4 Deadly Sins to Avoid When Selling "How to" Products

AVOID THESE 4 DEADLY SINS IN SELLING “HOW-TO” PRODUCTS

Good day. Anthony Manly here from selfmanagedbusiness.com. Today I want to talk to you about copywriting secrets. And specifically, we’re going to focus on what I call four deadly sins to avoid when selling any HowTo, product, or service.

Now, giving away any of your HowTo content, content in your free material, or too much content is not a good idea.

So as soon as someone sees your free stuff and feels like they can get a result, they will simply stop paying attention and they will certainly not buy your service or product.

Now, if you give them too much how-to in your paid newsletter, for example, or a course, you’re going to feel like you’re the teacher in school, which is you’re always giving excessive homework and they just drop your class full stop.

So how does this impact your sales copy?

And more importantly, or specifically, how can we avoid making mistakes that cause us to lose these types of sales? By giving too much information.

What are the deadly sins of selling?

So I’m just going to walk you through four (4) deadly sins and how to overcome those.

Deadly sins to “avoid” when selling.

1. The first deadly sin is focusing on more than one big result for your ideal prospect.

Now, whatever you offer, you might have multiple benefits and payoffs, but there should be only just one big result that people can expect to achieve when they buy your product or service.

Trying to sell too many ideas will sabotage sales before you even get started, right?

So don’t try to sell too many ideas.

Now, this ties in with the idea of telling them what to do and telling them how to do it because we don’t want people to feel they get overloaded if they buy from you.

Now, you’ve probably seen the meme that everyone talks about, which is having a short attention span. Sorry, let me repeat that.

People have shorter attention spans than goldfish.

Now, in my opinion, that’s not accurate.

It’s not that people have a shorter attention span. It’s that their attention gets divided up over a lot more sources of information.

Now, when somebody wants a result, they want that specific result that is what they’re looking for. And it’s just like yourself. When you’ve gone out and looked for a result, what you want to do is sell them one big result and then don’t divide their attention with any details like more information that they need. Okay, dearly.

2. Deadly sin number two, explaining how they will get that result.

I recently saw a marketer who was selling quite successfully on YouTube, and he does something similar to what we do with our products in our courses. Now, he was selling the result of making high ticket sales using a simple type of Facebook post that pretty much anyone can do or implement. Right?

This is what he was selling, but he wouldn’t tell you exactly what type of post it was, nor would he tell you anything other than just show you zoomed-out views of the particular content and how many people had responded to it.

What he did share was clear images of his final statistics to show you the sales that he made from these posts.

What that’s demonstrating are his results.

Now to make the sale he simply said we made a special kind of post anyone can do.

And then what he then said is that we chatted with them on messenger.

So the Facebook message is what we’re talking about.

He then went on to proceed to tell you that he spent $50 in ads or $50 in ads and got a couple of $1000 sales which is an excellent return on your Mate. Now then what he decided to do is scale it up.

So he spent $200 and he made five $1000 sales.

Again, he didn’t tell you what kind of post it was and he didn’t even tell you what they said in the chat.

Now he hasn’t told you to do anything but he did tell you what they did in such a way that made you curious and super excited to buy from him.

Now as a side note, the strategy he’s teaching is using a result-based post that creates massive curiosities, which is something we teach.

You tell people to instant message you through Facebook if they want to know more about the result that you’ve got.

Now what people do is they will raise their hands and you’re asking them to raise their hands on the post and it might be just something like yes or pick me in the post comments like you’re telling them what to say and we then use Facebook Messenger to close the sale.

Now he didn’t tell you that upfront, he just said to use the simple post that anyone could do and then people messaged him asking to buy.

Now, this is a perfect example of using curiosity and lack of information to make people believe that something simply holds the result that they want and that if they just pay for the course everything’s going to be revealed to them.

Now I hope you got the benefit out of that and understood what I was talking about. So I focus on results.

3. Deadly sin number three is getting specific about steps or tools.

Now unless you require somebody to make an outside purchase of your tools of choice you should either license them from somebody else or provide them as bonuses.

But what you shouldn’t do is get specific about the tools and use them and go through the steps.

So walking them through step by step when you click here, you click here. It’s not what you should do in a sales video or conversation.

All this will do is and it’s going to throw up objections and roadblocks and the might of the person that’s going to be reading your sales copy or watching the video.

So what you want to do is talk to them about how you should show them how to use the tools they already have or common tools that anyone can find on the Internet and access those tools through your bonuses, for example.

Now, as soon as you start laying out specific steps or tools in your sales copy, what you’re going to do is you’re going to start talking people out of buying from you.

Always communicate in terms of the results that they can expect and how you’ve removed every major obstacle to giving them the shortest path where they are now to achieving their number one results is taking them from escape and arrival, which is the framework that we teach.

People know they’re going to have to do some work at some point in time, but they just don’t want to do anything about it right now. Okay?

So your sales copy should focus not on the steps and tools, but it should focus on the outcomes.

Now, I hope you got benefit out of that particular deadly sin.

4. Deadly sin number four, failing to inspire toward achieving the result.

Now, this would be one of the biggest mistakes people make when selling any type of how-to information, products, or services for that matter.

What you’ll see is the sales copy focuses on what the product is and how it gets the target audience, the result.

Now, when people haven’t bought yet, you should focus pretty much all of your efforts on helping them to;

(A) envision themselves getting that result or enjoying that result, 

(B) believe they can get the result quickly themselves and 

(C) decide that the highest and best chance of getting that result is through yourself.

Now, the fastest way to inspire your ideal customers is by sharing stories or case studies.

Now, first, about your stories, you want to talk about how you got the result they want, right?

So you’re showing proof.

Second, you want to share case studies or testimonials or stories from students or customers of yours that got the result that that person reading or watching the sales video wants for themselves.

Now, another way to inspire people into realizing that you can help them achieve results is by focusing on how your method or service or product for that matter is different from someone else’s.

So your differentiation and what that means is first making up a list of what other people tell them to do to achieve the results they’re looking for. And here’s how you do it.

You tell them, here are your options to get X result.

But that isn’t what we do. We have a whole new way of getting this result.

It’s easier, it’s faster, it’s more efficient and it’s less costly. This means you can get the result you want in less time with less money, less hassle, and less headache.

Now, oftentimes the fastest way to differentiate yourself is to give your process a catchy name, and I’ll call out what others are doing to minimize it, and then explain that we’ve got a different process or method or tool to get the result, which we detail once they buy our product or service.

So I hope you’ve got a lot out of this. Please take it away.

Implement it.

It’s a great way to differentiate yourself in the marketplace and make more sales.