Writing the Charm Sales Letter: Backwards Time Lapse Video

I recently spend several days working on a sales page for our new SaaS, Charm, which we’ll be launching this week after over a year of development.

Aaand for your edification, I recorded a backwards time lapse of its development.

It’s 3 minutes long.

Tough Decisions: What Tack to Take?

Charm is a real killer of a support tool… and totally different from the other tools you’ve used. It’s a category buster, like my first SaaS product.

When you do something so different, the challenge becomes: How to talk about it so people will buy?

I’ve learned the hard way that it’s hard to sell something based on 3 or 4 different angles at once. So I’m not going to make that mistake again.

Once we’ve got folks using Charm, they love it. But it works on so many different vectors that it’s hard to pick the one angle to work with.

So I struggled for hours to write this sales letter.

How I Got My Angle

I’m a big believer in the power of funnels: gather a whole bunch of ideas, data, and stories, and then see what common themes you get when you distill them down.

So, to fill the wide mouth of my process funnel, I:

• filled many pages writing notes about life before Charm, life after Charm
• reviewed what I have sent to our beta customers or prospective beta customers
• wrote down everything I’ve told people in person when talking about Charm
• wrote a “personal letter” from me, about how & why we designed Charm

Then, to distill, I:

• reviewed all that information for common themes
• picked what seemed like the most powerful common theme (pain — see below)
• started from the headline that promised the opposite of the pain (went thru a lot of iterations)
• created an outline of subheadlines based on that single premise, the opposite of the pain: loving talking to your customers again
• filled in each subhead with sketchy notes
• rewrote & transformed sketchy notes into a narrative

I chose to focus on the pain of doing support, rather than the business intelligence and what we call “360-degree support life cycle” — because everybody feels the pain, but few people are actively looking for biz intelligence.

My plan is to get people in the door on pain, and then sell them on joy & smarts. Once folks start using Charm, they’ll learn how powerful it is to get biz intelligence from what they’re already doing (without any extra work).

I Can Teach You to Write Sales Letters

For this whole process, I used a process I came up with for my 30×500 Product Launch Class. In 30×500, you’ll learn how to use the power of funnels from start to finish: to come up with viable product concepts which will sell from day 1, to turn them into a list of features, to turn those features into an actionable plan, to price, market, and write copy to make it sell. And it’s systems, systems all the way down.

If you’re itching to create & sell your own products, but not sure where to start, you should definitely check it out.

Drop your name & email in the box below to qualify for my pre-launch discount of $250:

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Copywriting, Marketing. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.