Why This Sells Now | Annie's Training Center

When you finish this lesson you can

Explain the shift from searching to asking to someone who has never thought about it.
Explain what makes a business readable to an assistant, without jargon.
Say why the timing is unusual, and mean it.

The change, in one line

Search is not the only front door anymore. People ask now, they do not search.

For twenty-five years a customer typed three words into a box and got ten blue links, and the whole industry was built around being one of those links. A lot of customers now type a whole sentence into a chat window and get one answer back. Not ten. One, maybe three.

Why that matters to the guy with the tire shop

When there were ten links, being sixth still got you some business. When there is one answer, being described wrongly is the same as not existing.

And here is the part owners have usually never considered: the assistant is not choosing from a ranking. It is assembling an answer out of whatever information about that business it can find and trust. If the hours are wrong in three places, if the address on the website does not match the one on the map listing, if the site never actually says which towns they serve - the assistant either gets it wrong or leaves them out and moves on to the shop that is easier to read.

So what are we actually selling

Accuracy, completeness and structure. That is unglamorous and it is the entire product.

Every service we sell is a different way of making a business easier for both a person and a machine to understand.

Accurate - the same name, address, phone and hours everywhere they appear.
Complete - the services, the service areas, the questions customers actually ask.
Structured - written in a form that does not require guessing.
Current - because a business that changed its hours in March and its website in 2019 is teaching every assistant something false.

Why almost nobody is selling it

Most agencies are still selling the website-and-SEO package they were selling five years ago, because it still sells and rewriting a sales process is work. That is the opening. It will not stay open forever and it does not need to.

You are not early to marketing. You are early to this one thing. Say it that way - it is more believable and it happens to be true.

The way to open the conversation

Do not lead with the technology. Lead with the question the owner can answer.

Have you ever asked one of those chat assistants about your own business? Most owners have not. A fair number of the ones who have came away annoyed, because it got something wrong. That annoyance is the whole sale, and you did not have to promise anything to get to it.

Flashcards

Click a card to turn it over.

Check yourself

Nothing is recorded and nothing is scored. This is for you.

Why does inconsistent business information hurt more now than it used to?

Why: The mechanism is assembly, not ranking. Hard to read means wrong or left out.

What is the best way to open with an owner?

Why: Lead with a question he can answer. The technology explanation lands better after he is curious, and often is not needed at all.

An owner says his nephew already does his SEO.

Why: Do not attack the incumbent, and do not declare SEO dead - it is not. Open the gap that is genuinely not being covered.

Which is a safe, true thing to tell a prospect?

Why: State the problem truthfully. The moment you describe the output as something we control, you have made a promise you cannot keep.

Work to do away from the screen

Ask an assistant about a business you know well. Write down what it got wrong.
Write your opening question and the two follow-ups you would use after a yes and after a no.
Explain the shift to somebody in under sixty seconds without using the words optimisation, algorithm or platform.

Printable workbook (PDF)