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PART ONE
Let me explain the first fatal mistake that more than 90% of ALL would-be
online marketers make when they start prospecting to build their lists and sell
their products.
Before I do that, however, let's briefly re-visit the Law of Success, which
says "Do only the right things for only the right reasons."
Notice that
it says nothing at all about HOW to do the right things? The
critical things are WHAT and WHY, not HOW. That's because,
when you really understand what to do and why you should do
it, you can control the entire cause-and-effect process involved... you
can even create your own HOW to do it!
How does this
relate to prospecting?
It relates directly, because it reveals WHY so many people make this lethal
prospecting mistake!
So what IS
that lethal mistake?
It's nothing less than mistaking salesmanship for marketing. And let
me be blunt here... if you don't know the difference, you're in a whole world of
risk, on two fronts:
- First, you're going to approach
your prospects from entirely the wrong direction, and in entirely the wrong
ways. Rejection will become horribly familiar to you.
- Second, you're going to
find yourself being ripped-off by slick sellers who'll take brutal advantage
of your ignorance and vulnerability. (Chances are, in online marketing, that it's
already happened to you, ... maybe repeatedly.)
Let me explain the nature
of the problem, and how it arises. Then I'll show you how to avoid it in future.
(Very few people are aware of this eye-opening insight.)
ALL sellers
are opportunists
They have to be. It's the nature of their profession. If they see an opportunity
to make a sale, they have to act on it, or they're not doing their job.
If they find an opportunity to enhance their selling skills, or improve
their strike rates, they should seize them. It's intelligent behaviour.
No argument here from me.
The problem arises when opportunism overrides understanding. It's a problem
that afflicts every large sales organisation, where hostility typically exists between
the marketing department and the sales department.
One of the major causes of this conflict is confusion
and miscommunication. Here's why...
- Marketing
professionals are usually university educated. Marketing
was originally seen as a part of economics, prior to World
War II. After the war, it became a discipline in its own
right and, by the 1960s, was being adopted widely by large
corporations. Like any profession, marketers use very
precise language words and terms that have highly
specific meanings. This jargon is a form of verbal
shorthand that reduces the time and effort involved
in communication.
- Sales professionals
are usually educated on the job. They learn from their mentors, managers and trainers,
from in-house and external sales training courses, books, audio and video programs.
(Don't get me wrong here. I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with this,
or that sales people are ignorant or uneducated. They're just not educated in the
same way as marketing professionals, or on the same subjects. They come from very
different backgrounds, that's all. I know... I come from both.)
- Sales
people heard marketing people use marketing jargon and
it sounded very impressive. Sensing an opportunity
to make a positive impression on their prospects and clients,
and increase their sales, they adopted these terms
freely without understanding their precise MARKETING
meanings! Instead, they gave them assumed
meanings, taken from the context of their own experience
in selling.
Can
you see the danger here?
You end up with TWO groups of professionals, with roles that are complementary,
but very different, who use the same words and technical terms, but
with different meanings. Is it surprising, then, that so much confusion
and conflict arises between them?
As branding expert, Rob Frankel, writes in his best-selling
book, "The Revenge of Brand X",
the surest way to tell when a company hasn't got a clue
about marketing is to see if anyone in the organisation
has a business card or office door or desk placque that
says "Sales and Marketing". If so, they're
sellers, not marketers.
Here's the difference between marketing and selling, boiled right down to the basics...
- MARKETING is identifying
a need and satisfying it. (Needs define markets.)
- SELLING is getting people
to want what they need, because no matter how much they
NEED it, until they WANT it, they won't BUY it!
Here's
the reality of the online marketing scene...
| Most
of what claims to be MARKETING online,
is NOT marketing at all. It's just old-fashioned,
opportunistic SALESMANSHIP posing as marketing
to impress you! |
The difference between online
marketing and conventional marketing really boils down to only one aspect
of marketing... distribution! (Distribution is what brings the buyer and the
product or service you sell together at the same time and place.)
The real difference is found in their approaches to SELLING. (Selling
is the tail end of the marketing process and the front end of
the distribution process.
When the two disciplines are properly understood and applied, the simplest
analogy I can think of is this:
- Marketing people
locate the ducks, load the guns, aim and fire them.
- Sales people find
those targeted ducks and bring them home.
So
what am I really saying here,
?
That sales people are nothing but a bunch of retrievers? Isn't that belittling
the role of sales professionals?
Read what I wrote again. Then read it again. Read what I
actually said — not what you think I
said. Then think about reality. How often does that
actually happen in real life?
Almost never!
What I'm pointing to here is what, at first glance, seems
to be a massive failure on the part of marketers!
In actual fact, it's a massive misunderstanding
of the true roles of BOTH professions by company managements
and by sellers.
The real cause of this problem lies in the historical fact that marketing
is a much more recent arrival on the scene than selling. Selling is the oldest
profession of all. (Yep, even older than that one, if you think about
it... someone had to make the sale first, right?)
Marketing as a separate discipline didn't really evolve until the second half of
the 20th century. For a handy overview of the differences, visit http://www.profitclinic.com/msa
So sellers have had to learn from the university of hard knocks, over millennia.
Is it any wonder, then, that selling is so opportunistic? It's had to be
to survive. But, at the same time, it's a fact of life that many sellers
are predatory in their attitudes.
But how does
all this relate to your prospecting in online marketing?
In a nutshell, it's this...
90% or more of online marketers approach prospecting like sellers instead
of marketers. So they're lucky to achieve a 1-in-10 strike rate. If
they adopt a marketer's approach, they can achieve a 9-in-10 strike rate with a lot
less stress, effort and time. It's safer, easier, better and smarter in every
way.
So why don't
they do it?
For two reasons...
- They have no idea of the
differences between the two approaches.
- They don't know what
to do, why they should do it, or how to do it.
On the next page I'll show
you the first booby trap that this ignorance creates, . Then I'll reveal
what YOU can do to avoid or overcome it, why it's so essential, and how YOU can do
it successfully.
 Part Two
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