone is focused on selling. All the time.

When you focus on helping people instead, you earn their trust, and trust is what brings money.

When it comes to the interaction between you and your prospects, trust is the forerunner of money.

Meaning, people will not pay you until they trust you. For them to pay you, they must trust you.

So, see trust as the "root" and see "money" as the fruit.

You need to be chasing the "root" instead of the fruit.

All you need to do is what will make the customers trust you because when they do, they'll give you money without stress.

Helping also positions you as an authority in your market -- and having authority gives you a huge influence over purchasing decisions.

It doesn't matter if you run a digital agency, if you sell software, if you're a coach or anything in between.

Your future customers have problems which you can (and should) help them solve.

They have questions in their head and until that question is cleared, they won't be able to buy from you.

It has nothing to do with you, it could be your competitors cheated them or in a way, they lost money before and wouldn't want a repeat.

Well, they might if you can manipulate them.

"What do you mean manipulate,Johnson?"

Isn't that what the 'sales-dogs' ask you to do?

Go out there, read 99% of the sales books, all you hear is make sure you collect the money as quick as possible.

What they do not know is that you may collect the money but you may lose the relationship capital.

Before we launch ANYTHING in any of my companies, we ALWAYS help first.

We do that via series of email, videos, audio, etc.

Those emails have one goal and one goal only:

To position us as an expert, which helps build trust and "greases the wheel" to make an offer later.


Think it's a waste of time sending out helpful emails instead of just going straight for the sale?

Well, one time i got 250 replies to an email broadcast i did...

Here are some of the best replies I've received so far:

"Out of all those countless voices online you are one of the very, very few who’s the real deal."

"Excellent advice. Thank you for sending these incredible emails. I share them with my co-founder."

"I don't normally read long emails like this, but yours was pure gold! Subscriber for life."

"I love this. Looking forward to the other emails in this series!"

"Huge fan. Thanks for sharing your wisdom during these difficult times."

(Hint: when you send out emails, literally ask people to reply to you. It builds a huge bond and shows them you're a real person...)

Or look at how people were wanting to jump into my offer because i helped them first.

Take a look below:

Once you've built up trust with potential customers, you don't have to "sell" to them at all.

You simply tell them about your product or service, explain how it can help them, tell them what it costs, remove all risk in their buying decision and give them a way to pay.

When you help first and sell second, you can avoid all of the "trickery" that a lot of businesses have to use when it comes to sales, because they don't understand marketing.

You don't need to hire aggressive sales people.

You don't need to send thousands of cold emails.

You don't need to "network" (ugh) at trade shows.

All that stuff is only required if you get the marketing equation wrong.

So here's the correct equation when it comes to marketing:

                                                        H=T=C

                                   Helping = Trust = Customers

That's it.

When we launched this particular bran, in a first 12months, we were smiling to the bank.

Traffic to the site was exponential,leads were jumping in from all corners, sales was growing daily.

Why?

We got the marketing equation right.

We never sold anyone. We got them hooked by helping.

I mean helping without expecting anything back.

Google also loved our content, so our pages ranked at the top of organic search results for a bunch of high-volume keywords and phrases.

The take away from this . Ask yourself one question:

"What percentage of my marketing is helping and what percentage is selling?"

A good goal to shoot for is 80% helping and 20% selling.

For example, if you send 10 emails to your list, 8 of them should be helpful and packed with content, while 2 of them should make them an offer to buy your product or service.

If you spend $100 a day on Facebook Ads, $80 should be spent to run ads that help people in your market. The other $20 should be spent retargeting the people who clicked your ad with an offer to buy your product or service.

Easy enough, right?

Think about it like a piggy bank. Every time you help someone solve a problem problem, you're depositing goodwill into your piggy bank.

The more you help, the more goodwill you're earning.

Then when it's time to make them an offer or pitch them to buy your product or service, you're reducing the goodwill you've built up in your piggy bank.

Most businesses build up zero goodwill and keep making offers, so their goodwill balance starts at zero and actually goes NEGATIVE the more offers they make.

The key?

Always keep a positive balance in your goodwill piggy bank!

So, help 80% of the times, and sell only 20%.

Be honest, do you truly like people who keep pitching you all the time in an aggressive manner to win your business?