How I Closed My Biggest Deal Using A Burrito Analogy

 

When I started my first multimedia business in high school, we mainly sold websites. However, I was intrigued by the idea of search engine optimization and how it could help my customers since so many of them inquired about it.

 

 

I spent some time learning how to do SEO myself and eventually got really good at it. Even though I didn’t do the actual SEO myself, I knew a lot about it. I really wanted to integrate search engine optimization as a service within my business because we would have the opportunity to charge our customers on a monthly basis.

 

 

In this article, I’m going to share some mistakes I made selling SEO, how I overcame it with one simple trick and the valuable lesson I learned through this experience.

 

 

The Mistakes 

 

As a note, I do not run this multimedia agency anymore. I sold it over a year and a half ago so this story and lesson comes directly from my past.

 

 

After learning SEO, I was eager to acquire clients. I could easily make anywhere from $500-$2,500 a month by offering these services to my customers. I was great at selling websites, but I quickly found out that I was terrible at selling SEO.

 

 

I didn’t know what it was. I could close website deals left and right, but I couldn’t get a single customers to sign up for our search engine optimization services. I tried different pitches, prices and plans but nothing seemed to work.

 

 

One day, I was in my room practicing my pitch when my little brother walked in. He was only 5 or 6 at the time. I told him to sit and listen in on my pitch so he could tell me what he thought. After about 45 seconds, he got up and said he was bored.

 

 

My younger brother finally made me realize why every single pitch had gone so horribly wrong. My clients just like my brother didn’t understand anything I was saying. What did my pitch consist of?

 

 

Well a bunch of mumbo jumbo technical stuff. I would start by sharing a bit about our SEO team before jumping into our optimization plan. I would tell our customers about how we increase their page rank, create a high authority back links, article submissions and everything else that goes into ranking a keyword.

 

 

My clients didn’t care about all this. They wanted to pay me to get their keywords on the top of the search engines. As long as that happened and they got a ROI, they would be satisfied.

 

 

The Burrito

 

I knew clients wanted to know how we did SEO, but they didn’t want to hear about it from a technical standpoint. They really wanted to know what we would be doing in words they could understand.

 

 

The best example I could think of was a burrito. I had a mortgage company that was highly interested in our SEO services so I decided to try the burrito analogy. If you’re wondering how SEO and the making of a burrito are similar, let me explain.

 

 

In order to rank a keyword on the search engines, you need to do a ton of different on-page and off-page optimization techniques to make things happen. You optimize the code, add tags, re-write content, and do a lot of other stuff inside their website. On the outside of the website, you create back-links, press-releases, article submissions, forum posts and other things.

 

 

I told them that SEO was just like making a burrito. There are a ton of elements that go into a successful campaign. If you want to make a good burrito, you need to have all the following ingredients:

 

– Cheese

 

– Rice

 

– Sour Cream

 

– Salsa

 

– Lettuce

 

– Corn

 

– Meat

 

– Beans

 

– Guacamole

 

– Peppers

 

– Tortilla

 

 

SEO was just the same way. If we took just 1 of the many things crucial to a campaign, it would fail. If we just grabbed a piece of tortilla and stuffed it with some corn, you’d have a really shitty burrito.

 

 

The owner laughed at the analogy and said to me, “I don’t get why all the other guys confused the hell out of me and you come in and make it so crystal clear.” As you can imagine, I got him as a client.

 

 

Not only that, but that deal would be the biggest one I closed throughout my tenure with my multimedia company.

 

 

The Lesson

 

It’s amazing how making my pitch simple allowed me to achieve better results. Turns out, I learned a valuable lesson in sales. It doesn’t matter what you sell, it matters how you sell it.

 

 

From that experience, I learned two very important things. Look for the benefits of your customers and explain it in terms that a five-year old can understand.

 

 

The benefits of doing SEO with me was that I would get them on the top of the search engines quickly and provide them with a ROI each month. In terms of simplifying what SEO was, well even my five-year old brother knows how to make a burrito, which made that analogy the perfect one to use.

 

 

People don’t want to be confused and overwhelmed by technicalities. Keep things simple and show people how your products or services fulfill their needs and wants. As long as you do that, you’ll have the ability to sell just about anything!

 

 

photo credit: barron via photopin cc