Spare the horses
Last week I was at the Atomicon Marketing Conference in Newcastle.
It was an overwhelming day of networking with strangers and engaging talks from legends like Ryan Deiss, Geoff Ramm, and Rory Sutherland.
I even bagged a selfie with the one and only Laura Belgray!
And one of the best speakers I heard from was advertising legend Rory Sutherland—Vice Chair of Ogilvy Mather.
He told the story of inventor James Watt, who, it turns out, wasn’t just an engineering genius, but a marketing expert ahead of his time.
You see, he had the unenviable task of trying to flog waterpumps to mine owners, but he found he was getting nowhere trying to sell his engine in the traditional sense.
Because talk of foot-pounds and piston ratios just wasn’t cutting it with salt-of-the-earth miners.
If they wanted to shift more water, they’d just buy more horses.
So, in a stroke of marketing genius, Watt explained his engine did the same work as 10 horses.
Horses that needed lots of grooming, ate a lot of hay, and produced a lot of… organic fertiliser that someone had to shovel.
Compared to the one engine that could run 24/7 on a diet of coal, which these miners had in abundance.
And just like that, horsepower, the only “unit of marketing,” was born.
There’s incredible power in a name—advice I gave during a coaching call I was running earlier in the week.
I was helping a sales coach write a sales page for a new offer she was promoting.
She’d created a great mini-course on how to close more leads during discovery calls.
And each of her modules had very functional lesson titles, such as:
“Stop overpresenting, start selling!”
“Why you? Why now?”
“How to understand their buying process”
Which I’m sure you’ll agree are… 🥱 and certainly don’t fire me up enough to put my hand in my pocket.
Yet when she told me “most leads only find about six minutes of a sales meeting genuinely useful,” I stopped her in her tracks.
That’s it. That’s the hook.
Instead of “Stop overpresenting, start selling”, we now have “The Six Minute Secret: How to make sure your leads hear exactly what they need to buy.”
While this isn’t exactly James-Watt-level branding genius (hey, I came up with it on the fly!), it’s a lot more enticing, dontcha think?
Not only will this make leads more likely to buy her mini-course, but the curiosity about what this “six-minute secret” is means they’re much more likely to actually watch the video, put the lessons into practice, and sell more products.
You see, you can have the best content in the world, but if you’ve slapped any old name on it and shoved it out the door, it’s not going to land.
If it sounds boring, people won’t buy it.
If it looks boring, people won’t watch it.
Boring doesn’t sell and it certainly doesn't retain.
Just ask the horses.