Issue #54 The 7 Deadly Sales Sins

I’d like to share some marketing lessons that I learned from an accountant.  

The company desperately chased clients and signed up very few. They lost clients as quickly as they gained them.

And their website? Well, if there were such a thing as digital spiders, wading through the webs to get to the content would have been Indiana Jones material.

The very few unlucky soles who strayed into the morass never became clients.  

This is how they fixed it.

The key to marketing success lies in the 7 Deadly Sins of Sales and Marketing.

They’re deadly because they can kill your business, sins because they are fundamental, and 7, well, it’s a good number.

Today I am going to give you the first 3, the ones that we fixed to help our client get these results:

• Generate $800,000 of sales from a $93,000 investment over two years (so an 860% return on investment for you number types).
  
• Shift the business from looking for clients to turning them down (the reason they only have $800,000 of additional sales is that they can’t handle more work).
  
• Propel their website from dozens of unengaged visitors to thousands of engaged visitors.      

Ready? 

Sin 1: their client was “anyone who walked through the door.”

The core of business is systematization. You systematize your business to deliver repeatable results and that allows you to systematize your sales and marketing processes.

In the words of our client: “you can’t systematize accounting because every client is different.”

In truth, accounting is the most systematizable business you can imagine. But you can systematize any work, and business, the key is working with the same type of client. Define your standard client, deliver, repeat, and build a business.  

Work with the same client, solve the same problem and do it repeatedly.

Our client focused on startups and taxes. I’d prefer one, but two is better than infinite.  

How to avoid it? Define your target customer and specify a problem you solve for them.

Sin 2: You speak in the wrong language.

Wenn Sie kein Deutsch Sprechen warum wurde ich mit Ihnen auf Deutsch reden? Speaking to people in a language they don’t understand makes no sense.

Yet, everybody does this. I’d be willing to bet that your sales and marketing materials talk about what you do in your language.  

Our client talked about accounting because they were accountants.

The people they were talking to weren’t accountants. They didn’t want to talk about accounting; that was like speaking German in an English newsletter.

So instead we started talking about how to avoid accounting, make it work for you, and what to do with the gobbledygook that accountants give you to look at.

That worked.

How to avoid it: Identify your prospects’ questions and answer those questions, not the ones you want to talk about. 

Sin 3: No metrics and no plan
When you sell and market your business, you do not know what will engage your prospects.

Your first attempts are almost certainly wrong.

We were able to tune our marketing plan and sales conversation to get more out of both with metrics. We experimented and learned, honed and grew. 

You can only do that with a plan and metrics that tell you how well you are doing. 

How to avoid it. Develop your marketing scorecard, measure results, and make adjustments.

If you do nothing else, make sure you are not committing these three deadly sins. Honestly, this is the majority of the work this client did and it was fundamentally transformative.

Are you ready for Irresistible Sales?  

Our next ISM Cohort starts on May 5. Our iron-clad guarantee means you have nothing to lose and the process means you have everything to gain.  

Learn to transform your sales and marketing, get the

“Easiest sale ever” – Lori Karpman

and learn the secret to:

“She said it was like I was reading her mind.” – Tony Vear

While also getting

“CLEAR direction as opposed to my haphazard, unfocused and ineffective process.” – James Bonner

Want to learn more?  Click here.