Avoid This Pitfall When Selling Through Your Personal Brand
Nov 14, 2023
Coaches, course creators, and personal brand builders keep making a rookie mistake when trying to sell their products.
This mistake will cause you to lose 90% of the sales you would otherwise make.
Avoid this mistake if you ever want to sell any type of education product online. Don’t be like all these rookies.
The good news is—you can fix this mistake in a single day.
The other day I was watching a video on Dan Henry’s YouTube channel..
Which is great if you haven’t seen it. Dan’s a super sharp marketer who has done 30M in sales.
He has a new series where he roasts other entrepreneurs' businesses.
I like being the voyeur who watches him bash them (acting like I’m not making a lot of the same mistakes in my own business!)
In the episodes, Dan always starts with the same question:
Who do you help and what problem do you solve for them?
This guest was like: “I help people fix their mindset”
Dan asked: “Fix your mindset so that you can what?”
The guest: “So they can take more action…
Dan (getting frustrated): “So they can take action to do WHAT?”
Guest: “To achieve their goals”
Dan (pissed): “WHAT GOALS?”
The guest couldn’t answer that, either.
He had helped people with business, fitness, and other things.
Dan looked at the guy's wall behind him (they were on video chat) and asked:
“What are all those gold medals hanging there?”
The guy goes: “Oh, those are from all the Ironman races I do”
Dan: “Let me guess, you help most of your clients with fitness”
Guest: “Yep”
Dan helped the guy realize that he was helping people lose weight and get in shape. He also helped him see that he was serving men, ages 25-45.
Let’s compare the guy's clarity before he got on the call, versus after:
Before: I help people fix their mindset.
After: I help 25-45 year-old men get in shape.
Can you see how vastly different those are?
Which do you think would be easier to sell?
I hope the answer is obvious.
The biggest mistake that coaches and personal brand builders make—when they go to sell a product—is talking about things upstream of the end result their product delivers.
For example, inside that guy's program, he:
-Fixes their mindset (upstream) so that they will…
-take more action (upstream) so they can…
-achieve their goal (upstream) of…
-getting in shape (tangible end result).
I’m not making the guy wrong about being unclear, either.
If he was offering marketing or business help, that would be a little suspicious, given that he can’t even state what he does.
But, he’s highly qualified to help people with fitness. He just needed help talking about what he does. He needed to save all that talk about mindset and taking action for after someone had paid him—and was inside his coaching program.
He needed to keep his marketing message focused on a tangible, end goal.
If you’re a beginner or intermediate marketer, you probably need help with your messaging, too. We all do at some point. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on coaches who helped me with my messaging.
This is a normal learning moment, but it’s also one you HAVE to get past if you want to sell your stuff.
People aren’t buying a course, coaching program, or a book. They are buying a solution to a problem.
If the problem you are solving isn’t clear, no one will buy it.
OK, let’s look at some examples of tangible outcomes you could deliver in one of your products, to drive this point home.
There are 3 big markets you can sell within, health, wealth, and relationships. Picking your tangible outcome starts with that decision. Which of the three are you the most passionate about?
From there, you have to drill down to a tangible end result.
Here are examples of tangible outcomes within each of the big 3:
Health
- Lose 10 pounds
- Clear your skin of eczema
- Gain 10 pounds of muscle
Wealth
- Create $2,000/month in passive income
- Buy your first small business
- Grow to 10,000 YouTube subscribers
Relationships
- Find a partner after divorce
- Marry your soulmate
- Make 3 lifelong friends
How to Pick the Best Outcome For You
With so many potential outcomes to choose from, it can be intimidating to decide. Here’s a process that my clients love, that will help you discover the best tangible outcome you can deliver.
Step #1: Make a list of all the tangible outcomes you could get for your dream client.
Step #2: Score each outcome on a scale from 1-10 in two ways:
- how excited you are about getting that outcome
- how confident you are in your ability to get the outcome for someone else
We score it this way because we want you to:
- have a lot of passion for the outcome, and…
- feel very confident in your ability to deliver it
If you aren’t passionate about it, it won’t be fun. You won’t be able to sell it if you aren't confident.
We want you to have fun and make money.
Don't choose an outcome you haven't already gotten for yourself or someone else. You won’t be able to fool anyone, and it’s not ethical.
Usually, when you complete this exercise, one or two outcomes will stand above the rest. Choose the one that feels right to you.
If You’re Struggling
My tangible outcome is helping people write client-getting books. It’s very tangible. By the time we finish working together, you’ll have a book that brings you clients. You can even hold it in your hands. It’s a clear finish line we get to cross together.
But, I haven’t always had a tangible offer. I’ve made the same mistake as the guy Dan roasted.
I know how it feels when you haven’t found your tangible outcome. It’s frustrating. It feels unfair.
I’ve always been a writer. I made my own books starting at the age of 10. My Mom still has at least a dozen of them. My college buddies paid me to write their papers in college. I wrote two actual books and published them.
Still, it wasn’t until after all of this that it occurred to me “Oh, I should help people write books.” It all made sense looking backward, but I couldn’t see it for a long time.
You might find it and realize it was right under your nose. Also, you have to earn this kind of thing. I published two books that brought me multiple six figures worth of client revenue before I started to help others do the same.
Before that, I purchased 35 rental properties before I offered to coach others on how to do it. You gotta earn your tangible outcome by getting the result for yourself and/or someone else, first.
If you feel like you have tangible outcomes that you could deliver to someone already, but:
- You just can’t quite put your finger on what it is, or
- You are struggling to decide between two options
Think about writing a client-getting book to solve that problem.
Allow me to explain…
When you write a book designed to bring clients into your business, you have to get crystal clear on the tangible outcome your book delivers. You can’t write a book about “mindset” or “productivity”. It will drown in the ocean of books already out there about those topics.
I’ve worked with clients who weren’t sure of their tangible outcome before, like my client Susie. Her story involves escaping a narcissistic abuse relationship, rebooting her life, and helping her kids recover and thrive.
That’s also what we wrote her book about, helping the kids recover from being involved in a narcissistic abuse relationship.
Once she discovered that, she realized that she could create her backend coaching program around the same thing.
Discovering the tangible outcome of your book—that thing that makes you stand out—leads to discovering what you can offer in the paid programs behind your book.
That’s how you’re supposed to do it—the book topic and the coaching program should align.
If you’re interested in writing a book, fill out this Typeform questionnaire (6 questions, 1 minute long) so we can see if we’d be a good fit to work together:
Here’s to you discovering your tangible solution so you can sell your product easily…
Brian
P.S. - Here’s the link to the Dan Henry video if you want to see the guy get his business roasted:
