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As you’re casually scrolling through Facebook, you get a ping from someone who has sent you a private message. The message could be from a relative or friend but often these are sales pitches. A health and fitness coach wants to help you get in shape. A business “expert” offers strategies to grow your sales. A relationship consultant promises to guide you to deeper love in your life.
These people might be genuine experts who know their topic better than most, but the approach repels you. There’s a truth that most entrepreneurs know but need to keep reminding themselves: “Needy is unappealing.”
Financial stress is what motivates a lot of these marketing messages, but when you sense financial stress you think twice about doing business with that person. You want to do business with entrepreneurs who are successful. There are three things to understand so you don’t lose a sale because you come across as needy.
Related: Why You Must Never Show a Hint of Desperation, Especially When Things Are Bad
1. Your content must prove your expertise.
When you are a genuine expert you don’t have to spend most of your time trying to convince other people that you are. You have blog posts, articles, podcast interviews and videos to validate your expertise.
Content is what people absorb and what helps them to know, like and trust you. Chasing the sale wastes time you could be using to create informative content that bring sales to you. We live in a time of Google, social media and other search engines. You will be viewed as an expert when you have expert content appearing at the top of those search engines. That will speak volumes about your qualifications.
Related: 3 Ways to Make an Offer Your Prospects Can’t Refuse
2. Only make solid sales offers.
Your audience and potential leads should know when you are selling something in your business. There should be a page explaining what you’re selling with all the information someone needs to make a buying decision. The random-message sales strategy doesn’t work because it lacks clarity. Instead of trying to “sell” the person, send them a link to a sales page so they can research and make an informed decision.
Related: 12 Ways to Increase Online Sales
3. Have a coherent marketing plan.
Your business will grow or disappear based off of your marketing plan. Many businesses have no plan and their marketing is sporadic. Financial stress and the lack of a marketing plan is why you’re bombarded with sales offers that don’t appeal to you. A marketing plan involves looking at what you offer in your business and planning when you will promote those offers through out the year.
Scarcity determines value. If you offer everything all the time, the value won’t be the same as when you make your offers exclusive to certain times in the year. It’s never to late to sit down and create a marketing plan. Once a product or service is up for promotion on your calendar, promote hard. Spend some money on Facebook ads, get press, get promotion partners but don’t come off as desperate by targeting random people here and there on social media and through email. When nothing is up for promotion, give your audience and your distribution feeds free content to establish more trust.
Don’t be the entrepreneur who comes off as needy and desperate. Have a real sales plan and run your business how a business should be run. This post isn’t written to say that you should never sell to anyone on social media. There are billions of users on social media and a lot of money to be made. What I’m trying to get across is that there’s a financial stress/lack of plan type of selling that you should avoid in your business. The potential lead feels it and it repels them. People want to do business with someone they feel like is on the top of their game — be that entrepreneur.
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