The Lost Art of Sales

I know by writing this article I run the risk of sounding like I am still doing business in the 80’s, but there are many more times and places when the preferred marketing strategy should be to “just sell the thing”.

And for some reason that seems to be a lost or at least a disdained art these days.

I have prospered by figuring out Financial Efficiency in business, and the secret to that includes getting a new customer acquired and making a sale to them as quickly as possible.

In doing this one can turn that same $1 of capital invested in marketing over and over and over many times.

Not What the Cool Kids Think

For some reason, this runs contrary to a great many foolish, faddish approaches to marketing popular with the cool kids nowadays.

I have prospered by insisting on working with facts, not ideas and opinions. I work with real money metrics, not misleading new metrics — junk like viral views ‘n such, or impressions and the like and I am not scared to challenge the new age approaches. Sure, I run the risk of looking stupid or sounding like an antiquarian Luddite.

But, fortunately having somebody point their Pinterest account at me fails to intimidate me.

My own chosen and lived positioning for more than 35+ years has been:

To prize the elegant and simple things.

Many entrepreneurs and marketers let themselves be easily distracted by and interested in many, many, many things, to the point they sacrifice all discretion, all focus, and all power. In fact I have had to reassure entrepreneurs who are making great money that they are on the right track even though their Instagram feed isn’t as fake as their going bankrupt competitor.

For some reason they prize being embraced by all the cool kids, at whatever conference or meeting they go to, they prize showing off their clever use of the newest, latest, most hyped technology or tactic. They prize ego gratification, first adopter bragging rights, being ahead of every curve (even those leading off cliffs). They prize being an influencer in the platform of the month. Or having a “reel” (ie. fake TV show) and being able to invite their impressed peers onto it as guests.

Victims in the Making

They are a new breed of what I call, “Advertising VICTIMS”. They’re being victimised and self-victimised by old fakery in new wrappers and costumes.

It is a mistake to label my approach, as anti new stuff and in favour of “old school”.

Better to grasp that what I advocate has very deep, sturdy roots, has made marketers into millionaires every year since the turn of the century and right now, this day, and is therefore fact, empirical evidence, and experience based and is therefore reliable.

I will swap new and cool for reliable any day, especially when investing money or time, mine or a client’s. I call this: profitable pragmatism. It is a nonphilosophical philosophy.

I constantly advise clients: do the boring stuff. There’s a lot of money made or lost in the boring stuff.

Stuff — like identifying and managing differential customer value and lifetime customer value.

Here’s the Approach

I’ll suggest a goal for you. A life-altering, fortune-making, elegant simplicity liberating goal of goals.

What you will be best served by lusting for is a reliable selling process you can have so much confidence in that you will aggressively invest in buying appropriate customers….that you have so much reasoned confidence in, you will twice mortgage your house for, to pour prospective customers into your selling process.

What you should not be seduced by is more and more and more work to do and daily disruption to suffer while diluting your efforts over more and more media and needing more and more patience and persistence to finally get to a sale and then ownership of a valuable customer relationship.

By the way, personally, I’ve done nicely in my business chiefly by what I call my “Believers” — customers who are with me and continuing to support me, reliably responding to offer after offer, over 10, 20, even 30 years, each spending well over $100,000.00 with me.

Here is an important fact:

Virtually all of them started with me by directly being sold something by me.

Not by being gently brought into some polite ‘n pleasant place where they can roam around at their own pace, consume endless quantities of ‘free’, to slowly develop trust, and gradually choose to maybe become a customer.

Most coming into my sphere that way stay briefly, exit quickly and are worth little.

The Believers came and come by my reaching for their credit cards and immediately, directly selling them something. Of course, once they buy — I do my utmost to make sure they get a 10x return on investment. And that’s not old news either. Believers -in-the-making are being brought onboard that exact same way this very day.

There’s a secret that a decreasing number of marketers understand:

The right customer wants to buy now.

Finally, let me make a last vital point…

In the golden age of advertising, when ‘advertising’ was first becoming a business in and of itself, its streets were stalked by real characters.

Flamboyant characters like portrayed in the hit show “Mad Men” or if you are a bit older “Bewitched”. Self-promoters like Don Draper and Larry Hagman are symbolising the feisty, coarse, cigar-chomping tyrants like Leo Burnett. Or the brilliant and envelope-pushing figures like Albert Lasker. All larger-than-life personalities, each dogmatic about their methods, each sharply intolerant of bs, each impatient for results.

While visibly and significantly different from each other, all these leaders of this emerging field charitably named a profession had one thing in common:

They all knew how to sell, from actual, street level selling experience.

One way or another, they had all looked prospects in the eye and persuaded them to act against their common behaviour and skepticism, to make a purchase — now.

They had lived by ‘just sell the thing’.

This is lacking in the crowded, chaotic world of today’s advertising and marketing, copywriters, social media technologists… most have little or no experience with what actually works in persuading people to act. Few have experience with doing that when success or failure at 3:00 P.M. in the afternoon determines whether you eat supper or go to bed hungry that night.

Take it from me not only have I sold nose to nose, toes to toes to eat, I still go into the sales trenches every once and a while to see how prospects are reacting.

I urge you to take this message seriously — selling still works.