The 80-Year-Old Sales Principle That’s Vital in the AI Age

There’s a small but vital reframe I want to share, and it’s especially important right now as AI has caused much… consternation… in freelance circles.

Here’s the reframe in the form of a question: What are people buying?

To be clear, I’m talking about not just any people but people in your niche or market. And not “buying” as in what they were buying a year or two ago or but what will they pay for right now.

Put the creative or consulting work you have been doing on the table, so to speak, and with all the scrutiny and disciplined impartiality of a circuit court judge ask yourself, “What is my target audience buying right now?” That exercise may encourage you, or it may make you realize you’re selling seeds not carrots.

Let’s explore the difference, and help you figure out how to sell what people want to buy.

Selling Seeds Versus Carrots

A story from 1935 reveals the mistake many solo services providers make.

Jimmy Pattison was seven years old and living in Depression-era Saskatchewan when he saw an ad for piano lessons he couldn’t afford. How could he come up with the money?

Another ad for a sales job gave him an idea, so Jimmy took a straightforward approach to selling garden seeds. He went door to door and asked, “Want to buy some seeds?”

When that didn’t go so well, Jimmy tried a different question: “What kind of vegetables do you like?” Whatever the customer liked, Jimmy would talk about. Decades later, he wrote about that formative experience in Jimmy: An Autobiography: “I wouldn’t waste twenty minutes talking to someone about beans if she was crazy about carrots.”

The second question did the trick. Jimmy outsold people much older than him, and we’re wise here to slow down and ask why.

Why was the second question more effective? It got people thinking about the outcome.

In a podcast episode about Jimmy’s journey from selling seeds to building companies worth billions, The Knowledge Project host Shane Parrish describes the sales principle this way: “Find out what people want. Then show them how your product delivers it.”

Helping People Get What They Want

In How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling, published in 1947, Frank Bettger writes something remarkably similar:

“I resolved right then to dedicate the rest of my selling career to this principle: Finding out what people want, and helping them get it” (33).

So we have Jimmy and Frank, different salespeople of different generations in different countries selling different products to different audiences. Yet, whether the selling involves garden seeds or insurance, the focus should be the same: Selling is helping people get what they want.

Knowing that, I’d encourage you to ask the three questions I’ve been asking myself:

• What is my target audience buying right now?
• Does what I’m selling help them get that?
• Do I need to change what I’m selling?

Many creatives and consultants have been so focused on how AI is laying waste to livelihoods that they’ve stopped asking those questions. For example, I’ve seen copywriters poke fun at the laughable slop created by ChatGPT and Claude. These critiques are fair, funny, and cathartic. Without a doubt, talented human copywriters produce better machines.

The inevitable conclusion of these posts is “If you want excellent copy, hire a human copywriter.”

Again, the conclusion isn’t wrong. The quality of the copy matters a great deal. Even so, I see a missed opportunity.

“Want to buy some excellent copy?” sounds an awful lot like “Want to buy some seeds?”

Jimmy discovered that people want to buy the outcome, carrots or lettuce or beans. They want fresh, nutritious vegetables on the dinner table. They want vibrant health.

Excellent copy, creative work, or consulting is more process or mechanism than outcome, so what is it that excellent copy, creative, or consulting gets a client? What’s the meal or transformation?

The Conundrum of Different Dots

The mistake creatives and consultants make is assuming that their would-be clients see the same dots, or the same tiny events in a chain reaction.

Let’s stick with the copywriting example. Here are the dots that the experts, excellent human copywriters, are drawing a line through:

• Hiring a human writer, which leads to
• Getting excellent copy, which leads to
• Getting and keeping attention, which leads to
• Building trust, authority, and desire, which leads to
• Convincing more people to take action, which leads to
• More conversions and sales, which leads to a thriving business.

If you want a thriving business, hire a human copywriter. Boom! “What could be more obvious?!” copywriters exclaim. Excellent copy is a well-trodden path to the promised land of MORE CONVERSIONS AND SALES… THRIVING BUSINESS!!!

Meanwhile, on the client side, a founder or head of marketing sees different dots:

• Sales aren’t where I want them to be. What’s the problem?
• Sheesh, the problem is actually several things. This makes my head hurt.
• Let’s try some new copy. Maybe ChatGPT can help.
• This isn’t perfect. I’m going to spruce this up a bit.
• Okay, good enough for now. I’m going to roll with it and see what happens.
• [Very quickly moves on to the next thing and very likely not measuring results]

Clients usually aren’t experts in what they’re hiring a creative or consultant for. They can’t always tell differentiate between bland, predictable, forgettable phrases and sentences and where’s-my-bonus-cos-that’s-so-friggin’-good copy. They don’t see the same dots or the well-trodden path between “excellent copy” and “more sales.”

Yet, it’s all too easy and common for copywriters to emphasize the quality of their copy, not the outcome that copy produces. They talk about the superiority of the seeds instead of the carrots.

Thankfully, there’s way to escape the conundrum.

Drumroll, please… You must… ask… real people.

To figure out what people want, you have to talk to them. You have to be genuinely curious. You have to be studying their words and situation harder than a dad studies his daughter’s prom date.

Get some people in your target audience on a call, and ask them these questions right away:

• Have you worked with someone like me before, and if so, what was that experience like?
• What outcomes are you after related to [my area of expertise, e.g., copywriting, design, marketing, e-commerce, operations, etc]? What does success look like?
• How proactive have you been with [my area of expertise]? Why or why not?
• Has that process been easy or hard for you? What specific problems have popped up?
• If someone like me could make one or two problems go away, which ones should I focus on first? Or to put it a different way, what is the thorn in your help?
• Does anything else related to [my area of expertise] give you heartburn?
• If you could be in a different place with YOUR AREA OF EXPERTISE a year from now, what would have happened? What would be true then that isn’t true now?
• What do people like me often miss about [my area of expertise], especially when it comes to serving clients like you?
• What makes people like you reluctant to hire people like me? What are the most common objections?

If you ask good questions and listen closely, people will tell you what they want to buy and how they want you to sell it to them.

Maybe you’ll confirm that they want to buy what you’re already selling. Or maybe they want to buy different outcomes, and you need to either put your services in that packaging or bundle in new services. Either way, you can only improve your position if you answer the question we began with: What is my target audience buying right now?

If you don’t have a process for getting people in your target audience on a call, just follow my free Dream Client Interview Guide.

Yes, the disruption sucks. What are you doing about it?

A lot of us get comfortable selling a certain service, package, or offer. It sucks when AI makes things harder or a shift in the market pulls the rug out from underneath you.

While we’re disoriented and stumbling, the volume of anxiety about money and the future goes up. It can take our attention away from opportunity always available to entrepreneurs: determining what outcomes people want to buy.

My friend, don’t pull back. Lean in!

• “They’re not buying blog content.” What are they buying instead? Adapt.
• “They’re not buying big software projects.” Where is their money going?
• “They’re not buying Magento training courses.” You’re not a one-trick pony. What other problems painful, expensive problems can you solve through educational content?

Connect with people in your target audience. Ask better questions. Listen for the carrots. Sell those outcomes, not services.

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When you’re ready, here are ways I can help you:

1. Free Money. A pricing and money mindset guide for freelance creatives. If you’re unsure about your freelance pricing, this is the book for you.
2. Morning Marketing Habit. This course will help you build an “always be marketing” practice, become less dependent on referrals, and proactively build the business you want with the clients you want. My own morning marketing habit has enabled me to consistently make 6 figures as a freelancer.
3. 1:1 Coaching. Gain clarity, confidence, and momentum in your freelance or consulting business.
4. Business Redesign (Group Coaching). Raise your effective hourly rate, delegate with confidence, and free up 40 hours a month.
5. Clarity Session. It’s hard to read the label when you’re inside the bottle. I've done well over 100 of these 1:1 sessions with founders, solopreneurs, and freelancers who wanted guidance, a second opinion, or help creating a plan.