How To Sell Less To Make More Money

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is the List Building Lifestyle, a podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, then this podcast is for you. I also invite you to attend a free workshop at Igor.ac where I’m teaching how I made $21,779.45 in affiliate commissions by sending just 481 clicks to my affiliate link in one day.

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Welcome back to another edition of the List Building Lifestyle with your host, Igor Kheifets. Very few purchases in the world are commodity purchases. Very few purchases are all about the product. They’re more about the person buying as well as the person selling. For example, many of your buying decisions are actually identity statements that you’re making to show other people what you’re all about or to prove to yourself and show to yourself to be in line with your identity or your personality.

For instance, one of the reasons why I chose driving a Mercedes S class is because of the identity of a successful business owner. I didn’t get a Lexus of equal sort of… of equal setup, right, because a Lexus is an old person’s car. So my identity of being a young, successful business owner, it goes against what Lexus stands for or the reputation Lexus has in the market. So that’s why I would probably never get a Lexus until I’m older or unless something really weird happens. So that’s an identity purchase.

Now, another type of purchase and that’s the most prevalent purchase in the online marketing world, especially when it comes to selling, coaching, consulting, any sort of advice, any sort of information, people tend to buy into a guru, a father or a mother, a coach, someone that they can basically relieve their responsibility to. So a great example is my friend Tammy Montgomery, the Fearless Momma, and she’s sort of like the momma. She is exactly… Like the branding is so spot on because she basically takes people by the hand, and she tells them, “Look. Come with me. I’ll show you the way. I’ll take care of you. I’m going to be your momma.”

Now, there’s a power in that identity, in that positioning because people do want a guru, or a mother or a father figure, a coach. Someone who knows the path that they’re embarking on and somebody who will take them on that path with the least resistance, with the fewest mistakes possible, with the highest level of safety and predictability as they can get, and only someone experienced who is also very confident about the journey can take on that positioning, but here is where the paradox is occurring.

Now, most people who get into the information marketing or online marketing space needs to eventually start selling these products themselves. Right? They can’t really make money until they sell something, until they market a product, and the way most people prefer to market a product is not by basically building their own presence or building their own persona, but rather by having… by sort of latching on, if you will, to someone else’s titty.

What this means is that they don’t want to be the guru. They don’t want to be the father or the mother figure. They don’t want to be the coach. They don’t want to be the person who carries that responsibility and has to appear confident and certain in front of a crowd. They don’t want to be that. They prefer to stay in the shadows, but here’s… The paradox is it occurs when they don’t realize that the reason they signed up with someone else is precisely the thing that they need to become, but rather they refuse to become that thing and they try to attract people without stepping into those shoes, which of course always ends up with the same result, and that is… Well, maybe not always. Maybe most of the time ends up with the same result, and that is not making a lot of money.

Now, some marketers find the golden middle where they show just enough presence to be visible and to appear that guide, that guru, that father or mother figure, and then channel people into other programs where they are not the star, where they are not the leader, and that’s fine because they do enough of that. They do enough of presence. They have a big enough presence in their customers’ lives for the customer to recognize that they could be that figure, but most people don’t.

It weirds me out. It pisses me off because they all want the same thing. They all want a duplicatable system that will allow them not to work, like not to show their face. Many people, in fact, they’re even afraid to show their identity online in the first place, which is… For some of them, it makes sense, but for most, not. For most people… or will be perfectly fine if they show their identity online, but they just don’t want to do it because it’s too much of a risk for them, for a risk of being “exposed” or risk of having to take responsibility for someone or something, and that scares the living crap out of people, but that’s exactly why. That is precisely why they are not succeeding.

That is precisely why people, even if they are interested in joining your program, end up buying from someone else because they cannot make the leap from being interested to being engaged to then becoming a customer unless they feel that certainty and security throughout the path, unless they have someone to latch onto and for that someone to guide them by the hand.

It just does not work like that. There’s always has to be a guide because even if you think of all the major religions, people don’t just go and reach out to God. People don’t just leave everything like the Jews did not just drop everything and went out to like on the journey, right? They had to wait for Moses. Same thing for Jesus. Jesus had to show up before people sort of woke up. Same thing for Mohammad, right? Same thing again, like no one does anything unless there’s a profit, unless there’s someone with a message that encourages people to follow him or her.

Well, in religion, because of the ancient times when it was written, of course, it was a him, but today, we have plenty of prophets who are female. We’ll probably see more and more of these profits appear as a result of just the society advancing and recognizing that men can be as effective as women and vice versa.

Yo, it’s Igor. If you’re loving the content, hop on over to listbuildinglifestyleshow.com for more free training and a free transcript of this episode. Oh, and I’d really appreciate if you logged into iTunes and rated the show. It really helps. Thanks.

So point being is that no one will step outside their comfort zone unless invited to do so by a reputable or a trustworthy guide A.K.A. the prophet that says, “Hey, I got the keys to the book of the future. I know what’s going to happen, and I know how to make sure you are on the safe side when it does.” So obviously, in religions, they sort of scare people into doing it. They talk about the Judgment Day and things like that, but in the real world, while you can scare people, and there’s probably a fair amount of scaring I do myself, there’s also has to be a positive sort of change aspect to it. Meaning, that people need to strive towards something.

So when you combine these two elements, having a powerful prophet, a presence, or persona… Again, it doesn’t have to be the actual business. So if you’re an affiliate, you can become that prophet for your people. So when you become that prophet and you preach the message of change that’s possible for everyone, all of a sudden, people are willing to work with you. They want to give you money. They almost insist on working exclusively with you because they need someone to grab onto. They need that certainty. They need that predictability. They need to know what that path looks like, and they cannot figure it out on their own, which brings us to another point about affiliate marketing, which a lot of people don’t really consider.

You see, people think that affiliates are kind of like these, if you will, almost dirty creatures of the online marketing world as if they’re vultures trying to feed off someone else’s work. Now, besides bringing in the customer or making the sale for the product owner, which is the greatest benefit of the product owner, there’s a huge benefit in being an affiliate marketer for a prospect or a consumer who is on the fence because as an affiliate, you can become that figure, that leader for them to make the transition from thinking about solving a problem to actually solving the problem using some sort of product, or tool, or service.

As an affiliate, you’re doing them a huge service, huge service by appearing in front of them with the right message at the right time because if you don’t, if you don’t, they will never be able to overcome their disbelief or their self-doubt, and they will continue struggling with the same problem for years. So as an affiliate, right, your job is to become that prophet, is to become that figure, is to become that leader in order for people to even be open to the message from the affiliate product you’re promoting.

Now, of course, if you’re the prophet for your own product, which is great, you’re doing them two services, right? For one, you become that someone for them to take them over the bridge, and two, of course, you’re getting them that solution. So again, this requires a reframe for most people listening right now because most people think of selling and marketing as a bad thing, even though they recognize how important it is and they recognize that nothing happens until a sale happens.

They also believe that it’s pushy. It’s sort of like this hype-y profession, right, that sits… It’s the job of making claims. Well, the reality is in our industry, at the very least in our industry, that’s not true. The job is to be a prophet that preaches the message of change and offers the keys to the kingdom of the future or to the book of the future. Meaning, that you’re not there to push them into sales. Like people actually cannot be pushed into a sale.

I don’t believe people can be because if they want it, they’re buying it. If not from you, then from someone else. If not today, then two days from now. If not for this price on these terms, then on a payment plan, on some other term. If not for cash, then with financing, but they… If they want it, they will buy it. That’s a given, so you can’t really sell someone something they don’t want. The sales conversation can only take place if they actually want it.

However, most people believe that selling is bad and that salespeople or marketers push those sales on their customers, and they have this negative vibe about it. So the way that I shifted that because I had that happen to me as well. I mean, I come from a very analytical background, army, a junior engineer in electronics, so like we were never taught to think creatively or to be entrepreneurial. Like I was taught to get orders, follow orders, keep my mouth shut, and make sure my environment is clean, and that I was like… That was my education, so I had to go through the same reframe and understand that I’m not really even selling products anymore. I am selling a message, I’m selling the prophecy, if you will. I’m selling the keys to the book of the future.

When I made that shift, when I went from being a marketer selling a product to becoming a prophet, okay, preaching a message, my business changed. My business became much easier and smoother, and all of a sudden, the connection that I’ve had with my people, the level of intimacy I was able to achieve with my subscriber base, the amount of sales I was able to make as an affiliate when I was promoting stuff, it was… I mean, it just went up significantly because my message changed and the way I carried myself delivering that message changed with it.

So right now, I’ll leave you with this. If you’ve got an affiliate product you’re promoting, you should probably figure out what is that message that that affiliate product that you’re promoting is actually saying, and then go spread that message. When people consume the message and ask you more… to learn more about it, you can then point them to the affiliate product.

Now, if you’re selling your own product, then you’ve got even more thinking to do because you now need to figure out the message you want to carry into this world that would eventually lead to people doing business with you, and that will be a much better question to ask yourself than what’s the next marketing tactic you should try. Think about that. Trust me, it can change your business. So with that said, this concludes another episode of the List Building Lifestyle. I’m your host, Igor Kheifets, and until next time we chat, have a good one.

Thank you for listening to the List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, the transcription of today’s show as well as other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also, don’t forget to claim your free seat at the workshop I’m hosting this week where I show the two-step system that made me the top affiliate for people like Matt Bacak, John Crestani, Richard Legg, Michael Cheney, and many, many others.

In fact, on this workshop, I’m going to show you the exact approach I take whenever I promote an affiliate offer, the exact offers I promote as well as how I was able to make over half a million dollars in commissions using my small list of just 18,000 people promoting a weird type of product that almost no one else promotes. All that is yours at Igor.ac, so go ahead, claim your seat right now, and I’ll see you there.