How a 15-Minute Skype Call Triggered an Email Course Epiphany

I’m always amazed at what you can learn from your customers if you just listen.

Case in point:

Recently I had a 15-minute Skype call with a software developer from Ireland.

He’d bought our “How to Market Yourself as a Software Developer” course, worked the system, and in just over a year he’d become Internet famous and earned a coveted award from Microsoft.

What a great testimonial—you can never have too many of those.

Toward the end of the call we got to talking about how he found the course in the first place. He told me that one day he was thinking to himself, you know, I’m really not earning as much as I could be.

That little statement stuck with me. I kept finding myself going back to it—and then a couple of days ago, it triggered a real aha moment for me.

Here’s what happened:

One of the next projects on my to-do list is creating an email course to sell this “How to Market Yourself” product.

I feel like the sales angle that has the broadest appeal for this product is the “increase your income” approach.

I have multiple testimonials from developers who were struggling to earn $30K a year, went through the course, applied what they learned, and landed jobs making $100K+. And plenty of programmers earn hefty raises of 10%, 20% or more.

So I *could* write an email course that shows developers some concrete steps they can take that would bump their pay significantly.

Trouble is, software developers are VERY skeptical. If I come right out of the gate promising “here’s how to increase your income by 5% or more in the next 6 months,” they wouldn’t believe a word of it.

This problem has clattered around in my brain like a loose marble for the past few weeks until that short Skype call.

What I realized is, developers might not buy into the “make more money” angle, but they DO generally believe that they’re underpaid.

And it’s true—developers often generate millions of dollars in revenue for the company while earning a lousy 30 bucks an hour.

They’re creating enormous amounts of value and capturing almost NONE of it.

So my email course will start with a question:

“Are You Underpaid?”

Then I’m going to spend the next 7-10 days showing developers all the ways they are leaving money on the table—from the way they search for jobs, to the way they negotiate their salary.

I’ll show how ultimately the way you fix all of these problems is to have more offers and opportunities coming your way than you can ever possibly say yes to.

And the way to achieve that is… Marketing yourself.

See how neatly that all flows together?

That’s exactly the kind of logical progression that makes for a high-converting email course.

But I never would have had the critical insight without taking the time to chat with a customer.

Whenever you’re struggling with finding the right approach to take in an email course, or a landing page, or a sales letter…

Consider stepping away from your keyboard for a few minutes and picking up the phone.

You’ll be surprised what you discover.

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