One of my Email Players subscribers — who does not wish to be named for obvious reasons — told me about a new client doing a lot of dumb things, with lots of ways he wants to help them and get paid more by them… but is not sure how to go about approaching them and offering to help.
My advice:
“it’s temping to meddle but in my experience let them hang themselves with their own rope on mistakes, when things are dire then, and only then, offer to fix”
I say this as someone who wants nothing to do with client work.
So I bring a blatantly biased contempt to the table with these things.
i.e., take with big, fat grain of chili pepper.
But, clients or customers or anyone else… I am a big fan of selling “medicine” to the “sick” (not literally – this is all figurative, I say this for the alphabet agencies who may be snooping in on this…) and those looking for a cure for something that ails them. I learned this the hard way when I graduated college and hopped into an MLM and tried selling my family and friends on things they didn’t think they needed but that I figured they would want and needed.
Total waste of time and counterproductive in every way.
Trying to (figuratively) convince someone without a headache to buy aspirin is pointless.
But a guy with a four-alarm hangover?
That one is ripe for selling to, will probably welcome it, even eagerly buy. To try to convince people they are sick when they have no symptoms, are in danger when they don’t realize it, are self-sabotaging when they think they are crushing it or whatever is a big, fat exercise in futility in my experience.
This is the problem with a lot of marketers.
They have great ideas, great products, and maybe even excellent offers.
But far too many merely have a solution looking for a problem. And it shows in their frustration, and having to constantly haunt masterminds and buy coaching for answers… when if they simply started with looking for a problem to solve first, and then built or found a product around solving the problem… there would be no need for much else other than get that offer in front of a moving parade of people with that problem.
Something related:
One good thing I’ve noticed in my Twitter replies over the past year since getting back on there is the growing number of people wanting to learn more about the fundamentals of direct marketing, copywriting, and email. Every time I post about the subject several will ask where they can learn more about the fundamentals, what books, etc.
I always take that as a good thing.
So here is a crash course in the fundamentals.
It all starts with:
1. Find a problem
2. Solve it
Ooh.
So advanced!
Maybe it’s not sexy. But just taking that to heart will solve probably 95% of your marketing and copywriting questions, frustrations, insecurities, and uncertainty. Even if you bungle on a multitude of levels, just getting the above right can keep you on track, can work if you write horrible copy, and can see you to the end even if you don’t really know what you’re doing.
My opinion:
Just applying the above would eliminate probably 99% of cold DM pitches and emails from these blue flame special more worried about how to warm up 100+ domains to send cold pitches through than just building and growing a legal opt-in list. And just living the above, as a way of doing business & living life in general, would probably create such an overwhelming rush of success for a lot of boys & ghouls up in this business they’d wonder how it could possibly be that simple and easy, and be tempted to think it was luck or there must be more to it.
But it’s not luck and it’s no more complicated than that.
Find problem – solve it.
If you want to stand out from probably every single business you compete against just do that one thing, and do it well, and work hard at it every day. While everyone else is running around shooting their solution at everyone like a shotgun, missing 99% of the time and maybe hitting the target by complete accident if they even do… you are more like a sniper with a rifle with an infrared scope, perfect wind conditions, and hitting targets looking to be shot.
That analogy always breaks apart eventually.
But you get the picture…
All right on to the business.
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Ben Settle
