Align whatever it is that you sell, regardless of its price or its prospective buyers, regardless of media used, with the timeless, most fundamental motivations for parting with money. Fight the temptation and tendency to slip into selling based on your product or your service or your credibility — sell based on what actually motivates people to buy.

Fight the temptation and tendency to believe your prospect or client is overly sophisticated or intellectual or analytical and requires a more factual, logical, ‘high brow’ or professional sales approach. There is no such prospect or client.

Fight the temptation and tendency to insist your business is different. It isn’t. None are. Evaluate every word spoken or written, to be sure you are talking in the language of what people really want, what really motivates people to buy. Do no ad for men’s suit, luxury car, blue pill, red haired dog, private banking, investment in Macao, $10.00 child’s toy or 10-million dollar software system without talking in terms of what really motivates people to buy.

…..work hardest, longest, most diligently, studiously, aggressively, continuously at sharpening your skills at organizing words in a way that motivates people to part with their money. If you must be a nincompoop about some things, don’t let this be one of them. If you are to be a world class expert in any thing, let this be it.

Supposedly, I am a distant relative of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, generally credited with the now hopelessly antiquated “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Here is my new version, never antiquated, never to be antiquated:

Assemble the right words that truly motivate people, and deliver them by some effective means, and the world will open its corporate vaults and private piggy banks to you.

In short, what we work on most together, through every means: newsletters, recordings, telephone seminars, personal coaching, meetings, boot camps….the No B.S. Marketing Letter, Gold+, Look Over My Shoulder, a newsletter marketing to the affluent, etc., etc., is what you should work on most yourself, invest in most yourself. Be cautious of distraction. Be cautious of feeling bored with digging up the same ground again and again.

Beware siren songs of some easier way. Stick to the only skill certain to produce success, in any century, at any time, in any place, in any environment, in any economy, with any clientele.