“The hardest struggle of my life has been to educate advertisers to the use of samples. Or to trials of some kind.
They would not think of sending out a salesman without samples. But they will spend fortunes on advertising to urge people to buy without seeing or testing.
Some say that samples cost too much. Some argue that reporters will ask for them again and again. But persuasion alone is vastly more expensive.
None but those who regard advertising as some magic dreamland will ever try to sell without sampling.”
— Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising
I’m just going to paste that line again, because I like it so much:
“None but those who regard advertising as some magic dreamland will ever try to sell without sampling.”
I think my mission in life might be to help entrepreneurs understand that sampling and demonstration is the key to selling.
And the biggest obstacle in my path is the objection: “But you can’t sample services.”
And, like, sure, okay. You can’t just give away your services as a way to get people to buy. That’s the fast track to negative margins.
But you can demonstrate.
You can demonstrate the value of your services before anyone ever buys.
How? The same way a sample works in a product, or a food: You give people a little piece of the value you want them to buy from you.
That’s what this whole newsletter is, and what content marketing is all about: Giving people a little taste of what it would be like to work together, so they get to experience the value before they buy it.
And they get to decide if it’s what they need right now, later, or not at all.
But service providers, consultants, and advisors get in their own heads about it and think that they’ll devalue their business or their offering by making it more accessible.
They want to keep their secrets secret, they want to keep their value exclusive.
The trouble is, though, that no one believes you have secrets of value if you don’t show them a few.
Better to be a little less exclusive and actually have clients than be the most exclusive by having none, right?
Like Hopkins wrote in another section of his memoir, “The way to sell goods is to sell them. The way to do that is to sample and demonstrate, and the more attractive you can make your demonstration the better it will be for you.”
Again: “The way to sell goods is to sell them.”
I mean, that sounds simple and obvious and tautological but it isn’t. So many advisors and service providers try to sell their goods, their value, their services by obscuring them.
By hiding their value beneath an ever-expanding list of services, or requiring too much information from their clients before they can provide a scope or budget estimate. Or not posting on social media like LinkedIn, or not having a blog, newsletter, or other “middle step” content.
It’s like they’re nervous that if they actually just say what they do and what it costs, people won’t want it anymore.
Which is, let’s face it, just anxiety and insecurity and a lack of self-confidence.
Which is okay and normal and expected. But it’s not a marketing strategy.
Because anxiety is a poor guide for what actually works. It’ll keep us hidden, obscured by business camouflage that feels comfortable in the moment but only does us long-term harm.
At the end of the day, people don’t give us money because of what we’ve done before. They buy our services because of what they believe we can do now.
Which means our marketing must be current, active, and ever-evolving.
We can’t let our anxiety about being honest and obvious and clear about our offering keep us from creating marketing content.
Because the best way that I’ve found to demonstrate our current abilities is by talking about them and showing them off, delivering a little bit of value at the same time.
Remember what Rory Sutherland told us in his book Alchemy: A copywriter who worked for David Ogvily in the 1960s once said, “People do not choose Brand A over Brand B because they think Brand A is better, but because they are more certain that it is good.”
Again: “Because they are more certain it is good.”
Does hiding our service offering, our speciality, our knowledge and our experience make someone more certain we’re good, or less?
So what are we supposed to do instead, then?
How do we approach our content like it’s a sample? How do we give people a little taste of what it might be like to work with us?
By returning to what Roger Ebert once said about Steven Spielberg:
“When I talk to Spielberg, it's like he has something amazing he wants to tell me. He is delighted, he is fascinated, by making movies. Talking about them doesn't get old for him because he is not ‘promoting’ them; he is engaged in the process of understanding how his new movie came to be.”
The job of your content, the job of your marketing, the job of your sampling is actually quite simple:
You just have to engage in the process of understanding how your work came to be.
That’s what I’m constantly trying to do with this newsletter, and with the content I produce on behalf of my clients.
I want to engage prospects, clients, and casual observers in the process of how the work came to be. By talking through the motivations, the education, the experiences that underpin it.
In doing so, prospects get to sample the benefits, they get to experience a little bit of the value in the moment.
Like Hopkins, the hardest part of my work has been trying to convince entrepreneurs to sample, to demonstrate.
To get them to stop spending fortunes on empty advertising with no hope of working and invest more in demonstrating to the people who already care that they have the perfect offering for them in particular.
Marketing is not some magic dreamland, it is a demonstration.
It is a sample on a toothpick.
It is a little piece of value delivered in the moment so that value can be demonstrated at a distance.
And “the more attractive you can make your demonstration,” as Hopkins put it, “the better it will be for you.”
Kelford Inc. shows you the way to always knowing what to say.