I’ve been enjoying a bit of a ‘phone detox’ the last week while I’ve been on holiday.
It’s been refreshing, to say the least. Mostly, I’ve been keeping off IG/YouTube etc and putting that attention into reading/study.
Yesterday evening, however, I was doing a lazy scroll and noticed just how fu$king insane IG/Youtube is getting with direct offer ads.
By golly it’s exhausting… and it’s all the same $hit too.
It got me wondering… how effective really are the “sell sell sell” push tactics going?
Because it’s certainly not my style and it’s not what I recommend my mentees do (unless it’s part of a more value-based advertising strategy).
My rule of thumb is never to put “selling” above “serving.”
So in pursuit of understanding what was going on sales-wise in our businesses (to either prove or disprove my suspicions), I dived into my purchase analytics and found something that you might find interesting…
And it flies in the face of the mindless sales zombies on IG/YouTube who are part of the “always be closing” crowd… (the guys that are ramming dirty-sock offers down your throat before they’ve even bought you a drink).
Here was the stat that stood out:
92% of all the Alley-Oop subscriptions occurred after 90 days of being subscribed to my email list.
And just about every Ascension Mastermind application ticked in the application that they’d been following AA for years prior to reaching out.
Interesting, huh?
It’s as if…
Forming a bond with your audience, creating familiarity, emphasizing your willingness to serve, and establishing credibility and authority…
Needs to come first…
… Long before money changes hands.
Now, this might not be new news for you; but it will certainly validate what you already know.
In fact, it might give you permission to take a wildly different approach to how you bond with your prospects.
But before I tell you what this approach is, I wanted to make sure this was a consensus amongst the smartest marketers on the planet.
And it didn’t take me long to find that the smart marketers thought the same. Here is a snippet from legendary marketer Dean Jackson in a transcript from his Email Mastery course (I found a pdf online, so it’s freely available. Reply back if you want to read it and I’ll send it through):
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Only 15% of your prospects and leads will buy from you in the first 90 days. But when you think about the “life of a lead”, you think about 7, 14, maybe 28 days, right? But in reality, most people take far longer than that. So don’t neglect the 85% for the 15% who are ready to buy now.
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Jay Abraham (one of the kings in the world of marketing) says the same thing (I’m paraphrasing):
Commit to empathy, give advice (it’s decisive) not information (since it’s inconclusive), and serve unconditionally before money ever exchanges hands.
The point is this:
While your feed might be flooded with mediocre marketers trying to sell sell sell, smart marketers are playing the long game.
They are bonding with prospects and pulling them into their ecosystem, rather than pushing them away with “buy my shit right now, for today only while stock still lasts” LOL
So my question and advice for you:
Would you do anything differently with your communications, if you knew that 85%+ of people who interact with you won’t be buying from you in the next 90 days? Would you change up your approach?
Would you maybe, take the pressure off yourself to sell, and instead, just serve… and let the sale happen, when the time is right?
Certainly my approach.
This approach, along with many more advanced prospect bonding strategies, is exactly what I’ll dive into in April’s edition of the Alley-Oop newsletter.
The goal of this month’s newsletter is to help reframe how you think about the acquisition process, so rather than feeling like:
1. You have to chase prospects to “sell to”, you can have a steady consistent flow of “already sold” buyers;
2. You’re starting over month after month, but rather, your business can build and stack on top of each other month on month and benefit from compounding
3. You have all this pressure to go hunting for sales (ergh), rather than having them arrive effortlessly into your notifications…
Then below is the link to join the 100+ other coaches, consultants, and gym/clinic owners who look forward to their delivery every single month:
Once this puppy goes to print, I can’t say the next time I’ll be writing on this topic.
– Karl Goodman
