All for the Money? You Are Going to Lose.
Playing the short game
Doing something simply to sell, or for the money, is playing the short game. And the short game is SHORT.
If you want to get off on the wrong foot, doing anything for the sole purpose of making a quick buck is one way you can lose real fast.
Especially now, playing the long game has never been more important, and this means giving more value and benefit than products and services.
Yes, you need cash. We all need money to run our businesses, but that doesn’t mean we should be running our businesses that way. If you want to be successful and still around in the next 8 years, you need to build trust, loyalty. You’re not going to be doing this by selling something as soon as someone gives you their trust with an email signup, a follow, or an email.
Customers don’t need to sign up for emails to buy
If someone is subscribing to your email list, it’s because they feel they will get some value out of it, not because they want to buy something. Nobody needs to sign up for anything to buy something.
It’s crazy how many people will send me an automated sales email once I subscribe, or send me a DM asking to check out their new product as soon as I follow them on Twitter. I didn’t follow you for that.
If I wanted to buy something, I would simply buy. I wouldn’t subscribe, follow you, or message you in anyway.
You see ,what happens when you have “sell, sell sell” on your mind is the following:
You turn the person off. Right away they’re thinking, “Oh I don’t want to be receiving this sales shit every day”. Unsubscribe. Unfollow. I can name at least a handful of brands that have quietly changed their value emails into sell sell sell emails, and it’s not helping.
You end up diminishing the value of your content. Nobody is perceiving your “free stuff”, or “free content” as “free” or valuable anymore. Instead, everything becomes a sale pitch in their eyes, even if you do happen to be sincerely giving free valuable advice at some point.
Customer service and experience goes into the shitter. It’s no longer about the product, it’s no longer about the service, and what’s most unfortunate, its no longer about you, the customer. And when it’s no longer about the customer, and all about the business and the money, people see right through that and your business slows, word of mouth goes sour, or worse, silent, and your business dies.
Don’t get me wrong. You need to make money. You don’t have a business if you don’t make money. But if making money, or that extra buck, comes at the expense of sabotaging everything else, you are doomed.
Bottom line, you don’t want anyone thinking you are selling something to them instead of helping them out.
Jab, jab, jab, right hook, right? — Gary Vaynerchuk