Hobbling Along on Persuasion Crutches

The Desert of Arizona
Windy 66 Degrees – 4:04 p.m.

If you make something that your potential buyers actually want, you don’t really need PERSUASION.

Oh the many hours I could have saved myself had someone smacked me in the face about 20 years ago to deliver that simple idea.

At least I could have spent more time working on the REAL puzzle. Because even with that understanding, it’s far easier SAID than DONE.

But really, who needs to be persuaded to get something they truly want?

Almost no human I can think of. My kids certainly don’t. And most of us are kind of just those same kids in big bodies. So you can learn a lot from kids!

When you make things people don’t want…or when you make things where you haven’t quite aligned that thing so it becomes an OBVIOUS “must have” for your buyer, then you run into friction. Or worse, you just get ignored.

It’s easy to waste a lot of time swimming around in the pool of generalities when it comes to selling. So let’s hop out of that pool and get smarter and more specific about this.

Generalities aren’t so valuable until ONE thing happens. And that thing is defining the context of the entire selling ecosystem by choosing who your buyer is.

The bad news is that once you choose that buyer, then you really get to the hard work! The great challenge isn’t identifying your ideal buyer, the great challenge is disciplining yourself to ignore everyone else!

If you’re selling and everyone isn’t buying, here are some ideas to consider:

  • Give up the idea that everyone will buy. That’s a myth not worth pursuing. Have you structured your offering so you can be successful in spite of this?
  • Ask yourself if you KNOW who your buyer really is.
  • If you know who your buyer is, ask yourself if you TRULY know what makes them tick?
  • If you truly know what makes them tick, then have you aligned your offering so it is IMMEDIATELY recognizable as a “must have something” for that individual?
  • If you get this far and it’s STILL not working, and you are actually solving a problem your buyers want solved, then it might be time to rewrite the STORY of that solution.
  • You are selling to humans. Humans change. Their core doesn’t change quickly, but the story they tell themselves about that core does change. So you don’t solve this sales puzzle once and forever. You have to keep re-solving it as long as you want to be of service.

As you can see, there’s no solution that appears with a wave of your magic wand. Selling is a living, breathing process where the solution to the puzzle is constantly shifting in subtle and not so subtle ways. If you have to blast the volume on “persuasion,” you’re missing something.