Yesterday I organized a Zoom call for a few list owners.
One of these, a successful copywriter and marketer, was asking how to price, or how to persuade businesses to take him up on, his newfangled sales machine.
“Is $15k a year a good offer? The sales machine is super valuable, and has produced great results for the businesses who have used it. But it’s been a hard sell.”
I thought it was instructive that a successful copywriter and marketer was asking this question.
My answer was, if this thing produces sales so well, why not package up the results into a nice gift box, and sell that gift box instead?
In other words, instead of persuading business owners to buy a gizmo that costs $15k a year and promises to produce sales… why not persuade them to accept new money in the bank, which they can pay you a finders fee for?
In the words of marketing legend Claude Hopkins, who became the modern equivalent of a billionaire using little more than a typewriter:
“In every business expenses are kept down. I could never be worth more than any other man who could do the work I did. The big salaries were paid to salesmen, to the men who brought in orders, or to the men in the factory who reduced the costs. They showed profits, and they could command a reasonable share of those profits. I saw the difference between the profit-earning and the expense side of a business, and I resolved to graduate from the debit class. “
“Yes,” I hear someone saying in the back, “but business owners should already know that a sales gizmo isn’t really an expense, because it will help them make money. They should be smart enough to see a profit-generating solution when they see one. They should they should they should.”
Yes, they should.
But they don’t, just in the same way that the successful copywriter above should have remembered the century-old lesson that turned Claude Hopkins into a billionaire, but he didn’t.
The fact is, we have limited time and attention and energy, and doing the work of translation — of turning what we have into what we could possibly have, of what we buy into what it could do for us, of what we sell into what people really want — requires time and effort.
You can argue against this aspect of reality. Or you can work with it, and simply translate what you sell into a result that people care about, and that they can take you up on without risk.
Moving on.
I recently got a bunch of feedback from my readers, and I found that a large number of people list, as their #1 goal, getting consistent with emailing daily.
Maybe you too feel you should should should be writing consistent daily emails. But you still don’t do it.
If it’s not happening, and if it’s important to you, maybe it’s time for to take a different tack: