
If you’re wondering how to sell your product, I’m going to break down exactly what it takes to sell a product successfully.
No fluff, no complicated frameworks, just the practical, proven approaches I’ve seen work across thousands of businesses.
Whether you’re just starting out or looking to scale your existing business, this is going to give you the clarity you need to either sell more of your product or turn your product into a best seller.
The key to an amazing product isn’t what you think
This post is timely.
I have an online education business that shows skilled professionals how to land more clients so they can grow their online businesses. Most people who are new to business struggle needlessly because they have the wrong beliefs when it comes to what it takes to sell a product.
My business partner posted this on X (edited for brevity), and it sums up the reason why so many entrepreneurs struggle:
“People often mistakenly believe entrepreneurship requires inventing something completely new, influenced by shows like Shark Tank. Many waste years trying to develop unique ‘million-dollar ideas,’ getting discouraged when they discover similar concepts already exist.
The reality is that successful businesses don’t require novel inventions.
Understanding how to create valuable offers is what matters. Someone skilled in common office work—like accounting, creating SOPs, or project management—could build a six-figure service business or online teaching platform.
Unfortunately, the media portrays business success as dependent on groundbreaking innovations that lead to overnight success. This misconception keeps many talented people in traditional employment, unaware that their existing skills could generate significant income through business ownership.
The key isn’t finding a never-before-seen idea; it’s about understanding how to package and deliver valuable offers. Once I learned this truth, it transformed my perspective on entrepreneurship.”
For the vast majority of people, the best way to learn how to sell a product is to sell a product that already exists in the market.
It shouldn’t be new. It shouldn’t be revolutionary. You want a proven solution to a problem the market has already shown a willingness to pay for.
Related:
The foundation: Understanding what a product does
If you want to figure out how to sell products, you have to understand what type of transactions occur that make people want to buy—and how your product fits into that.
When people give you money, they are expecting value back. For your product to sell, it has to deliver value. This is why some of the key components of having a good product are:
- It has to solve a pain point or pressing problem
- It has to have a desired outcome for the end user
Fundamentally, if your product doesn’t solve a problem or have a benefit that is valuable, people won’t buy it.
People buy products for lots of reasons:
- Pain-relief
- Convenience
- Ease
- Status
- Entertainment
- Speed
The list goes on. But if you want to learn how to sell a product, you must be able to understand the gap between where people are and where people want to be. Your product has to fill that gap, or else it won’t sell.
Find the gap, create a product that fills it, and win by either filling the gap in a better way or having better marketing than your competitors (more on that soon).
You can beat your competitors by:
- Delivering the solution faster
- Positioning the core idea in a novel way (but not changing the core idea)
- Providing superior customer service
- Targeting an underserved niche within the existing market
- Streamlining the buying process to reduce friction
- Building stronger relationships with your customers
My understanding of business has grown over the years and I’ve come to realize the most advanced thing you can do is do the basics really well.
The critical role of market research
Here is one of the best ways to figure out whether your product is going to solve problems for people or deliver desired outcomes: Take time to research before you start creating products. And continue researching as you’re creating products.
The copywriting legend Gary Halbert said the number one way to become a great copywriter isn’t to learn how to write copy—it’s to figure out what people are buying.
Nothing else matters except for the behavior. Are people buying what you want to sell?
The way you figure out whether or not they want to buy is to find out if they are already buying something similar to your product. Or if they are buying something that is solving a similar problem.
There’s a lot of different ways you can conduct market research—it depends on the nature of the product:
If you’re writing a book, you want to go see what books are already selling on Amazon and read the reviews to see what people like and don’t like.
You can think of pretty much any product that would be sold on a marketplace like Amazon. Amazon is an ideal site to research products because it’s the biggest product library on the entire internet.
Look at Reddit and subreddits related to the nature of the thing you’re selling.
If you’re in a local, physical market, you want to see if other brick-and-mortar stores sell what you sell. Find out if there are other stores in a similar region or population size or locale that are selling the same things as you, and if they are doing it effectively.
Check out Google reviews.
The ethos of taking time for extensive research is missing from most businesses. The particulars don’t matter as much as the ethos.
A surprisingly large number of business owners formulate an entire product idea based on nothing more than their belief that the product is cool. These are the business owners you’re competing against. Out-research them and you’ll win.
Understanding market perception vs. your vision
A lot of people will say if you’re building a business, you want to believe in yourself and believe in your product.
But it’s most important to listen to and believe what the market believes.
If you want to learn how to sell your product, you must see your product the way the market does. And you must understand how the market is describing their problems.
Instead of using your interpretation of what the product does well, match it with the market’s interpretation of their problems so that you can speak their language and get inside their minds.
A common mistake is trying to sell people what you think they need. What your target market believes about the product, their pain points, and their desired outcomes—these things are more important than what you believe.
Instead of trying to force certain features, sell them what they want to buy. Then, give them what they need on the back end.
For example, if you’re selling a weight loss product, the person needs to do excruciating exercises, track their macros, and develop discipline—but that’s not what they care about.
They just care about the end state—they want abs.
So instead of writing a headline that says “We will show you how to track your macros, be more disciplined, and lift weights,” try “We will help you get abs in 30 days.”
Sell a desired end state. Sell the outcome of the product. Every product provides a transformation from pain to a state of pleasure, from boredom to a state of entertainment.
You want to figure out what the A and B points are. When you’re doing your marketing and trying to sell your product, don’t talk too much about the mechanics of how to achieve the result. Instead, talk about the result itself and move them in the right direction.
The only ways to acquire customers
There are four different ways you can sell a product:
- You can sell a product one-to-one to people who don’t know you (cold outreach)
- You can sell one-to-one to people who do know you—people in your network, people who are aware of you online, people who follow you on social media (warm outreach)
- You can sell one-to-many to people who know you, using content or media (warm traffic)
- You can sell one-to-many to people who don’t know you, using paid advertisements (cold traffic)
The way you get attention and make people aware of your product will be different depending on the type of product you sell.
For example, if you are…
- selling B2B marketing services, you might want to do cold outreach
- doing a coaching program, you may choose warm outreach
- creating an e-commerce store, you could decide to run ads
- trying to sell a weight loss program and become a fitness influencer, you might try creating content
Sometimes it will be a combination of approaches, but if you want to get good at selling a product, you must figure out your primary marketing channel. Decide which one you’ll use to make money and focus on lead generation hard.
Volume negates luck: You must do what is required
I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses as a project marketer at a marketing agency. Today, I run my own business that helps other business owners land clients.
I’ve seen inside and out of more than a thousand businesses at this point, and what trips most people up is that they grossly underestimate what is required from them when it comes to lead generation.
Let me give you a prime example: I work with a lot of writers and freelancers who are meant to do cold outreach to get clients.
A real, actionable strategy for landing freelance work is to wake up first thing in the morning, set a timer for 4 hours, and send a hundred cold outreach messages every single day until it works.
I have two friends who run seven-figure ghostwriting agencies, and that’s exactly what they did—they sent 100 outreach messages every single day until it worked. In my experience, the vast majority of freelancers not only don’t send a hundred outreach messages a day, they don’t make it to sending 100 outreach messages ever. They grossly underestimate what is required.
The same thing applies to lots of other businesses.
If you’re doing ads, you want to make sure you’re spending an adequate amount of money on ads to get clients.
If you’re creating content, you must create content persistently every day for months and years to build your brand.
If you’re doing outreach, be sure you’re hitting a total number of outreach methods as often as possible.
Alex Hormozi has this rule of 100 which is a great framework that you can apply to your marketing and leads effort. It’s either:
- $100 a day spent on ads
- 100 minutes spent on cold or warm outreach
- 100 minutes spent creating content
One of those three things has to be constant across time for a long enough duration for your lead-generation process to work.
Sell more of your product by fixing the most obvious bottleneck
Most businesses don’t work their leads all that well.
I have had experiences where I called businesses and filled out forms because I wanted to buy their service immediately. Some didn’t get back to me on time. Some never got back to me at all. Some didn’t even pick up the phone during business hours.
It sounds funny when you read it, but stuff like this happens all the time. Many business owners are not taking lead generation seriously.
The ones that do make a lot more money.
Let me give you a contrasting example: I was funnel-hacking a competitor’s product, so I downloaded a free guide from a YouTube video she created. In the form, there was a slot to fill out your phone number. I got a text from her SDR (sales development representative) less than 5 seconds after downloading the free guide.
The speed with which you contact your leads has a dramatic impact on how many units you end up selling and how many of those leads convert into clients. Most businesses are insanely slow or literally do not respond to their leads.
Having a good product that fills a market need and doing consistent lead generation at a high enough volume across months and years while actively responding to your leads will put you in the top one percent of businesses.
I’m not exaggerating.
There is a severe lack of basic principles like this in the market, and oftentimes all you have to do is consistently follow through.
After you nail the basics, you can get better at marketing and sales so you can sell more of your product. These next sections will show you some key concepts to understand.
Understanding marketing awareness levels
There is something called awareness levels in marketing that is key to getting more sales. These are the different awareness levels:
- Problem Unaware: The person has a problem that you can solve, but they’re unaware that they have that problem
- Problem Aware: They are aware of the problem and want the problem fixed
- Solution Aware: They are aware of their problem and actively searching for products to solve that problem
- Product Aware: They are aware of the fact that your product solves that problem
- Most Aware: These are people who are on the cusp of making a buying decision with you
Of course, this is only helpful if the business consciously understands what awareness level they’re trying to target. If not, their marketing misses the mark.
A real-world example from my business
In my case, I run a business that teaches people how to get high-ticket clients. Most of the businesses I help struggle to have a premium high-priced offer in their market, but they don’t know it yet.
So if I want to capture a wider audience, I might make a video called “How to build a six-figure business in 2025.” They know they want to start a business, but they don’t know yet that their problem is the offer.
If I made a video called “How to build high-ticket offer,” that would instantly close off 98% of people who want to start a business because they have no idea what an offer is. They don’t yet know that their problem is the lack of the right offer.
I make a video in the problem-unaware stage that makes them aware of the process of running a business and then alludes to the idea that it’s the offer that needs to be fixed.
That makes them a problem-aware customer.
This is only one example, but the point is that knowing awareness levels is essential. And just like most other businesses skip basic market research and lead gen, they’re often clueless about awareness levels. Master this basic principle, and you’ll lap them.
The sales process: Understanding pain points
The best way to sell a product is to understand the nature of sales itself.
When you’re in a sales conversation, writing a sales page, or making a product description, you want to understand the mindset of the person on the other end:
- What are their pain points?
- What are the things that they’re concerned about?
- What are they trying to fix?
- What is their dream outcome?
- What benefits are they looking for?
If you spend a lot of time listening and having empathy for them (both in sales calls and in understanding customer feedback if you sell digitally), that is going to help you close more sales.
You want to think about other things in the sales process, too, like making sure the sales process is efficient.
If you’re booking sales calls, make sure that all the people show up to the sales calls and that your show rate is good.
When handling objections, have empathy, patience, and affect so that you’re able to respond to those objections with confidence and ease.
You want to become comfortable with selling and remove the limiting belief of being “salesy.” Being “salesy” is actually good because you’re helping people make good decisions for their life.
And that ties back to the product: Sell a product so good that you can’t help but rant and rave about it. This makes selling much easier.
Are you secretly great at sales? Let's find out.
Sell your product by keeping it simple
Remember, it’s not about having the most original product idea or the most novel marketing.
Sure, those things are important, but the best way to learn how to sell your product is to do the obvious things.
The ones that will lead to more sales—like working all of your leads, responding fast, doing boring market research, cranking out enough volume with lead generation, and building a seamless buying process and customer onboarding experience.
It’s doing the basics well.
Many businesses suffer from overthinking, overcomplexity, and overidealizing the business itself. If you consistently practice these simple, pragmatic, and obvious strategies, you will make more sales, period.