1.Credible urgency is essential. “Why is this offer being made?”
2. You must make yourself vulnerable by disclosing your motive.
3. If a person can remember the last time you held an event like this one, your offer is not credible. (The only exception to this is if you have a once-a-year blowout of items that have “been here for 365 days.” The downside of this annual event is that people will start waiting for it. Your sales at full price will sharply decline each year as customers anticipate your predictable annual blowout sale.)
4. If they do not recognize WHY this offer is available for a limited TIME, your offer is not credible.
5. If they do not understand WHY only a specific NUMBER of these are available, your offer is not credible.
6. NUMBER is more credible than TIME unless the customer can independently research the time limit and confirm the validity of it.
7. A piece of crap at 90% off is still a piece of crap. The meth-laced crack cocaine of hard-hitting sales activation ads will work only when you are offering something that people already want.
EXAMPLES:
NOTE: Just as a lawyer needs to be able to present solid, verifiable facts to the judge, Sales Activation ads need to present solid, verifiable facts to the public.
Good facts can be extracted from any situation.
Here are a couple of situations that lent themselves to Sales Activation:
My jewelry client desperately needed store traffic.
PROBLEM: It was January, 2019. Christmas was over.
SOLUTION: Announce the truth. (1.) Last month (December 5, 2018) “BANG! went the gavel at Christie’s Auction House and a ring with a blue diamond sold for more than 18 million dollars.” (2.) Blue diamonds are unbelievably rare. Especially the big ones. (3.) We were able to find only 127 small blue diamonds in the whole world, and we bought every one of them. (4.) We have put each of these unbelievably rare blue diamonds into the center of a diamond pendant and surrounded it with small, white diamonds. (5.) Jewelry stores are empty in January, and we hate that. (6.) This is why we will be selling these 127 blue diamond pendants for only $1,000 each until the very last one is gone. (7.) It’s okay to call ahead and ask if we still have any, but please don’t ask us to hold one for you.
My A/C client needed to sharply elevate gross sales because he was about to sell his company and the value of that company would be greatly impacted by a rise in sales volume.
PROBLEM: It was October, 2019. A/C season was over.
SOLUTION: Announce the truth. (1.) “The United States Government has decided that the manufacture or importing of Freon will no longer be allowed after January 1, 2020.” (2.) Your Freon-based air-conditioner will not be able to use the new refrigerant. (3.) Between now and the end of the year, we will purchase your existing air conditioning system for $2,000 when you buy a new, high-efficiency system that uses the new, safer refrigerant. (4.) The current, high price of copper means that we can sell your existing system to the junkyard for several hundred dollars. (5.) Because this is the off-season, the price of air conditioners is already low. An additional $2,000 for your old system makes NOW the best time to invest in the new technology. (6) These same systems will be thousands of dollars higher in the spring. (7.) We will send a technician to your home for free to determine if you have an old Freon-based system, or one of the new systems that uses the new refrigerant. Call now.
REMEMBER TRUTH #2? “Anything that delivers big results quickly will work less and less well the longer you keep doing it.”
If the jewelry store or the A/C company repeated their offer – or made a similar offer within 7 years – people would feel they had been lied to, duped, and manipulated by the first ad.
But guess what always happens exactly 1 year later? The business owner looks at his or her sales volume for the previous year and realizes they are up against a really big number for the month. And they don’t want to see a decline in sales. So guess what they do? They demand, insist upon, (and then deeply regret,) “one more hit of that meth-laced crack.”
IN The SEPTEMBER 30 MONDAY MORNING MEMO: “How to Create Healthy, Safe, Sustainable, Sales Activation”
