Sales Tricks I Hate

I love sales but this BS doesn't work.

Sales is simpler than you think. 

It’s ironic I’m saying that since I’ve devoted this entire month to teaching you how to sell. If it’s so simple, why the whole month? 

Also, if it’s so simple, why aren’t we all millionaires? 

Well, a few reasons: 

• Lack of confidence 

• Lack of specificity (and the clarity that defines it) 

• Using tricks that simply don’t work 

As we discussed last time, marketing is sales at scale. If you want to sell to millions, you have to learn how to sell to one person. 

However, some people are eager to skip ahead and push a ridiculous solution down as many throats as possible. That’s why they use tricks that I — as a copywriter, marketing strategist and a salesperson — find extremely annoying. 

Please, for the love of God, don’t use these. (puke emoji) 

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Giving bazillion bonuses. 

Sellers do this: 

• To create urgency. If you buy right this second, you’ll get 78 bonuses you don’t need. Excited? 

• To mask the lack of value. Sometimes the bonuses sound better than the main product. 

• To mask lack of confidence. When you’re not confident in the main product, you try to offer more things to “trick” people into buying. 

How to do it right? 

If you want to do a cool bonus for urgency purposes, choose one awesome thing that’s an extension of your product, and announce it to people who’ve already shown interest in your original product. Then it feels like you’re focused on giving more, not taking more. 

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Quantifying the value. 

When I offered people the chance to have a coaching session with me if they became a paid subscriber, I didn’t include: value $999. 

People do this because it’s the easiest way to slap some quantifiable value onto something when they don’t know how to explain the real value it brings. 

Learn how to explain the value of what you have to offer; you can read this piece as a reference of a what a good sales strategy / sales page includes. 

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Storytelling on an informational sales page. 

People read stories for entertainment. 

Stories might help you sell if you’re a storyteller by heart and it’s something your readers expect from you — but every coaching sales page these days starts with a heartbreaking personal story that I honestly don’t care about, and I’m someone who pays for coaching. 

Stories are cool, but there’s a time and a place and it’s not on top of your sales page where you’re supposed to be talking about me, the client, and not you, the seller. 

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ABC

The golden rule in sales: Always Be Closing. Yeah, yeah. 

You know how I became a top salesperson when I was in sales? I let people make decisions. If they didn’t choose me, it was on me not asking them the right questions or not understanding well enough what they needed. 

The problem is never not pushing. 

The ABC rule makes you a pusher. If you go deeper and talk to people, you’ll find many will come back to you even if they’re not ready to buy at the very second. That’s what happened to me: people constantly asked me my name and then asked for me specifically when they called back to buy. 

Then also bought something on top because now I was someone they could trust to recommend something. 

Helped my bonuses for sure. 

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What to do instead of these tricks? 

Go deeper and be specific. 

Keep asking the question that rings in your potential buyers’ heads all the time: why should I care???

You do this, you won’t need any of the other gimmicks. 

I go into more detail about what to sell in each stage of the sales funnel here. 

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The September webinar will be… 

Selling for Creators: how to sell memberships, digital products and premium services so that people throw their wallets at your face. 

You want the details? I’ll be sending them to paid subscribers shortly so consider joining the paid Smarter Solopreneurs community.

If you do it now, you’ll also get access to the recording of our previous webinar, “Irresistible Substack Description” below, which will help you make your Substack… Well, irresistible. ↘