Selling like Santa was just here…

It’s Christmas morning. I wake up really early, jump out of bed and run to the tree.

Santa had come!

My family wasn’t rich so Christmas was the time to ask for the biggest present I could think of… something my parents could never afford… but Santa could.

Maybe you had a similar experience. If so, think back and try to capture that sense of excitement.

Got it?

Now ask yourself… are your customers just as EXCITED(!!) as you were all those Christmas mornings?

I’ve asked this question in my trainings for years. The answer’s often something like:

Really? Let’s look at it another way…

We’re back at Christmas morning. Describe your feelings between the moment you woke up and the moment you reached the tree…

Ahh… there it is… You were hoping you got what you asked for.

Is hope a part of your sales pitch? Of course it is.

Hope is attached to ALL products or services.

What that hope hangs on is different from thing to thing. But it’s ALWAYS there.

In its simplest form, they hope that whatever you’re selling will help them solve a problem, avoid pain or fill an unmet desire.

The bigger the problem, the more acute the pain or the bigger the hole in their heart, the more hope comes into play.

It’s really just a question of intensity.

Take investing, for example. Financial newsletter publishing specifically.

This is the business of selling people information to help them manage their own money – buy stocks, trade options, play the currency markets and so on.

Right now, I’m writing copy for a large’ish financial publisher.

The stock market has just had its worst performance in 52 years. It’s the worst bond market in 224 years. The worst losses on a standard 60/40 portfolio… ever.

All of this in the midst of the worst inflation in 41 years.

Everyone’s freaking out. No one alive has ever had to deal with this perfect storm of catastrophe.

And it gets worse…

Many of the people who buy financial newsletters are retired or soon-to-be. So they’re double freakin’ out.

They can’t afford to sell at such prices in order to pay the bills. That locks in a loss.

They can’t afford to wait until the market comes back… it might not by the time they need it.

They can’t afford to sit still because of inflation.

You would think this would be bad for business. Especially since many of the analysts who made the recommendations are also sitting on big losses (like everyone else.)

And, you would be right… to a point.

But here’s the thing… there’s still one sort of promotion that’s working well.

Ones that can credibly make a case that recovery is just one trade away. Or one new strategy. Or a new publisher with better analysts.

In other words, hope.

This is an extreme example, of course, but most businesses have an opportunity like this.

Selling on hope is a powerful technique.

For the same reason it got you out of bed on Christmas morning…