Sales, you are either really good at it or really bad at it. You either love it or hate it. Of all three pieces to the marketing cycle sales is probably the most misunderstood of them all. So many look at sales with this romanticized idea that people see an ad, click a button, and boom become a life long client. That is not the case.
This is lesson 3 of my Content Drip Planning course, available for free in the Units section of my group Focused on Content Creation. I am going, to be honest, I am not a sales expert, I am not a funnel expert, and I am not a business coach. The information I want to discuss with you today regarding sales is mostly regarding what I know sales not to be, and how content plays into sales. I am a copywriter I write content for sales pages, I am simply a piece to a larger process and system.
What is sales?
Going back to High School Economics and Business 101, if you want to make money you need to find a need in the community and provide a way to fill that need for cost + profit. As a business owner, you have already found that need and a way to fill the need, now if you are here it is because you are looking for a way to inform others about what you have found.
It used to be you took your products to market or opened a brick and mortar store within your town to fill the need your local community had. However, we are filling the needs now of individuals scattered across the entirety of the globe not just those in our own backyard. As we build businesses fully online we have to be more creative about finding those within the specific community we are looking to market ourselves too.
Sales a romance
Many people think about sales and have this picture of people seeing an ad, liking the ad, and clicking the purchase button. They view it akin to someone walking into a grocery store, looking at the shelf full of options and picking the one they want, purchasing it, and taking it home. However, that is not how sales works, even the sales of the items you see in the grocery store do not work like this. There is a lot of marketing, and psychology that goes into gearing individuals towards their purchase in a grocery store, but we are not here to talk about grocery store marketing.
When it comes to selling to individuals online you have to build trust, many of the items you see in stores have built up a level of trust that is at this point generations old. Coca-cola only sold an average of 9 glasses of soda per day for 5 cents apiece in 1886, now they sell trillions every year across the globe.
Sales are about relationships, your social media posts are not what is going to sell people on your offers, but that does not mean you shouldn’t post any aimed at selling your product or service. Online sales are made not via posts, but through private messenger and 1 to 1 calls. They are made through webinars where you brought together all of your marketing and finalized that final piece of trust, need, and desire for your product or service. They are not made because you posted a picture with pretty words and said you need this, you deserve this, only $250.
How to include sales in your marketing?
Sales should be a regular part of your marketing cycle. As it takes about 90 days for an individual to be warmed up and ready to purchase, and with you consistently gaining new followers on your pages you already have a following to advertise to.
If you are building the relationships and networking with your followers, building trust and providing value than as you post about different services and their costs or products and their costs you should have people engaging and wanting more information.
You need to continue those conversations and reassure the interested parties about their confidence in you.
Get them on a call, and in your inbox talk to them as the individuals they are with a genuine desire to help them. If you are a service provider post once a week regarding your everyday services. For those in product sales, you will want to post every day about your products.
Every 3 months host a big launch for your more expensive services or a free webinar/course to bring people into your network for you to promote your larger package offering.
During the month leading up to the service, webinar, or course post daily regarding the upcoming offer and its importance to your clients for solving their problem. Make sure that you still include relationship building and value-driven posts into the mix for those new people who are not yet ready to purchase your larger offer.
Your dream clients the ones who really want to work with you, will not mind the extra posting regarding your upcoming event, because it is genuine and not spammy. You are not being desperate and only posting about what you do and how much it costs.
I know sales are not clicking a button, sales are not constantly posting until someone clicks. Sales are relationships built and nurtured over time. Much like a lifetime partnership, you must first get to know each other, then learn where you fit in one another’s lives (this is the value part of your marketing), before you finally decide you are committed and ready to move in or get married.
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