Most of the time, sellers tend to focus on what they are selling rather than how to sell it. Alex shares a story of his failed business which they anticipated to generate $2 to $3million but which only produced less than $400,000.
Some people don’t want to go on selling because they don’t like to anticipate the rejection. What they don’t realize is that people won’t buy if they don’t understand, don’t believe, and it’s not the right time yet.
In this segment, Alex breaks down those three reasons why people won’t buy.
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Three Reasons Why People Won’t Buy
I remember it like it was yesterday. My face was in my hands. I was underneath my covers. I was embarrassed, demoralized and publicly humiliated. What’s worse, no one even cared about what happened. It was 2016 and a former partner and I had launched a product called Push Button Influence. We’d worked on it and we had a launch following the Product Launch Formula that Jeff Walker has developed over the years in the internet marketing space.
We had over two dozen partners to email their list for us. Our list grew to 85,000 people. From those 85,000, we were expecting to generate $2 million to $3 million. Instead of generating $2 million to $3 million, we generated less than $400,000.
What was worse is we were over $400,000 in debt because from the $400,000 in gross sales, we had to pay commissions. There were paid plans. We had some refund requests and there were contest winnings for the joint venture partners. We ended up being in debt after working one year super hard and doing maybe 20% of what we thought we’re capable of doing. It was embarrassing.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People
$400,000 is a lot of money, but when your breakeven is near the $800,000 mark, then it’s no longer a lot of money. Everything is relative. Context is decisive. The content of $400,000, that’s a lot. In the context of a breakeven of $800,000, then it’s not good.
The reason it was humiliating for me is number one, I had asked my joint venture partners to cash in on the relationship capital I had with them. I also had asked them for some time to pay them on their contest winnings and their commissions, which should be paid immediately.
The reason I asked for that was because I didn’t have the money. The money was in the bank. The reason I didn’t have the money is that they cost more to launch and make the product offer than it did for the money that came in.
I’m trying to pinpoint at this moment. I’m under my covers in my bed. I refused to go to work. My face is buried in my hands. I wasn’t weeping, but I practically felt like weeping. Maybe I was beyond weeping. Why weep? Men don’t cry, at least that’s what I’ve heard. I’m thinking, “What happened? What was the reason why it didn’t work?”
From 2005 to 2010, I had a million-dollar launch every single year selling my hallmark product back then, which I’ve retired, called TeleSeminar Secrets. The first week of December was my favorite week because I’d make $1 million in a week. We didn’t use the Product Launch Formula back then.
Jeff Walker, who developed the Product Launch Formula and his brother, John, handled the final year of the TeleSeminar Secrets. He launched it, I retired it, then he came out with his Product Launch Formula that developed a mastermind.
He is a genius marketer and there’ve been many multimillion-dollar launches ever since utilizing that formula. Ours wasn’t and it wasn’t the Product Launch Formula fault. It was our fault. I would say my fault because I didn’t take 100% responsibility to the three reasons why people don’t buy.
Why People Won’t Buy
The three reasons why people do buy is because they do know you, they do like you and they do trust you. If you’ve been in direct sales or network marketing, you know that this has been taught over the years. What are the three reasons why people won’t buy? If they don’t understand you, they won’t buy. If they don’t believe you, they don’t buy. If it’s not the right time, then they don’t buy it. They don’t understand, they don’t believe or it’s not the right time.
We made a cardinal sin and that is we didn’t start with the offer when devising it, my then partner and I. We should have started with the offer. That’s the cardinal rule. Begin with the end in mind. That’s one of the habits from Stephen Covey’s bestselling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. When you start with the offer, then you can pull back and make the offer more understandable.
[bctt tweet=”Begin with the end in mind.” via=”no”]
The feedback we got is they believed that it was possible to get more exposure, visibility and reach through Push Button Influence and push button doesn’t mean instant profit. It means when you push certain buttons such as share, tweet, broadcast, post or like, these are all buttons. There are over 50 of them in new media and social media, on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter and even with iTunes.
If you look at subscribing, rate, review, those are all buttons. That’s why we called it Push Button Influence because that’s what it come down to. It’s about getting exposure, visibility and reach. That was believable. Most of the people knew us, liked us and trusted us. For many, it was the right time but the feedback that we got is, “I don’t understand what I’m getting.”
We didn’t make the offer clear. We focused on the wrong thing. We focused on what we were selling and we weren’t focused on how we were selling it. How we sold it should have been showing them bits and pieces of what they’re actually going to experience and doing some over the shoulder demonstrations to see what they’re getting.
They weren’t clear on what, first of all. They didn’t get how we were going to show them how to do this. We’re $400,000 in debt. How are we going to make that up? Are we going to take it out of our own savings? No. We don’t want to touch our savings. Why deplete that?
The next plan is what started a new business for me. After I came out of my mild depression, I reached out to my partner and I said, “We’re going to go and sell high-end.” High-end means there’s a post-launch upsell strategy I want to implement. It became a new business for me, plus post-launch upsell strategy. Now I do that for others. I train other sales teams to do it. A whole new business came out of a disaster, which is usually the way it happens out of necessity.
Why People Won’t Buy: The context of your offer is more important than the content.
What ended up happening is we generated another $700,000. It became over a million-dollar launch now because I re-framed the launch as the frontend and the backend was waiting a couple of weeks, and then making done for you offers to that database we had built.
Even though 10,000 people had opted out, there were still over 70,000 people. From that group, there was over $700,000 to be generated in the next six to twelve weeks thanks to another former partner who helped the selling process. I have my own sales team now and we do it through Zoom and other video conferencing systems. We don’t like to use the phone because people get to multi-task.
Understand that if you start with your offer first, then you can start with your highest-end product. Even if you don’t have one, then go down from there.
There’s $100,000 offer. We have $30,000 offer, $12,000, then the launch product was $2,000. We got people for the $100,000 and the $30,000 and no one bought the $12,000. It was amazing. I teach others how to do the same thing.
After their launch is done, they make as much money, sometimes more, afterward. If they’re grossing the same amount, they profit more because the backend is a lot more profitable because there aren’t the joint venture relationships involved. They are now on your list and the JV partners have been paid out.
The launch is done. You paid out your contest winnings and now those people are on your list. This was scary. It was a scary thing to do because I didn’t know if it would work or not, but it did and it created and espoused a new business.
[bctt tweet=”Life wasn’t built to be fair. It was created to be lived.” via=”no”]
Lead Magnets: Focus On What’s Important
The moral of the story is to make sure you’re focusing on what’s important because what’s important is not the selling process, not the bait to get people in. People call it lead magnets. It’s not to bait them in and have them opt-in to build the list. Don’t even focus on the list. We thought the list was the thing. We’re celebrating, giving each other high fives when we got 85,000 people.
That’s not what to focus on. Where you want to focus on is what really matters, the offer. What are you offering? Make sure it’s understandable, believable and it’s the right time for your candidate to say yes. I don’t like calling them prospects. I don’t like calling them leads. It dehumanizes them.
As my good friend, Ryan Deiss, and CEO of DigitalMarketer say, “It’s not a B2B business you’re in. It’s not a B2C business you’re in. If you’re a Doctor or Chiropractor, B2P, Business to Patient, or even B2G, which is business to government. The only business we’re in is H2H, which is human to human.”
I stand up on stage and I’ll have people raise their hands. I said, “Tell me who has ever flown in an airplane.” Almost every hand goes up. I go, “Who would love to fly with a pilot who loves to fly?” All the hands go up. I go, “Who would love to fly with a pilot who loves to land?” All the hands go up and there are a few chuckles. I say, “If you have a choice between a pilot who loves to fly and a pilot who loves to land, which of the two would you choose?” They raised their hand; a pilot who loves to land.
There’s a lot of room for error when you’re 40,000 feet or 35,000 feet in the air, but there’s small room for error as you’re landing 1,000 feet, 500 feet, 100 feet, 50 feet, 40 feet, 30 feet, 20 feet and 10 feet. In fact, that’s what you hear the computer say if you’re up front and you’re in the cockpit. It’s because as you’re getting closer and closer to the ground. That’s when you have all the passengers lives in jeopardy. You better land well.
Why People Won’t Buy: Insights and principles can only work if you work them.
Context Versus Content
In fact, I’ve been on planes where the poor pilot’s been flying and the co-pilot for seventeen hours to Singapore. We probably have dodged a few typhoons along the way. We could have died and then they blow the landing and the entire seventeen-hour flight is judged based on the couple seconds where it was scary. It’s not fair. Life wasn’t built to be fair. It was built to be lived.
If you want to live in a successful way to ethically influence others, then make sure you always start with your offer and know that the context of it is more important than the content. Context is decisive. Otherwise, pushing an elderly person into the way of a charging bus on a highway would be the same thing as pushing an elderly person out of the way of a charging bus in a highway. One, you’re putting a person’s life in jeopardy. The other one, you’re saving a person’s life.
If context didn’t matter, you could say, “I’m pushing an elderly person around.” Why the elderly? It’s more graphic so you’ll remember it.
Context is decisive and how you frame your offer determines the response. If you pre-qualify people 80% of the time and then promote to them 20% of the time, you’ll do much better.
These days, I’m hired to do high-end offers from a panel setting. In the morning breakfast at 7:00 AM, people are showing up at a seminar. They show up at 7:00 AM. They’ve been invited because they know they’re going to get enrolled or attempted to get enrolled into a mastermind that costs $25,000 or $30,000.
In less than an hour, it’s possible to generate $1 million to $2.5 million. How do I know? I’ve done it. I’ve done it with Genius Network of which I’m a member with Joe Polish. I’ve done it with War Room of which I’m a member with Roland Fraser, Perry Belcher, Ryan Deiss and Richard Lindner. These are masterminds I belong to in the digital marketing space and in the business pace. This process came from a failing launch after not being in the scene for a few years.
I’m one of the living dinosaurs. I came into digital marketing in 1995 BG, Before Google. That’s why it was disappointing. I was embarrassed. I wanted to look good in front of my friends. I wanted to prove to myself I hadn’t lost it. That crosses my mind often. What was interesting and what flipped the switch and maybe this will flip the switch for you is I got a process that was triggered through a podcast that I was listening to called DarrenDaily.
My good friend, Darren Hardy, is the publisher of Success Magazine and a talented author. He’s written one of my favorite books of all time in business. I don’t talk about it a lot, but it’s The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster, a fantastic book. I recommend you go to DarrenDaily.com and subscribe. It’s free.
It’s a public service. It’s a way to get more exposure. I expose marketing online, I expose our services. It’s what I teach in Push Button Influence. Darren said in closing one of the episodes is, “Scary work pays well.” He had heard that from a colleague. Scary work always pays well. The scary work is selling.
Typically, people don’t like to sell because they don’t like to anticipate rejection. People don’t like to write either, but it’s more because they don’t feel good about their writing style. In selling, it’s they’re anticipating the response from the other side. What we’re claiming here at the show is that ethical influence is not about selling. It’s about storytelling. That’s why we start with the story, because anyone can start with a story.
If you hate to sell, this is for you. If you want to attract and convert more premium clients, this is for you. That’s winning the inner game of conversion. Scary work pays well. I thought to myself back in 2016 before I started the plus concept of creating high-end marketing funnels, which you’ll learn how it works, “How can you sell a $100,000 client if you don’t have a $100,000 product? Start with $10,000.” “I don’t have a $10,000 per product, Alex.”
Sell it first and watch how motivated you are because scary work pays well. In fact, it pays the best. What I did with that one-liner from Darren is when I got out of my mild depression, I got out of bed and every day at night before I went to bed, I would write one thing that scared me on an index card. Then on the other side I wrote the reason why that thing scared me.
Expanding Your Comfort Zone
Usually, it was maybe calling someone or doing something I didn’t want to do. Usually, it dealt with people. On the front it was whatever it was that scared me, on the back, why it scared me, which usually is an unsupported belief. When you compile these and don’t throw them away after 30 days, you’ll look back and you’ve expanded your comfort zone like a balloon. It doesn’t come back to the original size. You haven’t broken through because that’s too scary even though there are a lot of teachers who say breakthrough the comfort zone.
I say, “Let’s frame it another way.” Let’s expand the comfort zone. When I look back, what scared me many days ago, fear, moving through it, expanding through that it’s like working a muscle. You get good at doing scary stuff. If you keep those index cards over the course of a year, what scared you a year ago is going to look silly. That is my wish for you, because selling is fun if you pre-qualify the majority of the time and promote the minority of the time.
Here’s our review about the specific insights you and I have rediscovered. Once again, how you sell is far more important than what you sell. We talked about framing your offer. Coming up with your offer first determines the responses you get. The one thing you can do daily is to create an index card, put what scares you on the front, why it scares you on the back, and do that one thing the next day.
Write it at night, let your mind have it, marinate and percolate while you sleep, wake up with a smile and do that one thing and your life will change. You can only work these insights and principles if you work them.
I want you to go to AllSellingAside.com/iTunes. That’ll go directly to my iTunes channel. Type in your biggest takeaway or your big a-ha moment you experienced. If you have done it before, you don’t have to do it again. You can type that somewhere else, but I want you to do it as a part of a review. Go ahead, declare your one big takeaway in the iTunes review section by visiting AllSellingAside.com/iTunes. It’ll take three minutes out of your day. What you declare could provide you a lifetime of learning.
I have one final gift to give you in honor of the show, and that’s a complimentary copy of my eBook that’s titled Alexisms: Useful Lessons from a Recovering Serial Entrepreneur. You can instantly download it at AlexismsBook.com. It’s also available on Amazon, but why pay $20 when you can download it for free.
I hope our paths cross again next time for the show, which is dedicated to making ethical influence within your reach that you can achieve and even exceed your sales potential. Do whatever it takes to join me next time because our topic will be Galileo’s famous 3.4-second sales pitch. I encourage you to invite a friend or maybe bring a study buddy. It’s always fun to study or do this with others. I can’t wait to connect with you then. All good wishes.
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