The First Salesmanship Principle: Dollarization

In this day and age everyone is a salesman. If you are a blogger or web publisher, you need to sell your content to your visitors and banner placements to advertisers. If you work in the marketing department of a company, you need to sell your work and ideas to your boss. If you are a freelancer, you need to sell your services to customers. So one and so forth.

If this is the case, learning about salesmanship couldn’t hurt, right? What about the first salesmanship principle, do you know it? It’s called dollarization, and in this article I’ll explain how it works.

Dollarization means to put a dollar value on your offer. It means to explain to your customers (or readers, or boss, or whoever you are trying to sell to) how much what they are buying will be worth to them. Not worth in terms of satisfaction, feelings or any of these abstract things. In terms of dollars!

If you master this principle, you will be selling the easiest thing to sell on Earth: money.

That is right, you’ll be selling money. What if I told you that by paying $99 today you could get $300 within a couple of months? Provided I could back it up and show credibility, you would take my offer on the spot. That is what dollarization is all about.

Want to see a real example? Check the video on the Blog Profit Camp homepage. You’ll notice that John is using the dollarization principle throughout it. He basically explains that, by joining the training program, you’ll learn the system he uses to make as much as $40,000 per month blogging. The coaching program costs $397, yet I am pretty sure John will sell the 150 spots out pretty soon. How come? Because people won’t perceive the $397 as a cost, but rather as an investment. Members will invest that amount of money in order to make an even greater amount in the coming months and years.

And don’t get the wrong idea. You don’t need to be selling an online marketing program or a stock investing guide to be able to dollarize your offer. Let’s pick something as far from that as possible. Say tailor made suits. How would you dollarize that offer? It is simple: tell your prospects how they will be able to get a raise or a promotion by looking sharper and more confident at work. Better yet, find or commission a market research to find out the connection between wearing high quality and tailor made suits with the success that managers get on their careers. You could even launch an advertising campaign based on the results.

Let’s pick a more practical example now. What if you have a blog and are trying to sell advertising space? You could dollarize your offer by using case studies to illustrate the dollar value of your advertising spots to potential sponsors. First of all you would need to track how many clicks and sales each of your banner spots generate, on average. Let’s suppose that a 728×90 leaderboard generates on average 1000 clicks and 15 sales per month (a 1,5% conversion rate) and a 125×125 button on the sidebar generates on average 300 clicks and 5 sales per month (a 1,6% conversion rate). If you were then approached by a company selling a $50 product, you could send them your case study and conclude:

My 728×90 spot will make you $500 per month ($750 in revenues minus $250, which is the monthly cost of the banner) and my 125×125 spot will make you $150 ($250 in revenues minus $100, which is the monthly cost of the banner). So how much money do you want to make by advertising on my blog?

If you can dollarize your offer, your job as a salesman is half done.

Daniel is the owner of DailyBlogTips.com. Recently he launched a new project to help those who want to build their first site, called HowToMakeAWebsite.net. There is a free eBook available there, so check it out.