Teach, Don't Sell

Teaching, Not Selling In Sports I played baseball in high school and believe I had one of the greatest coaches ever. Each member of our team knew by the way he taught us and guided us each day that he knew what he was talking about, and we bought into what he was “selling,” which honestly wasn’t anything other than hard work, team work, being the best we could possibly be, and to have fun. Because we were bought in, we were massively successful, and he saw the return on his time that he invested in us and the program.

Teaching, Not Selling In Business

I want to take this back to the business world. It’s really no different. Once your potential customers know that you know what you’re talking about and that you truly want to help them solve their problems, not just turn them into a customer, you can get them to buy into what you’re “selling” without even having to sell anything at all. It’s really quite magical. Let’s now take this to a real world example. I have a lot of friends who own and/or work for solar power companies. I love the way they approach their door to door sales efforts. When they first knock on someone’s door, each rep is prepared to educate on the benefits of installing solar panels on the home. I’m not an expert in this space, but after talking with some friends, some of the benefits include a higher resell value of the home, lower monthly energy bill, the chance to sell back excess energy to the local power company, etc. In most cases, they don’t even bring up the cost to engage until the customer is educated, bought in, and ready to roll. Now, if only they would take the same model online… and let me do their marketing 🙂

Getting Started With The Teach, Don’t Sell Model

Hopefully, you can clearly see the power of the teach, don’t sell model. Yes, it requires a significant time investment in terms of creating the resources to educate prospects and establish trust with them, but the long-term return is phenomenal. To get started, we recommend using the hub and spoke model for content creation. Simply put, the hub is the all-inclusive resource that educates prospects on a certain topic. This piece of content traditionally comes in the form of a guide or eBook and is somewhere around 30-50 pages in length. Again, all inclusive. This piece of content should be gated, meaning a website visitor cannot get access to it without providing an email address, therefore generating a lead for you. What you do with that lead is totally up to you. We recommend building a marketing automation workflow and start dripping emails to them. The spokes are either supporting content that is 100% unique or repurposed pieces of content from the original guide or eBook. These typically come in the form of blog posts posted on your own blog or industry blogs with decent followings. The goal here is to drive traffic to the spokes, hook your audience with your amazing content, and lead them back to the hub to get the full resource and generate the lead. Pretty simple, huh? Again, the trick here is to teach, don’t sell. The moment a prospect feels like you’re being promotional or trying to sell them something, you’re toast — so don’t do it. Obviously, this is what we do day in and day out for our clients. Let us know if you have any questions about any of this. We believe there’s a better way to do marketing. We believe there’s a better way to connect businesses and consumers. Here’s to changing the way all businesses approach sales and marketing!]]>