How To Be The Only Business Your Customers Ever Even Think Of Buying From – Part 1

There’s 3 Valuable Marketing elements to consider in the process of selling. If you look at history and ancient institutions that have lasted for thousands of years like churches for example, you’ll see they ALL sell this way.

They keep you inside their world and make it very, very easy for you to keep buying form them. You can even see Apple and Amazon doing this today. And you are seeing it “in action” every time you go to a restaurant. So anyway, let’s dig into this.

Most people know about Attraction and Conversion the first and second elements in direct marketing, but what about the third, Consumption?

When you look at attraction it’s probably the easiest thing to do. Most people think of attraction as very hard, but technically speaking you can attract anyone with any statement. The problem arises when you are trying to convert them, because now they have to buy into something. This doesn’t have to be something that’s paid. It could be something that’s free. In fact, free is harder to sell then something that’s paid.

That’s fine, you’ve got attraction, you’ve got conversion, but now you’re stuck with something called consumption. Most people don’t understand consumption because there is very little information out there on consumption.

Consumption is really where the customer starts to use what they bought. Now, it’s possible that they haven’t used everything, but they will use something or chunks of it. The best example of consumption is you go into a restaurant and you start eating your meal and then you leave the restaurant, so what you’ve gone through are those three phases. You’re attracted to the restaurant, you then went to the second stage, which was conversion, which is you bought the meal, and all of us will end up eating a portion or the complete meal. That is consumption and it’s something that marketers have no control over. I can sell you the meal, but I can’t make you eat it. Well, technically you can’t make me eat it. There are ways around it. But the core is attraction, conversion, and consumption.

So if they don’t consume the food there’s no way they’re going to want to come back and buy something else, right?

There are situations where people will come back and buy repeatedly because they think it’s something magical where they just touch your products or your services and something’s going to happen. But for people that really want to go ahead and the people who will generate revenues and therefore keep coming back to you, those people will need to get some kind of result. For them to get a result out of it they have to eat the food. They have to consume it. They have to use it repeatedly, and once they do they come back. It’s a very simple formula in that sense that you get someone to your house, you give them a great meal, and they’re going to come back, as long as they eat it.

But the problem is how do you make them eat it?

Consumption is a matter of three elements. The first thing is intimidation, the second thing is isolation, and the third thing is implementation. I’ll explain that in a little more detail.

What happens when anyone gets a product for instance?

Supposing you got a product like Photoshop.

You’ve bought into it, you’re all excited, and you’re ready to go, and then you open up the program. You’re looking at the screen and it’s completely intimidating. There’s all these toolbars and all these drop-downs and all these kinds of things, so that’s the first thing that happens. After the excitement of buying a product or service, everyone gets intimidated and very few of us can go past that intimidation, because you learn how to do the second thing, which is isolation.

People who are exceedingly good, who we tend to call talented, are really people who have worked out or isolated things. What they do is they have learned a pattern of isolating. For the rest of us who are not able to isolate, the creator has to isolate things. So you go from intimidation, and to remove intimidation you have to isolate things.

To give you an example, if you’re giving a presentation and you’ve got one hour of content, instead of making you listen to one hour of content, I give you a small preview maybe the night before, maybe in the form of notes or something… 10 pages, 5 pages. That removes the intimidation, because that’s the whole problem. When you get Photoshop you’re intimidated. If on the other hand I show you a simple thing that you can do in Photoshop, that removes one layer of intimidation, that’s called isolation. That takes us to the third part, which is implementation. Once I isolate something and I make it easy for you, then it’s very simple for you to go and to implement it. So those are the three stages of consumption.

If you look at history, because a lot of stuff people talk about today, which is social media or blogging or whatever, it’s all just media. The first time radio or TV came along people said, Wow! this is a great media. It’s very useful to attract clients, very useful to get people interested in you. When you convert them, that’s a little tricky, but the biggest problem with conversion is that, of course, a lot of people don’t know how to make you consume whatever you bought.

The second biggest problem is that for a marketer, for a producer, for someone who’s creating a product or service, the most expensive part of the deal is getting the customer to buy the first time. A lot of clients might be on our list for maybe 3 months, six months, a year, even three years, and never buy anything. The first purchase that they make is the most expensive for us, technically speaking. So the first sale is the most expensive. Therefore, it’s only profitable for you when people keep coming back, but the problem is how would they know that they have to come back? Now, you say logically, I’ve got other products. I’ve got other services and they should come back, but we’re so busy in today’s world that we may never notice these products, or we may notice these products or services and do them randomly and not get the benefits.

That’s where you need to implement Sequential Selling.

What sequential selling does is it makes sure that you know at the start, you are here. It’s like those “you are here signs.” 

That philosophy needs to be taken into your services and your products. The customer doesn’t know what to do next or what should be done next. Of course you’ll try to sell them everything, but they get intimidated by that, so you can only sell them one thing at a time, but they still need to know where they are in the whole sequence of things. To let them know where they are in the sequence of things you have to create what is a sequential sale, which means “you are here.”

You need to create a pathway, so when customers come there they know exactly, “Oh this is step 1, this is step 2, this is step 3,” and they all follow these steps.

Now, this is not something new. If you look into religion you’ll find the same thing. For instance, if you’re looking into the Catholic church you’ll find that there’s a passageway. There’s baptism, Holly Communion, confirmation, and it goes on. Then at some point it lets you do whatever you feel like, but there’s a rite of passage, as it were.

The same thing would apply to any organization that understands sequential selling, so they will create Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, and really that’s what it is – laying out all your products and services in a way that you know what you’re going to do next with a client, and the client knows what they’re going to do next with you.

If you like this so far, click here to continue onto part 2 where I talk about the 2 techniques to sell to people and how Apple uses Consumption and Sequential Selling. I would also love to hear how you do this in your business or plan to, just leave a comment below.