Solution Selling Quotes

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you...it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre: "I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give. Responsibility to yourself means that you don't fall for shallow and easy solutions--predigested books and ideas...marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems. It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short...and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. It means that we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives. It means, therefore, the courage to be "different"...The difference between a life lived actively, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.

George Orwell first noted, the true genius in advertising is to sell you the solution and the problem.

Any problem can be made clearer with a picture, and any picture can be created using the same set of tools and rules.

The goal is to have customers who appreciate the value your business is selling; and customers who are willing and able to pay for that value. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're here to help your business figure this out, and to provide holistic solutions.

4 is the worst time to wake up, as anyone with the normal human sensitivities will tell you. Far too late to make a cup of tea or go back to sleep. Far too early to get up and do something constructive. There's nothing on television but arrogant evangelists and people selling acne solutions and motivational tapes. For me, base 12 philosophy aside, midnight is not the witching hour. 4:00 is.

We each sell alittle piece of happiness. You are elevating someone's spirit in some way, and to do that you have to understand the source of their angst and then you have to frame your product as a solution.

All businesses -- no matter if they make dog food or software -- don't sell products, they sell solutions.

Selling is serving, helping others find solutions, impacting lives positively with passion and integrity.

The truth is that we stray and have affairs not because we are all naturally inclined to have multiple mates but because our bond with our partner is either inherently weak or has deteriorated so far that we are unbearably lonely. We haven’t understood love or known how to repair it. So, confused and lost in a world that sells sex aggressively as the be-all and end-all of a relationship, the only obvious “solution” has been to seek out new lovers to try to create the longed-for connection.

Give serious thought to why your company should care about your strategy. Specifically, find problems that the board wants to be solved. What are senior managers scared of? Part of becoming a credible strategic thinker is learning effective approaches to selling ideas for your situation. You’ll know that you’re getting better at selling (or pitching) strategy when managers start coming to you when there is strategic thinking to be done.

Just as athletes never quit training, high performers never stop consciously conditioning and strengthening their habits. Real success—holistic, long-term success—doesn’t come from doing what’s natural, certain, convenient, or automatic. Often, the journey to greatness begins the moment our preferences for comfort and certainty are overruled by a greater purpose that requires challenge and contribution. The skills and strengths you have now are probably insufficient to get you to the next level of success, so it’s absurd to think you won’t have to work on your weaknesses, develop new strengths, try new habits, stretch beyond what you think your limits or gifts are. That’s why I’m not here to sell you the easy solution of just focusing on what is already easy for you. Just so we’re clear: There’s a lot of work ahead.

book and magazine publishers aren’t in the business of enlightenment. They’re in the business of selling books and magazines, not truth, and they know that seekers will gladly pay to be reassured that, common sense aside, they can wake up and stay asleep; awakening within the dreamstate being a much more marketable solution than waking up from it. Such

money. Just money.” She knew that wasn’t true. It was never about the money with him—it was about the work. It was about coming up with the perfect idea, the most elegant solution. Her dad didn’t really care what he was selling. Tampons or tractors or dog food for people. He just wanted to find the perfect puzzle-piece idea that would be beautiful and right.

You can't lose in sales if you remember that you're not selling; you're solving problems.

If you’re getting a lot of objections early in the call, it probably means that instead of asking questions, you’ve been prematurely offering solutions and capabilities.

First you make people believe they have a problem, and then you sell them the solution. That's how advertising works. Every snake oil salesman knows that.

We all need salespeople who understand the problem and can deliver a solution that works brilliantly for both sides.

The amateur salesman sells products; the professional sells solutions to needs and problems.

This is how problem solvers both pitch and sell solutions to businesses every day. They find other people’s big problems and then use their creative skills to come up with a solution.

Let’s face it, no one wants to be seen as a stereotypical salesperson who is pushy and untrustworthy. However, if you think about yourself as a doctor who diagnoses and then prescribes solutions to people’s problems, then I’m sure you’ll be much more comfortable selling under those circumstances—as a trusted, educated, knowledgeable, qualified, confident, capable advisor.

Con artists often target people who are emotionally vulnerable,” I said. “People who need to believe the reality they’re selling, desperate for a solution to whatever problems they’re facing.

The truth is that we won’t receive the support we need until we ask for it. Just because we can do it all doesn’t mean we should. And when we don’t speak up about our needs, we’re asking our loved ones to read our minds—and then we resent them when they fail our test. By not being open and honest about the support we need, we’re selling ourselves short and setting our relationships up for failure.

What do they all say? That will never work. By now, I hope you know what my answer to that line is. Nobody Knows Anything. I only get to write this book once. And I’d feel like I missed an opportunity if I ended this story without giving you some advice. The most powerful step that anyone can take to turn their dreams into reality is a simple one: you just need to start. The only real way to find out if your idea is a good one is to do it. You’ll learn more in one hour of doing something than in a lifetime of thinking about it. So take that step. Build something, make something, test something, sell something. Learn for yourself if your idea is a good one. What happens if your idea doesn’t work? What happens if your test fails, if nobody orders your product or joins your club? What if sales don’t go up and customer complaints don’t go down? What if you get halfway through writing your novel and get writer’s block? What if after dozens of tries – even hundreds of attempts – you still haven’t seen your dream become anything close to real? You have to learn to love the problem, not the solution. That’s how you stay engaged when things take longer than you expected.

Many cyberweapons manufacturers sell hacking tools to governments worldwide. For example, FinFisher is an “offensive IT Intrusion solution,” according to the promotional material from the UK and German company that makes it, Gamma Group.

In order to indoctrinate their followers and secure obedience, religions frequently tear people down, creating an emptiness that must then be filled with Jesus, Allah or any other deity. People are told that they are inherently bad or sinful and that the only way to become good is by giving over control of their lives to faith. As there is no evidence that any of that is true, religion, in effect, is creating an imaginary problem simply so that it can sell an imaginary solution.

To the temple!” their dad cried, his fist in the air. He always said that when they went to the temple. Sort of like cheering for a boring lecture or a long line on voting day. “If only we could bottle that excitement and sell it to all of Thuvhe. Most of them I see just once a year, and then only because there’s food and drink waiting for them,” their mom drawled with a faint smile. “There’s your solution, then,” Eijeh said. “Entice them with food all season long.” “The wisdom of children,” their mom said.

If the patriarchy didn’t want her talent on her terms, then they would have to get along without it, while she sat in the shadows, making their lives miserable from time to time, getting rich off their mistakes, exploiting flaws in their security, and selling the solutions back to them.

To achieve critical consciousness of the facts that it is necessary to be the “owner of one’s own labor,” that labor “constitutes part of the human person,” and that “a human being can neither be sold nor can he sell himself” is to go a step beyond the deception of palliative solutions. It is to engage in authentic transformation of reality in order, by humanizing that reality, to humanize women and men.

Here’s a rule of thumb: in the early stages of the sales cycle, any statements that you make about yourself, your product, or your solution should be responses to the client’s questions only. If they aren’t, you’re signaling that you are more interested in selling than in helping the client achieve his desired outcomes. So, don’t tell, tell, tell. Instead, engage in a dialogue and make sure all of your responses relate to the client’s needs.

The last year had been a series of wrong turns, bad choices, abandoned projects. There was the all-girl band in which she had played bass, variously called Throat, Slaughterhouse Six and Bad Biscuit, which had been unable to decide on a name, let alone a musical direction. There was the alternative club night that no-one had gone to, the abandoned first novel, the abandoned second novel, several miserable summer jobs selling cashmere and tartan to tourists. At her very, very lowest ebb she had taken a course in Circus Skills until it transpired that she had none. Trapeze was not the solution. The much-advertised Second Summer of Love had been one of melancholy and lost momentum. Even her beloved Edinburgh had started to bore and depress her. Living in a her University town felt like staying on at a party that everyone else had left, and so in October she had given up the flat in Rankellior Street and moved back to her parents for a long, fraught, wet winter of recriminations and slammed doors and afternoon TV in a house that now seemed impossibly small.

Similarly, product managers must be problem solvers as well. They are not trying to design the user experience, or architect a scalable, fault‐tolerant solution. Rather, they solve for constraints aligned around their customer's business, their industry, and especially their own business. Is this something their customers need? Is it substantially better than the alternatives? Is it something the company can effectively market and sell, that they can afford to build, that they can service and support, and that complies with legal and regulatory constraints?

But was the Newton a failure? The timing of Newton’s entry into the handheld market was akin to the timing of the Apple II into the desktop market. It was a market-creating, disruptive product targeted at an undefinable set of users whose needs were unknown to either themselves or Apple. On that basis, Newton’s sales should have been a pleasant surprise to Apple’s executives: It outsold the Apple II in its first two years by a factor of more than three to one. But while selling 43,000 units was viewed as an IPO-qualifying triumph in the smaller Apple of 1979, selling 140,000 Newtons was viewed as a failure in the giant Apple of 1994.

A husband is the only possible solution to your problems.” “Don’t you dare suggest a man as the solution for my troubles,” she cried. “You’re all the cause of them! My father gambled away the entire family fortune and left me in debt; my brother disappeared after getting me deeper in debt; you kissed me and destroyed my reputation; my fiancé left me at the first breath of a scandal you caused; and my uncle is trying to sell me! As far as I’m concerned,” she finished, spiting fire, “men make excellent dancing partners, but beyond that I have no use for the lot of you. You’re all quite detestable, actually, when one takes time to ponder it, which of course one rarely does, for it would only cause depression.

I’m not… What’s wrong with them believing?” Bea asked, a note of pleading creeping, uninvited, into her voice. “You do not sell belief, you sell belief-in. Belief in true love, as if everyone were entitled to it. Belief in a simple solution to a complex problem. Belief in one type of person, one type of future.” “No I don’t. I offer people dreams, and hope, and, and, something to organise their lives with,” Bea said, not sure why she was trying to convince him. “I don’t make them into ‘one person’.” “Oh no? Let me recall your doctrine: Kings, Princes and their ilk must marry girls whose only asset is their beauty. Not clever girls, not worthy girls, not girls who could rule. Powerful women, older women – like one day you will become – are nought but wicked creatures, consumed with jealousy and unfit to hold position. No,” he said as Bea began to speak, “I am not finished. Let us turn our attention to the men. As long as the woman is something to be won, it follows only the worthy will prevail. It matters not if they truly love the girl, nor if the man is cruel or arrogant or unfit to tie his own doublet. As long as he has wealth and completes whatever trials are decided fit, he is suitable. For what is stupidity or arrogance when compared against a crown? The good will win, and the wicked perish, and you and your stories decide what makes a person good or wicked. Not life. Not choice. Not even common sense. You.

The converse is true as well. The financial writer Morgan Housel has observed that while pessimists sound like they’re trying to help you, optimists sound like they’re trying to sell you something.28 Whenever someone offers a solution to a problem, critics will be quick to point out that it is not a panacea, a silver bullet, a magic bullet, or a one-size-fits-all solution; it’s just a Band-Aid or a quick technological fix that fails to get at the root causes and will blow back with side effects and unintended consequences. Of course, since nothing is a panacea and everything has side effects (you can’t do just one thing), these common tropes are little more than a refusal to entertain the possibility that anything can ever be improved.29

Mice and the Cat. Once upon a time, there was a house with lots of mice. They were fat and happy. One day a cat moved in. The mice had a meeting. "What should we do? The cat will eat us! Every day that cat sneaks up behind us and chases us back into our holes.” Finally they decided on a brilliant solution. They would put a bell around the cat's neck, so whenever they heard the bell, they could rush into their holes before the cat could eat them. Then one mouse said to the others, "The solution is excellent. Put a bell around the cat's neck. But the real question is: who is going to put the bell around the cat's neck?" The moral of the story is that we all know what we need to do (join and get started), but there is great fear in doing it.

Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one’s own navel, to turn up one’s eyes and humbly offer the back of one’s neck to Gletkin’s revolver—that is an easy solution. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is ananachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears. ...” He felt for the bottle behind him and poured out an other glass. Rubashov noticed that the bottle was already half empty. You also could do with a little solace, he thought. “The greatest criminals in history,” Ivanov went on, “are not of the type Nero and Fouché, but of the type Gandhi and Tolstoy. Gandhi’s inner voice has done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns. To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is.

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

corruption. Is corruption just a matter of legality, of financial irregularity and bribery, or is it the currency of a social transaction in an egregiously unequal society, in which power continues to be concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller minority? Imagine, for example, a city of shopping malls, on whose streets hawking has been banned. A hawker pays the local beat cop and the man from the municipality a small bribe to break the law and sell her wares to those who cannot afford the prices in the malls. Is that such a terrible thing? In the future will she have to pay the Lokpal representative, too? Does the solution to the problems faced by ordinary people lie in addressing the structural inequality or in creating yet another power structure that people will have to defer to?

What we all have to avoid is the notion that we can buy our way out of our problems. Instead, the goal is to reduce our costs by extreme frugality. This is psychologically difficult because if there is one great certain confidence in American society it is this: you can buy your way out of almost anything. Other than a few things that will land you in jail even if you are rich, we tend to look for solutions that involve buying things. Having trouble with your marriage? Take a vacation. Pay a counsellor. Don't want to eat pesticides? Buy organic food! Indebted? Buy a book about how to get out. Worried about Peak Oil? Look at all the things there are to buy. Got a crosscut saw and a year's supply of dry milk yet? Don't want to give up driving and flying? We'll sell you some nice carbon offsets.

Toward the end of the plague, yellow journalism had spread a cancerous dread of vampires to all corners of the nation. He could remember himself the rash of pseudo-scientific articles that veiled an out-and-out fright campaign designed to sell papers. There was something grotesquely amusing in that; the frenetic attempt to sell papers while the world died. Not that all newspapers had done that. Those papers that had lived in honesty and integrity died the same way. Yellow journalism, though, had been rampant in the final days. And, in addition, a great upsurge in revivalism had occurred. In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins.

The Mice and the Cat. Once upon a time, there was a house with lots of mice. They were fat and happy. One day a cat moved in. The mice had a meeting. "What should we do? The cat will eat us! Every day that cat sneaks up behind us and chases us back into our holes.” Finally they decided on a brilliant solution. They would put a bell around the cat's neck, so whenever they heard the bell, they could rush into their holes before the cat could eat them. Then one mouse said to the others, "The solution is excellent. Put a bell around the cat's neck. But the real question is: who is going to put the bell around the cat's neck?" The moral of the story is that we all know what we need to do (join and get started), but there is great fear in doing it. I know you want to start or build a business. Would it be okay if I helped you get started by putting the bell around the cat's neck and then you can say good-bye to fear?

I don't think that the despiritualised, dehumanised culture in which we live, the McDonalds and Disney culture, does our internal lives, our mythological lives, any favours at all. In other words, to be an Outsider in this culture now is to be looking inside at a plastic world, and I think it's easier to critique that world if I don't belong to it... In Hollywood where I live now, there's a lot of having lunches, a lot of going to parties... and I will have no part of that. I'm certainly not very good at it, I don't like it and I feel a little weird about it. I don't want to be part of the problem, I want to be a part of the solution, and the only way I can help solve the problem of the plasticity of our world is by writing, by painting and by making my work, so I stay where I can do that, which is at my desk, in my studio. I will venture out when I need to sell a book or exhibit my paintings, but the rest of the time my job is to be here and imagine.

Normally, Bentner would have beamed approvingly at the pretty portrait the girls made, but this morning, as he put out butter and jam, he had grim news to impart and a confession to make. As he swept the cover off the scones he gave his news and made his confession. “We had a guest last night,” he told Elizabeth. “I slammed the door on him.” “Who was it?” “A Mr. Ian Thornton.” Elizabeth stifled a horrified chuckle at the image that called to mind, but before she could comment Bentner said fiercely, “I regretted my actions afterward! I should have invited him inside, offered him refreshment, and slipped some of that purgative powder into his drink. He’d have had a bellyache that lasted a month!” “Bentner,” Alex sputtered, “you are a treasure!” “Do not encourage him in these fantasies,” Elizabeth warned wryly. “Bentner is so addicted to mystery novels that he occasionally forgets that what one does in a novel cannot always be done in real life. He actually did a similar thing to my uncle last year.” “Yes, and he didn’t return for six months,” Bentner told Alex proudly. “And when he does come,” Elizabeth reminded him with a frown to sound severe, “he refuses to eat or drink anything.” “Which is why he never stays long,” Bentner countered, undaunted. As was his habit whenever his mistress’s future was being discussed, as it was now, Bentner hung about to make suggestions as they occurred to him. Since Elizabeth had always seemed to appreciate his advice and assistance, he found nothing odd about a butler sitting down at the table and contributing to the conversation when the only guest was someone he’d known since she was a girl. “It’s that odious Belhaven we have to rid you of first,” Alexandra said, returning to their earlier conversation. “He hung about last night, glowering at anyone who might have approached you.” She shuddered. “And the way he ogles you. It’s revolting. It’s worse than that; he’s almost frightening.” Bentner heard that, and his elderly eyes grew thoughtful as he recalled something he’d read about in one of his novels. “As a solution it is a trifle extreme,” he said, “but as a last resort it could work.” Two pairs of eyes turned to him with interest, and he continued, “I read it in The Nefarious Gentleman. We would have Aaron abduct this Belhaven in our carriage and bring him straightaway to the docks, where we’ll sell him to the press gangs.” Shaking her head in amused affection, Elizabeth said, “I daresay he wouldn’t just meekly go along with Aaron.” “And I don’t think,” Alex added, her smiling gaze meeting Elizabeth’s, “a press gang would take him. They’re not that desperate.” “There’s always black magic,” Bentner continued. “In Deathly Endeavors there was a perpetrator of ancient rites who cast an evil spell. We would require some rats’ tails, as I recall, and tongues of-“ “No,” Elizabeth said with finality. “-lizards,” Bentner finished determinedly. “Absolutely not,” his mistress returned. “And fresh toad old, but procuring that might be tricky. The novel didn’t say how to tell fresh from-“ “Bentner!” Elizabeth exclaimed, laughing. “You’ll cast us all into a swoon if you don’t desist at once.” When Bentner had padded away to seek privacy for further contemplation of solutions, Elizabeth looked at Alex. “Rats’ tails and lizards’ tongues,” she said, chuckling. “No wonder Bentner insists on having a lighted candle in his room all night.” “He must be afraid to close his eyes after reading such things,” Alex agreed.

While these tactics were aggressive and crude, they confirmed that our legislation had touched a nerve. I wasn’t the only one who recognized this. Many other victims of human rights abuses in Russia saw the same thing. After the bill was introduced they came to Washington or wrote letters to the Magnitsky Act’s cosponsors with the same basic message: “You have found the Achilles’ heel of the Putin regime.” Then, one by one, they would ask, “Can you add the people who killed my brother to the Magnitsky Act?” “Can you add the people who tortured my mother?” “How about the people who kidnapped my husband?” And on and on. The senators quickly realized that they’d stumbled onto something much bigger than one horrific case. They had inadvertently discovered a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the twenty-first century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. After a dozen or so of these visits and letters, Senator Cardin and his cosponsors conferred and decided to expand the law, adding sixty-five words to the Magnitsky Act. Those new words said that in addition to sanctioning Sergei’s tormentors, the Magnitsky Act would sanction all other gross human rights abusers in Russia. With those extra sixty-five words, my personal fight for justice had become everyone’s fight. The revised bill was officially introduced on May 19, 2011, less than a month after we posted the Olga Stepanova YouTube video. Following its introduction, a small army of Russian activists descended on Capitol Hill, pushing for the bill’s passage. They pressed every senator who would talk to them to sign on. There was Garry Kasparov, the famous chess grand master and human rights activist; there was Alexei Navalny, the most popular Russian opposition leader; and there was Evgenia Chirikova, a well-known Russian environmental activist. I didn’t have to recruit any of these people. They just showed up by themselves. This uncoordinated initiative worked beautifully. The number of Senate cosponsors grew quickly, with three or four new senators signing on every month. It was an easy sell. There wasn’t a pro-Russian-torture-and-murder lobby in Washington to oppose it. No senator, whether the most liberal Democrat or the most conservative Republican, would lose a single vote for banning Russian torturers and murderers from coming to America. The Magnitsky Act was gathering so much momentum that it appeared it might be unstoppable. From the day that Kyle Scott at the State Department stonewalled me, I knew that the administration was dead set against this, but now they were in a tough spot. If they openly opposed the law, it would look as if they were siding with the Russians. However, if they publicly supported it, it would threaten Obama’s “reset” with Russia. They needed to come up with some other solution. On July 20, 2011, the State Department showed its cards. They sent a memo to the Senate entitled “Administration Comments on S.1039 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law.” Though not meant to be made public, within a day it was leaked.

To the degree that advertising reaches us, occupying our time and thought, it keeps us vibrating within strict limits. If forty million people see a commercial for a car, then forty million people have a car commercial in their heads, all at the same time. This is bound to have more beneficial effect on the commodity system than if, at that moment, all those people were thinking separate thoughts which, in some cases, might not be about commodities at all. Of course, advertising people will argue against the notion that the purpose and result of their activities is to unify and homogenize people and culture. They are forever speaking of the dazzling array of choices our market system provides and how advertising provides the information we need to make choices. It is an ominous sign that so many people can accept this argument, which confuses diversity of product choice with diversity of life-style or thoughts. It ought to be self-evident that if I choose a Ford and you choose a Volvo, we are not expressing diversity, we are expressing unity. Moreover, if you and I at any one moment are both occupied with mental images and feelings related to products—any products— rather than some experience which is not connected to purchasing, then in terms of the commodity system, the gross national product, and the world of advertising, we are indistinguishable; we have merged as “market.” While it might matter to Upjohn or Cutter Laboratories which drug a consumer buys, both are in agreement that they benefit whenever people seek any drug rather than a nondrug solution to a problem. Advertising, then, serves to further the movement of humans into artificial environments by narrowing the conception of diversity to fit the framework of commodities while unifying people within this conception. The result is a singularly channeled mentality, nicely open to receiving commercial messages, ready to confuse brand diversity with diversity itself, and to confuse human need with the advertiser’s need to sell commodities.

The Ten Ways to Evaluate a Market provide a back-of-the-napkin method you can use to identify the attractiveness of any potential market. Rate each of the ten factors below on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is terrible and 10 fantastic. When in doubt, be conservative in your estimate: Urgency. How badly do people want or need this right now? (Renting an old movie is low urgency; seeing the first showing of a new movie on opening night is high urgency, since it only happens once.) Market Size. How many people are purchasing things like this? (The market for underwater basket-weaving courses is very small; the market for cancer cures is massive.) Pricing Potential. What is the highest price a typical purchaser would be willing to spend for a solution? (Lollipops sell for $0.05; aircraft carriers sell for billions.) Cost of Customer Acquisition. How easy is it to acquire a new customer? On average, how much will it cost to generate a sale, in both money and effort? (Restaurants built on high-traffic interstate highways spend little to bring in new customers. Government contractors can spend millions landing major procurement deals.) Cost of Value Delivery. How much will it cost to create and deliver the value offered, in both money and effort? (Delivering files via the internet is almost free; inventing a product and building a factory costs millions.) Uniqueness of Offer. How unique is your offer versus competing offerings in the market, and how easy is it for potential competitors to copy you? (There are many hair salons but very few companies that offer private space travel.) Speed to Market. How soon can you create something to sell? (You can offer to mow a neighbor’s lawn in minutes; opening a bank can take years.) Up-front Investment. How much will you have to invest before you’re ready to sell? (To be a housekeeper, all you need is a set of inexpensive cleaning products. To mine for gold, you need millions to purchase land and excavating equipment.) Upsell Potential. Are there related secondary offers that you could also present to purchasing customers? (Customers who purchase razors need shaving cream and extra blades as well; buy a Frisbee and you won’t need another unless you lose it.) Evergreen Potential. Once the initial offer has been created, how much additional work will you have to put in in order to continue selling? (Business consulting requires ongoing work to get paid; a book can be produced once and then sold over and over as is.) When you’re done with your assessment, add up the score. If the score is 50 or below, move on to another idea—there are better places to invest your energy and resources. If the score is 75 or above, you have a very promising idea—full speed ahead. Anything between 50 and 75 has the potential to pay the bills but won’t be a home run without a huge investment of energy and resources.

Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.

PROBLEM → SET-UP → SOLUTION (Feature) → BENEFIT

Simply jailing newly free uppity blacks was an effective but expensive solution to the problem of control. Selling or leasing the inmates instead not only saved states the cost of incarceration, it earned them a profit. Eventually, leasing would provide the state of Alabama with one quarter of its yearly revenue and provide industry with untold profits. Arrest rates reflected the desire for profit.

I have realized that businesses—whether they make dog food or software—don’t sell products; they sell solutions.

Convenient Drain & Pipe Solutions Ltd are an official Bailey Products stockist, we sell Drain cleaning testing Equipment including Drain & Chimney Cleaning Rod.

if salespeople want to sell value and differentiate their product, they have to deliver insight that will reframe the buying vision so buyers end up with the solution that helps them overcome their challenges and achieve their goals.

In 2008, Box had a good way for companies to store their data safely and accessibly in the cloud. But people didn’t know they needed such a thing—cloud computing hadn’t caught on yet. That summer, Blake was hired as Box’s third salesperson to help change that. Starting with small groups of users who had the most acute file sharing problems, Box’s sales reps built relationships with more and more users in each client company. In 2009, Blake sold a small Box account to the Stanford Sleep Clinic, where researchers needed an easy, secure way to store experimental data logs. Today the university offers a Stanford-branded Box account to every one of its students and faculty members, and Stanford Hospital runs on Box. If it had started off by trying to sell the president of the university on an enterprise-wide solution, Box would have sold nothing. A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.

EAN codes ordinarily have the first three digits (the prefix) identifying the country of manufacture, but that doesn't make sense for books. The industry committee's clever solution was to invent two new imaginary countries -- called Bookland 1 and Bookland 2 -- with corresponding prefixes of 978 and 979." (29)

Most organizations equate salespeople’s results with the skill of closing. The theory goes, if salespeople aren’t making their numbers; they must have a problem with closing. I’ve spent the majority of my professional life working with individuals and companies to improve their sales performance, and I can say without any hesitation that closing, the so-called skill of asking for the order, is not the big problem. Often my clients discover that the real problem with closing is not adequately defining or diagnosing the prospect’s problems in the first place.

Having enough other opportunities to work on is the best position a salesperson and his or her company can be in. A full pipeline gives salespeople the strongest position from which to negotiate—the ability to say no.

Management who fall into this category are often so concerned about digital that they latch on to any idea, no matter how inappropriate. They want quick-fix solutions that will somehow solve digital. That makes them vulnerable to any charlatan with a digital product to sell.

Never Put These Ten Words in Your Pitch Deck Take a close look at your standard pitch deck, the “about us” section on your corporate home page, or your PR material. Highlight every instance of the words “leading,” “unique,” “solution,” or “innovative.” In particular, go find all instances of the phrase “We work to understand our customers’ unique needs and then build custom solutions to meet those needs.” Then hit the delete key. Because every time you use one of those buzzwords, you are telling your customers, “We are exactly the same as everyone else.” Ironically, the more we try to play up our differences, the more things sound the same. Public relations expert Adam Sherk recently analyzed the terms used in company communications, and the results are devastating. Here are the top ten: By definition, there can be only one leader in any industry—and 161,000 companies each think they’re it. More than 75,000 companies think they’re the “best” or the “top”; 30,400 think they’re “unique.” “Solution” also makes an appearance at number seven—so if you think that calling your offering a “solution” differentiates you, think again. If everyone’s saying they offer the “leading solution,” what’s the customer to think? We can tell you what their response will be: “Great—give me 10 percent off.” We don’t mean to be unsympathetic here. You’ll find it’s hard to avoid these terms—heck, we call our own consulting arm “SEC Solutions”! In all of our time at the Council, we have never once met a member who doesn’t think her company’s value proposition beats the socks off the competitors’. And it’s understandable. After all, why would we want to work for a company whose product is second-rate—especially when our job is to sell that product? But what the utter sameness of language here tells us is that, ironically, a strategy of more precisely describing our products’ advantages over the competition’s is destined to have the exact opposite effect—we simply end up sounding like everyone else.

Her problem at Renewable Solutions was that she could never quite figure out what she was selling, even when she was finding people to buy it, and no sooner had she finally begun to figure it out than she was asked to sell something else.

The foreign ministers were unsettled too by the buzz around the report’s insistence on a new diplomatic push that would involve talking to Iran—a kind of regional solution to the Iraq problem. They were rightly suspicious that the Iranians would use their enhanced diplomatic perch that would come with U.S. consultations to further their influence in the region, and the ministers wanted a promise that the United States was not about to sell out to Tehran to end the war in Iraq.

Although corporate bosses were starting to embrace BlackBerry, Lazaridis and Balsillie knew they faced a challenge selling bulk orders to big businesses. Technology purchases were the domain of chief information officers (CIOs). These executives were conservative and frowned on technology that exposed internal communications. “The problem with going through IT is they had to approve everything. It would take a year,” says Lazaridis. “You had to test everything, approve it, and most of these [CIOs] didn’t want it anyway. It was just another thing to deal with. But once a CEO tried it, that was it.” The solution, Lazaridis and Balsillie decided, was an unorthodox plan to infiltrate Fortune 1000 companies. RIM made it easy for influential managers and executives to link the addictive BlackBerry system into their corporate e-mail without involving the IT department.

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Many years ago, in his best-selling classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie noted that “an effective leader asks questions instead of giving orders.” Oakley and Krug call questions the “ultimate empowerment tool” for the leader.12 They observe that the better we as leaders become at asking effective questions and listening for the answers to those questions, the more consistently we and the people with whom we work can accomplish mutually satisfying objectives, be empowered, reduce resistance, and create a willingness to pursue innovative change.

If you are not ready to walk away from an opportunity, then you probably are not in a position to reach final agreement effectively either. The principle here is simple, but the ability to adhere to it is not. If you don’t know the value that your solution provides to the prospective buyer, you are at a distinct disadvantage. Why? Because you have little, if any, bargaining power.

Your solution may lead to less stress, healthier relationships, an improved quality of life, a more organized lifestyle or home, or a better work-life balance.

We sell ideas and solutions to people, and people sell our products and services to themselves.

The media are right now in the process of doing millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of free PR work for whoever is doing this. Such over-the-top, wall-to-wall coverage just sets the bar higher and higher each time for the nut jobs and terrorists to get everybody’s attention. “Which means bigger explosions, more bodies, and more atrocities. They should take their cue from the baseball media, which nipped fan stupidity in the bud when they wisely decided to stop showing people who run onto the field.” “So don’t tell people there’s terrorism? That’s your solution?” said Brooklyn. “How about at least not sensationalizing it so much?” Arturo said. “This is a bloodbath. Stop selling the frickin’ popcorn.

Successful sales teams walk into a relationship with a prospect with a pre-disposition that the first priority is to bring our expertise and knowledge in helping clients make informed, well-thought-out decisions so that they can choose the very best solution.

What refers to the strategies you choose, the products and services you sell, and the processes you use. You can spend your whole career chasing solutions to the million what problems plaguing your business.

In sustaining circumstances—when the race entails making better products that can be sold for more money to attractive customers—we found that incumbents almost always prevail. In disruptive circumstances—when the challenge is to commercialize a simpler, more convenient product that sells for less money and appeals to a new or unattractive customer set—the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents.

However, far worse, is the teacher who can only take sincere spiritual seekers half-way to their goal, like a used-car salesman who sells a young couple on the way to their honeymoon a car that the salesman knows will break down long before they reach their honeymoon cottage. Too many people today are looking for some mechanical or technological solution, when the answer is found in the subtle marriage of spirituality and science. Many spiritual masters have already made the journey to the center of the galaxy through manipulating consciousness.

It is hard to exaggerate what the company went through. It changed its strategy from selling products to providing customers with solutions. It changed its value proposition from offering beauty to improving return on investment (ROI). It changed its culture from top down to wide open. It changed the way it maintained quality from using audits to having process-based mechanisms. It changed its marketing philosophy from promoting what it made to creating what customers wanted. It changed its technology from a system built around an outmoded mainframe to one based on a state-of-the-art network.

Of all the factors that we have just spoken about, what is the most important to you? You definitely want to find out your prospect’s highest need, as this is the one that you’ll typically have to fill to push the prospect over the top. Have I asked about everything that’s important to you? Your customer will think more of you, not less of you, if you ask this, so long as you have done a professional job up to that point. You could also say, “Is there anything that I have missed? Is there any way that I can tailor this solution for you?

Zuckerberg did admit to Andy Barr (R, KY-06) that China had put its programme to start a central bank digital currency into high gear specifically because of Libra — that Facebook had caused the problem they were now selling a solution to: As soon as we put out this white paper on Libra, what we saw was, in China, especially, they immediately kicked off this public-private partnership with some of their biggest companies in order to race to try to build a system like this quickly, a digital renminbi.

In many ways, expensive advertising and brands arise as a solution to a problem identified by George Akerlof in his 1970 paper ‘The Market for Lemons’ in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The problem is known as ‘information asymmetry’, whereby the seller knows more about what he is selling than the buyer knows about what he is buying. This lesson was learned the hard way in Eastern Bloc countries under communism; brands were considered un-Marxist, so bread was simply labelled ‘bread’. Customers had no idea who had made it or whom to blame if it arrived full of maggots, and couldn’t avoid that make in future if it did, because all bread packaging looked the same. Unhappy customers had no threat of sanction; happy customers had no prospect of rewarding producers through repeat custom. And so the bread was rubbish.

At AnswerThePublic, you type in your keyword or search phrase and the tool generates a diagram of related searches. Depending on your search term, you can get hundreds of results that give you direct insight into what your audience is thinking, the kind of questions they’re asking, and the hot-button issues they’re struggling with. And once you know their questions and issues, you can provide the solution.

We’ve identified and chosen a solution that satisfies our requirements for solving our problem and is sufficient to achieve our desired business outcomes.

With this compromise, Morgan Stanley had satisfied the needs of the potential buyers of these bonds. However, that was only half the battle. Now the firm needed to address the seemingly impossible request from Banamex, that it be able to “sell” the Ajustabonos to the company without actually selling them. The ingenious solution to this problem depended on the unrated class of bonds Banamex would retain. Amazingly, it was based on Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, or GAAP. The basic idea was that if you own a company, you include all of the assets and liabilities of that company as part of your own assets and liabilities. If by retaining the second unrated class of bonds Banamex could be treated as the owner of the Bermuda company, it could consolidate all of that company’s assets and liabilities, including all the Ajustabonos. This ownership worked a neat trick. Because Banamex would own the company that owned the Ajustabonos, from an accounting perspective, it still would own the Ajustabonos even if it received cash for them.

Without needs, there are no solutions; and without solutions, it’s virtually impossible to establish value.

Don’t Sell Solutions, Sell Problems

So how do you help your Band-Aid solution stand out with people who don’t know they’re cut? You cut them! Of course, I’m not suggesting you cause any physical harm to your customers. Rather, you should adopt an approach that clearly conveys the problem you solve in advance of communicating the way you solve it. For example, back at my third start-up, when positioning our new-age feedback, coaching, and recognition solution, we could have invoked statements like: “We help employees get the feedback they need to perform their best and grow their careers.” “We help managers become great coaches.” “We help promote your amazing culture by making winning behaviors visible.” All imply that employees don’t get enough feedback at work, managers can often be poor coaches, and your people do amazing things that not everyone sees: fair points and all problems there is value in addressing. But they are also statements that are easy to dismiss. After all, many organizations already feel they provide their employees with sufficient levels of the feedback, coaching, and recognition they crave. We found prospects were much more responsive to our pitch when we preceded those statements with messages like: “Seventy percent of people leave their company because of a poor relationship with their manager.” “Most millennial employees use the word ‘hate’ to describe how they feel about performance reviews.” “Four out of ten employees are actively disengaged at work and cost companies millions in lost productivity.” Why did this approach work so well? The messages were striking. They were laden with specific and compelling statistics. And they invoked real business pains. They made the customer realize that they were already experiencing a loss. In other words, they were bleeding and in need of a Band-Aid.

In the case of Trunk Club, they led with a simple polarizing message related to how their target customers generally feel about shopping. By saying “men want to dress well, but they hate to shop,” they intentionally called out shopping as the enemy of their service. And if you are a man who hates to shop, you will rapidly align with their message without much thought. The beauty of this approach is that it has the opposite effect for clients who are a poor fit for your solution. For example, if you’re a man who loves to shop, you may be immediately turned off by Trunk Club’s value proposition. While being excited about customers not liking your solution may seem counterintuitive, it’s actually a good thing! Bad-fit customers who buy your product are more likely to become dissatisfied and hurt your brand. They may also provide errant feedback that can quickly derail your product or company roadmap if you decide to follow it. In short, polarizing messages can serve double duty by keeping the good-fit customers in and helping the bad ones self-select out. In the case of Trunk Club, this approach worked: they were acquired by US luxury retailer Nordstrom in 2014 for $350 million.

Entrepreneurs launched websites for selling pet food over the Net, or built giant warehouses for delivering groceries by van, before there was any inkling customers wanted to shop this way. And it turns out they didn’t. No one wanted to get their groceries delivered from Webvan’s automated warehouses. The Internet bubble burst, taking with it businesses that had developed solutions to problems that didn’t exist.

Before we dive into specific examples, let’s first look at a simple, four-step, codified breakdown for a typical infomercial pitch: 1. The Problem: Here’s the problem you’re experiencing today, based on your status quo state or the solution you’re already using. This is where the tension is created. Where they “cut you” and get you to see you are bleeding (as we discussed in chapter 4)! In some cases, this pain might be top of mind, or it might be hidden, latent, or even something you may not think about all that often. This is also a perfect place to call out the enemy you identified earlier in this chapter. For example, if this were an infomercial for a set of space-aged kitchen knives that never need sharpening, the narrative might begin with a poor fool trying to cut a red, ripe tomato with an old, dull knife. As the grainy black-and-white footage rolls, the unsuspecting subject squashes the tomato with their sub-par knife, sending seeds and tomato flesh flying in all directions (and ruining the white suit they were wearing for some reason). Tension is created as the viewer starts to see themselves as the subject or hero of this story. 2. The Ideal Solution: Here’s the ideal solution to the problem. While not always top of mind, people often know the solutions to problems but see them as requiring too much effort and cost. In other words, spending money or investing time doing something our hero doesn’t want to do can usually solve the problem. This is where that solution is positioned. For example, the ideal solution to our dull knife problem is to go to a fancy kitchen store and purchase some top-of-the-line Japanese hand-forged steel knives. In a business context, many problems can be solved by throwing tons of time, money, and both human and technical resources at a them. 3. The Problem with That Ideal Solution: This is what makes that ideal solution difficult or less desirable. Here, you are creating contrast between where your hero is today and where they need to get to—a large gap they need to overcome. In doing this you are positioning the ideal solution as something they don’t want to or can’t make happen. For example, you could go to the kitchen store and buy those fancy knives, but they cost hundreds of dollars that you would rather not spend. The same goes for the massive business resource splurge suggested in the previous step. 4. Enter Our Solution: The stunning climax! Here’s how investing in our product, service, or solution can help you overcome the problem and pain you’re experiencing, while at the same time circumventing the challenges associated with the ideal solution.

For example, our knives deliver the performance of those fancy knives at a fraction of the cost—and we’ll deliver them right to your door! Pro tip: this is also a perfect place to insert the belief statement you created in the previous section (e.g., “At the Cerebral Knife Company, we believe that every home cook deserves affordable, professional-grade knives”). Here’s another example of an infomercial narrative for a piece of home exercise equipment: Hey, do you want to lose weight and get in the best shape of your life? Well, the best way to do that is to go to the gym five times a week and work out for two hours each time. But gym memberships are expensive—and who has that kind of time? What you need is our awesome, cost-effective home exercise machine. Or how about an infomercial narrative for some kind of fruit and vegetable juicer: Eating too many processed foods is destroying your health. The solution is to eat more fresh fruits, vegetables, and juices. The problem is that typical juicers are too large, time-consuming to use, expensive, hard to clean, and kill too many of your food’s helpful nutrients. Our awesome, compact, easy-to-clean, and affordable juice machine is what you need! From a classical sales perspective, this messaging and pitch formula is so effective because at each stage your audience is taking small, incremental steps toward your solution. These steps are rooted in both universal truths and emotion. While the approach starts with tension to garner the buyer’s interest, the story unfolds naturally with no big leaps of faith required.

This is where LO3 Energy ended up when it developed its Transactive Grid in Brooklyn, a prototype of interconnected households and businesses that share locally generated solar power. The community was motivated by a desire to give environmentally conscious consumers and users the capacity to know they are buying clean, locally generated power as opposed to just helping pay their utility buy renewable credits that fund green energy production elsewhere in the United States. In the Transactive Grid, building owners install solar panels that are then linked together with those of their neighbors in a distribution network, using affordable smart meters and storage units, as well as inverters that allow the grid’s owners to sell power back to the public grid. The magic sauce, though, comes from a private blockchain that regulates the sharing of power among the smart meters, whose data is logged into that distributed ledger. And in the summer of 2017, LO3 took the process a step further by developing an “exergy token” to drive market mechanisms within and among decentralized microgrids such as Brooklyn’s. (Exergy is a vital concept for measuring energy efficiency and containing wasteful practices; it doesn’t just measure the amount of energy generated but also the amount of useful work produced per each given amount of energy produced.) Note that LO3’s microgrid is based on a private blockchain. Microgrids offer one of those cases when this model is likely sufficient, since the community is founded on a fixed group of users who will all agree to the terms of use. That means that some of the large-scale processing challenges of Bitcoin and Ethereum can be avoided and thus that the high transaction power of a blockchain could be harnessed without requiring the implementation of the Lightning Network and other “off-chain” scaling solutions currently under development.

It should be a punishable sales crime when an account is lost to a competitor who sold your client the same solution you could have offered, but never did.

The first thing to do is recognise that the rise of charlatans is a symptom of people being left behind. Charlatans are a symptom of the ills in our society more than they are a cause. And we need to be as angry about the ills that are making some voters seek out an alternative as they themselves are. Charlatans have been successful because they have effectively sold false remedies to the people who feel that the existing political structure hasn't worked for them. Just as the original charlatans could only ply their wares because a lot of people were very ill, so the modern-day charlatans are selling false remedies to legitimate grievances. Charlatans have employed two of the most powerful emotive forces to further their aims: anger and fear. Even if voters are sceptical about the alleged solutions of the charlatans, the fact that the populists are seemingly angry on their behalf has registered with them in a positive way. (pp. 98-99)

When we face complex, human-centered problems that we understand poorly, such as the one Ron Johnson faced at Penney’s, we should avoid framing them by analogy with others situations. Instead, we should invest in understanding problems from the perspective

you can provoke people to consume far beyond their needs simply by manipulating their psychology. You can seed anxiety in people’s minds, and then present your product as a solution to that anxiety. Or you can sell things on the promise that they will provide social acceptance, or class distinction, or sexual prowess. This kind of advertising quickly became indispensable to American companies desperate to generate growing demand.

Attention Write a headline that gets readers’ attention and makes them want to read on (chapter 6) Tell relevant readers that you’re talking to them Offer a benefit or the solution to a problem Use a creative concept (chapter 9) to generate more interest Interest Introduce the product and what it does See the reader’s situation or problem from their perspective and show how the product helps them (see ‘See it from the reader’s side’ in chapter 11) Give the reader the information they need to understand the product or what it does (see below) Tell a story – of how the product was made, or of someone who used it and benefited as a result (see ‘Tell a story’ in chapter 11) Desire Describe the benefits (chapter 3) in greater detail to make the reader want the product Evoke the experience of using the product (see ‘Make it real’ in chapter 11) Use persuasive techniques (chapter 13) to strengthen the benefits Activate social proof by bringing in testimonials, case studies, endorsements or reviews to show that other people are using and benefiting from the product (See ‘Social proof’ in chapter 13) Action Recap the main benefit(s) and/or return to the creative theme Use persuasion (chapter 13) to remove obstacles, overcome objections and convince readers that it’s OK to act – or point out the negative consequences of not acting Tell the reader what to do next with a strong, clear call to action

Suppliers called the solutions play, and customers have made their countermove. Customers are looking for ways to reduce both the complexity and the risk that suppliers’ solution selling efforts have foisted upon them.

It was clear to Winstanley that the State and its legal institutions existed in order to hold the lower classes in place. Winstanley at this stage suggested that the only solution would be to abolish private property and then government and church would become superfluous. Magistrates and lawyers would no longer be necessary where there was no buying and selling. There would be no need for a professional clergy if everyone was allowed to preach. The State, with its coercive apparatus of laws and prisons, would simply wither away: ‘What need have we of imprisonment, whipping or hanging laws to bring one another into bondage?’ 18 It is only covetousness, he argued, which made theft a sin. And he completely rejected capital punishment: since only God may give and take life, execution for murder would be murder. He looked forward to a time when ‘the whole earth would be a common treasury’, when people would help each other and find pleasure in making necessary things, and ‘There shall be none lords over others, but everyone shall be a lord of himself, subject to the law of righteousness, reason and equity, which shall dwell and rule in him, which is the Lord.’ 19 Winstanley did not call for mass insurrection or the seizure of the lands of the rich. He was always opposed to violence, although he was not an absolute pacifist and advocated an extreme form of direct action.

For example, it’s natural to think of America’s electric grid as one single connected network, but in reality it’s nothing of the sort. There isn’t one power grid; there are many, and they’re a patchwork mess that makes it essentially impossible to send electricity beyond the region where it’s made. Arizona can sell spare solar power to its neighbors, but not to a state on the other side of the country.

Almost all companies try to sell solutions to external problems, but as we unfold the StoryBrand Framework, you’ll see why customers are much more motivated to resolve their inner frustrations.

Salesforce and QuickBooks integration: the wrong audience I built many integrations for Connex, and Salesforce was one of my first. Intuit built one on their app store, but they later discontinued it. Here is why mine failed: Connex syncs ecommerce solutions. Amazon was one of our best sellers. Salesforce.com is a CRM, and this was a bad product fit for us. I had no understanding of the target audience. What features did they require? How much would they pay? Salesforce is geared towards medium and enterprise-level companies. We focused primarily on small businesses. The integration was difficult to build. Salesforce could hold orders, but users often added or removed fields. Our software had no logic to handle dynamically mapping fields. Each user’s Salesforce was different. Almost every user required a great deal of hand-holding. This is bad for a SaaS company. There were many technical issues. Users wanted features that I could not build. I built the integration because Salesforce has a large following, but my audience was just a subset of that group. How big your audience is, is anyone’s guess. We had a listing on Salesforce’s app store, but the listing failed to gather any traffic. I was unsure how many QuickBooks users required a Salesforce integration. There was a limited audience for this tool. The tool became a distraction because other products were selling much better. I had to raise the price of the integration because it took longer to set it up. This idea made my pricing more complicated, while my company is all about simplicity.

Why I was successful In 2014, I was 29 years old. I was selling against companies that had been in the QuickBooks integration business for five years or more. Some competitors had millions of dollars in venture capital. Their websites were the equivalent of a five-star hotel. These competitors had large sales and marketing teams that could easily show the value of their solution. The companies had a team of programmers. I had my pajamas, a corded phone, a cookie-cutter website, and a laptop computer. I signed up about three hundred new accounts because I was the first person to pick up the phone and I spoke English. I could answer questions on what my software can automate. If there was a problem, I called the customer and we did a screenshare. You need to talk to customers on the phone and you cannot email customers to death. Many customers later told me they reached out to competitors and received no response to sales or support inquiries. These customers said they chose my company because I was responsive. Potential customers want to speak to someone in their area who understands their language. You need to connect with them. Many people signed up for Connex because they liked me over the phone. We attract many small business owners. I had similar interests and I owned a business, just like them.

You bond with customers by talking more about what’s most important to them (their problems), rather than whatever might be most important to you (your solutions).

The One Question to Never Ask Your Customer Even seemingly widespread and innocuous practices can have unintended consequences. For example, to confirm understanding with their clients at the end of a statement or explanation, many sellers use the phrase “Does that make sense?” As in, “We understand that many of our clients have cash-flow constraints, which is why we offer monthly or quarterly payment terms that align with how they bill their customers. Does that make sense?” Or, “One of the things our clients love about our solution is the way our unique, three-layer security algorithm proactively identifies orthogonal threats to your network before they can cause harm. Does that make sense?” While the use of this confirmatory statement may seem innocuous, many people on the receiving end feel strangely put off by it (I am one of those people). The reason is because that phrase can subconsciously be interpreted in one of two negative ways. First, it can be seen as an insult to the customer’s intelligence: “Does that make sense? I ask because I’m not quite sure how smart you are so I’m afraid this concept, no matter how intuitive it may seem to me, simply isn’t something your puny brain has the ability to understand.” Second, it can imply that the seller simply isn’t good at explaining things: “Does that make sense? I ask because I’m not very good at explaining things and my words often leave people with a sense of confusion and bewilderment. I just want to make sure I didn’t do that to you.