I’ve been in marketing for about 7 years now. Before then I was a Network Engineer working for the Department of Defense. My greatest lessons in marketing didn’t come from a book or something I learned on the job — they came from observing others whose job it was to market to me.
I’m the guy that will buy a copy of National Enquirer just to study the advertisements. It may surprise you that some of these people are paid up to $75,000 just to create a single ad. For that kind of money you can bet the ads work.
Unfortunately, like many people I also have bad habits. Mine is buying cars. Over the last 6 years I’ve purchased more than 35 cars and been a part of over 50 car transactions. My habit peaked in 2011 when I purchased 11 cars for myself.
Purchasing that many cars may seem like a lot but keep in mind I also drive a hard bargain. I would say less than 10% of the car deals I’ve put together have resulted in sales so I’ve probably constructed over 300 deals during this timeframe. Most of them fell through because they wouldn’t budge on price or I didn’t like the sales manager or in some cases the entire dealership (lots of them are shady).
Today I have contacts with sales managers and dealership owners in 4 different states for just about every type of car you could want, even Ferrari. This isn’t an advertisement, I just wanted to demonstrate the range of my operations. I have a car buyers guide on Amazon available for kindle, okay that was an advertisement.
The one thing I’ve found in common with every transaction that I’ve ever completed is that it wasn’t just about the deal and the numbers, for many of them, it was about the atmosphere and the people I was buying from.
Did you catch that?
Whether or not you consider me a seasoned car shopper is up in the air, but what I just revealed to you was that the transactions that resulted in a sale were largely because I found the dealership and the salespeople agreeable, in fact, most of them I get along with quite well that we still check up on each other, even when I am not looking to purchase a car.
Most of my salesman are the leading sales associates for their dealership.
What I’ve learned from these salesman is that it’s not about the car. People are not there to just buy a car, they are there to buy you. If they like you, they’ll buy from you. If they like you, they won’t just buy one car from you, they’ll come back again and again, and they’ll even send their friends.
You see a car is a car, they are essentially the same everywhere, you can get the same car just about anywhere in the country. Same warranty, same promises, same results, if you think there’s something special about your specific car, you won’t go far in the car business. It’s truly the excitement and enthusiasm for what you do that excites people about the car.
I’ve applied this advice to just about everything I do.
Granted, some people are just not going to like you and others are just there for the car, doesn’t stop me from showing my personality in every transaction.
In the last 6 years I’ve turned a small internet marketing operation that started with just a single website into a multi-million dollar business with a recognizable brand name to the community it serves. I have over 3,000 subscribers that pay a monthly fee each month and it keeps growing everyday.
Our original philosophy for this website was to maximize advertisements. We didn’t care about return visitors, we didn’t even care if anyone came back at all. We wanted to expose as many people to our products and advertising as possible. At our peak this website would get over 60,000 visitors a day which resulted in great money. Over time we began to realize the failure in our strategy when the traffic started to drop off and we we’re no longer clearing $3,000 a day.
This is when we had no choice but to change our philosophy. Instead of trying to get 60,000 people a day to buy our product, we thought we should make a membership site and attract a loyal customer base that we can continue to make money off of long after they purchase.
We figured it was easier to get 100 people to pay us $100 a month by focusing on them, then to get 20,000 people to pay us 50 cents a month each. The income is the same, $10,000 a month, but the strategy and marketing is completely different. They call this strategy niche marketing or “neesh” marketing if you want to pronounce the word properly.
Visionaries is setup in this same fashion. It is essentially a membership program with a recurring subscription. Every person in your down line can be one of those loyal customers who will buy whatever it is you have to sell.
To our 3,000+ subscriber base we regularly promote other products we sell with great success. If you needed to, your down line should work the same way.
I will admit that person to person sales has a huge advantage over Internet Marketing when it comes to selling yourself. I don’t get to talk to people and instead rely on text and video to sell myself. This is why Visionaries is a great opportunity to sell yourself in person and through social networks where people can get to know you.
So although you may think it’s about the product and what it can do for people, the fact is, if they don’t like you they won’t buy from you, no matter how much they want your product. If you do convince them to buy the product, they probably won’t buy anything else you sell.
And although you may think your product is unique, regardless of what it is — rest assured they have heard all of the same promises pitched to them in the exact same ways, over and over again. From the money back guarantee to the expected results and they have been let down.
So if you’re doing well in this business, you’ve more than likely sold them yourself, the product is just a bonus.
So how do you tell if you sold someone a product?
Simple!
Try to sell or talk to them about something else. If they blow you off, you’ve sold them the product.
If they take what you say into consideration and show interest, then chances are you sold yourself.
Their willingness to talk to you about other opportunities or even talk to you openly in general is a great indicator of what you actually sold them.
If you’re selling them products, you’re not reaching your full potential. It doesn’t matter if you sell a million dollars of of your product. By selling yourself you can go further than you already are. Don’t get this confused with being a sell out.
I’m not talking about being fake to get people to like you, I’m talking about being you, being real, and letting your enthusiasm and passion show in everything that you do.
This passion is contagious and before you know it, you’ll have an army of people running around sharing that same passion with everyone they know.
It starts with you, if you sell yourself AND a you have a good product that delivers, you’ll achieve things you never thought possible.
If you’re in someone’s down line and they started selling a new product, would you follow them or would you stay where you are?
Great leaders are followed not for how much money they can make or their odds of success, they are followed because they are trusted and their followers are loyal. This is portrayed throughout our history.
In the movie 300 not even in the face of certain death would they abandon their King. Everyone of those men was free to leave at any point and time, they stayed.
And in the movie Gladiator, General Maximum’s army followed him, not the Roman Empire they served under. If he asked them too, they would stand behind him and fight all of Rome.
So if you’re a manager, does your team belong to you or does it belong to Rome?
Because the answer to that question is the only thing that really matters.
Products fail, companies collapse, but a team can rebuild everything from scratch.
Awesome Job Tom! Looking forward to more from you!