[idlewords]

My problem with howtos on sales/marketing is that they fall into two categories:

1. The author is not a good salesperson, so you should ignore the advice.

2. The author is a very good salesperson, and will sell you on the article.

The problem with 2 is that the author's interests are not the same as yours - they want pageviews, while you want effective advice. So my advice when reading a particularly pithy sales or marketing HOWTO is to ignore the content and concentrate on how it's written.

So by my own logic, ignore this comment if you found it persuasive.

[ivancdg]

This was a witty comment (the end made me chuckle)...but flippant.

Ultimately it is not very helpful: it does not address the content of the original article, which is excellent.

It is easy to fall into the trap of being so skeptical of sales writing as to automatically discount it. We see a lot of that here on HN which I find to be an unfortunate knee-jerk reaction.

Sales is a skill. During a layover I bought a book on the 'business' shelf of a UK airport. The book had tons of the warning signs of #2 above. I was extremely skeptical. It was called 'Selling to Win' by Richard Denny. It had the cheesiest cover you can imagine (think citrus green with pink).

But the things I learned in that book allowed me to get to 'ramen profitability' in my field. I was ahead of the crowd 6 months later, largely thanks to the techniques in that book.

Had I dismissed the book, I'd still be making fun of the cover and complaining about not having enough work.

[revorad]

That's exactly my conclusion. I stopped buying marketing/sales/copywriting help material when I realised the best material was the one I was reading already for free - the one which convinced me to buy the material in the first place! Sure, I still need to deconstruct how to make such material, but imitating and testing works.

[Wilduck]

This may not be true for every consumer, but for me, the salesperson who is most effective is the one who is willing to educate me about what I'm buying. I'm almost always willing to shell out a few extra bucks to buy from someone who has a teaching spirit.

For that reason, I'm not naturally as cynical of salespeople's writing. It's usually pretty easy to tell if what they've written is at least attempting to educate.