To give you a simple example close to home: Here at our digital sales and marketing agency, the Sales Lion, we also utilize an assignment selling process with our prospects. And keep in mind, our clients are other businesses, not consumers.

Because we get a very high number of leads coming into our system, we need to make sure that we’re working with good fits and not bad fits. We want to make sure we’re dealing with informed and educated clients versus those who really have no clue as to what we are and the services we provide—people who haven’t done any research whatsoever.

In our case at the Sales Lion, we have a two hundred-page e-book entitled Inbound and Content Marketing Made Easy. Any prospect or company who approaches us through our site must read this e-book before they can have a conversation with me.

You may be wondering how we introduce this e-book to the prospect. Well, the prospect generally contacts us through a form on our website and says, “I would love to set up a phone consultation.”

We then respond with an e-mail that looks something like this:

Hello, Mr./Mrs. Jones. Thank you so much for contacting us here at the Sales Lion. In your contact form, you requested a phone consultation with us. We certainly look forward to that conversation. But, in order to make it the most productive conversation for both parties, and in order to help you get the most out of the experience, we have attached an e-book for you to read before we speak. This e-book is the core of all our philosophy here at the Sales Lion. If you read this and feel good about what you see herein, you will know that we are a good fit for you as well as your needs. By the same token, if you read this and it does not align with your philosophies, you will also know if we are a bad fit for your current needs. Once you have completed the e-book, please respond to this e-mail so that we can set up a time to have our conversation. And, if you have already read the e-book, please just let me know and we will get that call set up right away. Sincerely, Marcus.

Let’s talk about a couple of things you just read in that e-mail that make it unique:

• You will notice how the communication is based upon the principle that if the prospect does certain things, they will have a better experience. This is much more effective than saying, “Hey, Mr./Mrs. Jones, I really don’t know if you’re worth my time. In order to tell whether you are, please read this.”
• The second principle that you will notice from that e-mail is the principle of disarmament, which we discussed in chapter 18. Here is how we have used disarmament with our prospect:
  • We have come right out and admitted that there is a chance that we will not be a good fit for them.
  • We have allowed the prospect to feel like they are in charge of identifying whether we are a good fit or not. But in reality, we are identifying whether they are a good fit for us.
  • We have allowed them to feel like they are in total control of their buying decision. The most successful salespeople in the world understand that one of the great keys to sales is helping the prospect feel like they are the ones making the buying decision. As human beings, we want to feel like we are in charge of our destiny and that nobody is telling us what to do.

Now, you may be thinking, Marcus, there is no way somebody is going to read two hundred pages of an e-book before your initial conversation!

I’m here to tell you that, once again, that is simply not the case. The only ones who are not willing to do this are the ones who are a bad fit for our company.

Look at it like this: If somebody reads two hundred pages of my words, my thoughts, my teachings, and my philosophy on sales and marketing, and then they come to me for a quote or proposal, they are unlikely to be also getting a bunch of other quotes because of a lack of confidence in me and my company.

The fact is, after reading two hundred pages of my teachings and philosophy, they either love me or hate me.

If they hate me, that’s fine. We skip the phone conversation, acknowledge that it’s a bad fit, and save each other time.

If they love me, it means I will have a much shorter sales cycle and a much more productive conversation with the prospect.

As you might imagine, the exact same thing is true with this book. There will be people who read this book and absolutely hate it. That’s not a problem.

There will be another set who read it, want to apply its principles to their businesses (or vendors, conference, and the like) and contact me to discuss.

Assuredly, the sales cycle for those calls will not be very long. The work has already been done.

I have just given you two examples. One applies when you are selling a product and the other applies when you are selling a service.

I reiterate that we’ve worked with companies of all shapes and size that have made this work for them in their own way. A few key principles remain consistent, namely:

• Every e-mail sent out by your company’s sales team is a teaching opportunity. So, stop sending out e-mails—especially e-mails of the sales variety—that do not include content that teaches the prospect or customer. It simply doesn’t make sense.
• As you can see, your salespeople are the ones who are using the content in their sales process. If you are going to implement assignment selling and use content in your company’s sales process, the salespeople need to be informed and aware of the content that is being produced. In the following chapter, I talk about this very point and the incredible need for sales and marketing departments to become completely aligned into one unit, without silos.