By the Ocean
Rain Coming 73 Degrees
7:22 a.m.
I spent years selling very expensive things to dentists. It was easy. It was lucrative. It was repeatable.
This marketplace had everything a marketing guy could ask for!
Lots of pain, lots of emotion, great stories of failure and success, lots of cash.
I’ve never shot fish in a barrel, but that’s pretty much what we were doing. It was harder to miss than it was to hit.
If you’re in a market like this, be grateful. They don’t come around every day.
If you’re some sort of expert, however, there’s a good chance your market isn’t just sitting there on the other side of a print magazine that has neatly collected everyone’s attention for you.
Instead, you have to draw your market out from the big blob of “everyone.” This is what a media platform (like this email!) is for. It offers the raw material required for someone to sell themselves on you.
With the help of the media platform, they start coming because of WHO YOU ARE, not just because of what you do. They start coming for your perspective, for what you stand for, for the way in which you approach a problem and the vision you have of what is possible.
What do I even “do?”
I provide clarity, direction and powerful ways of packaging value to business owners who want to stand out. That’s what I “do.”
I’m never going to put that in an ad or a video because that’s not the right package to really connect with the people I can help. When I didn’t know any better, I tried to cram all of that into some elevator pitch I could deliver at network meetings.
That was stupid.
And so I demonstrate. I SHOW instead of TELL. Whatever words you put around the demonstration will be much more appropriate for your situation than I could ever guess to come up with.
Demonstration is powerful. It is deep. It is slow, reliable and repeatable. It is the work most will never do. And most of those who try will quit because “it doesn’t work.”
Demonstration is the currency of experts. It’s how you say something without words.