The 3 musts of pre-selling your offers

by Chayden A Bates

Your sales messages will be more effective if you pre-sell to people before you give them a sales pitch. It is an effective sales technique.

Although this article is written from a web site selling approach, it applies to most sales situations

When looking at the task of promoting your offers, no matter what they may be, it helps to understand what this task truly involves.

Because most, if not all of your promotions are to generate highly targeted, qualified "eyeballs" for your "selling Web site", your salesman in print, it is understandable that you must create the needed ...

... for what you have to offer BEFORE your prospect ever links to your site. This is known as "pre-selling" your offers. Your task is to "prepare" your prospect for what your web site has to say.

If you pre-sell your offers correctly, you will find that, even if your "salesman" is something of a "newbie" to the many aspects of salesmanship in print, she can still very effectively do her job if you only compliment her in doing yours.

Let's look at these three factors which make your salesman's job that much easier.

1. Interest
To draw "Interest" to your marketing message you must first target your audience. It doesn't help to talk to a man looking to buy Mail Merge Software if you're selling Walking Shoes specifically tailored for golden age women looking to reduce their increasing lower back pain.

When you understand who it is you're talking to - when you target your market - you'll find it much easier to draw them in by relaying the message that "your offer concerns them".

For example, if you DO sell Walking Shoes specifically tailored for golden age women looking to reduce their increasing lower back pain ... to catch their "Interest", you could state, within the first few seconds of talking with them.

"If you're a woman who's fifty or over, plagued with severe lower back pain, and sick and tired of the same old pair of "walking shoe promises" that cost you not only your money, but lead to the increase in severity of your lower back pain, then read on."

... if this describes your reader, you've just grabbed their ear. You've created the needed "Interest" to draw your prospect ever closer to your marketing message.

2. Education
Once you've perked your prospect's interest, once you've grabbed their attention, you must then "Educate" them on the value of your offer. This can be done in one of two ways or both for maximum effectiveness. Show or tell your prospect ...

How and Why your offer is something that they may need, can use and do want!

You must meet their interest, their questions, their uncertainties, with "Education" on how and why your offer can and will work to help solve their pending problems.

To use our Walking Shoe example, which will "solve" the aging woman's "problem" of de-flaming her fiery lower back pain, you as the seller of this offer must educate your prospect on HOW and WHY your Walking Shoes are of value to her.

You must tell these women WHY your particular shoe will solve their biggest problem - their back pain, most aggravated when walking about - by showing them HOW your offer - your walking shoes - benefit them.

This can be done with facts, statistics or examples such as picture, video or word tutorials, or testimonials from women, just like her, who were able to walk proud again with not only a decrease in their lower back pain, but an increase in their stamina and energy!

By creating and instilling this education - this awareness - of their problems and the steps they can very easily take to solve them, you will in fact pre-sell them on your offer BEFORE they ever hit your Web site.

3. Desire
Creating the desire to "want" or "need" what you have to offer actually fits between "Interest" and "Education". You see, all the while you're drawing interest and educating your prospect about what you have to offer, you need to point out and almost "rub in" the fact that they have their problem. Now, this isn't to say that you would make fun of them for having it, rather heighten their awareness ABOUT it.

You need to understand that you're (hopefully) not the reason they have this problem. They had it long before they met you. All you're doing is creating that "desire" to fix this problem by continuously alerting them to the fact that they DO have the problem. To use our Walking Shoe example one final time, to create the needed desire of owning your shoes, you could subtly throw in lines such as ...

"... but if you insist on settling for just any old pair of walking shoes, here's what you'll have to look forward to in what are supposed to be your golden-years ... fallen arches ... filamentary discomfort in your hips and lower back ... extreme foot swelling and possible blistering as you lurch forward trying to accommodate the pain ... and all of this can be just from getting up to get a glass of water!

Thanks to this choice, you'll slowly be crippling any mobility you ever hoped to sustain in what were going to be, your last, great years of life ..."

The more times you tell them about or refer to their problem, the more "Desire" you'll create in them wanting to fix it. (NOTE: This approach should be used tactfully and not overdone.)

So again, to successfully pre-sell your offers as well as aid the effectiveness that your Web site - your salesman - has in closing "the deal", you must ...

... where in you will "prepare" your prospect for what your "salesman" has to say - with a forethought that your prospect should really only be looking for "Where the order button is"

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