In this article, I’m going to take a step back and help you understand five sales lessons that you can learn from Facebook Marketplace. By reading this article, you’ll get a better understanding of how the skills that you pick up on Facebook can apply to other business skills like your general salesmanship.
Lesson #1: Excellence is a choice.
The first sales lesson that I’ve learned from Facebook Marketplace is that excellence is a choice. If you’ve read one or two of my prior Facebook Marketplace articles, you know how easy it is to tell the difference between a good listing and a bad listing, and the drastic difference between the two types of listings.
For example, some people take terrible pictures of their items whereas other people take the time to curate and stage their item to make sure that it looks visually appealing to the potential buyer. Or from a product listing description standpoint, some people give no detail behind the item they’re selling, whereas other people talk about the benefits for the buyer to buy this thing, the savings that they might have from retail, if they were to buy this item used, and so on. The difference between good listings and bad listings is night and day.
And I think the key takeaway here is that excellence is a choice in how you decide to present yourself in a marketplace. Ultimately, you get to decide if you want to create a mediocre listing, or if you want to create an awesome listing that has a high probability of selling your item quickly.
Lesson #2: People mostly forget WIIFM.
The second thing I’ve learned from Facebook Marketplace in relation to sales is that people often forget about what’s in it for me. If you’ve read my prior sales articles, or even just my Facebook Marketplace articles, you know the importance of always writing in what’s in it for me for the other side.
In other words, people don’t care about what your personal history is with this item. They care more about how that personal history relates to them as the future owner of that item. Lots of times on Facebook Marketplace, I’ll notice people who share the entire background story behind the item and the time that they’ve owned it, but they don’t talk about things from the lens of what the future buyer can stand to benefit from taking this item off their hands. Write in benefits and not just in features and then you’ll be well on your way to addressing what’s in it for me. This is a common mistake in sales as well. People often forget to align the needs of their prospects to the thing that they’re selling and as a result, they missed sales opportunities.
Lesson #3: Clarity is crucial.
The third thing I’ve learned from Facebook Marketplace in relation to sales is that clarity is crucial. If you’re listing is missing key information, then less people will engage with it. If your listing is not easy to follow, then less people will engage with it. And in the case where your listing has terrible pictures, less people will engage with it.
Ultimately engagement is everything in a marketplace like Facebook. And so it’s really important that you are super clear in your listing as to what it is you’re offering, at what price, and when you are going to sell it. The easiest way to gut check yourself here is to ask yourself as the potential buyer of your item, if you would have any questions after reading your listing. If so, then your listing could be improved.
Ultimately, Facebook Marketplace is no different than any other marketplace in that the people that are able to clearly communicate value to the other side and clearly communicate in terms of the logistics to make that deal happen are the ones that are going to sell more on the platform.
Lesson #4: Pricing power comes from knowledge.
The fourth thing that I’ve learned from Facebook Marketplace in relation to sales is the importance of pricing power and how it comes from knowledge. As you’ve seen from my past Facebook Marketplace articles, you know how much I emphasize the importance of knowing the going rates of items in your local area as well as in other places online, such as eBay or Amazon. It’s only with that sort of market information that you’re able to have a more informed conversation, both as a buyer and a seller.
For example, if you didn’t know that in the last two weeks, some Sony,a6,000 bodies were selling for $300 on eBay, then you might fall prone to buying that item locally for $400 from a local seller. However, by knowing this information, you would potentially be able to haggle down that local seller and talk about the benefits of selling their a6,000 body to you, as opposed to paying online fees for selling something through eBay, which would potentially cut into their profit margin by five to 10% of the final sale price.
The key learning here is to keep in mind that as long as you’re operating off incomplete information, you will be working off less leverage than you could potentially have if you were to try to collect more information about the marketplace that you’re engaging with.
Lesson #5: Most people don’t know how to sell.
The fifth thing that I’ve learned from Facebook Marketplace around sales is that a ton of people don’t know how to sell. The reason why is because the traditional education system does not really teach us how to sell things in school. As a result, you have to learn sales from real-world experiences, from YouTube channels like this one, or from books that talk about sales. You can tell a lot about a Facebook Marketplace seller just based on the way that they list items.
If, for example, they don’t talk about benefits in their listing. They have bad photos or they don’t keyword optimize their titles, they probably are a person that just doesn’t understand how to sell things effectively. You should use the fact that you can recognize this to your advantage, become awesome at sales, and then leverage that superpower to get great deals on other things that people don’t know how to price, and then either resell that or enjoy the great deal that you stack for yourself.
Big takeaways
There are two things I want you to remember from this article:
- The first one is that you are likely better than average, and so you should stay that way or aim to stay that way. When you create your own listing on Facebook Marketplace.
- The second big takeaway that I help you’ll notice is that many things in life can teach you something applicable somewhere else. We just went over five things that I learned about sales from Facebook Marketplace, which just goes to show you how much overlap there can be when it comes to entrepreneurial experiences and opportunities in either our personal or professional lives.
If you found this article helpful, be sure to check out my YouTube channel to get new videos every single week I’ll help take you from zero to self-starter as you grow your business, get more customers, and hone your business acumen. Also, feel free to share this with anybody that you know that might benefit from these five sales lessons that I’ve learned from Facebook Marketplace.