UnSelling: The New Customer Experience

Chapter 41Beware of Mountain Climbers Who Sell Equipment

Picture a successful mountain climber standing on the summit. Exhausted and exhilarated, but if he gets his arm caught in a crevice, he may have a book/movie deal waiting.

With success come people who want to learn about the climber's strategy. What equipment did he use? How did he pace the ascent? These are the so-called best practices we look for in business.

What if this climber, instead of listing all his equipment and strategies, threw all of the stuff off the other side of the mountain and said, “You don't need anything! Except my new book/course/consulting: ‘How to Climb to the Summit of Success.’”¹

It's become the thing to do these days: Throw away what got you to where you are and morph your experiences into something that you can market and sell to others. Best-selling authors tell you that you don't need a publisher when their original publisher was one of the most important reasons they have their sizeable platform in the first place. Actors crowdfund movies and say you don't need a studio when without the studio-produced sitcom, they wouldn't have raised $5, because no one would have known who they were.

It has become way too easy for today's experts and successes to ignore the tools that took them up the mountain and instead sell us “five easy steps to success” in their place. There is no such thing as an easy trip to the top without hard work, luck, and a whole lot of tools.

This happens all the time in ...