Get wise with your whys – for stories that sell

If you consider that you need to do a sales pitch or have a conversation that will end in the sell, then you might be setting yourself up to not sell much at all.

The thing with a sales pitch is you’ll go into pitch mode–you’ll start to talk differently, change your energy, perhaps feel uncomfortable (as will most likely the person you’re pitching to) and you’ll feel less like you and more like a salesperson.

Do you sell you? Of course you do, you’re a business celebrity!

But are you only selling you – your time – and nothing more? That’s not good – as you’re putting a limit on what you can do and who you can reach, not to mention a limit on your income.

Here’s what I see a lot… people marketing recipes: the ingredients for a cake – the step by step pieces you need.

But what a cake lover is more interested in is the finished article – what a cake lover buys is a CAKE! I get a lot more excited looking at a slice of carrot cake than I do a bag of flour, eggs, sugar, some carrots, a wooden spoon… and yet this is what I see a lot of people are ‘selling’ – the ingredients.

I’m not a robot.

I can’t work non-stop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (although sometimes I do think this would be super handy–like the week before an event I’m running!).

And sometimes, of course, it all gets too much.

Doing your Thing too much can make you question if your Thing really is your Thing as it’s all getting ‘too hard’. Don’t let it be like that.

I get it. Trust me I REALLY get it. You want to sell EVERYTHING YOU KNOW. The thing with your Thing is that when you realise you’ve got this better, quicker, smarter, cheaper, more detailed, simply ‘better’ way of doing something, you want to help–and you want to give people EVERYTHING you have.

Most businesses are in the business of ‘helping’–helping other businesses, helping people, helping society, helping the world, some kind of ‘helping’ is usually the result of what they do. Whether that’s helping with a product, system or service… it’s usually there to ‘solve a problem’.

So why is this important to understand? In Marketing terms, it’s important that you absolutely know and can demonstrate the ‘problem’ that you solve and how you ‘help’.