How to change what your prospects believe
Dec 18, 2024
Which will bring you all the sales you want.
Let’s go back 100 years or so, to the 1920s.
Cigarettes were a big deal. Lots more people smoked than do now, because we didn’t know nearly as much about the health risks involved.
Plus, smoking looked awesome in black & white.
But there was one huge group of consumers who weren’t buying their daily or weekly pack of smokes and lighting up after dinner or while taking a break from their daily life.
Women.
And tobacco companies wanted to break into that vast, untapped market for their sweet, sweet, cancer sticks.
But up until the 1920s, social attitudes prevented most decent, respectable women from sparking up a cig.
However, in the roaring twenties people were shaking free of those 19th century ideals and really stepping into what it meant to be 20th century Americans.
And that included women smoking.
But the old taboos were still strong enough that advertisers couldn’t just come right out and show a picture of a woman smoking a cigarette with the slogan “Pass me another Camel, Mabel,” or something like that.
That would have risked slamming that door of possibility shut in too many women’s minds.
So what advertisers did was something a lot more subtle.
They started with something established: Men smoked.
And they took another established fact: men and women were often romantically involved with each other.
And then they built a bridge from those easy-to-accept propositions, to the more difficult one of women smoking.
Chesterfields did it with this brilliant ad, which first ran in 1927:
If you want a deeper explanation of the marketing psychology at work here, pick up a copy of Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz.
But because we talk about LinkedIn and B2B marketing and the like around here, let’s see how this principle applies to, say, selling agency services to 7-figure business owners, instead of trying to get flappers to pick up a Chesterfield.
3 things:
- Why prospects don’t believe your straight up claims
- Prospects don’t need to believe in your results, they need to believe in your mechanism
- Prospects need to have hope not just that it works, but that it works for them.
Why prospects don't believe your straight up claims
“Turn your expertise into a 7-figure coaching business”
We’ve all seen some version of this ad, this claim, this hook, thrown all over the place on social media, from Facebook to Youtube to LinkedIn.
And behind each of these ads is a guru crouched in front of a Lamborghini, talking about how effortless it is to become a 7-figure coach with “one simple hack” or something like that.
It happens in every market:
At first the simple claim is enough to get new customers: “Get clients online”
Then as more people enter that market, people have to enlarge on that basic claim: “Get 10 clients a month on autopilot”
And eventually the claims get so ridiculously overblown - “Become a 7-figure coach working 10 hours a week with One Quick Hack” that people stop believing that it’ll ever work.
And then something like AI enters the market, gives people a new thing to latch onto that they think will solve their problems, and the process starts all over again.
B2B buyers have seen every version of your claim.
They’ve seen every version of the exaggerated claim.
They’ve even seen every version of the ridiculously overblown (“I use AI to Earn $25K a day before I even get out of bed”) exaggerated claim.
And guess what?
Your prospects don’t believe it anymore.
Maybe they’ve tried similar products, courses, or services, and didn’t get anywhere near what they were hoping to.
Or maybe they’ve just been around long enough to know that the more hyped up and exaggerated the claims, the less likely it is that they’ll work.
But it’s not so much that they don’t believe it’s true for the business making the claim.
They probably do believe that the course creator, or the agency owner, has figured out how to make money… for themselves.
But your prospect doesn’t believe that it’ll work for them.
Because we all know (or suspect) that the people at the top have some sort of advantage that we normal people don’t.
Rich parents.
Connections.
Or just the ability & desire to work 70 hours a week because they’re 24 and single while you’re in your 40s, married, with a mortgage and 2 kids in high school.
So putting the basic claim - or the exaggerated version of it - in your LinkedIn content, in your newsletters, or in your live events doesn’t help your prospects.
In fact, it switches their “I believe” switch firmly to the off position.
They don’t care if you fixed something for yourself.
Or if you helped a different business do it.
They don’t believe it will work… for them.
So don’t fight against this natural skepticism.
Making a bigger claim about how awesome you are, or showing more & more of your happy clients who have already gone through the transformation you help with…
That won’t help someone who’s skeptical to believe it will work for them.
Instead, you need to make content that focuses more on the beginning of the transformation.
Where were you before you figured this all out?
Where were your clients before they met you?
That’s where your prospects are now, so that’s where you need to meet them.
Not at the end of the journey, but somewhere closer to the beginning.
So instead of figuring out a better way to phrase the benefits that you bring… think of the problems you solve. And spend more time writing posts, newsletters, video scripts, and live event outlines that address the problem, instead of just talking about the result.
And once you’ve created a lot of good content about the problem itself, you’re still not ready to jump to the results.
There’s still a massive amount of skepticism that you need to overcome.
So it’s time to start diving into your unique mechanism.
Prospects don’t need to believe in your results, they need to believe in your mechanism
So I’m a hunter, and not a very experienced one. Rather than reliably filling my freezer with venison, I do a lot of what my dad calls “camping and hiking with guns.”
And just like with any B2B service, there’s a lot of different things that go into success with deer hunting.
Now imagine that there’s a hunter who, unlike me, keeps the freezer full with fresh, tasty wild game meat.
And he tells me “it’s because of my scope.”
So I buy the same scope. And I get nothing.
Then he tells me “It’s the camo I wear”
So I buy the same camouflage and hit the woods, to no avail.
“Oh, it’s my tree stand”
So I buy that brand of tree stand. And return home empty-handed.
And eventually I find out that he’s hunting on the family ranch, in a valley that’s been home to a huge deer population since his great-grandfather’s day.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting on a piece of public land where the deer are all scared away by dirtbike riders.
His success has nothing to do with his gun, his camo, or his tree stand: it’s the spot.
And this happens all the time in B2B, and your clients *know it*.
The big results claimed by some lead gen agency like “20 qualified calls a month” don’t necessarily translate from industry to industry, or from business to business.
Situations are just too different. And savvy buyers are aware of that fact.
So you don’t need to just convince them that you’ve done something great.
You need to convince them that it’ll work for them.
And to do that, your prospect needs to understand how your solution works.
If they clearly understand that, they’ll be able to decide whether it makes sense for them to invest.
Plus, knowing how the solution works can give them confidence: it’s not because they don’t have a huge sales team, it’s not because they don’t have a 100K person email list, etc.
It’s just because they haven’t done the thing you’re suggesting.
But if they don’t understand how your “20 qualified client calls a month” system works, they’re just as likely to assume that it won’t work for them… Even if they believe it works for you and for other people.
So in between creating content about the problem you solve and content that brags about your results, include a healthy dose of explanation of the mechanism behind how your solution works.
And if you can clearly articulate the problems you solve, the mechanism of your solution, and the results you help create, you can start to give your prospects something very powerful:
Hope.
Giving your prospects Hope. Hope that it will work for them.
We all know about the placebo effect.
Doctors give someone sugar pills but say that it’s a treatment instead.
But interestingly… The person gets better anyway.
And you’d think that if the only thing that mattered was the mechanism - the drug in this example - then the placebo would have no effect at all.
Yet so often, it does.
Hope is an incredibly powerful form of belief.
When we believe that something will work to solve our problems, a mysterious force starts nudging us in the right direction.
From the unconscious process of healing a chronic condition…
To the grueling journey of building a business or growing an agency from 1M to 5M a year.
Hope has a huge effect on whether or not something will work.
And like we’ve already seen, just stating the results isn’t enough to create that hope.
But showing your prospects the combination of
- Problems they recognize
- A solution mechanism they can understand & apply to their own situation
- A history of results
…Well that… That does create hope.
Hope that the previously unattainable is in fact within reach for your prospect.
And once they believe that it’s possible, the process is already in motion.
They’re more likely to close than the skeptical buyer who just buys because you offered them a great price.
And once they become a client, the hopeful person is more likely to get the most out of your services compared to someone who believes that they’re destined for a lifetime of struggle.
And how we create this hope isn’t a mysterious art available only to a select few marketers, big-tent preachers, and Tony Robbins types.
It’s simply about focusing on the right things in your marketing.
Conclusion
We often can’t jump straight to the point with our marketing, our LinkedIn posts, our newsletters, or our live events.
Your prospects are too skeptical. They might believe that change is possible, but they can’t necessarily believe that they, themselves could make such a big change.
So instead of leading with your big, amazing results the way so many B2B people do, you need to
Build a bridge of belief from where your prospects are now, to where they want to be.
And you do that not by making better & better claims about your results, but by creating content about:
- The problems you solve, and the people you’ve helped in their “before” state.
This is crucial for getting past prospects’ initial skepticism. Show them people they recognize. Show them symptoms that they’re feeling.
This gets the initial belief of “oh, this could be for me.”
And then, making content about:
- The mechanism that makes your solution work.
This is how you get past that skepticism of “oh that might work, but it wouldn’t work for me.”
Clearly showing how your solution works helps people map that onto their own situation, their own business, & their own problems.
They can visualize how it could work for themselves, and see how it’s different from other things they may have tried that didn’t work.
And then - and only then - should you show these people content about
- Your results.
Once you’ve built the belief bridge for your prospects, and showed them that people just like them had problems just like their problems…
…And those people solved those problems with a clearly articulated mechanism…
…Then they’re ready to believe that they too can experience results like the ones you promise.
And that hopeful belief is the momentum that will carry them through the rest of your sales process.
So make sure that your LinkedIn feed, your newsletters, and your live events have a liberal helping of each of these 3 elements, and watch clients start coming your way.
