How to increase sales dramatically without destroying your brand or losing your soul in the process.

Over the years I’ve had the luxury of working with some of the biggest brands in the world. I’ve also had the pleasure of doing business with three man painting firms, and even sadly, some frauds. (unhappy face). What I learned, however could change your life forever.

The key difference between the brands and the frauds won’t shock you. Frauds build trust way faster, and get sales faster. Heck, a professional fraud can have literally no product, no establishment, no paperwork and even no business card and easily make sales all day long. What they truly lack, and what in fact makes them a fraud, is usually a product problem.

Usually the product they have doesn’t actually *do* what they say it does, or they don’t have a product to offer at all. You see, products in reality only prevent refunds and lawsuits. It’s a crude view, but stick with me. The fact is, you don’t have to have a product to make sales! Granted, it helps the honest salesman sell it when they can believe in it.

Heck, many big companies have been built on products that look amazing, demonstrate well but don’t actually do what they say they’re going to do. Classics like the solar powered car ventilation, The classic historic Veg-o-matic, and others.

What if the fraudster had a GREAT product?

Say the fraudster in our story above happens to actually FIND a cure for psoriasis, balding, cancer etc. Technically, they’re no longer a fraudster anymore… Now they’re simply someone with unbelievable passion, enthusiasm and outrageous claims, followed by a product that actually does what they say it does. Sounds like a match made in heaven, doesn’t it?

The best fraudster knows something that 90% of businesses don’t know. Without this knowledge, brands and businesses can still do ok, but they cannot rake in millions in sales in a short period of time.

What’s a brand, and why do I need one?

Many marketers have hurt small businesses by telling them they do NOT need a brand. They simply tell them that coca-cola marketing is a waste of time, and that spending money on ‘branding’ related activities is unprofitable. They’re only half correct. You SHOULD spend some time considering how you are perceived by the marketplace. What colors you use, what feelings your products/services evoke and all that. It’s actually a good idea to really craft that…

Fact is, you cannot sell something to a farmer wearing a 3 piece suit and tie. You can’t sell something to a lawyer while wearing stained overalls. Your company’s look and feel must match something that your ideal customer would actually feel comfortable with. Just imagine walking into a bank setup inside an old 1900’s, poorly taken care of barn. You just couldn’t imagine putting a $100k into investments there.

Where brands go wrong

In business you can do a lot wrong and still get results. It might cost you more, take you MORE precious time or take a ton more energy, but you’ll get results. Sometimes with big companies, or smaller high margin companies, they spend so much time on their look, their presentation, their emotional story and how they’re perceived, they almost avoid anything that looks like sales like the plague!

There is a nexus point, a crossing.. a zone in the middle where you can have an incredible presentation, high quality look and feel and yet still have an effective sales engine!

Here’s what fraudsters know:

 

#1. Their customer’s biggest pain. Granted, the promise to solve it. Some fraudsters have a gut instinct and can read the crowd or the person in front of them. They can listen to people as they gripe about various issues, then promise with conviction to solve them. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting anyone LIE and say they can solve someone’s pains… but as brands, thought leaders and heck even businesses in general we SHOULD be leading the charge on the pains we DO confidently solve. We should know and listen to our customer well enough that we can easily write a message that would appeal to them.

#2. The fear of staying in this spot. They know customers do NOT want to stay in this pain, frustration etc. Granted, you do not want to go around preaching that the sky is falling.. but sometimes through pictures, video shorts and other ways we can show the realities of not solving a problem without using fear directly.

#3. How to create a sense of urgency. Urgency and scarcity are just SOME of the biggest triggers known to man to help create desire. It’s what makes Apple product launches hot. It’s what separates the Ferarri from the Toyota sales. The pre-order for a Ferrari is a minimum 2-3 year wait, and so the urgency to not wait longer (for fear it might take even LONGER to get what you want, the rare status symbol) is very real.

If there is truly no limit to the product (IE: Apple could easily wait until they’ve manufactured 4 million devices, in fact sometimes they do..) you can create one by not shipping all the product at once and releasing it in batches. When a fraudster sells something, they always play on the deal being offered going away, the product or the opportunity is going away… and why not?

Real companies, getting QUICK and powerful results…

Here’s the big takeaway. Here’s what brands DONT do that keeps them from getting windfalls of sales.
(besides the obvious of knowing your ideal customer’s pain, and proving you can solve it)

#1. Making people feel uncomfortable. Here’s a weird fact about humanity. If we’re comfortable, we stay where we are. It’s only when we’re uncomfortable that we choose to take action and change things. Brands are usually afraid of reminding people of their pain. Sure, they’re usually ok with doing it in a playful way in a commercial on TV with cute things, but rarely do they ever want to actually make someone feel like the old way is painful.

#2. Cause-based marketing. Movement and cause based marketing work so well! They propel us to take up our protest sign and join legions of buyers and customers in the march against something. It could be anything from the old way of doing things, to the big picture vision of what the world would be like with the solution or just simply attaching themselves to a completely unrelated cause like world hunger.

#3. Being human and raw. Most CEO’s, people and companies in general don’t really want to talk about why they made a product. Not the REAL story. They don’t usually want to talk about the struggle, the mistakes, the frustrations and lost investor dollars. Yet these very authentic things are what build trust, and create incredible stories people tell and never forget. Since the dawn of time, humans have loved stories, especially one where there’s conflict, a build up of more conflict and a resolution of some kind. In fact, there are only 7 basic story types in the whole world and they all fall into these categories!

If you do NOT know what your customer’s biggest pain actually is, and you NEED to figure that out, so that all your products can demonstrate the transformation they create in solving customer pains… You may be interested in our COMPLETE market analysis, which provides exactly that and so much more.

Knowing their pains makes writing copy like pushing a hot knife through butter. If you DONT have a budget to hire a team or agency to create this kind of intellectual report, and want to spend the hours to learn to do it yourself, signup here to be notified when the course is completed.