Each successful sales pitch or marketing campaign mainly hinges on believability.

Buyers need to believe–at an emotional level–that you are telling them the truth.

Believability–not cleverness or creativity–is what obliterates apathy.

Your prospect is a tougher critic than any manager, coach, or consultant you’ll ever know. I came to writing sales copy from background in business writing. I was well-trained in good schools to make sure arguments flowed logically and every factual point was correctly sourced and cited.

Fast forward into adulthood and working as a health-care manager and consultant, my executives would nitpick statistics and push hard to get details. It could get tough but there was one thing they never pushed hard on- a whether or not they truly believed the business plan.

As long as I made a well-formulated business case, my bosses and colleagues didn’t really care if my content was believable and struck the right emotional cords.

And why would they care? They didn’t need to put their own skin in the game and invest their own personal cash in what I was writing about. Their hopes and dreams didn’t hinge on what I had to say . But with sales and performance marketing, the story is drastically different .

One thing it took me a while to understand intuitively is that simply reciting features and benefits doesn’t convince most prospects. A mere factual claim—even with solid proof– is not always enough to make the sale. Prospects—-because they are humans and not robots—- have to feel what you were saying is true.

This is something I talk at length in my book, Business Baroque.

Lets’ be honest, a lot of the MVP software sold by startups can be created in a weekend hackathon. By the end of the weekend, you can have a pretty decent SaaS platform. You could have lots of interesting features– maybe even features more advanced than the competition.

But all that is still not enough to get trust from the buyer.

Now you’re not going to get trust because trust takes a long time in human relationships. Instead, what you need—according to the insightful Oren Klaff– is status. Done correctly, status is a good replacement for trust. The higher status you are, the more people will believe you.

So how do you convey status in your marketing—without coming off as a braggart ?

Well, part of it comes from experience– including failures and learning what not to do. Part of it comes from learning how to communicate effectively in an emotional way. Part of it comes from learning about persuasion.

P.S. My book shows business owners and entrepreneurs the exact steps for using creativity to make lots of money. It costs around $30 everywhere else, but if you join my daily email list by clicking the link below, you can have a digital copy for free.

Get it here: https∶//powerpersuasion.net/