When I used to do door to door sales, I worked with a guy called Charlie. Charlie was a very well spoken, tall, handsome guy who would constantly do hilarious things.
One of his classic “pranks” was to buy a brand new £45,000 BWM and park it down the road from his parents, hop back in his old car and drive that home so they wouldn’t know he’d just spent a ton of money on a new car. Classic Charlie.
Charlie also had an incredible talent for selling TV packages door to door. Basically what we did was sell satellite TV subscriptions all over the South West of England. It was hard work, uncomfortable and the pay wasn’t great. However, the people were fun, we were young lads looking to make some money and we’d usually get a beer bought for us at the end of the day.
Charlie’s sales technique was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. He would sell pretty costly satellite TV packages without one mention of what the product was.
The hardest part of door to door is getting in the door. Once you’re inside, people let their guards down and you can open the conversation up. Of course everyone says that they’d never let a door to door salesperson in their house, but it’s a numbers game.
And Charlie had a special tactic for selling. What Charlie would do is make the opening pitch all about the customer. Even if he knew literally nothing about them, he’d focus the sales pitch on them rather than the TV subscription and he’d speak almost entirely in bullet points.
Knock on the door
Customer: hello?
Charlie:
- Hi there! Did you know that your TV won’t work in a few months?
- That’s right, old TVs need to be upgraded to digital signals
- Luckily you don’t have to buy a new TV
- We’re offering a digital signal upgrade courtesy of Sky
- Are you happy losing your TV signal?
- How would you feel if you couldn’t watch TV anymore?
- Would you like me to show you how to keep your TV signal going?
Reading through that script looks more like a landing page than a door-to-door conversation. Charlie understood that as soon as someone opens the door, their guard is up and they don’t want to buy anything.
Most of the guys selling d2d would try to “sell” straight away.
They would ask questions and introduce themselves. In sales theory, you’re taught all of this, but Charlie knew that he first had to get them to pay attention. Every second you spend introducing yourself, the person stood at the door is thinking “how do I tell them to go away?”
Read through those bullet points again. Every single one of them is essentially a headline. Each one could be a subject line of an email or a YouTube title. They’re all designed to get a response from a customer and have them listen to you and pay attention.
Not every sales interaction needs to be like this, structured in this way. But let’s look at the typical sales journey. Knocking on someone’s door is the equivalent of an advert.
It’s interrupting their normal routine and disrupting them. Just like an advert, Charlie knew he had to talk like a clickbait article or headline in order to get them to pay attention. It might sound weird and read weird but to the customer, he’s just getting to the point.
Every bullet point is also a benefit. They might not read like typical standard benefits, but they are. A benefit is just a better future version of something (or someone). It stirs emotion and in some cases, threatens to take something away from people. In the 1970s Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman researched the principle of “Loss Aversion”. A psychological phenomenon that people would rather work to protect a loss than to gain something more.
Charlie understood this perfectly and knew that taking away the TV was a more powerful attention grabber than to offer more TV. What we were trying to sell is a satellite TV subscription, but Charlie knew that we couldn’t get to the sales part until we’d crossed the attention part.
They had to want to learn more, and the easiest way to do that was frontloading the conversation like an advert and getting their attention, mainly through telling them what they’d lose out on.
In this blog post, we’re going to create a series of benefits as bullet points and use them as ammunition for all your sales copy. Your messaging, promotions, adverts, pitches, videos, blog posts, landing pages, subject lines – we’re going to create a lot of them.
These bullet points have been gathered from years of copy research and thousands of sales pages, pitches, blog posts, adverts, and headlines. If you want to get really really good at writing these, try to write out 5 per template. It’s a great exercise.
How to [benefit]
- How to finally shift that weight you’ve picked up and get in better shape than you were, 10 years ago
- How to find the top paying customers within your market and make YOU the obvious choice to buy
- How to generate more sales per day (without adding strain on your operations and delivery)
[Action verb] – [benefit]
- Explode the number of people within your network that want to refer you to their friends
- Discover the hidden secret to losing weight that Gladiators, Spartans and Batman all know
- Finally pay for advertising and new leads and know exactly what works
# ways to [benefit]
- 3 ways to earn money while you sleep and 1 mistake that all marketers make
- 5 ignored and hidden supermarket herbs that Michelin Star chefs know (and are dead cheap)
- 3 stages to make sales on automation without spending more on advertising
Better than [action/alternative] – [benefit]
- Better than buying new marketing funnel software. Customers DO NOT CARE what kind of marketing funnel software you use and this costs 1/12th what new marketing funnel software costs
- Better than social media marketing. Start generating leads and referrals TODAY, not in weeks or months time using social media groups to slowly build a following
- Better than selling graphic design, SEO or web design. See how we attract customers and leads without even explaining WHAT we do and why the customer is grateful that you don’t tell them that stuff
Do you [headache] Are you [headache]?
- Do you suffer from writer’s block? Never sure what to write for your blog content? From ideas to topics, titles and entire posts – follow our process to write killer blog content faster and easier than ever
- Do you suffer from bloating after starting your new diet? Are you tired of feeling full AND hungry at the same time?
- Ever had another driver blin you when driving at night? Sick of having bright lights shine into your eyes making it dangerous to drive when its dark?
It’s not your fault that you [action]
- It’s not your fault that you’ve invested in Facebook ads and it hasn’t worked out
- If you’ve ever tried losing weight and couldn’t keep it off, it’s NOT your fault (here’s why)
- Can you remember the last time you cooked a simple meal and it all went wrong? There’s a basic reason why and it’s not your fault
