Affiliate Sales Process

The Sales Interaction Process:

●      Start out building rapport, but don't approach the person simply for friendship nor should you approach them simply for traffic. You'll get the hang of this quickly, but it does require some finesse. You should get some very basic information about them and jump into asking them about any problems they may have.

○      Affiliates are smart and they do not want to waste time with you learning about their dog on the first interaction.
○      After getting initial rapport questions, begin asking about problems they may have so you can offer solutions.
○      Do not waste too much time on this stage because people hate wasted time.


●      Start the investigating stage (most important stage). Successful sales people ask the most questions related to our target earn the most success by far. This is the stage where you learn about what they do, how they work, what traffic sources they focus on, what offers they are seeking. The most successful closers don't use closing techniques to close sales, they ask more questions and use these questions as part of the process of closing.

○      Your goal should be to find indirect or direct needs of the affiliate. An indirect need would be, "I'm running french dating". A direct need would be "I need french dating". The same applies for specific traffic sources as well ("I'm running on trafficvance" vs "I need offers for traffic vance". Understanding the difference is vital in this process.

○      The more questions you ask (with actual goals behind the questions) the better rapport you will have. Affiliates like to be sold to and want to tell about themselves for the most part.


●      Developing needs into wants. The goal of this is to find out what these individuals needs then turn them wants. You need to make the publisher actually want what you are offering, you cannot force feed what you want for the publisher. You should, from the beginning of the interaction, develop a 'problem solving' atmosphere where you identify problems, and develop solutions with the affiliate.

○      Implied needs ≠ not successful sales, you need to turn them into direct needs and eventually into wants.

○      By developing a problem solving atmosphere  the interaction gives the impression that the publisher is actually making decisions to work with us by themselves. This is highly positive and necessary as we cannot force feed these people.

○      If they have implied problems, then you should work with them to make the implied problems more serious than they are - following up with positive questions like "if we bumped you on this payout to $5.75 would that make you more profitable?". This produces a negative problem, then positive solution they dictate to you.


●      Closing the sale. You need to set goals for every interaction with publishers. There are two successful goals to achieve: an advancement (setting another specific time to actually continue this discussion, for example), or an actual sale(margin actually starts getting generated). If an affiliate says that they will "contact you sometime next week", it's most likely them blowing you off. Be sure to set realistic goals for these publishers that you can actually achieve, and in most cases it's not going to actually be a margin generating sale on the first interaction.

○      Set realistic goals, for example a specific 'advancement' that will reconnect on another contact. Keep in mind, 1/10th of the interactions with new relationships will result to actual margin so you may require a series of communications.

○      Realize that we are working with ultra-sophisticated salesmen that rule with logic, not impulse. Thousands or millions of dollars ride on their decisions. Do not ever use 'techniques' on people, they will revolt. Force feeding sales using pressure actually results in lower post-sale happiness, meaning the long term relationship may be damaged.

○      Using aggressive or repetitive closing techniques in a sales interaction with a long-term relationship severely damages it. You are not selling cellphones to people, these decisions are highly impactful. Aggressive closing works on impulse and emotional decision.

○      Not all closing is bad because at the end of the day, you need to close the sale to actually get the margin. When closing, tell them - don't ask them.

Dealing with Success & Coming Back Stronger

One thing that many affiliates do each and every single day is give up when things didn’t go right the first time. In fact, this is probably the most popular reason why many affiliates don’t ever make it to the top. They give up too easily, instead of pushing on towards success. Some of the moments where affiliates are known to give up the most includes, but is in not limited to:

• When marketing attempts don’t seem to be generating any revenue.
• When the ad copy that they use doesn’t convert as expected.
• When things really start getting to the point of frustration.

Now that you see where a lot of people give up, you need to remember one thing. This IS NOT a guide that sells for $19.95 on how to make money the easy way. This is a guide on some of the best tactics that beginning affiliates can use to churn out nothing but success, as long as these tactics are incorporated as they’re shown.

Running a profitable business is far from being easy, and to be honest you need to be persistent and get the idea of stopping when things get rough out of your mind. In other words, the successful affiliate turns out to be the one that innovates, has passion, and shows the will to succeed at all costs.

So, how exactly can you turn failure into success?

Understand the Word “Failure” & What It Really Means

Failure is defined as “lack of success.” Do you honestly want to leave this world with failure being a word that’s used to describe who you are and what you did? Obviously not, because you’re taking one of the most important steps in your affiliate marketing career by reading this guide and that means you still want success to be something that’s right there in your hands.

If you look at it as failure, you’re simply downgrading yourself and this will in turn affect your personality, level of motivation, as well as business decisions. Which are 3 things that anyone who wants true success can’t afford to risk. Don’t look at not achieving the desired success as a failure, use it as a learning experience to help you do even better in the future.

Analyze In Order to Gather Needed Knowledge

Now that you understand what failure means, you should get that word out of your vocabulary for your own sake. Focus on changing things up by analyzing these rough times and using them to your advantage.

Here’s a simple approach to start developing your own way to analyze things. Ask yourself:

• Could it have been prevented or was it just a poor business decision?
• Did it affect anyone? If so, how can I fix it with them or at least try to?
• What are the critical events that led up to this moment?
• What exactly did it do to you or your business?

Use Your Analysis to Grow

This is one of the key parts of this particular section. In the beginning, take notes so that you can compile your findings and get into the habit of this level of analytical thinking. By doing this you’re giving yourself something to work from. Once you have all of the data that you need to know within your reach, think of how you can use it to change the way that you do things.

It could be as simple as reaching out to those that you hurt or even coming up with a way to streamline certain parts of your business for the sake of efficiency. Each situation is different, but there will always be a solution that you can use to turn what you used to look at as failures into priceless learning experiences that are sure to give you the motivation that you need in order to reach a new level of success.

As long as you keep the above information in mind, you’ll be on your way to experiencing life in a way that many people haven’t ever been able to think about.