Have you ever thought about the difference between conviction and convincing when marketing your business? In this post, I want to talk about how that relates to the push-pull of inbound and outbound sales and marketing.

If you feel like your job is convincing people that they need what you offer, you’re in an uphill battle. The thing is, if you think someone has to be talked into your service, product or your offer, you haven’t bought in. You haven’t convinced yourself that what you’re offering matters.

So you end up doing this song and dance. Once you get someone on the phone, you might think; I don’t even know what I’m doing here. But the person who stands in conviction knows what they’re offering is valid and knows what they’re doing makes a difference. That person gets leads coming to them.

The Difference Between Conviction and Convincing When it Comes to Sales

You still may do some outbound research along with calling, pitching and selling. If you’re using the internet to run and operate your business, you have to be good at sales in order to scale things. Emma and I were talking about this on Facebook Live in our group recently.

To me, sales and marketing go hand in hand. One is the short game and one is the long game. If you need to make money this month, you need to be on the phone with the people in your network and seeing how you can help them.

If you want to build a sustainable business in the long run, you need to start building marketing systems where you start talking about the things that you’re an expert in. That way, you can connect with people in a real and meaningful way. This tends to happen at a slower pace as opposed to all at once.

How Your Marketing Plan Gains Traction Over Time

You may feel like you’re doing all this marketing and all these videos but you’re not getting much traction. But when 6, 8, or even 12 months go by, you might look at your calendar and realize you’re booked with people that you didn’t have to convince to do anything. They’ve already bought into you.

The conviction that you have that your product, service, or offer is valuable to the people who have the problem that you solve shines through. Your close rate goes up because you have the right people on the phone. You have the right mindset and attitude when you get on the phone yourself and that’s what makes the difference.

How to Convince and Convict Yourself First

So yes, there’s a key difference between conviction and convincing. You need to convince yourself because if you are talking to the wrong audience, no amount of convincing will work. But say you are an orthodontist and you’re going after the over 60 crowd. You can have 100,000 conversations and still not get one new braces patient because you can’t convince somebody that they have a problem that they don’t feel like they have.

I find this with me and my business. The one thing that helps with convincing yourself is to really narrow down what it is you offer. For a long time, I was just offering marketing. It’s still a really good way to distinguish myself in the market. Now I have a focus on video content, and of course, we’ll still write people sales pages, create the websites and build sales funnels. But when I focus on video, I can then prospect so much easier.

I can look at companies that I want to work with and see where their video gaps are. It’s harder to do that if you do just general marketing because if you go to somebody’s website looking for some evidence that they’re doing marketing, you’ll find it. Even if it’s old or ineffective.

So narrowing down until you’ve convinced yourself will help you build that conviction muscle. Most people who I work with do not need help convincing themselves that what they offer is valid. But what I see online a lot are people who are just getting started in this world. The first step toward conviction is convincing yourself.

If you’re up for talking about how I can help you build that conviction muscle, click here to book a call with me. I’d love to chat with you.