Hey, this is Mark Butler.
And you are listening to a podcast for coaches.
I have in mind that I want to create a multi hour philosophical
analysis of the industry of coaching.
And if you know me outside this podcast, and if you know me through this podcast,
you might know that I have a tendency to overthink, and I have a tendency to
take what is simple and make it complex.
Now there's certain areas of my life where that has really served me, but
where it doesn't serve me is when you're trying to create a podcast
episode that is actually immediately applicable and useful to this handful
of people you have in your audience.
So I've successfully redirected myself away from.
That multi hour analysis and I've boiled it down in my mind to one topic.
That's why the episode is called how to read a sales page.
Now maybe somebody sent you this podcast.
Maybe you don't know who I am.
Let me take just a second and tell you why I think I'm qualified to comment
on how you should read a sales page or how you can read a sales page.
I wrote my first sales copy in around 2007 or 2008.
And it was actually to sell coaching.
In fact, I remember how hard I worked on it and how flowery
it was and how dramatic it was.
And now I kind of laughed, but it did work.
We sold some coaching.
I had a, I had a business partner at the time we'd sold some coaching.
And then I went on to have the experience of writing sales copy
that generated, I think, a total of about 2 million in the period between
around 2008 and the beginning of 2013.
The product that that copy sold was a membership a bunch of people
went through that membership and most of the 2 million I referenced
was generated from that thing.
And since 2012, 2013, somewhere in there, my copy that I write
has not really had a sales intent.
It hasn't had to because of my business model.
So I haven't written a lot of persuasive copy even in the last 10 or 12 years, but.
Starting in about 2014, 2015, I started to be an advisor to other coaches.
Now advisor can mean a lot of things.
In my case, it meant that I was their bookkeeper.
In many cases, I was their CFO.
In some cases, in other cases, I was sort of a thought partner, a strategist
where we were talking about how they were going to do what they were going to do.
And in some cases, I was more of a pure life coach, where we're
talking about their mindset, their relationships, their emotional state.
But what it gave me was, The opportunity to be inside a bunch
of businesses at a bunch of levels.
I've worked in businesses that generate a hundred thousand a year.
I've worked in businesses that generate.
2 million a year.
I worked in one business that generate Ted.
I don't know what it generates now, but at the time it was generating 25 million
plus in a year and it let me see inside and outside so I could see the copy that's
being written and I can have a personal relationship with the person writing it.
I can talk to them about the product they're selling and understand in
a one on one setting what their psychology is around their own product.
And then I can read the copy and see how they sell it.
Now, I'm happy to say, and I want it to be clear that I'm not bringing
you a cynical or a hypercritical view of this whole topic.
I have been fortunate.
I've never in the, in the 10 plus years now that I've been interacting with
and supporting other coaches, I've still never come across a client who I
believed had any ill intent whatsoever.
The way they did what they did might not be how I would do it.
But I've never ever worked for a client who I thought was lying or intending
to deceive or intending to harm.
So I'm not coming to you today to say, Oh, this is a takedown.
This is a takedown of, of anybody or of any way of being.
That's not what this is.
This episode is an attempt to have you approach persuasive content
online, particularly content that attempts to sell you training.
Or sell you experiences and to approach that persuasive material in a way
that makes it so you're less likely to regret your decision later, because I
can hold two ideas at the same time.
One idea that I'm able to hold is that training and community are powerful.
They are positive.
They help people transform their thoughts, their emotional states,
their ways of being and produce.
Great new results in their life, and I find it very easy to hold that thought
and to believe that I Also hold the belief that the hopes the dreams the
aspirations and in too many cases the self confidence of So many people are
buried in an invisible graveyard that we don't hear very much about and The
reason they're buried in that invisible graveyard is because they They didn't
take a thoughtful approach to the persuasive material that they encountered.
They made one purchase and then multiple purchases, and then they formed a
habit of purchasing that led to regret, self doubt, loss of confidence, shame.
And so since I have both of those ideas in my head.
Both of those strongly held beliefs in my head.
I bring this episode to you not to Critique anyone or anything.
Although I suppose my opinions will come through But to try to create a
tool that a person might come back to multiple times to help themselves engage
productively with whatever persuasive material they're seeing, so that they are
less likely to regret the decision later.
See, the industry does an amazing job with working on how they can be happy
about the decision later, but the industry doesn't do much with the acknowledgement
that there is such a thing as making a decision that later on you very.
Honestly, regret that's not coming from a place of blame or from a victim mentality.
It's just you coming back to a decision later and saying, I'm not happy
with the way I made that decision.
And I'm not happy with the results that that decision produced
In addition to the invisible graveyard, where some people's hopes, dreams,
aspirations, and self confidence are, are potentially buried.
We also have real financial consequence.
We have people walking around in some cases with tens of thousands
of dollars in debt that they don't have any clear path to paying off
Because they didn't know how to engage productively with
persuasive material online.
We do this thing in the industry, by the way, where we tend to be very all or
nothing about this topic, which is funny because as coaches, we really discourage
our clients from all or nothing thinking.
But when we talk about offers we make or offers that we've made in the past,
we tend to be very all or nothing.
We tend to say things like, well, if you're all in, if you go all in, then
you will succeed, you cannot fail.
And if a person doesn't get a good result, we tend to be
very all or nothing about that.
We tend to say, well, if you'd put in the effort, and we tend to say things
like, Well, there was a guarantee there was a money back guarantee
and you didn't meet the requirements of the money back guarantee.
So it's your fault.
We have, there is a, a temptation to blame the client in our industry,
which I think is very unhealthy.
We have a tendency not to acknowledge that all human relationships are entered
into with some level of ignorance.
Thanks.
There's confidence, but there's also ignorance.
So there's hope, but there's not certainty.
And I'm not just being abstract and philosophical.
Look at it this way.
We have to acknowledge that sometimes a person makes a decision that
isn't the best decision for them.
There are scenarios Where we, in our effort to be persuasive and in our
effort to give the highest possible service, we invite a person into
a relationship that they actually don't have any business getting into.
But once the money changes hands, there, there's a weird dynamic
that can be introduced where we say, well, you gave me the money.
So now the contract is final and where there's no going back, but
we're not acknowledging that.
There's a real possibility that that person is not better off for
having entered into that contract.
That doesn't make us a liar.
It just means that every relationship has started with some uncertainty.
And just because money has changed hands does not negate
the uncertainty that was there.
So in the same way that it makes sense for a person to say yes to a program,
it makes sense for them to back away from that same program when they
have new information and as easy as it was for us to take their money,
it should be just as easy to give it back when we have new information.,
I know it's very opinionated.
I'm bringing strong opinions to that, but I would ask you to consider it.
It's why, since the beginning of having anything that looks like a coaching
business, my refund policy has been, if you ask for a refund, I will give it.
It doesn't need to be named in some fancy way.
It doesn't need to be based on 61 pages of legal ease.
I've never had a contract.
I will never have a contract.
If you ask for a refund, I will give it.
That has led at some points to me giving refunds that I don't think were deserved.
That I think I earned the money that I was paid, and I don't think the person
is, is right to ask for it in return.
But what's my option in that moment?
My option is to hang onto that money and fight, or to know in my heart of
hearts that I made a good faith effort, that I've met my end of the contract.
And then now I release myself from having to do any thinking in the
future about that relationship.
I just.
Giving the money back.
That's the thing they care about, apparently, so that's
the thing I will give them.
If you want a refund, I will give it.
Anyway, we're supposed to be talking about a sales page.
Here is how to read a sales page.
Number one.
Find the price.
Scroll past all those beautiful images, scroll past all the headline
and all the subheads, scroll past the bullet points, scroll past
the testimonials, find the price.
By the way, if there's no price published for me, we're done.
If you're going to give me a sales page, but no price, I'm not sure why
we would continue the conversation because the message you give me.
Is that you don't think I'm capable of evaluating the program in
the context of, of its features, its benefits, and its cost.
So there's an indication.
And again, this is my opinion.
There's an indication that you don't trust me.
And you're saying I can give you the information that I think serves me best,
but not the information that I think might hurt the possibility of a yes.
So if you do all that scrolling and you still can't find a price,
and if it's something like fill out an application, but no price for
me, the relationship is concluded.
I need you to respect me.
I need you to trust me.
If we're going to get into a relationship, I need to know that you
want to be transparent and give me all the information that I might need to
make the decision without me having to escalate the relationship further.
For me, it feels like manipulation.
Do I think, do I think that makes the person inherently manipulative?
No, I, the person who doesn't put the price on the sales page, I'm not
saying they're acting in bad faith.
I'm saying they have their own fears.
And that's one of the ways their fears are being expressed.
It's not a confident person that hides the price.
It's a fearful person that hides the price.
Okay.
If you're afraid of that, I'm just not that sure I want to get
into a relationship with you.
So for me, you scroll down, you find the price.
After you see the price, you've already seen the headline.
Even if you scrolled quickly, you saw the headline, you saw the beautiful
pictures, you probably saw some testimonials on your way to the price.
Now you have the price.
Now, in my opinion, what you do is you close that browser tab and you walk
away and you spend time with the price.
Why?
Because there is a real cost to using money on one thing and not another.
One of the things we do in a persuasive setting is we make every effort to show
the benefits of the thing, such that there's no perceived trade off in the
purchase, meaning you pay me this money and it doesn't actually cost you anything
for all these reasons, but it's not true.
Trade offs are a fact of our life.
And if I put a dollar here, I can't also put it there.
So I'm encouraging you to walk away from the sales page for 24 hours, maybe for
a week and spend time with the price.
Ask yourself some questions about it.
First and foremost, what else would I do with that money?
If I weren't doing this with it?
I want to make big financial decisions in the context of my
next best use of that money.
And I want to notice how I negotiate with myself, especially
when it comes to trainings.
If I'm saying, well, yeah, that 15, 000 could pay for a family vacation.
It could pay for a car.
It could pay for.
pay down some debt.
It could do all these other things, but no, no, all those things are going
to be better after I do the training because then I'll have more money.
If you notice yourself having to negotiate hard with yourself, that is a strong sign.
It doesn't mean you absolutely shouldn't do that training.
It means that you are not finding it to be easily settled about.
The cost of the training.
Another thing that we're prone to in the industry is we tell people
that that unsettled feeling they have is fundamentally untrustworthy
because it's based in fear.
And I agree that that is one possibility.
The other possibility is that person is feeling unsettled because
they have a sense, a feeling, you could call it an intuition.
And That the decision actually is wrong for them, and they just don't have
perfect words for describing why yet as the person offering the training, it's
not my job to try to manipulate their emotional state in the way that serves me.
If I'm truly an advisor, it's my job to create an environment in which
they're able to explore their emotional state in a way that serves them.
So if they walk away from my sales page for 24 hours or for seven
days, that's not them being scared.
Although it might be, that might be part of it.
It's them giving themselves some space and time to consider and to
parse and to be with their emotions as they think about the decision.
If a person comes back to that decision, having processed
their own emotions about it.
Having thought through different scenarios about it and they make the decision.
Fantastic.
Amazing.
That's much less likely to be a decision that carries regret later.
But I, as a coach want to give someone an opportunity to feel right in their body.
Very coachy thing to say, I know I want them to have an opportunity to
feel right in their body when they're putting their credit card into that,
into that form, if they are dysregulated and unsettled, as that transaction is
happening, the likelihood that they're going to come back later, filled
with regret is much higher, by the way, as the provider of the training.
I don't want a room full of people who had to convince themselves to be in the room.
They are going to send the most customer service emails.
They're going to have the most concerns during the training.
They are going to bring up the cost of the training during the training.
They're going to talk about how they're afraid of not
getting quote, the full value.
I don't want them in the room.
The person that I want in the room, when I sell Mark Butler's super
expensive training about who knows what is the person who finds it to
be the calmest bordering on boring sort of, of course I'm in the room.
This was the easiest action I've ever taken.
It wasn't an easy decision.
I took a long time making the decision, but the action itself to sign up
turned out to be quite easy for me.
That's the person that I want in the room.
We're going to have an amazing relationship.
So, that is why step one, in my opinion, find the price and walk
away and spend time with the price.
Oh, side note,, ask yourselves how many times you could spend that amount of
money without having it meaningfully impact or even harm your life.
So, for example, if the amount of money that you'll spend on the training, even
one time, creates some amount of jeopardy in your finances, for me, walk away.
Because even if the training is great.
Spending that money has changed the risk profile in your life,
such that it can only turn out one way and still be a good thing.
Now we have pressure.
Now we have increased uncertainty.
We have potentially more contention in our key relationships.
So if you look at a price and say, I'm not sure I can even spend that amount once
without creating jeopardy in my finances.
Walk away.
Go save up, go save up.
Trust me.
I've been in the industry over 10 years, nothing in that training is
so time sensitive that you can't walk away, save up and come back
and have missed anything meaningful.
Trust me.
There's nothing in that training that you can't go experience on your own.
That doesn't mean.
You shouldn't do the training.
It just means there's nothing in a training that through experience
and trial and error that we can't figure out by ourselves.
So if the money is going to truly negatively impact our life in the
short term, then we can say, instead of incurring that cost, I'm going to
incur the cost of trial and error.
I'm going to do it knowingly and thoughtfully.
I'm going to save up some money and then I'll come back and do the training.
If I decide I will still want it.
You may discover that that training isn't so important a year later.
So ask yourself how many times you can spend that amount of
money without meaningfully impact or harming your finances.
By the way, it's true on the low end of the price spectrum as well.
If you could spend that amount of money a thousand times, 5,000 times, that also
calls into question the value of the thing, because if it's that easy to get
into, it might not be that valuable.
This is the phenomenon that I've started calling Funnel Cake.
Some of you don't even know what funnel cake is.
Funnel cake is like a greasy, delicious, you know, flour, sugar
combination that you get at the local fair or at the local sporting
event, which is just fried dopamine.
If a product is for sale inside of a person's sales
funnel, I call it funnel cake.
Now, I have very good friends and clients who may be upset with me.
We may have to talk about funnel cake, but because they sell stuff inside
funnels, but I'm not afraid to call into question the value of a thing
whose primary purpose is to escalate a person's decision making toward a bigger.
Yes.
So if, if I know after, again, a decade of seeing sales pages and sales funnels,
if I know that the only real purpose of the thing that I'm being offered is to
prepare me to receive the next higher ticket offer, then the thing that's in
front of me might not be that valuable.
I was just on a client call yesterday.
We were going through the client's finances and I saw
a charge for 4 and 95 cents.
And I said to her, Oh, you're in a funnel.
She's like, I don't, I don't remember what that even was.
And I said, I know what it is.
I know, based on the price that you're inside of a funnel.
So we Googled it.
She's like, Oh yeah, it's this funnel thing.
I was like, right.
I know.
I told you it's a funnel.
She said, you're good at this.
I said, it's not that I'm good at this.
It's that I've done it a hundred thousand times and knowing what I know,
having had the experience that I've had, I'll say, Oh, you're in a funnel.
And then I'll say, what are you stressed out about what's going on that
you're out there in people's funnels?
Because usually when people are in funnels, they're in some
sort of state of dysregulation.
Yeah, that's my opinion.
And now I'm probably going to have to answer for that opinion with some
clients in the not too distant future.
Anyway, if something is so cheap that you could buy it a thousand times,
I'm not sure how valuable it is.
People might say, well, don't you like books?
I love books.
The thing about a book is I can spend 10 or 20 or 25 and then it
lives on my Kindle and it becomes part of my personal knowledge bank.
My assets that I can refer to anytime I want.
I can drop in there.
The technology exists to make that information, not just low cost to own,
but low cost to access funnel cake.
Very often lives behind a login or it's a PDF.
I mean, it's low cost to own, but it's high cost to benefit
from in a way that books are not.
So yeah, I love buying books.
I love having a big library, but a big part of the value of that
library is its accessibility.
Okay.
I'm really going on some tangents here,
okay.
Next up, the next thing we're going to look at on the sales page.
I want you to try reading sales pages in plain text only.
Here's what you do.
You're looking at the sales page.
You do select all, right click, select all or command a on a Mac or
control a on a, on a PC and you paste the text only into a Google doc.
Why do you do this?
I want to get rid of all the beautiful imagery and the amazing web design.
Sorry to any web designers in the audience, beautiful design and beautiful
images play on our lower brains.
You know, the woman sees the other woman's amazing hair or fit figure,
the man sees the other man's incredible jawline or hairline, which I'll say for
no particular reason, it's definitely not a source of insecurity for me.
I don't know why you would ask.
They see the amazing jawline, they see the amazing hairline, and that is now
muddying the water of the decision.
Now I'm not evaluating the thing on what transformation it offers me.
Why?
Because beautiful design and beautiful imagery plays on our lower brains.
Now sometimes we want that.
Sometimes just being in the physical presence of a
beautiful thing is a good thing.
Changes our state for the better in the case of making a financial decision,
especially a big financial decision.
I at least want to have some awareness around what.
Is working on my lower brain and what is available to my higher brain.
So if I take a sales page and I just look at it in plain text,
now I'm more confident that it's my higher brain that is involved.
So if I extract the text and get the text into a Google Doc, now
I've at least minimized the impact of all the beautiful imagery.
And now I'm starting to evaluate the thing more in terms of its
higher brain value, what is actually being offered to me?
How is it actually going to transform me and my experience?
After I'm working with plain text, I go a step further, or I would encourage you
to go a step further and delete the main headline and delete the testimonials.
I know this is crazy.
Hear me out.
You've all probably seen videos or read books or heard podcasts that say that,
you know, it in a persuasive setting.
The headline is the most persuasive thing.
If that's true, then I want to delete it because the headline is not long enough
to hold enough information to actually help me make a more informed decision.
It's going to play on something in my lower brain.
Now, is that always true?
No.
Someday, when you see Mark Butler, super expensive training, and it's
a sales page, it will probably say something like, welcome to Mark
Butler's super expensive training.
And then the price will be beneath it.
And then beneath that, there will be, if you'd like to talk about it, let me know.
I mean, that's just probably be the whole, that will probably
be the whole sales page.
So a headline can't contain enough information to really
help an informed decision.
And if the research says it's highly persuasive, then my conclusion is it must
be a little bit, not manipulative, that's not the right word, but distracting.
If so few words carry so much weight.
I want them out and I want what's left over to have to do the heavy lifting.
Now, why am I going to delete the testimonials?
Because come on, if you've written sales pages, you know, that most
of the time the clients themselves didn't even write the testimonials.
Usually the smart marketer says, you're not good at this.
I'll write your testimonial for you.
I want you to read it and tell me if it's true.
According to your experience, but I'm not going to let you write it.
You're bad at this.
So the testimonials tend to be low information.
Here's what I would encourage you to employ instead.
There's a hack that you can use when you're buying books.
By the way, you ignore the five star reviews and you
ignore the one star reviews.
You go to the three star reviews.
The three star reviews will usually speak to the benefits of the book.
And they will also acknowledge where the book could have been better.
Oh, I liked this about it, but I didn't love that.
That's useful to the person making the decision.
I have found that when I focus on three star reviews for books, I'm,
I become even more likely to buy the book because I feel more confident
that I know what the book actually is.
So testimonials on sales pages are like five star reviews.
They are cherry picked.
And they are safe to ignore, , by the way, angry social media threads or angry
community forums about a person or a program, those are like one star reviews
and they can be safely ignored in my opinion, because what you'll find if you
take any time, which weirdly I have, if you go into some of these communities
where people are railing against coaches and their programs, what you'll find is
that the people who participate in those.
Oftentimes, not always, sometimes people are in there just hurting and wanting to
get some validation in their pain, and I actually completely understand that,
but there are some people who post in those communities where if you click on
their profile and you go sort of follow them around the community, you discover
that they're mad about everything.
They're mad about everything.
Every single thing.
And if a person is mad about everything and railing and raging
against everything, their opinion is not worth very much to me.
So I ignore them.
So in that spirit, I delete the testimonials because those are the
five star reviews that are cherry picked and probably handcrafted.
And I ignore the one star reviews because they're mostly just mad for being mad.
And I want to find three star reviews.
Now it's really hard to find three star reviews for, you know, Certifications,
coaching programs, masterminds.
So there's some work to be done here and trying to have conversations, have one,
two, three conversations with people who've actually participated and listen
to what they call the pros and cons.
Because we want to be psychologically consistent, it's very hard for us
to say that spending a bunch of money on a thing was a bad move.
So we work very hard to rationalize and justify ourselves after the fact.
And since that's fundamental to our psychology, my
psychology, your psychology.
If someone asks me, Would I make that decision again?
Would you spend that money again?
And if I say the truth is I probably wouldn't.
That's an expensive thing for me to admit and therefore more
trustworthy because I had to go against basic psychology to say it.
But if I say to you, okay, here's the thing.
There's a lot of it that I loved.
Here are the few things that I really thought were weak.
I didn't like them.
Here's where I think that the program did not live up to the
promise that the sales page made.
If a person can say that clearly and calmly, that's an incredibly
useful, , information set for you.
Who are trying to make the decision of whether to do it in the first place.
So come on, if you're going to spend 10 000, you're going to tell
me that it's not worth finding and having conversations with a couple
of people who've already done it.
And then within those conversations, you can also kind of ignore the five
stars and the one stars and look for the three star material where
they say, This was the good stuff.
This is where it could have been improved.
Overall.
I'm pretty happy with it.
That's going to help you make a much more informed decision.
So plain text only delete the headline, delete the testimonials.
What's left.
Most of what will be left will be bullet points.
, we all know the bullet points we find on sales pages, bullet points tend
to follow a feature benefit model.
You will get this and here's how that benefits you.
Great.
I think these should be, can be the most useful for helping you make your decision.
What I'll encourage you to do is take each of those bullet points and ask
yourself some questions about it.
What is the feature?
What is their proposed or claimed benefit about that feature?
And then how does that compare to what I know is most important and useful to me
today, wherever I am in my journey, I'm encouraging you to take a little extra
time and ask yourself what is offered?
Why does it matter?
And does that benefit still seem compelling given what I
know about my current situation?
Now you might find yourself in a situation where you don't know what you don't know.
My opinion would be, that's not the time to whip out the credit card.
My opinion would be that you're better off acknowledging that you don't know what you
don't know and going and discovering what you don't know by using Whatever YouTube
books, free content, but approaching all of that with a critical thinking critical
as in careful, thoughtful, not negative, approaching all of that with a critical
thinking view and saying, what is it?
Why does it matter?
And how does it relate to my current situation?
For any given feature, by the way, you want to be looking at , if there's text
offered in the thing, what, what reason do I have to believe that the text is
more useful and more consumable than what I would get from a Kindle book?
If it's video, what reason do I have to believe that it's more useful and
more consumable than YouTube video?
If it's audio, what podcasts are there?
And if it's coaching.
I really have to ask myself, do I believe that sitting in a room with
somewhere between five and 500 other people receiving nearly no attention
from the coach, I have to have a way of believing that that's more useful
than hiring my own one on one coach.
There are situations where I believe that's the case.
I've experienced them when I've consumed certain trainings.
But I do at least want to ask the question because there is one on one
coaching available from all kinds of coaches out there So I have to ask myself
in What situation does it make sense?
For me to pay the same or more money for much less attention and
personalization Now the standard answer that we give is well we
benefit from observing other people's experiences And I completely agree.
We just want to make sure that that's what we're expecting.
And that's what we're getting in the program, because if I go into a program
saying, I really want to benefit from other people's insights, I want to
benefit from other people's experiences, but then we find in the program that the
facilitation is not done in such a way that that actually happens where we're
all kind of sitting in our zoom room.
We're all staring at our screen.
We're not really having an opportunity to make a contribution.
We're not really having an opportunity to engage with the other participants.
Well, now I have a potentially a lecture and listen situation that I
have to admit to myself is lower value than my alternative, which would have
been hiring a one on one coach and getting all the attention for myself.
So for every bullet point, for every feature and proposed benefit, I've got
to say to myself, what is the feature?
What is the claimed benefit?
And what do I think of that potential benefit in the context of what I already
know about myself and my situation?
There's a thing that happens where people will buy a program based on
one promised feature and benefit.
So they'll see a list of 10 bullet points.
One of those bullet points will be so compelling to them that they
make the purchase based on that.
Do I think that's wrong?
I don't think it's wrong.
Do I think it's higher risk?
I do., my reminder for people when they're approaching a decision in
this way is don't forget, there's a ton of protein in milkshakes.
And what I mean by that is if you look at a milkshake and say, I'm going to buy
it because it has all the protein, you'd say, there's actually ways to get that
protein that don't come with all the carbs and fat or with fewer carbs and fat.
So you have to ask yourself, am I buying a milkshake right now?
Or am I having, you know, chicken and broccoli, which is a ridiculous thing
for me to say because I'm not choosing the chicken and broccoli the vast
majority of the time, but I'm being more honest than I ever have been about the
fact that the protein in a milkshake is buried in a bunch of carbs and fat.
And I think that happens with people buying trainings in the coaching world.
This suggests that you ought to have your own hypothesis about
what is true about you and about your coaching practice or whatever
training you're considering consuming.
It, it suggests that you ought to have a hypothesis about this is who I am.
This is what I want.
This is what I care about.
And these are the pain points I have that I'm actually trying to
solve right now so that we don't get distracted by shiny sales pages.
And let the person who wrote the sales page tell us who we are and what we
care about and what our pain is right now, because if they're a very good
copywriter, they can do that in the course of one sales page or one sales sequence.
They can persuade you to buy into a new version of yourself.
And a new definition of your current circumstances and a
new belief in the solutions.
The tricky thing about our world is everything I just said, I could
probably say in another setting.
Wow, that's great.
It's great to offer people a new view of themselves.
It's great to suggest new definitions for their problems
and new potential solutions.
In another setting, I'd be calling that great leadership.
So all of this has to be done together.
, I want to consider the price.
I want to consider the features.
I want to ignore the headline and the testimonials.
I want to evaluate the proposed individual benefits.
And I want to measure all of that against what I believe to be true about myself.
And once I've done that, then I can acknowledge the new version of
me that is being offered to me and the new way of thinking and the
new solutions to the old problem.
I can do all of that with clear thoughts and settled emotions.
And having done that, I'm so much less likely to regret the decision that I make.
And so much more likely to go into that training energetic,
happy, and enthusiastic.
It's going to have its bumps in the road.
There's no perfect training program, and I'm not suggesting that anybody has
to create the perfect training program.
But if we start the relationship in the right way, I think we drastically
reduce the likelihood of regret.
We can see how that's good for clients.
If you're a coach, if you're a trainer, this is also good for the brand.
I talked earlier about these insane reddit threads where I mean, I have
some commentary on some people's way of being in their training businesses.
I've got my opinions even about past clients.
I can say, well, I wouldn't do that.
I don't love how that was done.
But these Reddit threads are so absurd.
And I think part of the reason they go to such a crazy place is
that the well intentioned trainer offering what they're offering.
They didn't consider the fact that the better you get at selling, the
more likely you are to sell someone who's mad at you later, because
you persuaded them harder than they were able to persuade themselves.
And at some point they're going to come back and want to punish you for it.
A brand's best move is to sell with a little bit more care and even
a little bit more caution so that if somebody does make it into the
room, they're happy to be there.
And they're very, very unlikely to go out screaming into the world
about what a horrible person you are.
That's the worst case scenario of all this.
It's more prevalent, I think, in 2024 than it's ever been, because
there are more places for it to happen than it's ever happened.
And I think it all comes from a person who thinks their job
is to persuade at all costs.
And I would rather have a person in my program who was persuaded in a pretty
mediocre way, and they said yes anyway.
Because now I think we've entered into the relationship in a healthy way.
Does anybody want to date a pickup artist?
Maybe I guess I've been, I've been out of the dating game for 22 years.
So maybe I'm, maybe this isn't the metaphor for me to reach for, but the
fact that a person can be incredibly skilled at getting into a romantic
interaction does not mean they're a person you want to relationship with.
So if a has an absolutely incredible funnel and sales page.
You have to ask yourself, is this a pickup artist or is it a person with whom I
want to be in a long term relationship?
It's just food for thought.
All I'm trying to do is create some counterbalance in an industry where
there is so much powerful persuasion,
but maybe not quite enough acknowledgement that these decisions can be made a little
more slowly, a little more thoughtfully.
And frankly, There, there probably should be fewer yeses in the industry.
There probably should be a little bit of a balancing out where some of the
people who are buying these trainings would be happier if they didn't.
So that's how to read a sales page.
I hope it's useful to you and I'll talk to you next time.