MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Chet Holmes gave a ‘sum­mary pre­sen­ta­tion’ of his book, and I’ll jump through a few of his points. To me, how­ever, the most telling piece of advice he gave was this:

To sell any­thing to any­one, don’t sell your product

Now, that is counter-intuitive because if most peo­ple were to sell a pen, the first word out of their mouths would be, “Hey, I have this pen I’m selling…”

That is NOT how you sell the pen.

Chet Holmes says you should never sell the prod­uct. That’s his #1 strategy.

What does that specif­i­cally mean?

There are a few rea­sons why he says that. The first is a quick pyra­mid. If you think about it, only 3% of peo­ple in the mar­ket are ready to buy Right Now, they’re actively in buy­ing mode. There may be another 6% who may be will­ing to buy, 30% of peo­ple are prob­a­bly inter­ested in what you have (but they’re not in buy­ing mode right now –they’re not search­ing to buy), another remain­ing 30% are just not inter­ested – they’re not really look­ing for what you have…and the remain­ing 30% will never be interested.

When you’re talk­ing about a prod­uct to sell, you are usu­ally only talk­ing to the tiny 3–9%.

That is a GIANT mis­take, because you just end up not com­mu­ni­cat­ing to every­one else.

Chet Holmes fig­ured out how to talk to the other peo­ple. This is his key secret:

1. Look at Mar­ket Data

Approach them with mar­ket information.

Why? Let’s take secu­rity alarm sys­tems, for exam­ple. Mar­ket infor­ma­tion might be some­thing like, “Here are 10ways to reduce the risk of some­one break­ing into your home.” That is inter­est­ing, because if you were look­ing at a secu­rity sys­tem I would want to know how to lower that risk.

Or in Inter­net mar­ket­ing, you might be talk­ing about 10ways to do pay-per-click adver­tis­ing or to max­i­mize your prof­its on AdWords.

He has another insight that’s equally important.

We’ve all seen it on tele­vi­sion. What do you see on TV?

2. Bad News that makes peo­ple say, “Wow!”

You hit them with bad infor­ma­tion or bad news. I hate to say that, because that’s one of the rea­sons I hate TV –because they present you with bad news.

But, why is that? They share bad news because pain is 100% more influ­en­tial in mod­er­at­ing human beings to take action than gain.

If I broke your leg, would you want to get it fixed? Seri­ously, if you broke your leg, would you want to get med­ical atten­tion for it? Yes, you would want to get it looked at imme­di­ately. Would you do price com­par­i­son shop­ping of where to go if your leg’s bro­ken? No, you wouldn’t. You would take imme­di­ate action because you were in pain.

If you were involve in an acci­dent and you were taken to the emer­gency room, under nor­mal cir­cum­stance you wouldn’t ask –you’d let them take you to whichever ER is clos­est. Pain really mod­er­ates people’s behavior.

That’s the other thing that Chet Holmes says. Don’t hit them with gain but with the pain of what could really happen.

Just to give you one of his exam­ples, he shared some really pow­er­ful data points that he used to help one per­son who is in the nutri­tional sup­ple­ments’ field.

1. Start with mar­ket data.

His case began, Did you know that the inci­dence of can­cer has gone through up dra­mat­i­cally? The num­ber of breast can­cer cases have risen by 80% since the 70’s. Today, the life­time risk stands at 1 in 9.

Every woman has some risk of breast can­cer. About 80% of women who get breast can­cer have no known fam­ily his­tory of the disease.

3 to 4 out of every 100 women who are 60 years old today will get breast can­cer by the age of 70, and about 1 woman out of 100 women who are 60 years old today will die from breast can­cer by the age of 70.

2. Share bad news.

What you look for in the bad news is the “wow” fac­tor. When you hear sta­tis­tics like the ones men­tioned above.

In the case of men, stud­ies show that sperm counts in healthy men appear to have dropped by more than half in 50 years.

A sur­vey of 1,350 sperm donors in Paris found a decline in sperm counts by around 2% each year over the past 23 years. Among men who died in 1981, 56.4% had nor­mal, healthy sperm pro­duc­tion. By 1991, how­ever, this fig­ure had dropped dra­mat­i­cally to 26.9%.

That is what’s hap­pen­ing. By throw­ing out these data points, you get people’s atten­tion and they start lis­ten­ing to what you have to say. Men that want to have chil­dren are lis­ten­ing, and cer­tainly, because of the com­pelling mar­ket data makes you want to pay attention.

In addi­tion, sci­en­tists say that diet/ nutri­tion and mod­ern lifestyle are pos­si­ble causative / con­tribut­ing fac­tors. (At this point they have yet to men­tion that this per­son is sell­ing nutri­tional supplements.)

What is caus­ing it? Nutri­tion, and nutri­ents. Or rather, the lack thereof is con­tribut­ing to the rise of these con­di­tions. Isn’t that interesting?

Fur­ther research is then used to estab­lish and prove the mar­ket data.

Imag­ine the sur­prise of going online and dis­cov­er­ing that the vit­a­min and min­eral con­tent of veg­eta­bles has dras­ti­cally dropped.

Some of the dif­fer­ences in vit­a­min and min­eral con­tent are enor­mous — a 50% drop in the amount of cal­cium in broc­coli, for exam­ple. Water­cress is down 88% in iron con­tent; cau­li­flower down 40% in vit­a­min C con­tent — all since 1975. The vit­a­min A in apples has dropped from 90 mg to 53 mg. Cau­li­flower has lost almost half its vit­a­min C, along with its thi­amin and riboflavin. Most of the cal­cium in pineap­ple is gone-from 17 mg (per 100 grams raw) to 7.

That is really, really bad news, isn’t it? So how are you tak­ing care of your­self? Even of you are eat­ing your apples and car­rots, from where are you get­ting nutri­ents? There’s a big wow to dis­cov­er­ing that your veg­gies don’t have enough nutri­ents to sus­tain you anymore!

What they have estab­lished is

1. Mar­ket data

2. Bad news –> a big wow

The answer to the sur­pris­ing sta­tis­tics of mar­ket data nat­u­rally fol­lows as nutri­tional sup­ple­ments.

That is a far more pow­er­fully charged sales angle as opposed to approach­ing some­one and telling them, hey, I’m sell­ing nutri­ents. Peo­ple may not be inter­ested in nutri­ent pills, but they are inter­ested in reduc­ing their odds of hav­ing breast can­cer; they’re inter­ested in being fer­tile if they still want to have fam­i­lies, and stay­ing in healthy for longer. That is why it is absolutely impor­tant that you hit them with mar­ket data first.

This is what Chet Holmes has done with the sales orga­ni­za­tions that he has built to dou­ble their orig­i­nal size. This applies to almost any and all indus­tries and busi­nesses, whether you are in law, med­i­cine, or any other pro­fes­sion. That is the power of mar­ket data –it makes objec­tions pass away and opens the door and gives you per­mis­sion to have a conversation.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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