Don't Try to Sell What Your Market Isn't Buying

The most common — and painful — mistake I see marketers make is to develop a product that no one has any interest in buying.

This is why so many inventors spend decade after decade without any commercial success.

They’re passionate, yes — but they’re passionate about the product — about their brilliant new invention that they’re sure the world needs.

A smart businessperson falls in love with the market, not the product. Fall in love with your buyers. Watch them, listen to them, cherish them. Figure out ways to surprise and delight them.

Famed direct marketer Gene Schwartz wrote that copywriting was like sailing a ship. Your market’s desire for a particular product or service is the wind that propels that ship.

A smart marketer can take a faint wind and make the best of it. And in the internet age, you can collect bits of breeze from all over the globe, and combine them to make a strong business.

But even the best marketing technique will only take you so far. The desire has to be there before you start trying to sell. Where there’s no wind, there’s no movement.

That’s actually why the very first thing the students work on in the flagship course Teaching Sells is to identify a profitable market. Not a market of enthusiasts or fans — a market of buyers.

What’s a buyer? Someone who deeply desires a certain result, and will pay to get it.

Step 1: Get analytical

There’s a lot of analysis you can do to unearth a solid market.

The simplest is just to watch for a topic with lots of competitors. The “blue ocean” strategy, where you look for a market without competition, is attractive in theory, but more often a lack of competitors means a lack of buyers.

Instead, look for markets driven by the basic human desires that never change. People will always look for sex, status, or a really great lunch. They want to look cool, to feel safe and secure, to create better relationships with their kids or spouses, to make themselves more attractive. We always have wanted those things, and we always will.

Then you figure out where the holes are.

What are the slivers of the market that aren’t being served well? What’s missing in the other offerings, good as they may be? What can you do that’s different in a valuable way, in a way that better serves a slice of the market?

Innovation is great, if you’re innovating in the right direction. Instead of dreaming up a product or service no one has ever seen before, innovate better ways to serve a robust market.

Step 2: Get empirical

But analysis only takes you so far.

There are all kinds of business ideas that should work … but don’t.

Maybe you’re not a great fit for the market you’ve chosen.

Maybe you’ve figured out what your customers need, but it turns out it isn't something they want.

Maybe what worked last year (or last month) doesn’t work today, for any one of a thousand reasons.

There’s one way to find out if your idea will work or not, and that’s to fire off some bullets and see if they hit a worthy target.

Last year, with some help from Authority Blogger Chris Garrett, we added a module to Teaching Sells on the “Minimum Viable Product.” It takes everything our students learn about developing the right product for the right market, and it teaches them to create a bullet first, before they build a cannonball.

Step 3: Create a bullet and fire it off

This weekend, put together the smallest product possible that will deliver a benefit for your customer. It might be an 8-page special report. It might be a 30-minute webinar or teleseminar on a basic concept.

Whatever it is, make it good enough to pay for. (Keep in mind — you want to deliver ten times as much value as you'll charge.) Since it’s going to be a small product, the price will be in line with that.

Not a lot of risk for you, not a lot of risk for your audience. And it’s a priceless way to gather intelligence about what works and what doesn’t. What your audience values enough to pay for, and what they don’t.

Put your new product out for sale next week. If you wait any longer than that, you’ll get sunk in analysis paralysis and a week will turn into three months. Rather than getting it perfect right now, let your audience know it’s a beta version — that you guarantee it will have some flaws.

For more articles like this (by Sonia Simone) go to www.copyblogger.com

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