What does an entrepreneur want – I mean really desire – more than anything else?
Most people will say “Freedom”, “Success” or perhaps “To Make An Impact”. But anyone who’s been deep in the game of business-building will feel the truth in their gut:
You don’t wake up day after day hungering for those abstract concepts. Freedom is what you write down on your goal-setting journal or whatever… it’s not what you get your hands dirty chasing after, when you sit down at your desk on any given day.
Freedom, Success and Impact are all ideas that sound nice. You want them, sure, but not as badly as the life coaches and phony gurus – trying to sell you “the secrets” – want you to want them!
What entrepreneurs really lust after is much more specific…
As the founder of Commit Action – where we talk one-to-one to a couple hundred business owners each week – it’s been my job, passion and obsession to find out what you really want. And not just at the intellectual level of goals you want to check off your list. I’m talking what you’re really seeking.
What you’re hungering for at the deepest, most unconscious level.
The truth about achieving total, absolute “Freedom” or whatever, is that it’s kinda like winning the lottery. It’d be so hugely game-changing that imagining it doesn’t even feel real.
Think of a life where you’re just laid up by the pool, with push-button money-while-you-sleep profits rolling in unstoppably… that afford you any fantasy purchase or experience you can think of.
It sounds great… but it feels unreal. There’s something that makes most people uneasy about this fantasy in their gut. Would you really be happy?
I bet you think about that sometimes too: What it’d really be like to win the Powerball.
My guess is that you tell yourself if you won the lottery you’d still probably work on your business. You wouldn’t just walk away from everything you’ve tried to build and live on the beach. At least, not for long.
You’d have the resources to grow your company faster, get that really amazing branding work done, hire the very best people and finally build the business you always knew you were capable of.
You’d build your thing – easily and effortlessly – and have a ton of fun doing it. Right?
This brings me to what business owners really want, deep down:
They want the business to feel like it’s flowing. They want it to be easy.
If you want to understand the core of your entrepreneurial psychology – what really makes you tick and what’s breaks when you’re feeling “off” – then know this:
The thing that makes us uneasy about lottery fantasies is that we know – deep down – that the journey itself is supposed to be rewarding. An imagined Powerball win represents “the end” in the minds of entrepreneurs. A kind of final, ultimate retirement. The end of needing anything. Of having everything. And wanting nothing.
It doesn’t feel right because when business is going well, entrepreneurs love it. You enjoy the thrill of growth. Of seeing your ideas turn into results. Of serving and delighting customers.
You only start wanting to escape from that – dreaming about the lottery aka the-ultimate-escape – when it feels hard. When your business feels stuck. Like something inexplicably isn’t working. That there’s no “Flow”.
The difficult-to-pin-down truth about what business owners really want is this: They want an experience of Flow.
It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot. I don’t mean Flow in the personal productivity sense – although most of us want that too. I mean Flow in your business itself.
There’s a feeling an entrepreneur gets when the business flows. Let’s see if I can construct a clumsy metaphor here:
A business experiencing Flow feels like piloting a raft down a smoothly, powerfully flowing river.
You dip your paddle in at smart, strategic places – you nudge your way along your course as the current carries you. It feels as though you’re caught up in something that’s relentlessly pushing you forward.
And it’s not that there’s never obstacles. You may even hit some rapids. You may have to paddle sharply on one side for a little. Your decisions and choices – where to apply that paddle – really help and matter. But all the while, the current carries you.
I believe this is what entrepreneurs really want
Many business owners don’t feel like this. They feel as though they’re wearily paddling a raft through a still lake. Or through sticky molasses. Or through confounding fog. Or upstream, against a current pushing back against them.
There’s a sense of struggle. Of everything being difficult and nothing really working.
These entrepreneurs, deep down, don’t wish to win the lottery… they just wish for Flow.
What the hell is this article really about?
If you’re still reading, I’m guessing you resonate with my aquatic metaphor.
So what is Flow, really?
The water is revenue. Customers, both new and repeat.
Many business owners feel like they’re wearily struggling to get the results they want. They’re struggling to get a solid flow of business in the door.
What they really, truly want is for that struggle to turn into ease. For the sales to flow.
It feels horribly unfair that your business doesn’t flow
If people knew what you know about your product or service… if they knew those special things you and your business bring to the table… they’d be lining up to buy your stuff.
But there’s a disconnect. They don’t. They don’t know. They don’t line up to buy.
This disconnect is the blockage – the dam that prevents the flow. It’s a breakdown in your ability to market and sell.
And it has everything to do with your psychology.
All marketing and sales strategies are an attempt to get what’s in your head… into other people’s. To get them to know what you know, so they naturally want to buy what you sell.
To accomplish this, business owners will try everything: Content marketing. Cold calling. Social media. Billboards. TV commercials. Door-to-door sales. PPC ads.
… and within those categories, hundred of individual tactics exist. There are whole billion dollar industries dedicated to selling the “secrets” of these methods of turning strangers into customers. They ALL exploit every business owner’s desperate desire for Flow.
The problem is that none of this – not the tactics themselves or the trainings on the secrets of using them – address the real issue:
There is a psychological disconnect between your knowledge of the value you offer and the perceptions of your potential customers out there.
Even if you could wave a magic wand and have a personal, one-to-one conversation with every single person in your target market… you wouldn't sell all of them. It wouldn’t work.
Why?
Because of an innate psychological problem that causes a TON of problems for all humans
We never really know what it’s like to be other people.
We only get one experience of the world: Our own.
We think we know what other people are thinking. We think we know what they believe. What they want. What it’s like to be them.
But really, we only know ourselves.
The horrible sabotage business owners make of their sales and marketing efforts is just this: They assume their target market’s brains work just like theirs do.
In this one swift and easy mental mistake, an entrepreneur will destroy any chance of achieving a flow of business growth – of effortless and powerful customer acquisition – by failing to understand where their psychology ends and the customer’s (different) psychology begins.
Many entrepreneurs believe they know better. They assume they know perfectly what’s going on inside of their customer’s mind. They tell themselves they just need to reach more people. But when they do that, the flow isn’t there.
They’ve underestimated the overwhelming power of their subjectivity bias.
Because this critical piece of psychological bias isn’t understood and accounted for… otherwise GOOD products and services, that offer tremendous value and are delivered with heart… will go misunderstood by the wider public. No one will know about them. And the business offering it will struggle, then fail.
The secret to creating a relentless FLOW in business
Clever marketing tactics aren’t the answer. The secret is understanding your psychology as an entrepreneur AND the psychology of your customer.
The secret to un-stuck-ing a business that knows no flow… is marketing psychology. Not tactics. Not Platforms. Not sales tricks. Not even copywriting.
It’s the psychology of marketing itself – the art and science of transforming what you know into something other people will GET – that will allow you to connect with strangers in such a way that your business gets picked up and carried by a powerful stream of new business.
And that’s why I’m announcing my first new training program in over five years. For the first time ever, I’m breaking down everything I know about Marketing Psychology.
Introducing...
For entrepreneurs trying to build:
An online brand for a product company
A platform for yourself as a thought leader
An old fashioned (unsexy) business that deserves new (sexy!) results
Any business-to-business products or services company
Really, any venture that exchanges customer’s money for goods or services!
This series of detailed training workshops will arm you with the material to plug into ANY valid marketing tactic, making it soar.
You’ll learn how to extract the high level concepts from your psychology, so that you have the insights and ingredients that readily, easily and even automatically assemble themselves into ultra effective customer acquisition strategies.
In other words, this workshop will show you precisely how to make your new business flow.
Workshop take-away 1: Certainty
You will walk away with the psychological clarity that enables you to accurately predict precisely which marketing or sales tactic aligns best with your business, and which will naturally and easily bring you results.
You will find out exactly why certain approaches work so well, and what has been missing for your business specifically when what works for others doesn’t work for you.
Workshop take-away 2: Integrity
You will gain the psychological know-how to instantly make your product or service CLICK with your target market in a genuine, non-slimes and super powerful way. They’ll instantly desire what you offer once they hear from you.
Workshop take-away 3: Attraction
You’ll also gain mastery of the brain science that attracts flocks of people to your business through ideology… making them fans of you and your product/service for LIFE.
Workshop take away 4: Decision
Additionally, you will learn the mental frameworks that enable people to instantly perceive huge value in your product or service and have them ACT on it – making the decision to fork over cash, instead of just their curiosity – immediately.
Most importantly…
This program teaches the psychology of marketing flow… so you’ll gain insight into how these things will happen easily, effortlessly and almost automatically. New business should – and can – flow like water… like gravity… like a force.
How the training will be delivered
In the spirit of flow, we’re running this workshop as a summer program – the time of year where it really feels like winning should be easy. Where you business should be able to be swept away in a lazy river of results. Also, when you have the time and headspace to do the psychological exploration that this program entails.
This is not a traditional marketing training. You won’t be learning about PPC tactics, or social media hacks. You’ll be exploring your own psychology, getting to know yourself in a deeper and more powerful way than you ever had. And most importantly, you’ll be exploring your ideal customer’s psychology in ways you never had before.
The perfect place to participate in this workshop is from a shade garden chair. Or by the pool. Or at your cool, quiet kitchen table while the kids play outside.
Here’s what we’ll be doing over June, July & August: 2x in-depth video tutorials will be released each month Additional worksheets and resources for every psychological exercise Audio versions of the tutorials for learning-on-the-move After the two tutorials go out, I will run a LIVE masterclass presenting case studies, doing Q&A and hot-seat workshopping participant’s individual marketing psychology Recordings of all live sessions will be published |
How can you get access to the training program?
This training is free, but it’s not available to the public.
It’s only available to people who are guaranteed action-taking badasses. We don’t want to sell this program to the kind of folks who have folders upon folders on their computers filled with never-implemented info products. We only want people who are going to execute.
That’s why I’m releasing the entire program as a bonus to active Commit Action Coaching members.
If you’re new here and you want to know what the hell Commit Action is, scroll down to the big red button below here and click it – the best place to start is with our free video training there.
If you know about Commit Action membership and have been on the fence about working with a pro accountability coach, now’s the time.
If you join Commit Action as a new member before Friday June 7th, you will get access to the entire Marketing Psychology Summer Camp material in addition to all the features and perks of Commit Action membership.
We have less than 40 membership slots available on our coaching roster, so if you want IN, don’t hesitate. You can sign up for a membership here.
Commit Action membership means weekly goal setting coaching calls with an expert accountability coach. You can think of them as a member of your support team, who's singular job is to encourage you to show up and be the very best you can be. They’ll give you more clarity and focus than you’ve ever experienced.
During the Marketing Psychology Summer Camp, Commit Action coaches will be helping members set goals around working through the material, while also balancing their other business growth priorities.
If that sounds scary, or something you want to AVOID this summer, then this program isn’t for you. Buy lottery tickets instead maybe?
If you want to spend your summer learning how to craft and engineer flow in your business… then make sure you’re a Commit Action member asap.