When I pivoted my first company from video production company to marketing agency, I geeked out on the technical stuff.

I studied, read, watched videos, and spent countless hours listening to the marketing greats and perusing the Harvard Business Review.

I knew every term, every framework, every case study that could be applicable to my prospects.

And when I saw prospects, I unleashed my incredible knowledge and expertise on them, knowing that all of that learning would help them buy our services and get the best outcome they could possibly want.

And you know what happened? Nothing. We didn’t get customers… instead, they ran away!

It was so frustrating and demoralizing. I remember banging my head against the wall (sometimes literally) for months trying to figure out why nobody was buying when I clearly had the best solution for them.

Here's the problem that I was too stupid to understand...

The reason I got into marketing in the first place is because it gave me an emotional spark. I had an epiphany about how cool and effective marketing could be, and that epiphany came before any of the knowledge, experience and expertise that I developed after that moment.

See, when I was communicating with my prospects, I was trying to skip a step in that process. I was trying to go directly from awareness to interest in what I was selling, when in reality my own journey actually looked like this:

Awareness --> Epiphany --> Interest

I finally realized that my job wasn’t to make them an expert like me…instead, my job was to help them have that same epiphany, so they, too, could get excited about marketing and about what I could do for them.

That’s a different approach. That takes dumbing everything waaaaaaayyyyy down, eliminating the technobabble, and leaning heavily on emotional selling rather than logical selling (because remember, it’s about sparking passion, not about making a logical choice).

For instance, I could have just told you, "hey, talk to your customers like they’re idiots." But, instead, I told you the true story about how I struggled with this very thing.

Through that process, I (hopefully) helped you have the same epiphany I did: Effective selling is about bringing them on the same journey that you, yourself, had back at the very beginning, and helping them have the same emotional aha moment that will help them buy.

So what did we learn?

• Most salespeople try to take prospects from awareness to interest, but they’re skipping a step.
• The right journey is awareness --> epiphany --> interest.
• Think back on your own journey to becoming an expert in your business. What was it that sparked your passion?
• You must create that same spark in your prospect by helping them have the same epiphany that you had about why your product or service is so great.
• That’s an emotional sale, so leave the logic, technobabble and high-level concepts at home!