Tuesday, January 02, 2007

The Problem with Automated Marketing

The problem can easily be summed in the words 'selling skill'.

I am not talking about marketing, I am talking about the ability to sell sell sell.

See most people can be good at marketing, but when it comes to selling, it is a whole different story.

To sell something requires more than marketing, it requires an understanding of your buyer. A deep understanding and the ability to communicate in words and images the reason someone should buy whatever it is you are selling and to understand major trends and trend forces to enter the conversation already going on in their mind, as a famous copywriter once said.

But here is the big problem with automated anything: It is not human. It is machineware.

People do not buy from automated systems, they buy from people. They buy from people they trust.

You can automate almost everything in your business except that one intangible thing: the human touch.

To me that is the biggest problem with automated systems on the Internet, the lack of humanity,to buy anything you want to know that you are dealing with a person and not a faceless company or system that is why you can automate everything else except selling.

Selling is a personal skill. It requires you to put yourself in your buyers shoes and sense their objections before they ask. Feel the pain they feel and offer a solution that best fits their situation.

You do not see a lot of really fine-tuned selling skills in email newsletters. Agora offers are the best I have ever read. Their copy is selling perfection or as close as you can get.

The reason you do not see very good selling in email marketing is that the market is so hot right now, good sales copy is not required to make a sale. People will jump and just about anything that looks decent.

But that will change, making it harder for anyone to make a sale without really top-quality selling skills.

You might be scratching your head saying, 'Gee, if it is easy to make a sale now, I must be doing something wrong because I can not sell anything!'

And that is my point. The bar is being raised almost daily and the offers that worked 1 year ago, no longer hold water.

There are other reasons it is getting tougher and tougher to sell online - if you are unskilled in the art of selling - one of those other factors is the life cycle of a product. Products are released and die within months, sometimes weeks!

Think of Firesales,they were hot now where are they? I guess there are still a few around, but they are almost dead. Big product launches have been huge in 2006, will they be in 2007? Maybe, maybe not, they will probably be replaced with some other new marketing strategy.

Being on top of trends, markets and Internet technology all help to craft sales strategy but who can keep up with it all? Unless you are dedicated to online trends, current marketing strategy and technology changes it will be hard to keep up. It is a full-time job and then some of it takes up a lot time.

That brings us full-circle: Selling is a personal skill that is crafted on an awareness of these trends, or 'major forces that can neither be shaped or stopped, but only watched carefully and guide your copy along these line' as Eugene Schwartz, the famous copywriter, would say as well as being able to enter a persons conversation in their mind.

Selling in not just the ability to write a few entertaining trigger words in an email. it is being able to harness the forces of major trends, capturing them in your copy in a way that makes the sale.

Heady stuff, but oh so important.

Do you find it difficult to sell? To convince people to buy your products or affiliate products?

What I have said here may be the problem and it is also the problem and failure of using automated systems to sell products and services online. People buy from people, not machineware or systems.

Praveen Kumar is a success coach who has a passion for real estate investing for capital growth and internet marketing for cash flow. He has been helping others, who share the same vision, to start their home businesses and become financially free. Please click here To find the best home based business ideas and training.

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