Show Not Sell

It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone hates being sold to. (Apologies to Jane Austen.)

I was working on a project for a client who was writing a B2B sales manual. He had reams of data showing that salespeople had a terrible self-image. They hated telling people they were in sales because everyone hated salespeople.

One of the most popular copywriter training companies, AWAI, has several sales funnels devoted to pitching writers on lines of business where they don’t have to do any sales writing. Just this morning I received an email from content marketing titan Brian Clark pitching me on his clientless writer income course in partnership with AWAI (it’s about Substack).

If we all know people hate being sold to, why is so much time and money spent on high-pressure sales tactics?

The simplest answer would be because it works. But there’s something else also happening. High-pressure sales tactics, which manipulate people’s most primitive emotions: fear, greed, and lust, work in the short term.

However, these tactics also produce high churn rates. It’s too easy to overpromise and underdeliver.

There is another way to land new customers. You can create marketing that’s not manipulative. You can find customers who love your company. But you must stop selling to them and start showing what you do.

“Show not tell” is the cardinal rule of great writing. I was first introduced to this idea in seventh grade.

Mr. Cauchi had us write silently for the first five minutes every day of seventh-grade English. We would come into the room, and a prompt would be written on the board. Our job was to take out a fresh piece of paper and start writing.

The exercise was called “Show Not Tell.” The goal was to write something as descriptive and evocative as possible without leaning on declarative sentences.

After the five minutes were up, we traded papers within our table groups and offered feedback. Then, the group picked one person’s piece to share with the class, and that person read their five-minute show-not-tell masterpiece to the class.

I was horrible at this exercise. I was all about the facts. But these daily exercises would shape my writing for the rest of my life.

The idea that the facts are not enough would be hammered home when I began practicing as a young attorney. Judges and juries are considered the triers of facts in the American legal system, but they are really the audience. My job as an advocate was to weave the facts and law into a compelling narrative that moved judges and juries to find a way to rule in favor of my client.

Blatant manipulation was not going to work, and it was illegal in any event. Naked facts were not enough. I had to show why my client deserved to win.

When I left the law to become a full-time copywriter, the first lesson I learned was “benefits, not features.” This meant excellent sales copy describes how a product or service would change the customer’s life. That was more important than listing the specs or features of a product.

But this notion of selling benefits is often where the most salesy language is introduced. This is the stuff that people hate, even when they are persuaded by it.

If the cardinal rule of writing is to show not tell, the cardinal rule of marketing should be, “show not sell.”

What does that mean?

It means that your job as a copywriter, marketer, or small business owner is to demonstrate the effectiveness of your product or service, not to manipulate or cajole someone into buying.

Show not sell, and this is going to be a hard pill to swallow if you are a writer, means that the words you use in your marketing are the least important part of the equation.

The most important thing you can do to close more sales that turn customers into raving fans of your brand is to choose the right customers to sell to.

You don’t want customers that you had to work hard to persuade. It takes a lot of time and money to pressure people to buy, and often those people leave when someone else makes better promises or offers a better price.

Remember, even in the world of business services, you are selling to people, not businesses. Businesses can’t decide anything. Managers, directors, and executives make the decisions for the company.

You want to invest your time and money into deeply understanding who will benefit from your product the most. You want to preach to the choir.

You want customers for whom your brand is the obvious solution, and you want to turn away customers who will only benefit a little from your product.

Show, not sell, turns you into a trusted advisor. Your content shepherds customers through a complex decision process and helps them find the best choice for them, even if it’s not your product or service.

This even works if you are an author. The job of your marketing isn’t to sell your books. The job of your marketing is to find the kinds of readers who will love your books. You want to help people have a great reading experience, even if they buy books from other authors.

Show, not sell, means your marketing truthfully describes how your product’s features produce the benefits you are describing. You don’t need to be an expert in persuasion; you need to be an expert in your customers, your product, and the other competing products on the market.

When you show not sell, prospects will welcome sales calls, read your emails and white papers, and they will be delighted to buy from you.

The future of marketing is not AI. AI lets you do brute-force persuasion, but when your customer is receiving thousands of AI-written emails from dozens of companies, and then using AI tools to summarize and sort all those emails, no communication or persuasion is happening.

When you change the focus of your marketing from selling to finding your choir and showing them how your product is a godsend, everything will shift for your business.

A COO does not want to commit tens of thousands of dollars to an enterprise-level solution after working with a chatbot. That COO wants to talk to a human who is both knowledgeable and empathetic before risking their company’s future (and their job) on an expensive solution.

A reader who cares about stories doesn’t want to watch an AI slop book trailer. They want authors who are passionate about life and their work.

Show not sell is more than a snappy slogan. It’s an ethos. It’s a way of approaching persuasion where the primary efforts are spent on understanding what customers want and need, building a product around those wants and needs, and then showing prospects what the product can do.

All of that showing needs to be done with skill and empathy, but it doesn’t require creating artificial scarcity or preying upon base emotions like greed and fear. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t appeal to emotions; it must. Every decision is an emotional one justified by facts.

Show not sell is not just for B2B marketing. That traditional den of vipers, the American used car dealership, is also starting to adopt the ethos of “show not sell.”

I recently went with my adult daughter to buy a car. We visited several car dealerships, and at about half of them, we were greeted by a salesperson who gave us their card with their cell number and told us we could text or call with any questions but that they would let us browse.

There was no pressure or browbeating. She found many of these salespeople knowledgeable about the cars on the lots. At one stop, once she had looked around and was ready to ask some questions, the woman who eventually got her sale was the one who listened to her requirements and told her they didn’t have anything on the lot that would fit her needs.

The salesperson then showed her something on the web from a rival dealership that would work. We went there, and that car was already sold. Disappointed, we went home. Later in the week, the salesperson from earlier texted about a car that just arrived that seemed to fit my daughter’s needs.

She bought it.

That salesperson worked harder to make that sale. She listened, made notes, was honest, and very knowledgeable about the market. That led to an eventual sale, and guess where I’m taking my next teen when they’re ready to buy a car?

Show not sell is not cheap, it’s not easy, and it is hard to scale.

However, show not sell is incredibly effective in reducing churn, creating off-the-charts customer satisfaction, and building a sustainable business that makes a difference in the world, one customer at a time.

In a world with more noise than ever, where people have more ways to avoid annoying sales messages, and where genuine human interaction is scarce, there’s no reason to keep using outdated and corrosive sales tactics.

It’s time to invest in showing your customers you care about their future, not just their potential as entries in your recurring revenue database.