Going Against Sales And Marketing Trends While Working Towards Your First Sale

 

You don’t always need to follow today’s sales and marketing trends to make that first sale. Sometimes, you need to take a different approach to your business. In this episode, Victoria Wieck discusses trends in sales and marketing and why these trends don’t always apply. Victoria talks about building your brand and gives tips and strategies that help build customer trust. Listen in and learn more about working towards your first sale.

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Going Against Sales And Marketing Trends While Working Towards Your First Sale

I am so excited to be talking about the next topic. It’s going to be talking about the counterpoint to the trends about sales and marketing, how to get your first sale, how do you market to people, your target market, all those. People are talking about this. There are tons of articles, mastermind classes on and on. I’m here to buck all those trends and all the myths. If you are brand new, starting out in a business or maybe you already own a small business and you’re learning about the sales funnels, getting approached by people telling you that they can build all these funnels. In fact, I even saw a book about do you know the difference between a website and a sales funnel.

Let me make sure that we all are under the same wavelength when we talk about sales, marketing and sales funnel, which is used to be one of the most favorite ways of people to get a lot of customers into literally a funnel. They’ll capture email somehow. They’ll buy your email list from someone or somehow, they get your email. Once they’ve captured your name and address and email, maybe they’ll even know a little bit more about you, your gender, income, they will put you in this funnel because they believe that you’re not going to buy it the first time they send it to you. They’ll send you a whole series of emails so they’re trying to turn your name into this funnel. When he shoots out at the other end, you typically will buy something from them. That is a sales funnel.

There were all these marketers who will do all the pre-marketing to get you into the funnel. There’s a whole business going around us. Think about when you’re marketing anything. When you’re starting a business that you’re marketing anything or maybe you already have a successful business, you have to understand you are a consumer-first before you’re the marketer. Think about how it feels to be bombarded with emails because that’s what a sales funnel does. A typical sales funnel will give you some little freebie or something and you will get this email from someone. Once they capture your email, they’ll typically give you a 5 to 7-day sequence of emails. “Nice meeting you. I don’t know if you know but I’m an expert in X,Y,Z and I have this wonderful product or something like that.” The next day, you get a little bit more of a cranked-up email and continues on until the fifth day.

Based on whether you click on any one of those or not, there’s a whole separate sequence. You might get up to 30 emails in 30 days. As you can see, that’s a lot of emails. I will tell you that people who do this for a living will tell you two things. The more leads you have, the more sales. The more emails you send out, the more sales. These are what I’m being told all the time. As a consumer, if somebody sends me five emails in five days, I delete them. By the time a third email comes in, I delete it. If they send me another series of 5 or 6 emails, I’ll delete their name completely because it’s ridiculous to get that many emails. If you can’t spit it out in the first 2 or 3 times, it’s not great.

I don’t believe in traditional sales funnels. Capturing some information about you and only if there’s a fit. If somebody bought your email list from a skincare company and now they’re selling you gym equipment, that’s about a 50%-60% match. If you bought a mailing list from a skincare company and now you’re selling baby clothes or something like that, that’s not a perfect fit. It might be a 20% fit.

Sales and marketing are two completely different things. Marketing is very different from sales.

If there’s a good fit and you think that you can transform somebody’s life, what does that mean? How do you get your first sale from anybody? If you already have an existing customer or existing business, maybe you’re getting your sales from your existing customers. If you have a new group of people that you want to target or you want to launch a new product, how do we then get your first sales? The first sale is to earn their trust. How do you earn their trust? I’m also being told you find the problem then you solve the problem and it creates a new problem. This is a great example.

How do you gain your trust? That’s a problem because first, you don’t have trust levels. You’ve got to build trust. The next problem is, “I understand. I need to build trust. How do I build trust?” You build trust by trying to engage with them. Try to understand what it is that they want from you. For example, if you don’t know anything about the person and say if somebody, you got this email list from a skincare company, you might want to ask if this person has problem skin. Does she also exercise? Is she a fitness guru? Is she into health and fitness on top of the skincare?

Let’s dial this back a little bit. If you go to a party, you wouldn’t go up to somebody and say, “I’m Victoria. Nice to meet you, Joe. Would you like to buy my mastermind?” I don’t think that would work. They’re going to think you’re crazy. If you walked up like, “My name’s Victoria. Nice to meet you, Elizabeth. Would you like to buy my haircare?” Same thing. You want to have a dialogue. You want to ask when you meet someone for the first time, “How are you?” “I’m great. How are you? What is it that you do? How’s the weather? How are the kids? How’s the family?” You find out a little bit about them. They might say, “As a matter of fact, I’m such a health guru. I’m having a hard time during COVID because the rest of my family loves eating junk food.” That’s a piece of information that you have if you happen to be selling nutritional foods, for example.

Get to know a lot about them. Take an interest in them. You can do this by offering a poll on your website or you could simply ask questions. Ask them to help you. That’s one way to gain their trust because as consumers, we want to know that whoever is selling something to me, that they’ve done their homework and at least want to know a little bit about me before they start to pitch me with a $5 product or $50,000 product. It doesn’t matter. You want them to know about you, to be interested in you and to be invested in your future. No one’s paying anymore for information. They’re all paying for transformation. You want to make sure that you convey that. If you get the opportunity, you can then talk about other people’s lives you’ve transformed or maybe even use an example.

When Kim Kardashian wanted to lose weight and did these exercises, she wore these hurdles and I have something similar, for example. That could be storytelling and also an interesting way to gain a little bit of understanding because you’re telling the person you’ve done all this research, you know what’s going on. The other way you also gain trust is by sharing your expertise. For example, I happen to know a lot about video. I happen to know quite a bit about video production, how to use lighting to your favor, how to put video makeup on, which is different from print makeup. In this day and age of everything going to video, even from your social media posts to your brand video on your website, even a podcast, when you have to do a video, that knowledge I have is important. It’s a knowledge a lot of people don’t know anything about, by the way. If I share that information freely with potentially your clients, you don’t tell them everything you know.

 

I’ve been doing live TV. I’ve done tens of thousands of hours of live TV under every condition. I’ve done them on location, on cruise ships, in the desert mountains to do it in countries like Japan, we can do some in the studio and quite a bit of it in my own home. I’m not going to share every single thing I know but I share enough things that are marketable, things that I could easily sell. If I did a video series about video presentations, how to talk, how to create content, how to get your hair and makeup done in 5 to 10 minutes, people will pay $200 to $300 for that. I know a lot of people who would. If I share that with potential clients, they’d be more likely to keep coming back to check and see what else is free. Leading with generosity, sharing your information as much as you can without charging them, it’s going to cause them to be much more interested in you so that all you would have to do then is offer them and give them a compelling message as to why this could be important to you.

If I shared with you five mini videos on how to look great on video, how to talk compellingly on video, how to not get nervous and how to pitch somebody on video, for example. I then had a mastermind, let’s say, about video presentations and how that could catapult your brand, explode your brand sales by doing a few things. You’re more likely to respond to that than if I only sent you a blank 31 emails in seven days. I don’t even want anybody who’s got that time on their hands to be in my mastermind. This person doesn’t have a lot of other time to do the right thing for their business when they’re reading that many emails. That’s sharing your knowledge.

Another way you can collapse time in terms of gaining trust is to learn the art of shining a light on other people. For example, if your social is full about me like, “I want this. I want that. I’m drinking my fancy coffee. I’m a brainiac. I’m a genius. I do whatever.” You can do that very effectively and establish your expert authority if you do them in small snippets. The more effective way to do it would be to shine a light on someone else. For example, I posted a little thing about my father, who immigrated here, sacrificed everything he possibly could. The poor man was so brave at that age. He came to a country and didn’t know a single soul. He didn’t speak English. He found out all the money was taken with five kids. He did all of this stuff and never complained one time. My father’s been gone. He passed away in 1999.

I posted something about my father. He never lost hope and energy. He never literally stopped learning. Over 50 years old, he got his doctorate here. He was a president of a university that specialized in oriental medicine to acupuncture oriental medicine, alternative medicine, it’s the same medical degree. He wanted to shine a light on Eastern Medicine in America. Well over age 50, he went to school with five kids and two jobs. He graduated at the top of his class. I’ve shown a light on him about his will to succeed and his commitment to the people he loved and his persistence. It got more likes than almost anything I posted over that whole weekend. That’s one example.

As consumers, we want to know that whoever is selling has done their homework and wants to know a little bit about us before pitching.

The other example could be that you could shine a light on maybe some of your clients. It could be an incredible story from the BBC or the Wall Street Journal or CNBC. I read one time this kid who had to walk something like 20 miles to go to work and back. He didn’t have a car and somehow still studied. He was like a janitor and did all his things. He got his high school degree and got accepted at Harvard. If you shine a light on something like that, this shows you the human side of you, the compassion and that you care, you’re a normal person, a likable person and you like similar things. Shining a light on other people, it could be newspaper stories, a nurse who went above and beyond. I’m dealing with that now. My mother-in-law, the people that used to take care of her when she was in a retirement home, on their day off there’s five of them. They come and see her as she’s going through the last phase of her life.

Shine a light on other people. It could be related to your brand or stuff you do or completely different from that. Whatever you want to shine a light on whether it’s strength, persistence, compassion, kindness, all of those stories exist out there in the current world. Shining a light on other people is great. Another way you can gain that trust is by having other people talk about you. That could be your community leaders if you do a lot of community volunteer work. It could be your past clients, your employees or anybody that talks about you in a different light. They could talk about you in a way that’s very different than the way you could talk about yourself.

You’re not going to go up to somebody and say, “I’m beautiful. I’m gorgeous. I’m successful.” You’re not going to do that. It’s tacky, let’s put it that way. Somebody else might say, “I met Joe when I was volunteering at the homeless shelter. This man was the most compassionate, the most organized human being I’ve ever known. The guy had a schedule. That was the only way we were going to be able to serve 400 people because he had the know-how.” If you are selling organizational skills, for example. Organizing closets or whatever would be the perfect testimonial even though they weren’t necessarily selling your product. Have other people talk about you.

 

Lastly, repeat all of the above. You’ll find that sales will come naturally. You don’t have to send out these ugly emails every single day for 7, 8, 9, 10 days at a time. If you’re interested in learning a little bit more about this, check out my website. I do have a lot of information there. If you want to join one of my masterclasses, you can do that too. All of my masterclasses, by the way, are completely closed and they are by application only. I forgot to mention it in my previous shows. What I will do is share twenty minutes of my time. You can book a call if you have a quick issue to deal with. I cannot share more than that time freely all the time because I do have to work. I wanted to give that quick review on sales and marketing the best way.

Sales and marketing are two completely different things. Marketing is very different than sales. The best way to get sales and marketing, we’ll talk about how they’re different because there are promotions, advertising and all the different ways you could create sales and also market. They’re very different functions.

If you’ve enjoyed this session, please go ahead and review it on Apple. That’s how we are all judged on, how other people find you by reviews. I don’t need a great review. I just need an honest review. You can sign up for my upcoming book or upcoming webinars. I’m trying to do as much of that as freely as I can. Sign up for all of those. As we close now, please check out my YouTube channel, Million Dollar Hobbies. We hope that many of you will visit especially as I talk about video, how important the video is, the lighting and all of the equipment you have to have. Until next time. Please, stay healthy and happy. Remember, happiness is a choice. I hope you make great choices. Have a great week. Thank you for reading.
 

Important Links

• Website – Victoria Wieck
• Apple – Million Dollar Hobbies
• YouTube Channel – Victoria Wieck