It’s near-impossible to build or even run a successful business without being pretty damn good at selling.
A good entrepreneur’s main skill is pitching and selling investors on his vision and customers on his product or service.
And employees also have to be motivated and trained in — aka, sold on the importance of — delivering the right customer experience, even above and beyond what they’re ostensibly hired to do, like install AC systems, fix people’s plumbing, do their taxes, work the espresso machine, etc.
So you’d think these same owners would be great at selling themselves in their ads — but boy-howdy is that a bad assumption!
Here’s the Missing Key:
Successful business owners create order from chaos. They don’t just sell, they wrangle. And after graduating to a certain amount of success, they move from wrangling to systematizing and procedural-izing. If they don’t, they never get big enough to bark like a big dog on mass media.
But after doing all that, they assume everyone else has their same focus and organization. Everyone else, in their minds, lives in the same world they do.
And they forget that their speaker to prospective customers moving amidst the chaos that represents most people’s lives.
Which means they forget how hard they have to work to break through the chaos and clutter to get people to sit up and take notice.
They’re a bit too far out of the carnival barker phase of their own careers.
The Solution:
Hire someone who can create advertising that’s true to the owner’s core beliefs, values, and message, while injecting the right amount of showmanship and Big Idea Branding power to speak to people living amid their own personal chaos.
Modern life is a three thousand ring circus. So while salesmanship is great, it’s not the same skill as creating enough of a drum-roll-spot-light-hype effect to focus attention where it’s needed.
And that’s why business owners tend to fail at producing their own advertising.