Making Your First Million.pdf - Association of Net Entrepreneurs and ...

Making Your First Million
Chapter 15 - How Do I Sell By Mailorder?
It's one thing to buy. It's another thing altogether to sell. Buying's easy. We've been doing
it from early childhood. Buying is a mutually satisfactory relationship. You buy what you
want, pleasing you, and you give cash to the seller, pleasing him. Selling? That's much
harder. Or is it? The variables remain the same but you're now on the other side of the
equation. What you have to do is convince the buyer that it's in his interests to buy what
you're selling. And to do that well you have to swap perspectives and look at it from his
point of view.
What are you selling? From your point of view you're selling a drill bit. From the buyer's
perspective, he's buying a hole. You need to look at the benefits to the customer of the
products you're selling. And you need to sell the benefits, not the product. The customer
is simply not interested in you, or helping you out by buying the things you're selling.
He's not a charitable giver, buying your bits of scrap metal to help you out, though I've
seen many sellers whose marketing seems to take that tack. They sell and oversell the
product, thinking if only I repeat myself often enough I'll bore or trick the customer into
buying. It doesn't work that way. To be a good salesman you need to get into the
customer's skin and look at the benefits the product provides him or her. This is the key.
Let's look at a simple example that I saw this week in "Your Garden": A wicked garden
gnome. You want to sell it by mail-order. How do you do it? You could try the oversell
method of: "This magnificent, hand-painted garden gnome is a faithful terracotta
reproduction of the original present given by King Adolphus to Queen Gertrude in 1426
etc etc." Selling the features of the product. How often do we see this? It's simply
tiresome. Or we could try to get into the mindset of the customer who might want to buy
gnomes. This is where you've got to think again. What kind of person buys these tiresome
gargoyles? A fruitcake? Sometimes. A sentimentalist? Yes. A gardener? Possibly. That
would depend a little on the type of gnome. A nostalgia freak? Yes. A Dungeons and
Dragons propeller-head? Probably.
The advantage of getting into the head of the potential purchaser is you'll not only come
up with a better sales approach you'll also greatly narrow down the range of media you
advertise the product in. Knowing roughly who will buy will now start to tell you why
they'll buy. Why? To amuse, to surprise, to shock. Themselves? No. Your garden gnome
purchaser is buying with someone else in mind. He's not buying to surprise and amuse
and shock himself. That wore off in the first 30 seconds. He can't do a Mr Bean and
pretend surprise and shock and amusement at the wicked little gnome baring his bum
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