The Mystery Element In Sales
The element of mystery can be effectively employed to involve your audience. We are all naturally curious about the unknown. When we feel we’ve been left hanging, it drives us crazy! We want to know the end of the story. We want our tasks to be completed so we can check them off our list. This is also known as the “Zeigarnik Effect,” named after Bluma Zeigarnik, a Russian psychologist. This effect is the tendency we have to remember uncompleted thoughts, ideas, or tasks more …
The Obstacles That Keep You From Closing The Sale
The very first obstacle that many persuaders experience is prejudging a prospect. They set up an appointment, hang up the phone and then immediately say, “Oh, great. This lady’s looking for a product we don’t even have. She’ll never buy.” It could be for any number of reasons, but basically the salesperson decides, based on one scrap of information, that the lead isn’t going to go anywhere before s/he has even met or spoken with the prospect. This is a common but huge selling…
The Power Behind Understanding Resistance
Do you want to know why your prospects aren’t buying from you? There are three R’s or three things you need to understand if people walk out that door and don’t purchase from you. Most people are wearing a badge that says convince me, help me make a good decision. They need and want help. They want to be confident in making the right choice. That is what a great persuader does.
The first R is reason. You didn’t give them a reason to buy. Maybe you didn’t generate enough in…
Timeless Marketing Truth: How Do You Know Your Advertising Copywriting Is Good?
There’s only one way to know if your advertising copy is any good. It’s the same way that your customer knows it—it sells!
We are not all born copywriters, but we are all born customers. As a natural born customer, you can recognize good copy…
Step outside yourself and read the copy fresh: does it reach out and connect with you, does it hold your interest, does it promise something real that you really want, does it convince you?
“It has been said that advertising…
Timeless Marketing Truth: How To Add Character To Your Marketing And Bring Your Message Alive
Making a character out of the advertiser brings the message alive. Maxwell Sackheim is most famous for inventing the Book-of-the-Month Club. But before that, he invented some dramatic, and dramatically successful, advertising.
One of his patented techniques was to make a character out of the advertiser, writing ads as if the clients themselves were actually talking. One Sackheim client was Frank E. Davis, “The Gloucester Fisherman”. This is how Sackheim wrote for him:
…
Timeless Marketing Truth: The Unchanging Truth About Selling Fickle People.
What we want changes overnight; what makes us want it hasn’t changed in thousands of years, nor will it change in thousands more. The serious student of marketing can learn much from early analysts of motivation. Here is a bit of George French’s “The Art and Science of Advertising” from the turn of the 20th century…
“We know how to appeal to Smith because we know Smith. We know what will please Brown because we know Brown. We know how to get our way with Jones because we…
Timeless Marketing Truth: What Is Advertising, Anyway?
Your first clue to the truth about advertising was written more than 100 years ago.
Let me tell you the story of a young, confident copywriter by the name of John E. Kennedy. Early one May evening in 1904, Kennedy, a former Canadian Mountie, sat in a New York barroom.
He sent a note upstairs to the office of A.L. Thomas, the head of the Lord and Thomas advertising agency. “I’m in the saloon downstairs,” the note began, “and I can tell you
what advertising is. I know y…
Timeless Marketing Truth: When Headlines Really Draw, Who Needs Pictures?
“A great title is a work of genius,” said E. Haldeman-Julius in the 1920s.
Haldeman-Julius sold 200 million (really) of his “Little Blue Books.” His headlines were his product, because he sold his books by the title. About halfway through his brilliant marketing career he wrote a book called “The First Hundred Million,” in which he shared some of his secrets…
EHJ had a system. If a title didn’t sell over 10,000 copies in a year, it was sent to a place in his office ca…
Transformational, Long-Term, Permanent, Lasting Change
Change is the key to our success and to our financial future. Often in our own lives, however, change is something we fiercely resist. Even when achievement sits on our doorstep, we’re still too comfortable to make an adjustment. The very first place to look for transformation is within. When you take ownership of yourself, your life and your income, you are on your way to harnessing success.
I learned early in my life that if things needed to change, it was up to me to ch…
Using Irrational Belief as a Tool of Mind Control
Just suppose that everyone had some superstitious belief that drove them and you knew exactly what it was. That would be REAL power!