Sean D'Souza: Sell your product before it even exists

One of the advantages of pre-selling events, as seen with Wimbledon, is that deadlines can be reached with the events being able to start on time. Photo / Supplied

It's the centre court at Wimbledon. The big digital Rolex scorekeeper is blank. There's no linesperson peering to decide whether the ball is in or out. No umpire sombrely saying, "quiet please".

Heck, we've arrived at Wimbledon a month too early. But those empty seats aren't empty seats any more. Each seat is pre-sold way before the event.

The movies do it. Sports events do it. So why on earth don't you pre-sell your product? Why do you wait to smell the ink on your freshly printed books? Why do you wait to see the superb packaging on your information CDs and DVDs?

I'll tell you why: because you're doing it the way things have always been done. The guy before you didn't pre-sell. He waited until every part of the product was ready to deliver and only then decided to sell the products.

And the biggest reason is fear.

What if you don't finish the product on time? What if you don't ship on time?

The "what ifs" swirl in your brain like a whirlpool and prevent you from the big advantages of pre-selling your product.

So let's get to the point, shall we?

* Advantage No1: Pre-selling puts an external deadline on you. The reason why Wimbledon, the Olympics and other events start on time is because they're pre-sold. There's no deadline extension. Everyone works towards a focused, unrelenting goal.

On the day you're supposed to release your product it's out, without the endless procrastination and extensions. For a change, your projects actually get done on time.

* Advantage No2: Pre-selling funds your venture and relieves stress. There's nothing like 10, 20 or 500 customers buying your product in advance.

This takes away the stress of "what if this whole thing fails?" and allows you to focus on creating great content and great packaging. Most importantly, it takes away the stress of financing the venture.

* Advantage No3: Pre-selling gives you an insight into customer behaviour.

What's causing customers to buy? What's causing them to hesitate? You can make all your adjustments by studying the response of your customer long before you do the final launch of your product.

Which brings us to the disadvantages.

* Disadvantage No1: What if you can't deliver on time?

In most cases, an email or letter to your customers will solve the problem instantly. Customers aren't ogres. They understand that things go wrong. But be sure to tell the customers exactly why you can't deliver on time.

And when you do deliver, send a little bonus to compensate the customer for the delay. If you can't deliver, it's quite simple to just refund the entire amount and give a valid reason why you can't go through with the offer.

* Disadvantage No2: My competition will beat me to the market. Hmm ... You're not inventing the Walkman, are you? Yes, your competition will be watching, but does it really warrant the fuss? Your best chance of getting a product out in the market is to enter a market that already exists.

Bill Gates didn't invent the operating system you use today. Apple's iPod wasn't the first MP3 player on the block.

What you can pre-sell:

* Books: We've sold e-books long before they were written. The Brain Audit was pre-sold before it was completed. When we released the upgraded version of the Brain Audit, we pre-sold that as well.

* Workshops: Yes, I know you know workshops are pre-sold. But we pre-sold six workshops in a row. You had to buy into all six workshops to get the bonuses/discounts offered. The workshops were conducted from February to June and were pre-sold six months earlier, in August. So it was not just a pre-sell but a bundled pre-sell, too.

* Consulting: Our consulting sessions are always pre-sold. The customer pays for consulting at least a month before the event begins.

* Membership sites: Before we started up 5000bc.com, we pre-sold the site to our existing customers.

We didn't have a single article, there was no new design, and in effect 5000bc didn't exist. Yet, customers bought into the product well before a single line of code was put together.

Don't just sit there reading this article ... pre-sell your product.

Once the first customer pays, you'll have all the motivation you need to make sure you deliver.

Sean D'Souza is chief executive of Psychotactics and an international author and trainer. He is the author of The Brain Audit - Why Customers Buy (And Why They Don't).

www.psychotactics.com