Being a business owner, manager and employee in different industries over the years I have learned many things. I think the most important thing I have learned is that it all starts and is all dependent on the quality of people that you work with.

First you want people who are going to tell you “What You Need to Hear” not people who are going to tell you “What You Want to Hear?”

If you want your employees to take good care of your customers and to be creative and responsible then start by taking good care of your employees. Reward them and treat them with respect and get personally involved in tackling their issues and needs. Ensure you have outlets in place for employees to openly express their concerns without fear of retribution. Communicate what is expected of them what you are doing and how long it will take, and directly involve them in the solution.

Bottom line growth is not sustainable only top line growth is and only top line growth will get you the results that will take you where you want to go with the rewards and success that come with it.

So how can some think or where did they get the idea that they can get the best marketing, sales; service or support minds on the cheap? These people who are on the front lines day after day - Are you Business- and the ones who are going to make the difference in its success.

Saving money is something we are always looking to do but making money means that you are doing the right things to be successful and to be successful you need to have the kind of people who can get results and this means you need to “Pay for Performance.” If you want to save money save it on office supplies, Press your vendors for discounts, change your electric company but don’t think that a gift certificate for dinner or a pat on the back alone is going to recruit or retain the talent you need to drive and sustain your goals.

Were you born a business owner or senior level executive or did you have to pay your dues and earn what you have today? Did you seek out the companies that thought people with your experience and talent were a dime a dozen and didn’t want to pay what you were worth? I think not.

I stayed at the last business I worked at because they knew the value of people from management to salespeople to every worker there. I and my talented co-workers made more money than we could elsewhere and the business made even more and were consistently at the top of their region and district. Here is a business that to this day continues to prove this all out. How can this be? It is a direct result of sharing with and respecting the people who make it happen for you. It means making an investment that unlike the stock market is guaranteed to pay off. There is no complex formula here to figure out.

Do you want to attract Independent thinking people who can create value for your business? Or do you want parasitic people who are going to attach themselves to you on the cheap because they have few or no other options?

We all lose sight of things that were in front of us all the time. Open your eyes and you will find the key that will open the door to reveal who will take you to those next levels of success and beyond- Your Employees.

William Cosgrove

Fear is one of our most primal emotions, instilled from infancy. When my dad said I better stop crying or he’d give me something to cry about, do you know what I did?

 

I shut the hell up.
 

Yes, our natural instinct to avoid danger or harm is a powerful motivator and influencer of behavior. Always has been, always will be.

 

Not surprisingly, marketers caught on to this fact decades ago, whether they were selling financial services or personal hygiene products. And while many marketers took a respectable approach, others went straight for the gutter.

 

For example, in this 1932 advertorial, Listerine tried to make women feel like they would end up with a dog instead of a husband because of bad breath. (Image courtesy of Duke University Libraries)


 

On the other hand, you’ll probably remember this legendary and hugely influential anti-drug message, which also spawned its fair share of spoofs:


 

The Three Basic Steps of Fear-Based Marketing

Scientific studies have been done to evaluate various approaches to fear-based marketing, but appealing to someone’s fear typically involves three steps.

 

1) Present a risk or threat that arouses fear. The risk or threat has to be realistic and severe enough to motivate your audience to act. This is why you need to do your research and know your audience instead of making assumptions.

 

2) Show how vulnerable your audience is. If you try to scare someone with sensationalistic claims, you’re being manipulative. Instead, discuss the real consequences of not acting.

 

3) Explain how you can protect your audience. Convince your audience that the risk reduction or threat removal is worth the effort and cost involved with using your product or service.

 

This is when most marketers screw up. They revert to marketing-speak, going on and on about how wonderful their product is.

A critical part of the third step is building up your audience’s self-efficacy – the belief that they’re physically, mentally and emotionally strong enough to take action. If someone feels they can’t control their fear, they won’t act.

In other words, you’re not just selling your product as the solution. You’re empowering your audience to face and overcome their fear.

Helping People Overcome Fear to Make Positive Changes

In a previous post, I discussed the power of pain point marketing. Like pain point marketing, fear-based marketing doesn’t exploit people’s desperation. It also doesn’t have to involve a life or death situation.

 

Are financial advisors being evil if they warn people of the consequences of failing to save for retirement?

Is a doctor being evil by telling people that drinking one can of soda per day can dramatically increase their chance of chronic illness? True, by the way, according to a recent study.

 

There’s a big difference between persuasion and manipulation. Fear-based marketing can be a perfectly acceptable and ethical approach to marketing, as long as it’s based in reality, and especially when you use marketing to build trust and establish yourself or your company as an authority.

 

When delivered powerfully yet respectfully, fear-based marketing does more than motivate people to buy products and services. It can motivate people make positive changes in their lives.

Many people tend to bury their fears and pretend they don’t exist. They allow their emotions to cloud the cold, hard facts and refuse to admit they’re afraid of anything. A fear-based marketing message can help people accept reality and face their fears.

 

The Verdict

Some marketers believe any negativity is poison in marketing, and tapping into someone’s fear is the equivalent of emotional blackmail.

Unfortunately, real life isn’t all pretty flowers and rainbows. Marketing should reflect real life, complete with real fears and real problems. Imagine the sense of relief someone would feel if you empower them to overcome their fear and neutralize a genuine risk or threat.

 

As marketers, we’re not being evil. We’re doing our job.

by Scott McKelvey
 

 

I would like to step back from posting an article today to get feedback from you on how you feel about your marketing initiatives and answer questions that are important to you.

This is an opportunity for you to get questions answered and get information on how you might initiate or improve on your current marketing platform and initiatives.

 We would like to hear from you about your individual needs, concerns and problems you may be experiencing in relation to your particular business.

None of us have all the answers but our experienced staff will do its best to answer your inquiries and get you the information you need to make informed decisions.

Below are some general questions we would like you to think about and add any inquiry or comment you may have in the comment section. All inquiries made are on our secure servers and held in the strictest of confidence.
 

1. How do you fell about the overall performance of your Marketing Department?

1. Do you think there is room for improvement?

1. What areas would improve if you could?

1. What would you like to implement if it was cost effective for you?

People have little interest in purchasing a bed; what they want is a good night's sleep.

Some folks would sleep on a cardboard box if it meant they’d wake up refreshed—that’s what makes it a real problem in need of a solution.

Entrepreneurs must go beyond simply building products; they have to sell what their product will allow customers to do.

If they don't, you know they’re inexperienced. Take a look at this quote from investor Dina Routhier:

The most common thing that pegs an entrepreneur as an amateur is when they come in and immediately start talking about their amazing new technology, and forget to start the discussion with, “What big problem in the market am I trying to solve?” If they don’t start with the problem, then I know they are green."

Let’s look at some examples of how benefits help sell products.

"Lose 30 Pounds in 30 Days!"

(Thanks, Mega Shake!)

As an armchair observer, it's all too easy to scoff at over-the-top late night infomercials. And yet, these ads are making sales, often far more than that super neat-o new web app everybody talks about but nobody wants to pay for.

In fact, the infomercial industry is still growing. It's even gone on to eclipse the TV industry itself:

Why bring this up? If there is anything that infomercials are good at, it's selling benefits. For one, they understand that people can be coaxed, not driven.

Claude C. Hopkins once said, "Prevention is not a popular subject, however much it should be." It is far easier to sell around existing desires than it is to create desire.

Infomercials might all sound the same, but they work because they sell solutions that are perpetually in demand. It’s similar to how the most successful tech startups take a problem that already exists / has always existed, and make their solution easier, faster, cheaper, or more accessible.

There's also the effective use of selling a system. "30 pounds in 30 days" is appealing because you know what you're getting. Magic diet pills use this dishonestly, but with legitimate workout programs like P90X and Insanity, the language is the same. Nobody actually wants to buy a workout program, they want abs and better conditioning in a reasonable time-frame.


 

What's In It For Me?

Let's step away from infomercials and observe the effectiveness of selling benefits in the "real" business world. This stuff works, sans sleaze.

Apple understood this when they released the first iPod. MP3 players were nothing new, and the technology trounced CDs. The problem was marketing; the right pitch hadn't been made to explain just how much better customers’ lives were going to be once they owned an iPod.

How do you think Apple decided to frame the magic of the iPod? Around its technical prowess, or what customers could do with it?


 

The message was persuasive because, in the words of Seth Godin, it was all about "Me, me, me. My favorite person: me." Gigs of data have nothing to do with me, but a pocket full of my favorite songs certainly does.

The irony is that those who most often admire Apple and Jobs—those in the startup community—tend to have the biggest problem with selling. Many a HackerNews thread is filled with vitriolic commentors who insist that he who lists the most compelling technical features wins.

This has become such a problem that Justin Jackson recently wrote a very popular article reminding software developers that they aren't "normal" in relation to their customers:

Increasing the technical challenge while creating a product does not increase the chance for more sales. This surprises us. We get an idea for a thing, think about the technology we’d use to build it, and get excited. 

“I could build this on the Twilio API!” “I could learn that new CSS framework!” “I could use this new tool I just purchased!” 

The problem is that all of this is focused on us, the creator, and not on the customer, the consumer.

There's a natural inclination for craftsman to want to talk about the craft.

But remember, customers generally won’t care about the cogs that make your product turn. What they want to know is, "What's in it for me?"

A Better Version of You

In a well-stated case for solution selling, Belle from Buffer argued that people don't buy products; they buy better versions of themselves. As Jason Fried noted:

"Here's what our product can do" and "Here's what you can do with our product" sound similar, but they are completely different approaches.

As with many aspects of marketing, it all comes back to having a compelling proposition of value. This is what many miss, and it’s why you'll see ill-informed comments like this crop up from time to time:

I'm one of those developers who thinks that marketing in general is 'scummy'... I'm willing to acknowledge that there can exist marketing that is not scummy but it's hard for me to think of real world examples... I love building things that people enjoy using but I hate sales and marketing."

Apparently, you're supposed to sit in your basement and build things without ever trying to sell them to the people who need them the most.

Bullshit!

Take a look at the homepage of a great company like Bidsketch:



It reads an awful lot like the "benefit selling" we've discussed throughout this article, but to my knowledge, you won't find founder Ruben Gamez on late night TV exclaiming, "But wait, there's more!"


 

The “selling” here is beneficial to me as a customer: I find out what you provide and what I can do with it without being forced to slog through details I don't need.

As an example of what not to do, I once came across a SaaS app (that wasn't made for developers) that stated in their sub-heading, “Proudly made with Ruby on Rails.”

“What's Ruby on Rails, a level from Mario Kart?” Ninety-nine percent of customers won't know and simply won't care. It’s like shoving the schematics in their face before they even have a chance to decide, "Is this what I need?"

Kudos to many bootstrapped companies, who tend to deeply understand the value of selling benefits (perhaps because they actually have to make money).

Freckle doesn't even mention the word "software" before you're reminded of your biggest problem when using time-tracking apps.



SerpIQ knows prospects will say yes to their question. Once the benefits are clear, they learn about how and why it's a faster and more accurate tool.


 

Features Still Matter

Obviously, letting features "tell" still matters a great deal—once you've sold a prospect on what you can do for them, the details ease their decision-making.

Take buying a car; what you need is a car spacious and safe enough for your family, but when it comes down to a split decision, you might select the one with the heated leather seats. Until the benefits are obvious, stuff like this is just eye-candy.

Features can often connect the dots and put the benefits into a greater context. There are two important ways they do this:

• Justification: Esurance uses comparative pricing to explain why their insurance is cheaper (through features). The savings are gained from their lean operation, which was "born online." Once the benefit is sold, features are used to explain how you'll make it happen. If a hosting company says your site is totally secure (hooray!), features show you how and why that claim is a guarantee. Sell the benefits first, then highlight the great features you offer to close.
• Differentiation: Describing your point of difference means elaborating on your features. We often tell Help Scout customers about how most help desks outsource their email parsing. Ours is in-house, which allows us to do email integration and voicemail support that others can't do (only after the "help desk headache" issue is addressed does this feature become important).

My personal persuasion hero, Claude Hopkins, has a useful tactic on how to correctly frame features and benefits:

There is one simple and right way to answer many advertising questions. Ask yourself, “Would this help a salesman sell the goods? Would it help me sell them if I met the buyer in person?”

Would you, making a sale in person, talk about the titanium frame or the nickel-cadmium alloy mix of your brake pads before addressing the benefits to a customer?


 

Remember that by not selling on benefits, you're doing a disservice to customers. Give them what they want by showing them why your product is that "one thing" they've been searching for.