How you ask for something quite often dictates everything. In this episode, Ken Courtright kicks off Part One of The Ask Is Everything series, talking about his upcoming book of the same name. Here he compares how marketing is done in the old days versus today. Relationship building and showing value are key factors in creating websites and broadening your reach. Through some examples, Ken proves his point that adding value through educating your consumers works well for modern marketing.
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The Ask Is Everything Part 1
This episode is titled The Ask Is Everything. I am currently putting the finishing touches on my book. This is the longest book I’ve ever written by far. It took almost two full years to write. The following book is going to be called The Success Wheel. I did an episode solely dedicated to that book already. The following book, which could be my best book, the title of that book is The Ask Is Everything and that is the title of this episode. These episodes are all about how you ask for something quite often dictates everything. I’ll give you an example. In the old days, let’s go back to Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, put on the suit, coat, the crisp shirt and tie and go out into the world, knock on doors, call from the phone book and get an appointment. At all costs, do a presentation to a potential client and build value in that presentation until the value equals two times the price. Once you can read that potential customer, their body language and their questions where you feel you’ve got the value twice as high as the asking price, you were trained as a sales rep. You can then Institute AFO, which is Asked For the Order.
In the old days of the Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins and Brian Tracy era of selling, a lot of the books and techniques were all about building value in your marketing materials, sales presentations, TV commercials until the value to the potential customer’s minds was twice the price. When it was twice the price, Marketing 101 would tell you once the value to the potential customer is twice the price, they’ll probably stroke a check, pull out their credit card, get out some cash and you can do a sale. That’s the old days. In the old days, people could not instantly verify every claim. People didn’t have instant access to your competitors through this fundamental business game-changer called the internet. Now, it is no longer about building value equals 2 to 3 times the price and asks for the order, “It’s not a yes yet? Let me build more value until you buy.” Those days now and forevermore are physically gone.
People need a relationship. The web in and of itself removes relationships. Click To TweetNow, companies have to prove value and earn relationships over time. I’m not saying you can’t build a landing page and do a Facebook or PPC campaign directly to that page. You can, but we are in a more transparent and see everything at any moment and relational state of being in business. In business now, if you want to move product and service digitally, there’s a rule of thumb that is getting accepted of a 6 to 1 ratio. It means, let’s say you’re using a newsletter approach. You’re going to do six newsletters without asking for the order, without offering a discount, a promotion or whatever. You’re just going to add value and asking nothing in return. On the seventh one, you’ve earned the right. You’ve made enough value add deposits where you can now ask for the order. From what we’re seeing, definitely on our 700 sites, that is the case.
How you ask for the order is everything. I’m trying to do this with a somewhat dramatic effect because we’re not in person. I’ve explained this in person many times and I can read the eyeballs until I know the audience is completely catching this. In the old days, if you could picture, my hands are building a pyramid of bricks stacked on top of each other until there’s only one brick at the top of this pyramid looking thing, you keep adding value as a sales rep until they finally cave in and go, “Fine, I’ll take it.” You can still do that in a 60-second commercial. You can do that in a four-page marketing brochure. The reality is the odds of you sending someone to a webpage thinking that single webpage or even a short two-second video is going to claim that your paper towels, furniture repair or cell phone service is better than the rest and thinking that they’re going to cave in and buy your item because they’re on your page, it doesn’t work like that anymore.
The days of having to claim the best widget are over. I’m not saying don’t strive to be the best. The reality is people need a relationship. The web in it of itself removes relationships. What do people crave? What they can’t have. The internet strips all relationships. It’s a stale environment, forcing people to crave what they don’t have, which is more relationship. I’m trying to say this in many different ways. How many people are out there, maybe even reading this, that have built or currently have landing pages or websites? You’re buying Facebook traffic or you’re doing a pay-per-click and you’re at home literally crying in your Cheerios because you’re not selling anything. The money is not coming in. I want to make sure, if you’ve never known of this before, you’re knowing it from me for the first time. Showing value on a website that equals two times the price knowing they can instantly verify if there aren’t 2 to 10 other competitors claiming the exact same value online, instantly.
Quite frankly, for you to be out there promoting what ten other people are promoting and expecting sales to flood in is criminal. I say this because I came out of a mastermind group and there were dozens of people and there was a recurring theme, “My product’s great and my service is phenomenal.” Time and time again, I could open up with literally 90 seconds, advanced notice, I can open 2 to 3 competitors claiming almost identical prices and people go, “I guess I never looked at it from the potential client or customer angle.” Showing value is two times the price, which has been done for 100 years. Everybody else is still doing that. They can shop you instantly, but what separates business now, and here’s the point, because The Ask is Everything.
What separates people now is how websites ask for the order. Some websites earn the right to ask you to buy something. How do they do that? You’ve seen this many times, you go to a page and clearly, there’s a product or service right there and getting at least 50% of the equity of that homepage. They’re asking you as strongly to dig into this side of their website, either as, “Would you be interested in joining our Facebook forum or our newsletter or this and that.” As much as they want to sell you that shoe, hat or suit coat. They know the odds of you buying that suit coat if you’re new to the website or their hat or whatever they sell is close to nil until you get to know them as a company and as a person. They’re dedicating space to giving you more and more information until you’re comfortable doing business with them.
How many of you reading this have gone on a website to buy something even in the last 90 days, not only did you not buy it, you end up clicking on someone’s Facebook page or you dug in super deep to that website and ended up joining a newsletter? It’s probably close to half of you reading this. What you’re finding is, and this is only in the few years, it’s a growing number. I’m going to say, it’s 15% to 20% and I’ll predict that it might be 50%. You’re going to see such a large amount of homepage of a website space dedicated and we’re overhauling IncomeStore.com’s How It Works Page towards this. The whole How It Works Page is dedicated to adding value in educating, understanding that they can’t pull the trigger on a purchase unless they’re thoroughly educated. There’s nothing they can find on anybody else’s website for alternative investment or any ancillary web product, something like that. What our company is doing and what I’m urging everybody to do is take a look at your actual sales funnel.
Whether it’s a landing page, a homepage, direct sales, where someone’s walking directly to a business office, it’s knowing that they’re going to go home and research if you’re doing that walk-in traffic. It’s knowing that when they land on your landing page, they’re going to research you and compare. Knowing when they land on your corporate homepage and they get to your final shopping cart, they’re going to compare. Are you providing the world with more information where you can educate them deeper and deeper and you can earn the right deeper to ask for the order? The question again is, the ask is everything, are you adding value to earn the right to ask for their order or are you sticking a product in front of them, hoping that the product, claimed to be the best, is going to do the selling for you? I’m hoping that helps. See you on the trail. Take care.
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