This past week I was doing some training with a new salesman I just hired for one of my offline businesses. This business builds websites for professionals then gets those websites to a top position for geo-local keyword phrases related to their profession.

Otherwise: When a vet in Lexington wants to be #1 on Google for “lexington vet,” we get it done.

Anyway I was training this guy and we had done a couple sales calls together–I did the talking and he did the listening.

After we got done we debriefed to see what he had learned.

“What do we sell?” I asked him.

“We sell websites!” he was enthusiastic.

“Nope.”

“We sell search engine position?” he was obviously thrown and posed this as a question back to me.

“Nope.”

“Do you mean we sell to people?”

“Not even close”

Finally I let him in on it: We sell paying customers.

People don’t hire us because we can get them to the top of Google. People don’t hire us because we can build a pretty website. People hire us because we are going to deliver new, paying customers.

Anybody can build a website–most websites we can build for $97 with all the bells and whistles.

But almost no one is going to deliver new, paying customers to these professionals. We are.

Now, about your own business…

What do you sell?

Are you “selling” ads? Then you’re actually selling paying customers to your advertisers. That’s an easy one to define.

But what if you are you selling information? Then your product is the change that information will bring to your buyer. A book on “How to Knit” is really about delivering a new ability–knitting–to your buyer.

A book on “How to Drive a New Luxury Car for Zero Dollars” is a little trickier, but the product is actually getting others to look up to your buyer. (Don’t be fooled…luxury cars are about displaying personal status, not about “engineering.”)

If you can’t tell someone in a sentence or two exactly what you are selling then you will never be able to convince them to do business with you.

So tell me–what are you selling? Leave a comment and let me know. It will make you money.