Marketing Goldmine Discovered in 1950’s Self Help Book

I Just finished reading W. Clement Stone’s Book The Success System That Never Fails and I have never dog-eared more pages in a book in my entire life. Aside from an awesome line mentioned in between chapters of this 1950’s self-help book, stating, “one day we will land a man on the moon,” The book is one of the few that actually Inspired me to Action and I have implemented several changes in my daily life so far.

Probably the biggest lesson I learned from the book is that Marketers could learn more about driving sales from self help books than from marketing books. Here’s why. For starters, as human beings driven by human nature, we are more similar than we are different from our customers. Self Help is about hacking our behavior to overcome our self defeating behaviors to bring about change in our lives.

“What Could Possibly Be More Telling About What Someone Wants, and How to Get Them to Take Action, (Like Buying) Than the Information They Seek Out By Themselves to Take Action and Motive Themselves to Improve Their Lives?!”

The Great Thing About W. Clement Stone’s Book is that he was One of the most successful Salesman Ever, amassing a fortune of Hundreds of Million or possibly Billions throughout his career.

“What Self Help Book Could Be More Telling About How To Get Customers to Take Action Than A Self-Help Book Written By a Proven Success, Who Built a Nationwide SalesForce and Sold Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Insurance?!”

Spoiler Alert: His book’s system for success that never fails is really not rocket science, it is quite obvious, self evident and simple.

Step 1: Inspiration To Action – You Need to Be Inspired, Usually by dissatisfaction to take action to succeed. Clem Stone spends several chapters teaching how to inspire yourself to take action.

Step 2: Know-How – You need to know how to do whatever you are trying to accomplish. To be clear, Know How is just knowing how others succeeded or knowing what you need to do to succeed. This is not the same as Experience, which is part of the next step.

Step 3: Activity Knowledge – This is probably the most overlooked step by people, but possibly one of the most important. Activity Knowledge is actual Experience taking action implementing your Know How. The best example I can think of is SEO. You can learn SEO from blogs, books, and lots of places… But there isn’t a single SEO on the planet that wouldn’t tell you that SEO can only really truly be learned by actual experience growing traffic and boosting rankings by optimizing your website/s for Search Algorithms. Nothing replaces experience, and while you can probably teach someone everything you know about implementing something, you can hardly teach them all the unquantifiable pieces to the puzzle that can ONLY COME FROM EXPERIENCE. One such example would be the taste of success that motivates you to continue and PROVES TO YOU THAT YOUR KNOWLEDGE ACTUALLY WORKS AND INSPIRES CONFIDENCE Within You… that of course brings all sorts of additional benefits that contribute to success.

There are many more lessons from the book which I will share in future posts, but for now I strongly encourage you to buy the book. I bought it because Dan Kennedy recommended it as one of the 3 books that he would read if he could only read three books.. He was not wrong. Buy it Here.

P.S. if you are wondering what actionable steps the book inspired me to take, one example is what he calls a Social Time Recorder… Where I keep track of what I do each day in a journal, like how much time I spend actually working, wasting time, working on improving myself, eating, etc…One of the reasons this is such an effective self help tool is that when you actually track and see how much time you waste and how little time you actually spend on productive objectives, it brings the dissatisfaction needed to Inspire you to take action and make changes in your life. Another great benefit of the Social Time Recorder is that it forces you to crystallize your goals and objectives, which is obviously a prerequisite to achieving success in whatever your objective is.

As a marketer, this is obviously very insightful for several reasons. First of All, it lets you know that you need to identify or help your target recognize enough dissatisfaction in their life to Inspire them to take the action you desire. It also requires you to make sure they know how to solve their problem (i.e. buying your product)… There are other lessons as well but the biggest marketing takeaway from the book is… “People Want Change,  They want to Improve, If your Problem Properly solves Their Problem, Marketing to them should be relatively easy.”

“As an entrepreneur, before pursuing an idea, you should probably ask yourself, are my customer dissatisfied enough with their current situation to actually take action. If They Are, Than You are in business!”

I Guess The Real Question Now is… How Dissatisfied are you with your current situation? Is there more you can do to improve your life, become more of a success, and achieve whatever you desire? Are Atleast Motivated Enough to go to the library to check out The Success System That Never Fails or Atleast Buy the Book on Amazon From My Affiliate Link?“

One Thing Is For Sure, The book not only inspired me to Write this post, but to also include amazon affiliate links, which I have never done before, and spend $7 promoting this blog post on Facebook. Whether these are positive or negative actions, only time will tell, but Nothing Moves Until You Take Action, So Let’s See How This Post Plays Out.