How to Sell Anything

Let’s take a business or a service for example: investing.

We need to understand one elements before we even begin:

1. Each market has 5 (but we will only use 3 here) different awareness levels.

And here’s the breakdown

1. Awareness levels:

1a. There’s an unaware audience. They don’t know that they need to invest or haven’t looked into it.

The way to “catch” those is usually by doing “push” advertising.

Meaning not Google but FB ads etc.

And this is how you’d get their attention:

You’d start with an emotion that reels them in:

• Fear : inflation is eating up your savings…

• Curiosity: did you know you could invest risk-free…

• Desire: the richest people all do one thing — investing…

1b. Problem aware.

They know that they have a problem.

An example of what they’d search on Google is “how do I start investing”.

You can use pull or push advertising for this audience.

1c. Solution aware.

They know that a solution exists. So they’d google something like this…

“Best broker for safe investments…”

Again. You can get their attention using either pull or push.

But ALL of that is irrelevant. And you’ll lose if you do this.

Here’s why:

2. Sophistication levels.

Each market has a “skepticism level”.

In other words?

How many other businesses out there are offering a similar solution?

In investing the answer is A TON.

So what do you do?

2. Positioning.

You beat the market by either using a unique mechanism or a unique positioning.

Let me give you an example:

Did you know that Whiskey is a crazy good investment?

Yes. Investing in bottles of whiskey that age and go up in value.

Did you know?

Many people don’t.

So what an investment business could do is position themselves as…

“Weird profitable investments”.

And give whiskey as an example in the sales messaging. There’s ton of proof and material online to make the point.

But this creates a problem:

Let’s go one step back.

Remember awareness levels?

Here’s what you need to know about them:

Solution aware audience is a VERY small audience.

Problem aware is a bit bigger but still small.

But here’s the thing: those two audiences are EASY to sell to. Why?

Because of “the pain threshold” which we’ll get into in a sec.

But wait.

What about an unaware audience?

Unaware is the biggest audience and this is who you try to sell to when you want to SCALE big.

Don’t go there if you’re looking for 10–20 clients.

But here’s the problem:

Remember the whiskey positioning?

You can’t find the solution or problem aware audience on Google.

There are very few searches for that.

… And this is where you win.

You go to a “pull” (FB/IG) platform and target the unaware audience.

And it works wonders. Here’s why:

3. Triggers.

What is a trigger?

A trigger is something that happens in the potential client’s life.

And you can’t control it (you can in some cases but that’s for another time).

So for example?

A person saw the news and heard about the inflation. Then? Boom. Trigger.

I won’t go in-depth to tell you how triggers work but just know this:

A trigger is an event that prompts a thought.

For example: “OMG I’m losing money every day when it’s sitting in the bank!”

It’s much deeper than that but that’s the gist.

What happens next?

The person goes to Google to look for investment opportunities.

But here’s the thing:

The Meta algorithm is so crazy that it can find those people at the right time.

At the “trigger” time.

So you get a chance to show them a perfectly-timed ad. On A PUSH platform.

And with your unique positioning?

You’ll get their attention and they’ll contact you if it makes sense.

But here’s the problem that I see advertisers making again and again:

In fact it’s two problems and they both have to do with this:

4. The pain threshold.

The moment the trigger pops up? There’s usually A LOT of negative emotions that pop up with it:

• Fear

• Shame

• Disgust

• Guilt

And more.

Why is that relevant? Because of two elements in your messaging:

4a. Interfering with triggers.

You don’t know which trigger your potential client’s brain triggered.

So instead of trying to play into a trigger that you’re unsure of?

Leave it blank.

Make your copy “bland” enough for the prospect’s brain to be able to fill in the blank.

4b. Framing.

Your prospect is probably feeling a lot of pain when they get to read your copy.

And they’re ready to take action because the pain is so big.

So what you wanna do is frame every single word of copy to fit their emotional state:

FEAR.

And what do we want to happen with our fear? Only one thing:

For it to go away. As quickly and painlessly as possible.

And THAT is the framing you need to think of when writing every single word in your copy.

And here’s the kicker of this thread:

Notice we focused all of our effort on thinking.

It has nothing to do with copy. Copy will write itself the moment you’ve done the heavy lifting:

THINKING.