“Every battle is won before it is fought”
– Sun Tsu/Bill Belichick
Earlier this week, I joined an awesome training by Joe Schriefer of Agora that may very well change the way I write sales pages and do launches.
If you want to check it out, it’s the “Copyboarding” training inside Copy Chief. Basically, it’s the technique Agora has been using to help newbie copywriters rip out 7-figure sales pages that only take about 3-5 days to write. (And these are loooooong sales letters.)
It fits in beautifully with the customer-awareness level stuff I’ve been rambling about the past few weeks.
The idea is this: You hook the reader with a compelling headline and lead (which I break down more here.)
Once the reader is engaged, they’re going to have dozens of doubts and objections.
“How do I know this will work for me?.” “But I’m not an expert”, “Why should I believe you?” etc.
The idea is to brainstorm all of the objections your customer will have in regards to your product ahead of time.
Then, organize them based on the order they will come up. From there, your sales page is just a matter of resolving one objection after the next.
Lots of sales pages do this naturally. You see people explain who they are before introducing price. Because “why should I listen to you” is the objection that pops up before “how much does this cost”?
There’s a lot of other important stuff to get through before you get to price. Which is why it’s towards the end.
Just the act of writing down out allllllll (I mean ALL) your customer objections and having ready-to-go answers will be huge.
But laying them out in the order they show up in your reader’s head provides tremendous clarity for your writing. Because while X, Y, and Z are all amazing benefits your product provides, not all of them matter to your reader just yet. Right now, you’ve got to focus on objection A. Because that’s the big screaming doubt in your client’s mind. Until that’s resolved, you’re not going to move them along the path of buying.
Once you resolve it, some other concern will arrive. So you resolve that and continue until they’ve reached the end of your pitch/sales page and have no more doubts or concern.
Of course, this all hinges on your ability to hook the reader in the first place. Which means you’ve got to get them to see you can give them a unique advantage in an area they care about. So things like figuring out your audience, finding a great hook, identifying your unique selling proposition, etc are all still important.
Now I haven’t tested this yet, but I see no reason why you can’t apply this same system to your sales funnel. Because a launch or evergreen funnel is basically a “sideways sales letter” as Jeff Walker puts it.
Once you paint the picture and get them to see the unique benefit you provide, you can spend the rest of the emails taking them on this journey of resolving their concerns as they come up. (Which, again, is basically what great funnels/sales letters are doing anyway.)
That’s just a super high-level overview. The training, which was put on by Agora copywriter Joe Schriefer, is great for copywriters and biz owners. I highly recommend you check it out in Copy Chief. It can shave a whole lot of time and help you avoid the crippling doubts/self-loathing that has a way of creeping in when writing long sales letters 😉
I’m not an affiliate or anything. Just thought this was awesome and wanted to share.
Brian
P.S. Tax tip! My friend just told me that his accountant told him that if you file a tax extension you have less of a chance of getting audited by the IRS. Reason being, they have a quota to hit for audits. So they try to get most of them done early because they don’t know how much they’ll have to work with once the extension comes in.
So, fun fact.