Perry Marshall – Celebrity Expert Formula

Are you sick of begging for Joint Ventures, slugging it out for clients, getting your head bashed in, and struggling on the outer fringes of success? Then there is ONE massive advantage that shifts all the power from the other guy’s corner to yours.

If you earn your bread by winning over skeptical customers in a hyperspeed, competitive marketplace, then these 10 things are definitely on your HATE LIST:

1. You hate it when you need to close a sale – because you can’t walk away from stinky business deals. Time-vampire customers suck your brains out and devour your soul like fried chicken.

2. You hate competing on price. Shaving pennies with bargain hunters with no regard quality, sucks. Being the lowest bidder. Last week you took an order at some ridiculous cut-throat price. You said to yourself, “I’m going to pay for this.” Actually all you did was push your cash flow woes into next month – knowing it’ll be worse then than it is now. You pray some ‘bluebird’ sale comes through later to patch up your cash flow.

3. You hate it when having a superior product effectively works against you. People get overwhelmed by the choices and they’re not sure who to believe. They pick the guy that tells them some happy-happy-joy-joy story. Unfortunately, the guy they picked wasn’t you.

4. You hate it when people choose some big dumb company over you just because “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” You work your ass off for your customers and the Big Dumb Company’s service is mediocre and their products stink. They get the business anyway. Ain’t it great?

5. Prospects assume you can’t deliver the goods… a competitor you know is inferior, they think is superior. The customer goes with your rival. You helplessly watch the sale evaporate. Six months later the customer calls you & tells you their project is an unmitigated disaster. The customer is livid, but it’s too late to re-start the project and pick YOU.

6. You hate it when a hot prospective customer Googles your company and finds some moaner on a discussion forum (you bent over backwards to solve her problem but she slammed you anyway) – and you lose business. They know nothing about the hundreds, even thousands of satisfied customers you serve.

7. You hate sending emails that go into black holes; making phone calls that get blocked by gatekeepers, mailing big fancy packages to potential JV partners and getting silence; doing JV’s with pond-scum promoters who couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag; product launch attempts that go nowhere for lack of cooperation; begging for links from other websites, getting the scraps.

8. You hate that when your Google traffic stops, your business stops. You wish you had some kind of air cover, some kind of “Good Karma” that would rain customers on you even when you’re not paying through the nose for clicks.

9. You hate angling for slots as a conference speaker and standing in line for thin rations of your customers’ time. You hate making repeat phone calls to prospects to “follow up”; you hate feeling needy.

10. You hate it when people automatically believe your competition instead of you – because they’ve got more magazine articles, more links, more testimonials, more visibility, more STREET CRED.

I learned this stuff the hard way. My first few years in sales were a long, hard road.

First sales job: I was a manufacturer’s rep and I was selling this Very Cool network technology that I thought everybody ought to get their hands on. It was exponentially better than “the conventional way of doing things” and I was just sure customers were going to snatch this out of my hot little hands.

They weren’t buying… but they were at least listening. (OK, I gotta qualify that. Some of them were listening between bites of free pizza after I’d bought for them, after I’d pounded through gatekeepers and begged for appointments just to get in front of them. Sure they were listening… with skepticism.)

I pounded the pavement for months, educating every company I could find about the marvelous benefits of this hot new technology. I crisscrossed the Chicago area in my beige Ford Taurus seeking anyone who would listen to me.

I sponsored lunch & learns, Dog & Pony Shows, demonstrations…. catered lunches, gave impassioned presentations… I pumped myself up in the mirror every day. “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and people like you.”

I reassured myself, “Dude, one of these days all these deals are gonna start popping and yer gonna get yerself some mighty fine commission checks.”

At one point I started to notice that every time I went to see a customer, I would see a little book on his desk. My competition had written a booklet and they were offering it for free in all the trade magazines etc.

Their handy little book was going out everywhere. It was saturating the industry. My competition was cherry-picking the best customers and wowing them with great demonstrations and credibility.

One by one, all those “awesome deals” I was about to reel in started falling apart.

Again and again customers would wanly smile and shake my hand. “Perry, we decided to go with BRAND X instead. But thanks for all the information and advice. It helped us a lot, really it did.”

You’re welcome, sir. Glad to have provided the wonderful education and free doughnuts.

I would drive home and tell my long-suffering wife I’d lost another sale.

My competitors completely ate my lunch. Ain’t it fun, living out “Death Of A Salesman” every day? I did not get one single technology sale, even though I broke the ice and did a year of costly missionary work.

It was a hard, hard lesson in something that I would someday become an expert in:
Building Credibility.

One of the most powerful spells your competitors can ever hold against you is to seem like they’re “everywhere.” Nobody can go anywhere in your industry without hearing their name repeatedly… bumping into their information… getting their perspective instead of yours.

If you’re on the negative side of that equation, you do the hard, back-breaking missionary work and SOMEBODY ELSE swoops in at the last minute and steals the sale.

If you’re on the positive side of that equation, other people do the hard, back-breaking missionary work and YOU swoop in at the last minute and steal the sale.

(Which way do you want it?)
If your business in any way relies on your knowledge, expertise or credibility, then there is ONE advantage that instantly makes you superior to all your competitors. This advantage moves your products off the shelf, lands you the hottest gigs, pays you the highest fees, and even generates links to your website every single day. It stimulates a cycle of success that spikes your income.

Other Perry Marshall Videos:

B2B Marketing Kit

80-20 Facebook Express

80-20 Landing Page Conversion Express

Perry Marshall - Consulting Accelerator Blueprint

Perry Marshall - Express Productivity

Perry Marshall - AdWords Bootcamp 2012

Perry Marshall - Facebook Firestorm 1 and 2

Look Over Perrys Shoulder