At first, it's the questions you ask that set you apart

Years ago I worked with a woman - let's call her Jodie - who tried everything under the sun to get more sales.

She was in a regional area of Australia, in a boutique law firm. She's not a lawyer, by the way. She had big ideas of all different types.

Most of the time, all she was allowed to do was "turn on Google Ads". (Until she got the principal to a Tony Robbins retreat, but that's another story.)

Over the years, she did all kinds of Standard Marketing Things.

She ran billboards.

She ran radio ads.

She produced loads of content.

She did networking, educated referral partners, invested in SEO, invested in advertising.

The content that really did move the needle for the firm was operational content: We put in a VIP section on their website, automated the shit out of customer notifications, worked on the internal framework for approvals... that kind of thing. 

But it wasn't sales content. It wasn't related directly to the buying decision. They thought it was, but it wasn't. The one campaign that was, she wasn't allowed to run.

After five years, she was frustrated beyond belief.

All that money, all that time, and the one thing that worked consistently was training the team in how to sell, in every conversation. That includes every "free" consultation. If you offer these, and you or your team can't sell, you're wasting your time.

Anyway.

Your lesson today, padawan, is that Marketing and Sales are intertwined, but they are fundamentally different things. 

As the King of Sales, Jeffrey Gitomer says:

'Learn to question better than your competitor…The key to selling is questioning. At first it’s the only thing that sets you apart from the others.'

That's how and why great case studies work: They are built on the right questions. And the answers are used to prove to others that you already know them.

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