I was almost gleeful when I came upon this quote in an article about “How to Sell Better in 13 Simple Words” in Inc magazine. When I read that a famous speaker who makes 6-figures with every talk said the same thing about brevity and clarity making you more hireable, I almost cried with happiness.

Clarity Makes More Money

Everyday in the business of teaching businesses how to market themselves, I have to push them to become more clear. More clear about who they target, what pain point they solve and what words their target uses about the pain they’re in. There is tremendous resistance to getting clear. People refuse to do the outreach to find out the information. People refuse to let go of serving multiple markets with multiple services and products and it all goes nowhere. But when I hear a successful colleague touting the same advice, I have to applaud!

Simple Gets Hired

I’ll never forget the story of how producers of the movie Alien sold it to investors in 30 seconds flat. They said “imagine Jaws in Space” and history was made. When you simplify what you do when you’re explaining your job, people get it and they want to pay you for solving that problem that you’re saying you’re an expert in. People buy what they understand. For example, when my IT Consultant client launched a new sub-brand based on our research, called “On Hold Rescue” for the Healthcare industry, things became crystal clear for their marketing. They knew where to network, who to talk to and what the pain was. They started sparking interest with buyers even before their new website was finished!

Brave Enough To Turn Off People

The absolute best part about this advice on “How to Sell Better” is the caveat to this rule of simplicity. That by choosing to niche down to a specific, specialized target and pain point, that you can be turning people off who are not in that target or suffering from that pain. The collective advice of business experts to that problem? Be brave enough to do it and be ok with it. You don’t WANT to target everyone. You don’t WANT to specialize in everything. You want to be a very skilled, micro-niched, highly paid expert.

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