My psyche was just hijacked by a sweet sounding, marketing demoness!
I just received a voicemail from an amazingly sincere, genuine-sounding coaching “guru.” She went on and on about how she wants to give back to me and show her tremendous appreciation. All I have to do is visit her web page for details.
I visited. It turned out to be a long-form sales letter. You know the type: they mix testimonials with sincere-sounding stories and revelations of how the writer was poor, destitute, and reduced to eating their own belt in an attempt to find protein as they lived out of their car. Then suddenly they discovered the secret to everything and now you can have a little bit of their juicy goodness by attending their wonderful seminar for just $X hundred dollars. (Even though they’ve enjoyed a seven figure income for years, they are charging you for the information for your own good, of course.)
Halfway through reading her site, I began to feel the urge to attend the seminar. I realized that I’ve never made seven figures a year. Looking at all the pictures of the people who have attended and now blow their nose into genuine, gold leaf toilet paper made my knees quiver with a mixture of jealousy and painful feelings of inadequacy.
Then I noticed what I was feeling. I noticed the longing to attend her seminar. I noticed the inappropriately intense emotional reaction I was having. I closed the page, added her phone number to my voicemail spam box, and am adding her email newsletter to my spam filter list as well.
Psychologically manipulative long-form sales letters work really well. I highly recommend developing a knee-jerk reaction to them: delete them and consider the seller totally and completely discredited in your mind. If someone has something of value to offer, refuse to listen until they show you in a non-manipulative way. Ask for a sample. Ask for statistics. “How many of your students are now enjoying a 7-figure income? How long did it take them?” Ask for references. “Please give me their phone#s so I may call and verify.”
Anyone who claims to be a multi-gazillionaire who is generously helping you out if you pay them just a few hundred dollars is a scam artist. If you’re rich and want to give back, give. Don’t sell, give. You don’t have to do it as formal philanthropy, just offer your stuff for free. Coach Marshall Goldsmith, one of the most successful and highly paid coaches in the world, gives away everything he does for free at http://www.MarshallGoldsmithLibrary.com. As he once told me, “I have more money than I could ever spend, why should I charge people when what I care about is helping them?”
If you’re using long-form sales letters in your own business, try seeing if you can resort to selling your product on its own merits. If the answer is “No,” improve your product until you can.
It’s important to note, however, that if I send a long form sales letter, you must buy my products, make me a billionaire, pay for mansions for me, lots of Rolls Royces, and scantily clad models on both arms. I may be outraged, but I’m not stupid…
This is MARVELOUS! You are not only funny, you are dead on, and it is so few writers I can say are able to bring such “completeness” in their writing and still make me HOWL! What a gift you have. And you may have saved me a bunch of money, lol.
Most people are only selling good copywriting it seems.
September 28th, 2009 at 2:24 pm(Two ob-full-disclosures: (1) I’ve been a client of Stever’s, with great success, and (2) I was once an executive with a company that used a multi-level-marketing channel – also with great success.)
Marketing snake-oil self-help is no different from marketing New Improved toothpaste (‘now with FlavaBleach endorphins!’), or political initiatives (‘call Sen. Flatfoot and tell him to stop electrocuting our war heroes’), or cosmetics preying on the insecurity of 13-year-old girls (with a little help from the magazine industry).
I mentioned the MLM bit because, well, IT WORKS. (Best Marketing Phrase Ever: “…the success you deserve”.) We’re all above-average drivers; we all had that One Great Idea long before we saw Ron Popeil flogging it late-night; we all just KNOW if we could just unlock that ONE secret, take the right seminar, find the magic formula — we too would unlock our hidden potential, learn the secrets of the experts, overcome self-defeating behaviors — and make a zillion dollars in foreclosed real estate (or ForEx, or commodities, or anything that uses ‘leverage’)…
I’m gonna coin (pun intended) a phrase here: “Opportunity Alchemy”. (Stever – you’re free to use it (or laugh at me).)
Instead of transmutation of lead into gold, the philosophers’ stone, or the fountain of youth — people are now buying into magical shortcuts to “get rich”, or “empower themselves”, or “overcome the negative thinking that’s blocking you from achieving success!” (Which, of course, they deserve.)
I’m a big believer in Stever’s methods — particularly “the Work”, so don’t get me wrong: people DO get stuck in bad patterns, and can benefit enormously from solid, real coaching — I did.
But – success doesn’t come from a tape, or from the worksheets in a notebook you got at a $250 seminar at the Courtyard Marriot in Fresno. (Success, in this case, comes ONLY from SELLING those tapes and seminars.)
Just as with any important human endeavor — successful relationships, raising a child, conflict resolution, achieving artistic or scientific brilliance — there are insights, there are learnable behaviors and practices, there are skills — but there are no magic tricks.
If you could spend $250 on a seminar that’d teach you how to make $150,000 in 2 months — why is the guy who’s leading the seminar wasting his time collecting your $250, instead of ‘multiplying his money’?
He knows these secrets, right? But it’s evident that he finds it more profitable to teach get-rich-quick seminars.
Final comment: Warren Buffett, arguably at least one of the most successful investors in history, takes pains to explain, for free, to the world at large, everything he knows and is doing. He’s like the Linux of get-rich gurus: he publishes his source code. (Small irony, there, given that he pals around and plays bridge with Bill Gates.) He doesn’t do seminars, or charge for his “secrets”, and regularly makes the point that anyone can do exactly what he does, if they have the discipline to follow it.
Most still want to hunt for that shortcut.
September 28th, 2009 at 3:37 pmStever,
Right on! Thanks for the link to Marshall Goldsmith’s site. VERY useful. A goldmine of information.
Omar
September 29th, 2009 at 4:21 amWell Said.
If they want your Credit Card number, IT’S NOT FREE.
If someone is trying to sell you something they are not “giving back”.
December 11th, 2009 at 11:05 am