Sales in general doesn’t have a great reputation for being a genuine, people-oriented industry. So if we as entrepreneurs want to get our products, ideas, and services out into the world in a society that highly values authenticity, we have to learn to do it differently than those stereotypical used car salesmen down the street.
This is such a daunting task, especially for those of us who’s number 1 goal is to create good content or products. Selling and getting it out there isn’t always what comes second-nature for us. Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income got to sit down with us to give us his best tips to boil this down into an art form that won’t make us lose our minds.
Connect with your audience
We mean this on a relational level and also on a research level. Utilizing a research method, we need to rely on feedback from our target audience. Whether that be clients, customers, viewers, listeners, or any combination of these, we need to be studying their needs by asking them questions, dissecting their comments, studying their language, and noting their pain points in order to understand them better and help solve their problems.
On the relational side, we can show them that we care about their needs and about them people and peers by meeting them where they’re at, using their language, and engaging with them. We can also use trial and error to see what works and how our different strategies land on our audience. What content is just going crazy? What content gets almost no traction?
Pat described his experience building his newest tool, the SwitchPod, using these methods. He saw a need, or pain point, he brainstormed some fixes for the problem, he asked questions of his target audience, and he built something incredibly useful for a specific group of people needing that exact solution. This gave him credibility in his industry as someone we can trust and lean on to help us solve problems. He and his business partner Caleb met their kickstarter goal for this product in 11 hours and 26 minutes, so we would say that’s a successful solution.
Grow Your Audience
We have heard this time and time again, but Pat impresses upon us the need to be brave and put our own face and voice to our message. We can tell our audience the truth until we are blue in the face, but unless they are connected with us on a personal level and looking into the face of a person they’ve grown to trust, it means almost nothing to this present-day market. We also need to show them consistency. When our target audience learns to trust us, they depend on us to show up for them. We become part of their routine and we need to respect that.
We can’t earn that trust and build that bond using the same methods in each environment though, we have to do the work to learn the needs of each platform. In the social media world, this means publishing long-form content on YouTube, live content on Facebook, and bite-size content on Instagram. When speaking to an in-person audience, it’s learning to speak directly to the people who have shown up to learn from us. When podcasting, it’s doing the work to learn what our listeners want to hear, how long they want to listen to it, and how to stay in our lane and not vary our content so much that we lose interest.
These are just a few examples of how putting in the time can build loyalty and ultimately grow our audience and client lists. Bryan puts it like this: “You will lose credibility with people [if you don’t do these things]. Do it right, make sure that you’re communicating with that audience correctly on that platform…Take the time, don’t be lazy, and do it right for that platform that [they’re] consuming content on.”
Be strategic with your time
With our audience and clientele consuming content on such a wide variety of platforms, we need to be confident in our content and efficient with our efforts. By taking one piece of long-form content and repurposing it into multiple tools formatted correctly to all of your platforms, we can get a message we are confident in to our audience effectively. At Go Rogue X, we have so much faith in this method that we built our entire business model around it. Like Loren says “There’s a lot of power in repurposing your content and really focusing in on where your audience is and doing it right.” Let us do that for your business and show you how to make your own amazing ideas work to grow your business.
Pat Flynn wants to show you through his own experiments exactly how you can stop trading time for money and start building a business that works for you. He is the host of the Smart Passive Income podcast, a YouTuber, author, and blogger. His newest venture, the SwitchPod, is out and for sale now!
