Sell You Before You Sell

By Alex Rodriguez

9 out of every 10 people hire professionals who can first demonstrate the value they can bring, and who they feel they can trust deeply.

Yet you might still wonder: How can you build real trust in the quickest, most effective manner so that you can close more sales?

The answer is simple: You need to first earn people's attention, which will then allow them to have an expectation about you.

In Sell You Before You Sell, you will discover the four essential qualities of a solid personal brand, and practical tips to elevate your profession to close more sales using your authenticity, attractiveness, alignment, and everything awesome about you.

When you sell like everyone else does, that is, when you focus on convincing others, desperately trying to make people agree to separate from their hard-earned money and hand it to you, selling does become extremely difficult... and at the end of the day, it's simply grueling.

After all, nobody wants to be sold to.

But when you first sell people on why they should pay attention to you, then doing business becomes automagically easy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex Rodriguez
• Release date: Dec 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9780990642459

Alex Rodriguez

Alex Rodríguez is a Creative Digital Marketer who develops high-end digital campaigns for companies looking to transform their brand and grow their business further. He specializes in digital product and brand launches. Throughout almost two decades, he has created highly-performing launch campaigns for Fortune 500 and global brands, most of which have resulted in millions of dollars in sales in record periods of time. Alex has created strategic digital content for clients in 4 different continents and 3 separate languages (English, Spanish, and Mandarin). As a result of his strategic creative, he has been honored with some of the most distinguished awards in Web, Advertising, and Social Media. Alex heads up the team at YMMY Marketing (ymmymarketing.com), a digital creative agency in Florida, USA. He often writes about how to strategically attract audiences at www.CreativeStrategyTips.com . Alex is also the host and producer of The Digital Marketing Minute, a daily podcast.

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Introduction

What is the value of being the first person to pop up in someone’s mind, right when they need a particular service performed?

How valuable would it be to increase the success rate of your sales appointments to such a degree that you can double or triple your business?

What if you could increase your authority so that people that meet with you are less resistant, and your sales go through more smoothly?

This is exactly what I intend to show you in this book. You will learn what I have personally done to raise my closing rates, wipe away objections before they even come up, and ultimately grow my business.

Although I’ll be talking about sales, this isn’t a book on sales training. You won’t find techniques around which words to say to close harder, the five steps of a successful sales presentation, none of that. In fact, you’ll barely find anything here about what to do during your sales appointments. Although I could share ideas and insights on what has worked for me during my sales appointments, that’s not really the point of this book.

I would be dishonest if I told you that the only thing you need to close more sales is to employ an arsenal of trick phrases and scripts at your next sales appointment. If you’re only thinking about your performance during the sales appointment, you are missing out on what really makes a difference.

This book is about the art and science of selling before you even set up the sales appointment. It’s about selling before you even get into contact with someone for the first time.

In the next chapter, I’ll explain why that word selling is in italics. Here I’ll ask you an important question: Do you believe that selling is a bad word?

I know many people who do believe that selling is a topic they should avoid at all costs. They would say things like I’m just not a salesperson, or I’m just terrible at sales, or Salespeople are just too pushy. If you asked me this same question four or five years ago, I would have said the same thing! It wasn’t until a friend pat me on the back and gave me these wise words of advice that I began to understand the concept of selling. This friend turned to me one day and said, If you’re in business, then you’re in sales.

Having learned my lesson, I’ll go even farther and say: You are always selling.

One of the dictionary’s definitions of the verb to sell goes like this: To give up a property to another for something of value.

In a broad sense, if you are in business, you are always presenting people with something valuable in exchange for something that they own.

Yet as mentioned before, for some strange reason, the concept of selling fell into the swamp of undesirable concepts, along with liars, crooked politicians, people who text and drive, friends who spoil TV shows on social media, and other things we just hate. Maybe it was the door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman’s fault, I don’t know. What I do know is that so many people resist the idea of selling, even though they are selling every single day of their lives.

Yes, I mean it. You are selling 24/7, 365 days of the year, all the time.

You may not realize it, and you may even want to fight against this fact. I would have been the first one to resist this idea, if it weren’t because I discovered the effect it has had on my ability to grow in business. And it all begins with accepting the fact that we are always selling.

Now, if it’s true that you are always selling, then it’s also true that more of that always time is spent before and after your sales appointments than during them. Let me explain this another way: Let’s imagine that one of your sales appointments lasts one hour. As far as that single sales encounter, you were selling in person for that single hour, but were also selling for hundreds of hours before the appointment. If we consider one month of your time, that single in-person sales appointment was 0.13% of your actual time selling.

Yes, you are selling way before you present others with the opportunity of a business transaction.

Let’s face it, in this era of fast-moving communication, offering your services so they can contract you does not impress anyone. Buyers now come to sales meetings more equipped than ever, with more information and insights than at any other moment in history.

These decision-makers are either sold on your solution before the first minute of the first sales appointment begins, or might be convinced that they will not purchase that day. The most influential factor that will affect the sales outcome will be how well you have sold yourself before this moment.

People only invest in what they know and trust, never what someone merely presents them. If they aren't deeply convinced that what you offer is the right fit for them, they will never buy from you.

To convince them, you need to build that knowledge and trust, which happens most powerfully before the sales appointment.

Here’s an example that happened to me fairly recently. This kind of situation actually happens to me all the time, but I have one stunning experience in mind as I write this.

I once met a guy at a networking meeting. Shake of hands, a few words exchanged, here’s my business card, thanks for yours, and that’s it. We really didn’t spend a long period of time talking.

A month or so later, he reaches out to me via email, telling me that he had a problem with his business, and as he thought about different ways to solve it, my name came to mind. He then asked me for an appointment where I could present what I could do for his company.

Now keep in mind, before he reached out, I had not sent him a brochure, nor asked him to meet for coffee, none of that…yet without doing any of these sales tactics, I came to his mind, and he requested an appointment from me. His brain did the work of automatically connecting his business’ need with my name.

Please don’t misunderstand me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with sending a brochure or asking to get together with someone to find out more about them and their needs. I’m just saying that in this situation, I didn’t do any of these things, and yet, I was the first person he thought of as someone who could solve his company’s need.

Ultimately, I did end up arranging a sales meeting and I did close a five-figure deal with this company without much back and forth or hesitation on their part. The process went as smoothly as it could have.

Pretty cool, right? Well, I won’t tell you here what I did—or what I continue to do on a consistent basis—to make this happen. Do you know why I won’t tell you?

Because that’s what the rest of this book is for.

Chapter 1 - Two Types of Selling

Two Types Of Selling

In the previous pages, I used the word sell with different meanings. The first meaning we’ll dig into in this chapter doesn’t need explaining, as it’s the meaning you’re most likely familiar with. I’m talking about passing goods from one hand to another with a delivery of currency in return. It’s what we normally call a transaction.

If you’re in a consultative practice, you sell when a potential client examines your deliverables and outcomes, and decides to pay you for your assistance. Depending on the stage you’re in, you may call it presenting a proposal, hiring, signing the contract, getting the deal, or some other term. In the end, it comes down to good ol’ selling.

It’s safe to say that you’ll never approach a random person on the street and offer your services, nor would you expect someone to come to you out of the blue and hire you while you were just sipping on a latte macchiato at your local coffee shop.

Selling directly—meaning, presenting value to a person without prior experience with you, your product, or your company—is perfectly fine for lower-ticket items. If all someone needs to purchase is a couple of tomatoes at the grocery store, a bottle of aspirin, or a can of tennis balls, you don’t really need to spend efforts on presenting your authority ahead of time. If my son has a lemonade stand on a fairly populated corner on a sunny Saturday morning, he’ll probably sell quite a few glasses of lemonade—at the very least, because of the amazingly charming way he can say Sir, would you like some delicious lemonade?

In the case of most high-ticket services, a prior relationship with a brand is absolutely essential. Why? Because a transaction of this sort requires a bit more consideration on the buyer’s part. People usually have questions that need to be answered before they make a serious decision to invest in your services.

Research shows that in business to business sales, 86% of businesses open a project with a clear preference for one particular supplier, even though they might interview more than one. In other words, 8 out of every 10 business opportunities already seem to have the winner pre-selected before they place a request for proposals¹. This is also true in consumer sales. According to Nielsen² 92% of consumers say that they trust recommendations from people they know, while only around one third of them said they trusted traditional advertising.

It seems like those who establish their authority and credibility —their brand— most successfully, wins before the game even begins.

There are many great definitions for the word brand, but I’d like to use an extremely simple one here. A brand is a clear expectation towards a particular experience.

It’s much more likely that someone will pay higher amounts for brands they have a clear expectation toward, because they can more easily visualize the experience they’ll receive after making the transaction. This expectation can come from many sources. For example, a previous purchase of the same brand, a recommendation from someone else, or some kind of valuable information they consumed can leave a customer with a high expectation of that service. After any of these, they will come to the sale with a clear picture of what they’re getting for their money.

Yet it’s practically impossible to cause someone to have an expectation if they aren’t first paying attention. In other words, if someone has no reason to pay attention to you, you will never have the opportunity to generate a picture in their mind of what to expect when they do business with you. On top of this, inviting others to pay attention to you is becoming more difficult with every year that passes.

Today we live in a hectic, information-saturated world. We’ve coined terms like FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out—to refer to our incessant need to be mentally plugged into information sources and consuming the latest and greatest updates, whether they are signals or just noises. Our attention span is now smaller than that of a goldfish³. It’s becoming more and more difficult to catch people’s attention in the middle of the distractions that tickle their brains on a consistent basis.

And yet, unless they decide to pay attention to us, we will never get a chance to create the expectation needed to have an opportunity to sell to them.

Pay attention! Have you ever noticed how we normally use those words? We refer to attention as something we pay to others. Yet, I don’t think we treat this payment as what it is, an actual transaction.

This is the other type of selling I want to talk about: The Transaction of Attention.

We pay attention to things that are valuable, while at the same time, we refuse to pay for anything that won’t add to our experience. If it doesn’t satisfy a need, desire, or aspiration, we move on towards the next diversion in our lives, whether it be binging on that new show, a mobile game we just downloaded and can’t stop playing (that one we knew we shouldn’t have downloaded, but we did anyway), or just the incessant chatter inside our own heads.

At any given time, people have a certain amount of attention available from their daily attention wallet, and whatever idea they find worthwhile or attractive gets a payment of that attention. Today, there are more things than ever competing for these types of transactions. There are so many players in the business of getting people to pay attention to them, and it’s a rough contest. Attention is the most valuable currency of our day. If someone thinks about your brand for more than four seconds, you win.

Some might think that I’m going too far by calling attention a currency, but from where I see things, attention has most of the characteristics of a currency system. It’s in limited supply. It’s generally acceptable and desirable. It’s portable. It’s indestructible, and it’s valid payment for something valuable.

In fact, a group of founders and developers have developed a cryptocurrency based on the idea of giving actual market value to our daily human attention. They’re creating a system in which you can pay and exchange with your attention just as you would with any other government-issued currency system. This initiative may or may not succeed, but the fact is that many are waking up to the fact that our attention is an extremely valuable currency at our disposal.

Therefore, it’s reasonable to think of the act of persuading others on why they should pay attention to your message as a type of selling. If we happen to be successful with the transaction of attention, then in exchange, we get a moment of their focus and their thoughts. Let me repeat this: We gain a person’s most valuable currency when we present them with a reason why they should focus on a valuable idea we present them.

When they pay us their attention, something amazing happens. At that point, we get an open door to generate an expectation in their mind and in their heart. Ultimately, when they have this expectation, we’ve set the perfect environment to present our services in exchange for money.

Here is another look at the process:

Attention (First Transaction) > Expectation > Sale (Second Transaction)

The reason people find it so difficult to close more sales of the second kind is that they haven’t closed enough sales of the first kind. They just haven’t had enough successful transactions of attention with anyone. As a result, there is very little expectation surrounding their brand, and very few people place value on the service they offer.

This is often typical in highly commoditized industries, where each professional is not much different than the next one. You might have even felt the pain of a perfectly qualified prospect passing you by, or even choosing another competing consultant over you.

In the deepest part of your being, you know you’re absolutely different than everyone else in your field. The problem is… people you could do business with don’t know it.

And the reason they don’t know what makes you different is that by default, they don’t really expect you to be any different from anyone else.

They don’t expect you to be different because —you guessed it— they’ve never been sold on paying attention to those aspects that make you so different from everyone else in your field. Would you blame them? In reality, they haven’t paid any attention