Guest Post: How to Persuade the Anon Way

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This is a guest post from Joshua Lisec, a friend of the BowTied Jungle. He quotes us (BowTiedBull) and praises BowTied Sales Guy in his #1 international bestseller So Good They Call You a Fake, which BowTied Commoner interviewed him about. Like we said, friend of the Jungle.

Joshua is a world-class persuasive writer, and that’s why everyone wants him to be their ghostwriter. Enjoy this post—you’ll learn something you don’t already know. And it will work.

Take it away, ghost.

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You’ve seen this, haven’t you?

“Work With Me.”

It’s the call-to-action of every personal brand website. Think coaches, consultants, copywriters, coders, and so on. Like so:

Click through any one of these pages, and you’ve clicked through a dozen more. You’ll see navel-lint-gazing copy about “passion” and “vulnerability” and “badass vibes.” You’ll also get stories about how these professionals are “making space” and “creating income and impact” for clients.

It’s 99 percent bullshit. Yet it works. For 99 percent of them.

Or should I say, despite the bullshit. These personal brands are just that—personal. Real person. Real face. Real smile.

“Work With Me” works because the professional pitching their services has name recognition. People know them. Like them. Trust them.

Of course, the upside of the personal brandification of the internet is its downside. If any ole Joel can have a business, website, booking page, and services package, any ole Joel does. Everyone tries to differentiate themselves in the same way—“Are you a soul-fed badass entrepreneur like me?”—so no differentiation occurs. It is hilarious to me.

But not every corner of the Internet suffers from this strange disease.

A certain network of cartoons has each other. They start, fight, and win together. Personal brands are teams of one; a certain cartoon jungle is a team of titans in-the-making.

That said, building a business as an anon means you have the tabula rasa problem—you have no personal brand. No track record to rely on. You’re all “Work” and no “With Me” because there is no “Me.” At least not someone I can google around for references, results, and reviews.

So going anon as an entrepreneur is playing business on hard mode. After all, “It’s who you know” is the universal advice-shrug of professional success. But that’s standard fare. For below-average Joel.

The BowTied nation is a cut above. A network unlike any other. There’s something here for everyone.

But this network aims to sell real products to real people. Nobody wants the community to devolve into a network marketing-style s***show where all everyone does is pitch each other their own half-baked products; no actual customers are to be found.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Let me show you the way.

How to Persuade the Masses the Anon Way

Consider the humble beverage brand.

Let’s pick three.

Coca-Cola. Waterloo sparking water. Gatorade.

These work. Because every human in the Western world has guzzled one of these brands’ products in the last twenty-four hours.

Now, without googling . . . do you know the CEOs of all three? Some of you know the Coke exec because you just do. Fair enough.

But do you know about his “vulnerability” or his “passion”? Do you even care?

Turbo Autists and above already know the point I’m about to make. Personal branding doesn’t matter as much as Work With Me-rs believe.

Sure, there is a difference between a one-person micro-business and multi-billion-dollar corporation. But at day’s end—and midday and the plumber’s crack of dawn—it’s not about you. It’s not about “With Me.” It’s about the “Work.”

Specifically, the Jobs your work is about to Be Done.

Get The Job Done, and Nothing Else Matters

The unexpected capitalizations of that last sentence are a wee tribute to Jobs To Be Done theory, aka, JTBD. And I am a big fan.

Jobs To Be Done is the brainchild of multiple fathers—Tony Ulwick, Clayton Christensen, and Thomas J. Miller. Their innovation and go-to-market framework goes like this:

Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) Theory: In any given industry, customers buy “tools” to get “jobs” done. They choose the tool they perceive to be the best value for the price and their budget relative to the available alternatives.

Did you hear the dog that wasn’t barking? The tail that wasn’t wagging?

Yep—at no point does JTBD tell us “customers buy products from personal brands following their passion.”

Interesting. Don’t tell Life Coach Laura!

Understand Jobs To Be Done, I tell my author clients, and you are a hop, skip, jump, and a slide away from earning seven figures per year.

Which means your product has a job to be done. So show it doing that. And doing it well.

We’re speaking metaphorically here. We don’t mean a literal job job like accountant or IP lawyer or tantric Shibari therapist (I have lively clients, OK?).

By “job,” we mean a task to complete or a goal to accomplish that, if left unfinished, will cause loss and pain and regret and shame. Either because something was actually lost (e.g., “She turned me down because I look like Humpty Dumpty.”) or because an opportunity for great gain is slipping through their fingers (e.g., “How do I get that job without an MBA?”).

So! A job is what your offer gets done. And customers choose it because your offer can be shown to do it better than competing solutions. Those competing solutions are of course other products and services but also the status quo of jackdiddlynothingsquat. Sit, wait, and hope things change (they won’t). Give customers what they want or take away what they don’t, and you win. So simple a cartoon can do it.

Jobs to Be Done pervades all business, from top-of-funnel (ToFu) content to bottom-of-funnel (BoFu) product description and sales copy, even post-purchase thank-you automation and customer nurture emails.

Now, you probably caught that little bolded bad boy back up there didn’t you?

“. . . can be shown . . .”

And that my anonymous friend is where the JTBD rubber meets the money-printer-go BRRR road.

Multisensory Future Pacing and Some Homework to Get Results

In the publishing industry, we now know that readers don’t judge a book by its cover. They judge a book by the thumbnail of its cover and as much of the title that’s readable.

Few authors can rely on personal pull alone to sell a book. You know that type—that’s when your buddy goes, “Bro, did you hear? Giga McChad just released a new book! How did I miss that?” and then you go buy the book because it’s Giga and everybody buys his books.

What if you’re not Giga-famous? With Jobs To Be Done and a little help from our next persuasion friend, that doesn’t matter. I’ve seen my lesser-known author clients as de facto anons. Readers catch their book title in search results on Amazon, go Woah, that’s exactly what I need!, and buy despite never having heard of my clients before.

No name recognition? No problem.

Jobs To Be Done is customer-centered sales and marketing, focused on the customer’s needs rather than brand awareness, brand recognition, brand anything. That’s why it’s a pitch-perfect fit for low-name-recognition entrepreneurs and anonymous innovators, like the denizens of the BowTied Jungle.

And you can boil it down to a simple phrase-formula.

Jobs To Be Done, in 1 Sentence:

“When I _____, I want to be able to _____ so that _____.”

Thus begins your homework, anon.

Your product name, services package description, sales emails, signup pages, and more will all follow logically from however you fill in those blanks.

Remember those earlier examples? Let’s try those on for size. Pun intended.

“When I ask out an 8.5, I want to be able to attract her with my fit, disciplined physique so that she says yes.”

Or consider:

“When I apply for my dream job, I want to be able to meet the qualifications without an MBA (somehow) so that I am obviously the best candidate and get promoted.”

You can imagine 1,001 different businesses that can succeed by helping both people get what they want. And at no point do you need to be famous.

But what you do need is the ability to show that your offer works.

And now we finally pick up where the last section teased off—showing your product works. And I don’t necessarily mean show as in visuals of the thing in action.

I mean multisensory persuasion plus future pacing.

A few months ago, I wrote the sales copy for a wooden chess board’s Kickstarter. The initial campaign goal was $6,000. We did $1,912,092. How?

Multisensory future pacing, anon. That’s how.

Future pacing is the idea that you bring customers into the future to imagine in vivid detail how your product looks, feels, and sounds as it gets the job done for you—and how you look, feel, sound, and so on having gotten what you want.

Having a peek at that page and you’ll notice right away multisensory future pacing persuading customers to pre-order on the spot (which they did and 3,390 of them).

For example, the copy reads at one point:

Streaming the Brandenburg Concertos on your phone will never be as exciting as watching the orchestra perform them live. The same is true with chess.

Expert players are renowned for their graceful moves. Precise. Without hesitations. But so far, automatic boards have failed to imitate this, they have slow and robotic moves like claw machines.

The further you scroll down the page, the deeper you experience—the more you see, hear, and feel—the offer of your chess-fan dreams. Supporting photos and videos do also show the chess boards being built, the pieces being carved, and the software being programmed.

As an aside, if you’re going to say your product is “detailed,” you better f—-ing show it.

Otherwise you’re lying by omission.

So do the opposite—deepen the description of what you want customers to believe to be true, that your product is perfect for them and does what you claim.

And they will know because they can see it. Hear it. Feel it.

Just as I have used subtle multisensory future-paces throughout this poast so you are likelier to implement what you’ve read today.

You caught the meme contrasting Jobs To Be Done with personal brands. You might have had a physical response of laughter or at least a chortle. You noticed tactile language about dogs, rubber, roads, and printing money. I gave you the powerful visual of pyramid schemers selling each other’s products to each other without a single real customer in the room.

And I gave you a real example of what you might be able to see in your own future after implementing what I teach you—going from four-figure expectations to million-dollar revenue.

All this, you can do, too.

Now that you’ve peeked behind the advanced business persuasion curtain, reflect on the meaning for you—and how you can better persuade the anon way. Ask yourself:

How can your customers see your product is working?

How can your customers hear your product is working?

How can your customers feel your product is working?

How can your customers smell your product is working?

How can your customers taste your product is working?

Your answers are copy-and-paste-able headlines, product descriptions, email pitches, and more.

This is going to work. And the reason it is is going to work is you answer the all-important question every customer asks themselves consciously or unconsciously upon seeing or hearing a pitch:

What’s in it for me?

State with clarity what valuable job your offer gets done. Let them see, hear, feel, etc. the offer working to get that done. Then show customers what the future is like with that job being done.

At no point do you need to be anything other than anon. Personal brands are zeroes.

Because customers don’t care about some vulnerability backstory. They care about what they want—and how you will help them get it.

That’s how you win.

One more thing.

I’d like to close out this piece with another way for us to win together.

Business persuasion is the hot topic, but in practice, it’s hard. Why? There are so many tips, tactics, strategies, and secrets, it’s hard knowing what to do. Sifting through it all feels like sorting your kitchen’s “Where does this go?” drawer.

What we want is someone who knows that 95 percent of marketing and sales advice doesn’t work, and most vital of all, which 95 percent.

That someone is me.

If you dig content like mine that does a deep-dive into persuasion techniques that work, good news. There’s a lot more where today’s guest post came from. Click this link:

Best Way™ Persuasion

Sonic Autists’ Note from BowTiedBull:

Hey guys.

Consider joining Joshua’s Best Way™ Persuasion.

For $99, you get one curated persuasion strategy each month for your business. Simply explained with case studies, examples, and do-it-yourself steps like the above.

But what if you don’t have the time to implement it? There is the option to pay Joshua $2,500 to just do that month’s persuasion strategy for you.

I challenge you to find a more cost-effective use of your marketing budget.

The best way to think of Joshua’s $99/month offer is as a call option on buying a $2,500 done-for-you turnkey persuasion test for your business. So if you do, say, four tests a year, you’ll spend $11,200 on one of the best persuasion consultants out there.

And unlike most affiliate offers, Joshua’s putting his money where his mouth is. He’s paying us a bounty for each new subscriber he gets from this offer. The total is more than the subscription.

IYKYK

Since we don’t do affiliate fees but we do want to track conversion, we will put all the collected affiliate fees towards the next prank.

Equal opportunity, unequal results. Subscribe here:

Best Way™ Persuasion

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BTB Note

None of these links are affiliate links we don’t make anything. Joshua mentioned BTB in his popular book and is definitely a follower of the jungle.

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