Lie #10 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #10 : "Build a superior product, offer a superior service, and provide elegant solution to difficult problems, and you will be successful."

NOT true.

There are all kinds of highly educated, talented people who are selling custom doors at Home Depot. It's not what they want to do, it's not what they should be doing - so why are so many talented people having such a hard time?

Here's why:

What you can do and how good you are does not matter. What matters is how well you COMMUNICATE what you do and how good you are. That is the difference.

Every year, tens of thousands of people invent, innovate and create brilliant products, terrific solutions to truly perplexing problems - only to find out that it's darn hard to raise money for their new ventures, and even harder to get customers to listen. Most of the time those new products and services die on the slag heap of great ideas that never saw the light of day.

You don't want that to happen to your great idea. So here's how to make sure it doesn't:

Make sure that marketing, sales, advertising and PR is the foremost priority in your new venture. Even if you don't like Microsoft , you MUST learn this lesson from them: They don't have the best software by any stretch of the imagination, but they do have the best sales strategy. And in business, it's the sales strategy that wins, not the superior technology.

So if you're waking up every morning thinking about the minute details of your cool product or service, please stop and re-calibrate.

Understand this:

1) Having a superior product is not necessarily an advantage, and can even be a DISadvantage - because it can distract you from the real objective, which is to GET and KEEP customers.

2) The product you develop is rarely the product your customers want to buy. That's OK as long as you're listening and flexible. But if you've already spent all your money perfecting the product, then you won't have any left to respond to customer feedback.

3) The product or service itself is, at most, maybe 25% of the equation. Advertising, PR strategies, and real-world market testing (as opposed to "market research", which is usually just "opinion research") --- all of these things are MORE important than the product.

4) Innovate, Don't Invent -- It's much easier to go into an existing market and solve an existing problem with a slightly improved, more interesting product (innovation) than to create a product from scratch that solves a problem people don't realize they have. That's goes along with my principle of "enter the conversation inside the customer's head."

Back to selling custom doors at Home Depot -- nobody needs to suffer this fate. But don't underestimate the challenge: If you have superior talent, then the best investment you can make is in communicating that talent to the world -- clearly, effectively, and without fail.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #9 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #9: 'All customers are to be treated as demi-gods'

Some of us kill ourselves trying to do this AFTER the sale, which is fine. Except... some customers simply *are not worth the effort.*

What are the 'bottom 10%' of your customers like?

--They beat you up on prices
--They pay late
--They expect special treatment
--They're rude
--They don't respect your boundaries.

Well today I'm giving you permission to FIRE them. Get them off your back, once and for all.

Most customers will be shocked when you fire them. But you'll be amazed at the liberating feeling and the renewed self-respect you have when you establish rules and stick to them. And when your other customers find out that you have enough self respect to give problem customers the boot, they'll respect you more, too.

Consider this:

Former CEO of GE Jack Welch had a policy of getting rid of the bottom 10% of employees every year. Controversial? Absolutely. Did some really good employees fall victim to 'corporate politics'? No doubt that happened, too.

But was it effective? Yes, it was.

It sounds harsh, and certainly it's an unpleasant policy for everyone involved, at least at the moment. But think about it -- don't you figure the poorest performing 10% of people in a company probably belong somewhere else anyway?

And... don't you figure your competitors need your worst customers more than you do? That IS an excellent strategy, by the way. Distract your competitors from good customers by sending 'em bad ones.

So go ahead -- Make my day. Get rid of the bottom 5-10% of your customers every year.

Make a list of people who drain your resources and damage your morale, and get rid of them.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #8 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #8: 'You can't charge premium prices for a commodity product.'

If you're fooled into thinking this is true, you'll live by cheapest price and die by cheapest price all day long. People who believe this have thin profit margins and low morale. But they don't have to.

Case in point: Starbucks, AOL, and Microsoft are ALL in commodity markets but have managed to re-define the rules such that they are relatively immune from price competition. And I can assure you that there are THOUSANDS of small businesses as well, who use the same shrewd tactics to sidestep the whole issue of 'commoditization.'

Being a 'commodity' is the pits. The worst situation you can be in is to sell something that's readily available from dozens of other people. But you can change that. I have a very specific terminology and strategy for re-inventing your
business and making it clearly stand out from your rivals, even if you ARE in a commodity market.

It's the same thinking process that AOL, Microsoft, McDonalds and Starbucks all use - seemingly invincible companies that dominate fiercely competitive commodity markets.

Let's take AOL as a brief example. You can become an Internet Service Provider with a few thousand dollars of cash and some phone lines. Some ISP's have even given away their services for free. But AOL maintains a fat-margin price of $23/month.

How can they do it? Because AOL is fundamentally different than all other ISP's. They have FORCED themselves to come up with unique ways of making themselves non-interchangeable with others. They have AOL instant messenger, all kinds of online communities, and proprietary software. And once you're on AOL, it's hard to get off.

You can lift ideas right out of AOL and Microsoft and cleverly apply them to your business, so that apples-to-apples comparisons to your competitors are difficult or impossible. If you are in a commodity business - then you MUST do this. *It's not an option.* When you do, it makes everything you do vastly easier and more effective.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #7 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #7: 'If you want to educate customers about new ideas, you have to buy 'em all doughnuts, lunch or dinner, and do a big dog & pony show.'


Is your product or service something that's really cool, really useful, and really helpful to people -- but the problem is, nobody realizes how much they need it?

There was a new technology that I sold at two different jobs. Basically it was another one of those 'great ideas' that could solve lots of problems for people, but nobody knew they needed it.
So it was very hard to sell!

I would go into companies, buy lunch for all their people, and give enthusiastic, informative presentations about this really cool new technology that could make their lives infinitely easier.

Ever done that before?

They'd file in, consume my pizza, listen apathetically to the presentation, and file out. They'd go back to their cubicles, I'd go back to my office, and they wouldn't spend a single dime on anything. The whole situation really sucked.

Then I heard about a guy named Jeff Paul in the financial planning field who'd figured out how to solve the entire problem by charging people for seminars.

Here's what Jeff did: He used low cost advertising and direct mail to get people to fork over real money to come to his tax seminar. Then he charged them another fee if they wanted to meet with him for a private 'consultation.' On top of that, he got paid the usual commissions on the financial products they bought. Not only did he make money every step of the way, he
closed twice as many sales as he did before, and his customers followed his financial plans more carefully. He built an enormously successful practice, because he was positioned from square one as the expert that he truly was, instead of a peddler.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? 'What if that could work for me???'

So... I put together a 3-day, $1500 training course for this technology. I wrote a 4 page sales letter that 'sold the sizzle' and *really* explained why it was worth the time and money to show up and really, really learn this stuff.

Two months later, Fortune 500 companies were sending their employees to this class, learning how to use our equipment, and paying for information that I formerly couldn't give away with free pizza. A major trade organization even licensed our new
course and started selling it to their entire membership. We were getting paid to teach prospective customers how to use our products! Our competitors were HACKED OFF. You can probably do something similar in your business. It's a lot easier than you might think. And your competitors will be really mad at you, too.

Since the Internet can deliver information to people for very low cost, and sometimes for almost nothing, it can be the key to doing "missionary work" for cutting edge products very inexpensively.

My favorite tool for doing this is a White Paper. A White Paper is your statement about how a problem should be solved. A well-written, well-promoted white paper is worth its weight in gold, because it educates customers about your way of doing things cheaply, and it's a terrific tool for generating sales leads.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #6 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #6: 'People need to see your advertisement 6-12 times before they'll remember it.'

If your ad does not work one time, it ain't going to work twelve times. This lie is used to sell all sorts of advertising space and campaigns that are a waste of money. And because the people who tell you this ALSO tell you you can't measure advertising, you have no way of knowing whether they're right or wrong.

You pull the big black checkbook out of your desk, spend a bunch of money, and you have no idea what you got back. What
a horrible feeling that is!
First, figure out how much response you need to make it pay off. Play with the elements of your ad, running it in an inexpensive place, until it gets the response you need - THEN run it six to twelve times. When you measure the effectiveness of advertising - and systematically improve it - you'll discover that some ads produce 20 times as much results as others. When you discover formulas that truly work, you won't just run them 12 times - you might run them for years. And you'll make profits all along the way.

And when you actually test marketing messages for performance and experiment with them, you'll find that tiny changes in wording have ENORMOUS effects on response.

It's absolutely SCARY to think about what can happen if you're not testing things. And it's absolutely incredible what happens when you are.


The good news is, 95% of companies don't test their advertising. Your competitors almost certainly don't. If you do, you have a clear advantage over them.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #5 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #5: 'You have to pay your dues now, but in only 2-3 years you'll have enough customers and referrals that you won't have to cold prospect hardly at all.'

There are two things wrong with this statement: The first part, and the second part. First let's talk about 'paying your dues.'

There's a traditional salesperson's version of this -- and then there's the guerrilla marketer's version. The marketer's version of 'paying your dues' is vastly more productive, as I shall explain.

The sales version of paying your dues is 1-3 years of brutal grunt work, until your client base is big enough to let up on the cold calls. Good marketing can eliminate the years of cold calls in the first place. But here's how the marketer's version works:

You polish and refine your sales message, on paper, or the web, or in some kind of media, until it's razor sharp - and then you test it inexpensively until it's effective and profitable. (Web traffic is often the fastest place to perfect this, by the way.) THEN you roll it out to the big world and put big money in - and big money comes out immediately.

It's a HUGE leap frog effect, and you don't think of it as 'paying your dues' --- you think of it as TESTING. 'Testing' is WAY better than 'Rejection.' It's a fascinating learning process instead of a gauntlet. It's also a way of growing a company fast without a ton of investment capital.

Once you've tested a marketing campaign to the point where sales or sales leads come in at an attractive Return On Investment, THEN you can invest heavily and watch the profits come rolling in.

OK, now for the other part of the lie - the part about not having to prospect any more. You ALWAYS have to prospect, IF you do not have a marketing system in place. Always. No matter how long you've been around.

Note: If you provide such an outstanding service and customers are so delighted that they eagerly refer others to you, then you won't have to prospect anymore. But referrals themselves are still a marketing system! And there are many things
you can do to stimulate still more referrals.

In any case, if you you switch from brute force prospecting to shrewd Guerrilla Marketing, you'll never again be a victim of Lie #5.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #4 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #4: 'Prove to your customer that you're willing to work harder, drive more miles, and bend over further than everyone else to earn his business.'

This one's pretty subtle. At first glance it seems like foolishness to say that anything less than fantastic customer service is going to cut it in today's marketplace. But here's the thing: Most sales people try to communicate this way too soon, in the process of being way too eager to win the customer's business.

So what happens is, you're chasing the guy, saying 'Call me any time, day or night, page me, here's my home phone number. Heck, I'll even jump out of bed and come and see you if I'm right in the middle of making love to my wife, because man, lemme tell ya, I'm eager to win your business!!'

Of course customers know that after the salesman has made every conceivable promise to win
their business, they still end up dealing with a bunch of apathetic yo-yos in customer service or
tech support, and the project will STILL probably be late anyway - regardless of how eager the
sales person is. That's why your enthusiasm doesn't help you.

Here's a great way to fix the problem:

1) Don't act so darn hungry to get the guy's business. Your customer service and tech support people ARE busy, and they don't have time to hold the hands of problem customers. Don't be afraid to tell your prospects that they have to *qualify* to do business with you. It's counter intuitive, but when the customer finds out that you're not drooling all over yourself to get his purchase order, he's going to respect you more.

2) *Guarantee* results to the customer - with teeth. Guarantee on-time delivery, specific levels of performance, with negative consequences for YOUR company if it doesn't deliver the
goods. You do not have to promise people the moon! You just have to keep the promises you DO make.

Now this requires support from the president of the company on down. And most companies
don't like to guarantee anything. (When push comes to shove, you still have to deliver results anyway, right? Giving a guarantee often just means clearly stating what's already true.)

And if you aren't willing to guarantee anything, why the heck not? Why should your customers take all the risk after they've heard a bunch of empty promises?

Even a modest guarantee can enormously empower your sales message. Define what you can and can't deliver, go to the mat to keep your promises, and draw the line right there. Customers will be far more responsive and you won't appear desperate.

People are cynical, and they'll only believe what you can prove. Here's an article on how to erase that cynicism and earn more trust than your competitors:

When you seamlessly integrate bold sales messages and meaningful guarantees with the other ingredients of my system, the results are exciting.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #3 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #3: 'You've just got to run some ads and get your name out there.'

This one costs companies BILLIONS of dollars.

It was also one of the key causes of the DOT COM disaster that tanked the stock market in 2000. Advertising is a crucial ingredient, yet it actually works against many companies. But when it works in your favor, amazing things can happen.

All advertising MUST do one of two things:

1) Generate Sales or 2) Generate Sales Leads.

And do so in a measurable, quantifiable way.

If you do either of those things, you'll have no problem 'getting your name out there' and you'll also make money in the process. But if you simply attempt to get your name out there, it's very likely that you won't generate sales OR sales leads.

Worse yet, if you hire an ad agency, your ads will usually be written by some English major who's never had a sales job in his life (a colossal mistake, since advertising and selling two sides of the same coin) and the agency account rep will try to win you over with a song and dance about winning awards.

Here's an ugly truth: Ads that win awards rarely generate sales. And ads that sell rarely win awards.
Remember the Talking Sock in the PETS.COM superbowl commercial? It was cute and memorable, but it didn't save those guys from the Dot Com Boneyard. Dead Dot Coms Don't Lie.

People don't expect nearly enough from their advertising, and they don't hold it accountable for results. So they waste millions of dollars... then they start pounding their sales people for orders on the 26th of every month. Most companies also try to make their advertising do too much. Let me explain.

When you're generating sales leads, you must remember that all you're really trying to do is get people to raise their hands and identify themselves as someone who has a problem - and tell you who they are. Anything beyond that dilutes the effectiveness of your ad. So don't make the mistake of telling them too much. The purpose of pure lead generation advertising is NOT for you to tell them all about yourself - not in the first step anyway.

The purpose is for them to tell you who they are.

When you do this correctly, it's simple, elegant, and outrageously effective. And most importantly, nobody feels like you're chasing them. Oh, and one more thing: Everything you say in advertising must be very, very specific, including what you do and who you do it for.

If you're busy being all things to all people--if you've got a huge list of things that you can do,
you're probably not going to sell anything to anybody. You must define a niche for yourself that's reasonably unique. In fact even if you don't have a niche, you need to invent one where it did not exist before.

Here's an article about what's so desperately wrong with most business-to-business advertising, and what to do about it:
http://perrymarshall.com/marketing/b2b_marketing.pdf
Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #2 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #2: 'You've just got to get in front of more people.'

Lie number two used to be the first thing I'd say to myself when I woke up each morning. Waking up every morning with a lie circulating in your brain is a very, very bad thing. This one gave me ulcers. It caused me to spend untold thousands of hours in my car, driving to see anyone who would allow me to walk through their door. It caused me to spend untold thousands of hours on the phone, trying to set up appointments. It also caused me to owe staggering amounts of money to Aunt Visa and Uncle Master Card.

Here's the truth: If you are nothing more than a 'salesman,' then nobody wants to see you. Ever. Because nobody is ever jazzed about having an adversarial discussion with you about whether they're going to buy something or not. 100 years ago, face-to-face selling was often the only way to find out about a new product or service. Not now. We've got a PC right in our dining room and a DSL line - and ANY TIME my wife or I want to know about something, we jump right on the Internet and go find out. Just yesterday Laura and I were discussing housing prices and five minutes later we were surfing a real estate site and learning everything we wanted to know. Isn't that a lot easier and safer than inviting a real estate agent over for tea & crumpets? You bet. But please understand, the issue is NOT that real estate agents are obsolete.

The issue is:
1) Is the Internet working FOR the agent, or AGAINST her?
2) Does she add legitimate value to what the customer can already get from the Internet?
Is she positioning herself such that customers who are ready to do something see her as a valuable resource and call her when it's time to act?
Or is she just a friendly face who really just wants their listing?
She must clearly position herself as someone who drastically speeds the buying or selling process and makes it MUCH EASIER for the buyer / seller to get what they want.

OK... So how do you DEMONSTRATE that you, as a sales person, make your customers' life easier - that time spent with you is time well spent?
Here's how: In your marketing, you focus on their problems, not your solution. You focus on the itch, not the scratch. This might sound simplistic, but even so, hardly anybody really does this. If you doubt me, just pick up ANY magazine and flip through it. Ask yourself this question as you look at every ad: 'Is this ad about my problem, or is it about somebody's product?' 90% of the time it's about their 'cool' product. And nobody really cares.

The only thing people care about is their problem. So here's a major shift: Instead of being a sales person who's trying to get in front of people, become a problem solving Information Source. (Usually it's *written* information first, not a phone call.) You'll get five times as many sales leads that way. No joke.

After you've provided information that helps them solve their problem, the next logical step is for them to meet with you. They call you first - you don't call them. And you walk through their door as a problem solver, not a peddler. I call this 'Information Marketing.' It's THE fundamental concept in my marketing system. People aren't interested in your solution. They're interested in their problem.

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Lie #1 in Sales & Marketing

Lie #1: 'Make more phone calls today than you did yesterday.'

If making phone calls really, actually works for you, then I suppose you should make more of them.
But most of the time, as I explain in 'Guerilla Marketing for Hi-Tech Sales People,' the phone calls aren't really working that well in the first place. And doing more of what already isn't working is just dumb. Plus, unsolicited phone calls just annoy people.
Today when you hear a motivational speaker getting sales people all revved up to go make phone calls and endure rejection, picture this in your mind: 1000 soldiers with sticks and rocks in hand charge valiantly onto a battlefield, where they are cut down with machine guns, tanks and artillery fire - dying in droves.
Actually a tiny handful of extraordinary, talented warriors will survive by strength, testosterone and wit. But the odds are heavily tilted against them. Only the very, very best even survive, much less prosper.
If your only weapon in sales is your telephone and your ability to withstand rejection, you're fighting tanks with sticks. And as the 21st century unfolds, the problem's going to get worse, not better.
Think about this: about 30 years ago, factory workers began to be displaced by machines and cheap foreign labor. The worker cost $12 per hour but the robot only cost $2.50 per hour. Anyone willing to work for $2.50 per hour? Lots of sales people are doing just that.
Today, sales people are being displaced by websites and media. Imagine for a moment that you were a door to door book salesman today (they were quite common 100 years ago) -- how would you ever compete with Amazon, or a bookstore like Borders or Barnes & Noble? Impossible. You'd starve to death. And you couldn't possibly provide your customers a similar level of service or selection.
A person selling books door to door is only slightly different from somebody who sells insurance or telecommunications or any number of other products and services today.
But here's the TRUTH: IF you carve out a niche for yourself and IF you use automated tools like your website and direct mail, you CAN increase the efficiency of your business and you CAN compete. And you won't antagonize your customers in the process and you won't need those big doses of motivation.
Listen up: You MUST carve out a niche, and you MUST use your communication tools shrewdly.
Most companies don't. Most websites are designed with no particular purpose in mind. Most companies don't have any idea how to create a direct mail piece that makes the phone ring. (That's why they think direct mail doesn't work.)

BOTTOM LINE:
1) You MUST have marketing tools that do the grunt work for you.
2) You must tweak those tools until they're effective.
Often you'll try something and it doesn't work the first time.
But... the good news is, once it works, it will usually work for YEARS.
That's why time spent on marketing is absolutely the best time investment you can make - IF you're educated about what really works and what doesn't.
Here's a link to an article about selling new technology to hard-to-reach customers

Original Source: Perry Marshall

Why the Most Important Success Ingredient Has Nothing to Do With Google!

100 years ago, in 1903, the Wright Brothers achieved their monumental goal of flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Most people don't know that there were quite a few other people trying to build an airplane at the same time. One was Alexander Graham Bell; another was the President of the Smithsonian Institution.

All of these guys were much better funded than a pair of bicycle shop mechanics from Ohio with a wind tunnel in their garage.

But there's a key difference that led to the Wright Brothers' success.

The other guys focused on making a more powerful engine.

Orville and Wilbur Wright focused on the plane.

Specifically, the Wright Brothers built their airplane as a glider without an engine - then mounted the engine later, almost as an afterthought.

They flew it in the breeze first, then added power later. That was the key to their success. They discovered that when you're building an airplane, the wings are more important than the engine.

What does this have to do with Internet Marketing?

The point is that all of this is not really about Google AdWords, or any particular way to get traffic. What matters more than all of that is the ability of your website to get people to take action - to opt in, to buy, or whatever you want them to do.

Google AdWords just happens to be the fastest, easiest, and sometimes the least expensive way to get the traffic there. But once again, it's not about Google - it's about your website.

What Google will help you do, more effectively than anything else, is send highly targeted, predictable traffic to your website, day in and day out, so you can experiment, test, and perfect your sales process.

Perry Marshall's "Expanding Universe Theory" for Doing a Marketing Rollout

Now listen up, because what I'm about to explain is profoundly important. It seems simple, but it's revolutionary. Please pay attention here.

For most businesses, the FIRST thing you should do is properly set up a Google AdWords campaign and play with your website until the traffic converts to sales profitably.

Frankly it doesn't matter how long it takes to make that work. Every step of the process teaches you very important things, even if it's through trial and error.

Why use Google for that? Here's why: It's just about the only way to get a steady, predictable stream of traffic day in and day out. Most other sources of traffic, like free search engine listings and PR, are things you have no real control of.

THEN... once it's working on AdWords, you take the same messages and sales process and roll out your product in this order:

1. Google AdWords
2. Search Engine Optimization
3. Other PPC's like Overture and Findwhat etc etc.
4. Email promotions
5. Affiliates
6. Press Releases
7. Direct Mail
8. Print Advertising

You see, items #2 through 8 are more expensive and/or less controllable than Google. Get it right with Google first, where you have total control THEN do email. THEN get help from affiliates. Don't let any of these other things or people be your guinea pig - if it works on Google AdWords first, then you can invest in these other things and be fairly certain it will work.

I can't overemphasize how powerful this is. Usually search engine traffic represents only a tiny percentage of the people who are potential customers for you. When you roll out to items 2 through 8, you can often make five to fifty times as much money as you were making with AdWords. And no longer is it necessary to risk more than a few hundred dollars on a marketing campaign!!!

A little traffic. A lot of traffic. Turn it on or turn it off at will.

You can use it the same way the Wright Brothers used the wind tunnel in their bicycle shop - to perfect the airplane before going out to "the big time."

Original Source: Perry Marshall