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The Danger of the Two Sales

The Danger of the Two Sales is a straightforward but not well-known marketing and sales problem that kills many new businesses.

Here's what happens to produce it:

Someone has a brainwave and makes a new product or service.

You see this all the time in the agency and Software-as-a-Service world...but you'll also see it in products, such as a condiment.

Then the creator goes out and tries to sell the thing, and discovers nobody wants it.

"Why don't they understand how great this is?" they shout. After all, it's clear as day to them why people need whatever it is.

But the public, the target market, other people... everyone else just doesn't get it.

The now-frustrated creator gives up.

the danger of the two sales, unable to sell, positioning problem, marketing problem

Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

Understanding What Causes The Danger Of The Two Sales

What happened here?

The new business owner, fired up with the enthusiasm for their innovative idea, has dangerously bypassed the first problem in sales and marketing...

...identifying a problem people admit they'll pay to have solved.

This is the first of The Two Sales. You must make this first sale, and it is best if that sale is implicitly understood by your prospective customer before you begin talking to them.

In other words, the first sale is that your prospect admits there is a serious problem to be solved: one that they will pay money to fix.

If you haven't achieved this, you run a great risk of having your "solution" sound unnecessary or, even worse, nonsense. You'll ever make a sale in this situation.

The second of The Two Sales is that YOU are the best provider of solutions for this problem.

Can you see how if you blindly try to rush past the first of The Two Sales, that your target market agrees there's an issue here worth solving in the first place, your prospect will blink at you in confusion when you try to show off "your baby"?

Making Use Of The Two Sales

You might be astonished how often this situation comes up. If you keep the Danger of the Two Sales in mind as you begin, though, you'll be able to make use of it.

As a for-instance, I pre-qualify prospective clients for people who already believe that a metrics-based approach is good. For them to already be demonstrating they value numbers because they're collecting their own data—and aren't afraid of math.

So many newbie business owners are afraid of a little math.

When I do talk to someone about our services, I know they're already on board with doing some math...that they speak the language of marketing and operations results. I do not have to risk falling into the situation of trying to sell someone who just isn't into numbers and probably never will be. What a frustrating experience that would be!

Do you see how this directs your marketing?

Your marketing is best deployed in filtering in those people who already believe as you do. Then you can talk to those who qualify—those you've made The First Sale to—further about the details of your amazing solution.

Of course there are situations where a new problem and a new solution are very real. But you'll still have to deal with The Two Sales: before you'll ever make a sale you'll have to educate and convince someone, or get them to agree, that there is a serious problem in this area. Then you can move on to you being the best solution provider.

Many, many businesses have died an early death because their founders did not understand The Danger of the Two Sales. I encourage you to not be one of those founders.

2023 Update on The Danger of the Two Sales

In reminder...

The First Sale (from the buyer's point of view): Is this a good idea for me in general?

The Second Sale: Is YOUR solution the best one for me?

Rush past the first and you'll have a lot of trouble making the second.

Take your time to make the first, and now that you've got your buyer's ears open, you'll have a much easier time with the second.

>> Jason Kanigan is a business strategist and conversion expert. To book a session to speak with Jason, click here. <<

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Money Tolerance And The Games We Play

Money Tolerance is a topic I'm surprised to find I haven't written much about here, given that it is such a central concept not only to the sales training I deliver but also to life. Your life.

If we look at the 80/20 Rule aka Pareto's Law, and apply it to your life, we find this: a small number of beliefs and their resulting decisions turn into the majority of what you experience in life.

The purpose of thinking is to stop thinking. The vast majority of our decisions are made on autopilot, drawing on what we've done before, consistency, identity. The maintenance of identity is key, whether you're conscious of this or not.

money tolerance, dollar, eye, bill

Photo by Vladislav Reshetnyak from Pexels

The Consistency of Money Tolerance

Money Tolerance is a two-parter. It's a limiting belief to imagine as two goalposts: one lower, and one upper. The upper limit is easy to spot, at least when we're being truthful with ourselves (and we often are not). This is the number at which you start saying, "That's a lot of money".

This is a game we play. We play it first with ourselves, then with others.

You see, that number is a BS story. It's nonsense. One number isn't any bigger than another: compare your number to infinity. It's all a game. Why this number and not another? You probably heard your parents say it. "This washing machine is a lot of money." OK, $500 or $1000 gets locked into your mind as "a lot of money".

But it's not the same number for other people, and this is where many folks get stuck in the game they're playing.

"This car is a lot of money," Dad said about the Mercedes station wagon priced at $87,500 because he wanted the nice trim package. So for you, $1000 is peanuts; "a lot of money" starts at $80,000.

How This Key Limiting Belief Affects Your Sales Conversations

Different people are walking around with different money tolerance levels... but they don't know it.

So as a prospective customer, you can bump into somebody who has an extremely different belief in what the cost and value of what you offer as a business owner or salesperson represents.

If you grew up being imprinted upon that "$80,000 is a lot of money", but this prospect in front of you right now believes that "$500 is a lot of money"... can you predict what's going to happen?

That prospect is going to collapse. They're going to fall into themselves, because their belief doesn't support your price tag, and they're going to leave. They literally cannot stand being around the mere idea.

Take this in.

You can also use Money Tolerance as a qualifying tool: I certainly do.

I've explained for years how you choose your customers.

One of the levers you've got available to work with here is Money Tolerance. What if you were to use it to set a bar? So that only those people who already believed—were playing the game that the money number level of where you believe value begins is what they already agree with—were allowed past the velvet rope?

What if you only let people with a pricing-value belief matching your own see the offer?

A big part of positioning works this way. Consider Mercedes again. They're happy to give away whatever info is on their website to whoever wants to look: they know the vast majority of visitors are dreamers who will never qualify to buy. Only those who come into the dealership, and pass the test of answering some qualifying questions correctly, will get the chance to receive an offer to buy. Remember, those are the prospects who can stand there and participate with the idea of this investment as not being "too much money".

How can you take this concept to your own business and apply it?

>> Jason Kanigan is a business strategist and coach. If you're ready to book a session with Jason, click here <<

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How SaaS Vendors Get It Wrong

saas vebdirsSaaS vendors habitually have a critical problem.

And it leads them to do unproductive things in their sales and marketing process.

We'll be looking at these timewasters and sales losers over the next few posts. Here's a surprise: the same issues plaguing the field in 2007 remain today. For now, though, let's concentrate on the seminal issue.

A lot of SaaS vendors built something nobody wants.

The founder thought it was a cool idea. They went ahead and dumped the few, precious resources they had into their "baby."

What's the issue? They made it in isolation.

Look at that list of SaaS sales problems from 2007:

  • I don’t have enough leads
  • My customers want to customize my application
  • Getting new customers up and running is too long and hard
  • My prospects aren’t Internet savvy
  • My sales cycle is too slow and takes too much effort
  • My prospects always seems to want that one thing we don’t have
  • My prospects don’t have enough time or interest to talk to my sales staff.

These apply to ERP, accounting software and CRM tools as well, many of which are sold as SaaS solutions.

Why do you think these things happen? Does it sound like the SaaS solution matches up with the buyers' problem?

The Key Issue of Struggling SaaS Vendors

They didn't solve a problem a buyer said they'd pay to have fixed.

If you're one of the SaaS vendors, now you've got a real problem.

You've got a solution in search of a problem.

See, it's not what you say that gets people to buy. It's what they say.

Their problems. Their situations. Their specific language.

Yes, the terminology they use.

When you don't use the language your buyers use to describe the problematic situation they're in which your solution will get them out of, you miss your target.

What do SaaS vendors who don't know this do?

Run to features.

We'll be looking at this in more detail later, but nobody ever bought because of features.

That's why demos don't work.

Cranking Up the Number of Demos Is NOT the Right Solution for SaaS Vendors

Occasionally, if you run enough of them, a demo is going to accidentally match up a problem with your solution.

But this is an accident.

You won't really know why they buy.

And it's obviously incredibly inefficient.

SaaS vendors run into a couple business-killing issues when this happens:

1 - Not Invented Here syndrome, which makes them believe the only possible solution is to do more demos

2 - Burnout of tech staff forced to do unending demos and becoming increasingly frustrated with the results.

We'll look at each of these in greater detail in upcoming posts.

For now, though, if you're one of the crowd of struggling SaaS vendors, ask yourself...

"Did I build something buyers actually want enough to pay for?"