Double O Phil, license to sell

The title came up to me this afternoon, while driving back home, after going out of town for my day job. I am a James Bond fan, I love most of the movies. My favorite one is Die Another Day. Here, I might prefer to say "Sell Today." :)

We are all marketers here. Someone told me recently that online marketing is not about selling, that I should do my homework. That might have been true in the 20th century, but nowadays, we call ourselves marketers but the bottom line is, we want to sell opportunities, services or products. As my good friend Chuck Bartok told me months ago, let's not walk on China eggs.


License to sell. What do I mean by that? That I need permission from whatever authority to sell anything? Not at all. The title of the article is designed to attract readers to this article. Will I succeed? I have no idea. Some articles get a lot of likes, some don't. To get to the point, the expression "license to sell" does mean something to me. I am the one who must give myself the license to sell. Building relationships is essential and fun in social marketing, but at the end of the day, you have to develop the skill to call for action, so that you can close the sale. It's definitely a skill to develop. It comes naturally to some people, just like some play piano at 5 while I can't play guitar at 47.

But talent is not enough. Learn how to sell. Try things. Some of your approaches will fail, some of your text ads will be lame. Keep tweaking, and learn to track results, i.e. where the clicks come from. When the first sale or referral comes, you'll start believing it is possible for you too.