The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [65]
This one piece of advice upends the vast majority of marketing you’ll see out there and marketing training you’ll learn in undergraduate and MBA marketing courses. Most marketing focuses on what the marketer wants to sell. That’s why we find most marketing so invasive and annoying. Because we don’t care about what the marketer wants to sell.
Good marketing, in turn, speaks to the prospect about their deepest emotional realities, their innermost desires, and about helping them achieve what they want in those realms. Thus, the best marketing is all about human connection, on a genuine level. If you can truly help your prospect achieve their deepest wants and desires in the area your product or service addresses (and if you can’t, you shouldn’t be marketing it in the first place), then you are actually doing your prospects a great service by communicating with them about their problems or issues, because few people ever meet us on that level, even in our personal lives. It feels fantastic to be heard, met, and understood. If you can do that with your prospects, then they will most certainly want to do business with you (provided what you’re selling is an appropriate match for them).
The recording gave a specific process for getting inside of the heads of the people you’re communicating with, so you can talk with them about what is most important to them. If you talk with them about what’s most important to them (instead of talking about your pitch, which I guarantee is low in the list of what’s important to them), they will listen, and they will trust what you have to say. The process Craig offered was simple: make a list of your prospects’ biggest fears, frustrations, desires, dreams, and nightmares around the issue your product or service helps them with. List twenty-five answers for each of these categories.
I gave Jena the homework to make these lists, answering from the viewpoint of her prospective weight-loss clients. This was the first time I’d ever given her “homework” around her business, so she looked at me funny—but she was in no position to protest, given how dire the situation was.
She created a beautiful portrait of the inner emotional reality of her prospective clients, via the answers to this exercise. And with that portrait, I began constructing an e-mail to send to her list, which spoke directly to her prospects’ most urgent needs:Are you absolutely, positively sick of constantly feeling self-conscious of your body?
Are you tired of looking into your closet and seeing all the clothes you wish you could fit into again?
Do you feel that your weight is holding you back from doing what you want to do in life?
Do your cravings feel “out of control”?
Do you feel bogged down by lethargy as a result of carrying around extra weight?
Do you fear that you’ll never manage to lose the weight?
Does the fear of diabetes or heart disease lurk in the back of your mind?
Are you afraid that you will be relegated to a “small life” because you don’t have energy to be out and about creating something large?
Do you feel your body is not trustworthy, that it will screw up the plans made by your mind?
Do your cravings expand to become all-consuming, sabotaging “the weight-loss plan”?
Are you concerned you’ll never find the time to implement healthier eating?
Are you sick of feeling like a failure because you fail to lose weight?
I then wrote, in Jena’s voice, a story she had told me many times, about how she had struggled with every one of these painful bits of self-doubt and self-hatred, before she finally figured out how to get her health, eating, weight, and body image in order. At the end of the e-mail, I provided a specific way for potential