Last night, I rewatched a dark but fascinating movie called Angel Heart:
Mickey Rourke plays private detective Harry Angel, who is on a missing persons case.
Throughout the movie, in order to unearth the next clue, track down his guy, and collect his unfortunate bounty, Harry Angel pretends to be:
– A researcher from the National Institutes of Health, when getting records from a hospital…
– A journalist writing an article, when talking to Toots Suite, a blues guitar player…
– A client coming to have his future told by a spirit medium…
– A customer at a hoodoo supplies store, looking to buy some High John De Conqueror root.
Harry Angel lies. He doesn’t work at the NIH, and no amount of squinting will make that fact true.
You don’t have to lie. But you can still reposition or repackage who you are and what you do, with integrity, right now, in a matter of seconds, to make it more likely people will hear you out. Without lying, you can get the benefit of what Harry Angel does to move his case forward.
Really, it’s the same thing I talked about in my email yesterday — ask what your prospects are looking to buy, instead of how you can sell what you have.
Because this doesn’t only apply if you want to get people to buy your PDFs or coaching or copywriting services or whatever.
It applies equally well if you’re simply trying to open up conversations with people, which can yield valuable information or lead to a valuable relationship or partnership down the line. In other words, cold outreach.
In entirely related news:
If you take the idea above ^^^^ and generalize it a bit, it applies just as well to get people to open up your newsletter emails, read them, and have their mind gradually or suddenly opened to the possibility of giving you some money.
And if you want specific step-by-step instructions on how exactly you can do this today: