When I first started blogging and selling my coaching services online a few years ago, I was pretty much clueless about what makes people buy a certain product or service. This is probably why my results selling online weren’t very good either, despite offering pretty good services. 

Fortunately for me, my willingness to experiment and my passion for human psychology helped me make substantial progress in understanding the psychology of the buyer. Thus, I managed to grow my coaching business and eventually make it a success, based 100% on an online business model. 

There is one key idea that took me a really long time to realize and accept. If you fully realize and accept it, this idea could be the single most important leap forward you will make as an online seller.  

The idea is simply this: people don’t care about your product or service. They only care about getting a need met. 

For you, your lose weight product or your confidence coaching program may be something that you’ve put a lot of work in developing and is very dear to you. But for the potential buyer, it’s not. It is just a means to an end. 

People are by nature self-centered. They have problems, needs, wants and challenges in their lives, and they’re looking for effective solutions to help them deal with them. Whatever it is that you’re offering is for others just another tool to consider and possibly to use. 

You may be wondering: Well how does this help me sell my stuff online? Here’s how: 

The biggest mistake I see online sellers make is putting the focus on the product or service they offer, and not on the positive effect it will create in people’s lives. 

They’ll go into pointless details in describing it; they’ll talk about how they developed it and how cool it is. At the same time, they’ll pay little attention to connecting that product or service with the most important needs the potential buyer has and explaining the buyer how that product or service will benefit them. 

Consequently, the buyer only gets a vague idea of what that product or service does for them and is not compelled to buy. Your stuff does not resonate with him or her because you haven’t put enough focus on clearly explaining the positive effects it creates. 

Whenever I would present one of my coaching programs, I used to focus the presentation on the skills the buyer would acquire. This works fine if the buyer is already highly aware of how that skill will help them and it triggers an emotional response, but that’s typically not the case. 

I used, for example, to promote coaching programs telling people that it would help them develop assertive communication skills. The only problem was that most of them didn’t even know what assertive communication was, so the offer wouldn’t attract them.

Now I talk about fixing relationships or dealing with difficult people, the kind of things that resonate with many individuals and compel them to buy. Sure, what I teach is still assertive communication, but I don’t focus the presentation on that, I focus it on the end benefits. 

I can’t even begin to tell you how much this helped my coaching business and how much easier it is now to acquire new clients. 

I encourage you to always start product development, marketing and sales with the needs of the buyer in mind. Work your way from there and always communicate people solutions, not just products or services. It will do wonder for your business, both online and offline.