Trust Me, I’m in My Underwear — The Guys (and gals) Who Earn TRUST are the Most Successful
The Network Marketing World was fractured, it seems to me, by the advent of the Internet. Traditional network marketing sales and recruiting techniques (weekly meetings, conference calls, “belly to belly” selling), were rendered obsolete in the minds of many.
The “Webpreneur” was born. Halleluja! No phone calls, no hanging out in hotel lobbies, no pestering of neighbors and friends!
The “closet marketer” was finally empowered! Enter SPAM, FreeForAll links, search engine chicanery…all in your underpants with no one the wiser! Woo-hoo!
But here’s the catch: MARKETING IS SALES. And do we really want to buy anything from a guy sitting at home in his underpants? Probably not. Sounds fishy.
“How would anyone know?” he (and you, perhaps) will ask. THEY WON’T. But they also won’t know very much about you at all. Oh yeah, they can read about your online money-making successes, or how you dropped three dress sizes in one month…but that doesn’t tell them about YOU. That tells them about WHAT YOU HAVE DONE. And however impressive that may sound, the thought will always be in the mind of the buyer: “Is it true? Can I trust this person?”
Success in sales is ALL ABOUT TRUST. Because what is a “sell-job,” after all? Isn’t it CONVINCING someone to take some action, to buy or buy-into something? A thought, a pair of shoes, a concept…even a lie?
A CON JOB happens because the con artist gains the TRUST of his victim.
So doesn’t it stand to reason that if you want to be good at selling things, you have to be good at getting people to TRUST YOU? If they trust you they will be inclined to buy whatever it is that you are selling.
The really smart marketers, I think, online and off, have this all figured out and if you read web pages, books and articles about MARKETING you will see that the guys (and gals) who can earn your trust are the most successful (over the long haul).
So what does this have to do with the title of this article? Buyers cannot totally trust you until they know who you are. (And once they do YOU could sell virtually anything to them in your underpants…in person even!)
This is where CONTENT comes in. CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT. Everybody talks about CONTENT. But content is not what a lot of people think it is. It’s not what I thought it was not long ago. It’s not about facts upon facts, or images upon images, or even copy upon copy. It’s WHAT’s ON THAT PAGE (or in that presentation) THAT TELLS THE BUYER ABOUT YOU! That’s the content they’re looking for!
The challenge is, as a salesperson, TO FIND THOSE PRODUCTS THAT YOU BELIEVE IN because that’s where your PASSION will come from. That’s what will be HONEST and instill TRUST in your buyer!
Who’s going to sell you a car first? The salesman that you have to go pull away from his Subway sandwich (by the way, do you believe that “Jared” lost 150 pounds eating at Subway? Just asking…) — or the salesman that owns a car just like the one you’re looking at and LOVES IT?
Now obviously you can’t be “IN LOVE WITH” every product you sell. But you have to find your passion SOMEWHERE. Because ultimately you’re going to have to get people to trust you.
In the old-school network marketing world where virtually no business got done without “meeting the sponsor and his upline” — and TRUSTING THEM enough to drop a big check on them — the “leader” showed his PASSION. And his disciples were the ones who could rouse the masses with their passion as well.
It’s the same on the Internet today, but without as much flesh and blood involved. The really good people on the net — half the world it seems is peddling their stuff — ARE PASSIONATE about what they do. For them it’s really not about dumping a product on a million “loosely associated affiliates,” to coin a phrase. The good ones are TRYING TO SOLVE PROBLEMS. They are passionate about it and so their work is good and their presentation smacks of sincerity (and the products usually ARE GOOD TOO)…and they gain trust…and they sell like crazy.
My point is that whether you want to sell on the Internet or you want to drop flyers off at the beauty salon, or invite the neighbors over for a “meeting,” you won’t really be good at it until YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE and WHY YOU ARE SELLING THAT STUFF in the first place.
Once you know that, you will be honest with YOURSELF. That alone sends a reassuring signal to the buyer…and you start gaining TRUST.
DA Jack Hayford worked corporately as a network marketing (MLM) start-up consultant for over fifteen years. He left that world as a full time occupation in 2005 to devote his energies to his first love: MUSIC. You can learn more about his projects at HayfordConsulting.com and Events-in-Music.com.
Tags: Network Marketing
