Ready for an uncomfortable truth?
Most sales and marketing material sucks.
Focusing as it does on what you do, it rarely has the emotional heft to grab your market’s attention.
Here’s the good news:
- Creating crappy collateral is rarely intentional
- You already have everything you need to transform your marketing and get the results you want and deserve
If you’re like me, you likely approach your business development with the best of intentions. After all, you do what you do because you’re passionate about your work and want to use your skills and experience to help others achieve their goals.
Therefore, your marketing is about generating opportunities to do good, drive value for others, and engage in more of the work you love.
Problem is, if your sales and marketing material sucks, the result is always the same. Despite your best efforts, you struggle to engage and attract the people you need to build a successful business. No matter how good your intentions,
So how do you take the suck out of your marketing?
Well, first you need to know what’s going wrong and why.
Why Most Sales and Marketing Material Sucks
Let’s get real. Nobody wants their sales and marketing to fail! But that doesn’t stop us from sucking the life out of it.
One of the key reasons for ‘The Suck’ is how we approach copy creation. Rather than tapping into the elements that will make your market sit up and take notice, you focus instead on the things that interest you.
Typically, what you do and how it works.
As one of my favourite mentors once told me, talking about what you do, is tantamount to showing someone a picture of your baby and expecting them to love it as much as you do.
They won’t. What they really care about is their baby (business).
It’s not anyone’s fault. Rather, it’s a natural consequence of being close to what you do. You have an intimate understanding of your business, and it’s exciting. But, invariably only to you.
But the real fundamental flaw is people don’t buy what you do or how you do it. They buy what they believe you can do for them. Plainly put, they buy what you’ve done for people like them.
They don’t buy features and benefits. They buy outcomes. And what they want is to experience the transformation that delivers those outcomes.
Now that is good news because with a little bit of work, you can easily calculate and convey the transformative effect of working with you.
Or in other words your value to them.
Three Essential Ingredients to Communicating Your Value
There are three ingredients that combine to stop your sales and marketing materials from sucking and ensure it establishes you as your market’s go-to provider instead.
They are:
- Your experience,
- Your expertise
- Your Impact
And they are your business’s most valuable assets.
Your experience conveys your relevance. It encompasses the people you’ve worked with, the size and scale of their business, and the industry verticals they work in.
It includes the mistakes you’ve made, the lessons you’ve learned, and the lightbulb moments you’ve had along the way.
It’s your understanding of your market’s needs and how well-tailored your approach is to the problem they need you to solve.
Your expertise conveys the level to which you’ve mastered your craft. It encompasses the problems you solve, the way you solve them, and the elegant process you’ve designed that drives the results you achieve.
Your impact conveys the meaningful positive change that you’ve had on your clients and their businesses. It is a combination of the results you achieved, and the meaningful change those results delivered.
Your impact is crucial. While results give an indication of your ability to do the job, it’s the impact those results deliver that makes them meaningful to your clients and by extension, your market.
How to Leverage your Most Valuable Assets
Your experience, expertise, and the impact you have on your clients (both professionally and personally) are the Crown Jewels of your business.
They are clear differentiators and most importantly, they are the things that your market actually buys.
Features and benefits only reflect the potential of your product or service. While it is your expertise, experience, and impact that offer real insight into your relevance to your market’s business and confirmation of what you are capable of.
Your customers can’t afford to buy possibilities. They need proof that you are their perfect partner.
Your experience, expertise, and impact offer this proof. They are measurable, believable, and meaningful, and are used by your market to get a feel for their own future success. They are emotive rather than logical and stir the imagination.
By communicating the relevance of your experience and expertise, how they’ve shaped your process to enable you to deliver the impact you do, people become confident – and convinced – that you are the supplier they need, from the endless options they could consider.
Don’t let fear get in the way
adly, most people don’t leverage their experience, expertise, and impact.
Why?
Mostly it’s mindset. Either they’ve never considered the value of them or because they honestly don’t believe that people will find them of value.
Often manifesting as imposter syndrome, too many people put their success down to luck or convince themselves that what they achieved wasn’t so special.
So instead of luxuriating in the confidence of what they are capable of or where that capability comes from, they rarely probe their own achievements and what has led to them.
Worse, some feel that it’s not seemly to speak about their successes. They consider it boasting of sorts that wouldn’t play well in the market.
Nothing could be further from the truth. When your market reaches out to you, they’ve typically decided what they want to buy. They now want to work out whom they should buy it from.
If you can’t demonstrate your relevance and value compared to the rest of the market, your buyers will look elsewhere.
It might seem counterintuitive, but I’ve found that the best way to overcome this fear is to speak to your clients directly. They’ll confirm just how good they think you are, and (most importantly!) why.
In fact, I’ve found that when you talk to clients, they’ll tell you everything you need to know to sell to more people like them.
They will tell you how your experience, expertise, and impact have changed their lives. With that knowledge, your confidence in selling yourself and your abilities increases.
Your content and your copy become more forthright. More certain. More powerful. It even changes the way you walk into a room.
And as your confidence and conviction in yourself and your abilities increase, so does that of your market in you.
The result, you close more contracts than ever before.
However, you can only do this once you start asking the right questions.
But what are those game-changing questions?
New Guide Incoming
Well. Next week I’m launching a new guide, which will outline each of the key questions you should ask and why they are important.
I’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready.
Here’s to unleashing your value and achieving the recognition and success you deserve.
Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash