Archive for March, 2009
Help Clients Overcome Fear? A Soft Sell Analysis
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We’ve been asked: How do you help clients in overcoming their fear of a new venture?
This is a question all healers and care-givers must address.
When we see our clients struggling with worry, depression, frustrated ambition, confusion . . . tied up in the knot of their fear of failure, their fear of the unknown, fear of a new venture, of growing bigger, of making money—more money than they had ever been able to imagine—our first impulse is to help.
The question is—help with what?
Our first answer is help clients overcome fear, because we believe overcoming fear is the doorway to what they say they want.
But is this really the best approach to help with overcoming fear?
When Nobody Buys: The Unconfessed Truth of All Internet Marketers
Posted by: | CommentsYou’re involved in the Internet because you want to generate online money.
You’ve created your new product or service to market and sell to people who you believe will be thrilled to have your help and support.
You get a terrific sales page, write your sales copy, and you get it all ready to go.
Then you send an enthusiastic message out to your list members inviting them to improve their lives with what you’re offering.
And you wait to get your first sale.
And you wait to get your first sale.
And you wait to get your first sale.
And you wait to get your first sale.
And you wait to get your first sale.
And it never comes.
Soft Sell Marketing Template? It’s internal . . .
Posted by: | CommentsWe’ve been asked: What is the basic template of soft sell?
Asking about templates point to a desire for a system, a repetitive, predictable process that creates efficiency and economy.
No business could exist if it had to invent new processes for every new product offer. So systemization is necessary.
But a focus in systems usually reveals an external, mechanized approach.
So here’s another way to ask the question: Can there be a template for the internal aspect of marketing.
And the answer is “yes.”
Sales Trends and Emotional Connection: Are They the Same?
Posted by: | CommentsWe’ve been asked: Most marketers focus on their sales trends. What do you focus on?
This question raises the issue of the external and internal dimensions of marketing and business.
By internal we don’t mean the secrets and tactics and closed-door meetings. As internal to a company as that may be it’s still all about the external.
By internal we mean the emotional connection between the seller an the buyer and the awareness the seller has to the power and impact of that connection.
Soft Sell Isn’t About Political Correctness
Posted by: | CommentsThe other day we attended a local seminar and noticed that the presenter, a young man in his late twenties we’ll call Andrew, was using a curious power point to demonstrate the buyers for his Internet marketing program.The “buyers” were all male and all white.
So Judith raised her hand and said, “I’m curious. All the people you’ve got in your power point are males and white males. It’s hard to listen to your presentation when I’m not represented up there and neither are lots of other people in this room.”
Andrew looked stunned.
With other audience members nodding in agreement Judith went on, “Why didn’t you put in a few females and some people of color?”
We could see Andrew was getting edgy, eager to shut Judith up. But she wasn’t finished.
“My husband and I represent the Soft Sell Marketing Community and a growing movement that’s emerging around the globe. And we’re proving—without a doubt—that women want to succeed in business big time and will buy marketing products. And of course the same is true for people of color—so you’re missing the beat for lots of us.”
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Soft Sell Marketers Association – The ONLY Place for Beginners
Posted by: | CommentsSince we got involved in Internet marketing as raw beginners—former psychotherapists who had NO background in marketing, sales or computer technology—we’ve seen, over and over again how major Internet marketers, who make tons of money every month, offer courses that are NOT FIT for beginners.
Their sole teaching credential and sole lure is the money they earn.
But doing something well and teaching what you do to others—no matter how much money you make—are two completely different skill sets.
And to compound the problem, the deeper anyone gets into a subject or a skill the harder it gets to remember what it was like before they knew what they now know. So these major “teachers” very often operate from unconscious assumptions that their students know more than they actually do.
So to say, “Look at me, I make kajillions a month” not only has no bearing on whether they can teach what they do to others, their big numbers only set up the illusion that they can. And while those Big Numbers are often an effectively hypnotic lure, very often the “teacher” has NO IDEA how to pay it off.
And who gets hurt? Not the guy with the big numbers. It’s the beginner who is investing their dream money, their hope money, caught up in a fantasy of the big future, lots of energy spinning in circles.
Why are we writing about this?
Advertising Age (or AdAge) magazine delivers news, analysis, and data on marketing and media. In the March 2, 2009 issue, in an article about the difference between soft and hard sell, accrording to authors Hamish Pringle and Peter Field:
What the data show us is that emotional campaigns are almost twice as likely to generate large profit gains than rational ones, with campaigns that use facts as well as emotions in equal measure falling somewhere between the two.
Pringle and Field characterize hard sell as “persuasion-based rational arguments”; and soft sell as “campaigns that inspire strong emotional responses and create true engagement.”
Advertising Age is no namby-pamby, new age publication. It’s a bottom-line driven, let’s-find-what-works, no-nonsense magazine that is distributed world wide.
So their support of soft sell isn’t spiritual, it’s strictly business.
We are grateful to our friend Jeff Hutner who told us about the article and then tore it out and sent it to us. Thanks Jeff.
Now, there’s the spiritual element, one that’s even more important.
Soft Sell Squeeze Pages? A Contradiction?
Posted by: | Comments“I’ve come to really dislike squeeze pages. From examining my wallet I know they are effective. Is there another way?”
There are two ways to answer this question, and both are contingent on the phrase “after examining my wallet.”
1) If the writer is a marketer then he/she is profiting from squeeze pages but has an issue with using them.
2) If the writer is a consumer then his/her wallet is lighter after having fallen too many times for the techniques used in squeeze pages.
Soft Sell Marketing: One Hard Seller’s Point of View
Posted by: | CommentsAre you sick and tired of the hard sell online marketing tactics?
Online marketing tactics that hammer you until you either get out your credit card or you run away?
Well, look at this peek into the hard sell marketers’ mindset.
Because . . . well . . .my, my, my what you can find when you’re out surfing the search engines.
What follows is a fictionalized version of a snippet of forum dialogue that we discovered when researching the phrase “soft sell.”
NOTE: To protect the identities of those involved, we’ve translated the conversation into fiction but stayed true to the original intention that took place at the heavily hard sell forum site. .
