What A Bottle of Coke In A Luxury Five Star Resort Taught Me About Selling
Where Is Just As Important As What
Hey friends,
What’s the most you’ve ever paid for a bottle of coca cola?
You’re going to think I’m an idiot with more money than sense, but I’ve paid around £5 for a bottle of coca cola.
Yep. Five. Great. British. Pounds…
I know. I can feel your disbelief, but let me explain.
It was 2013. I had just won a poker tournament for $11k and decided to treat myself to a holiday in Singapore and stay at the luxury five-star resort Marina Bay Sands.
I had spent the day splashing around the infinity pool under the hot Singaporean sun with a few friends when I realised I was quite thirsty.
Back then, I hated drinking water. So all I wanted to satiate my thirsty taste buds was a refreshingly ice-cold glass bottle of Coke.
I opened the drinks menu and saw that it was going to cost me an arm and a leg.
I knew a bottle of Coke would have cost me £0.50 at the 7/11 store.
I knew the Coke I was getting was the same inside any other bottle.
But I still willingly paid for it.
So what caused me to pay up to 10x the price?
Well, it was hot. I was thirsty. And I was too lazy to go to a 7/11 or find somewhere else that was cheaper.
So why do I bring this up?
Well, because it highlights an important truth about selling:
Where you sell is just as important (if not more) as what you sell.
I spent a lot of time improving my copywriting skillset and trying to offer the best services.
But here’s the thing:
It doesn’t matter how good you are if you’re selling in the wrong place.
At the end of last year, my first client asked me to go on a little hiatus whilst they went through new product development.
Given that my income had now effectively dropped to zero (don’t rely on one client — you’re only as strong as your weakest link), I was in a desperate search for new clients.
A friend suggested I use Upwork. He had sold his bookkeeping services on there and said that it should keep me afloat until my first client was ready to resume.
So I signed up, created an account, wrote some beautiful copy for my profile and started sending out proposals left, right and centre.
After a month of grinding out Upwork, I was met with silence. No one accepted any of my proposals.
My mother didn’t raise a quitter, so I told myself to keep going. It’s just a numbers game. Given enough time and proposals, someone, somewhere, will eventually say yes.
But they never did.
Albert Einstein once said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
So I sat and thought about what I could possibly be doing wrong?
I was pretty sure it wasn’t the proposal copy. I tailored every proposal and tested every framework. But none of them produced any results.
After another long day of grinding out more proposals, I was winding down with a Rory Sutherland podcast, when he made a remark that changed everything for me.
Rory — the vice chairman of Ogilvy — said he thought going to a marketing convention to sell marketing services was a dumb idea. And that he’d rather go to an accounting convention because there’s no competition there.
That’s when it hit me: I had been doing it wrong. Grinding out Upwork was turning me into a commodity.
I was competing with thousands of copywriters who were equally, if not better, as skilled as me.
I was also selling to low-budget clients who were only looking for the cheapest option.
That meant I was competing on price. And when that happens it becomes a race to the bottom.
What I needed to do was become a £5 can of Coke in a place where people were willing to pay for it.
I needed to focus on getting in front of businesses that really needed my help: Businesses that had bigger budgets and could see the value in what I was offering.
And this is the key to selling your services: Go to where there’s no competition.
I started cold-emailing people and asking for referrals.
In a space of a few weeks, I went from begging for $150 projects to closing 2 long-term projects and one short project.
All because I decided to change where I was selling.
Instead of thinking about how can I get better, start asking yourself:
Where can I sell my services so they will be worth 10x more?
— Jason Vu Nguyen