How Your Big Fat Ego Is Sabotaging Your Ability To Make Money

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes

Your ego’s job is self-preservation and advancing your personal dominance over your environment. In the old days when the law of the land was based on physical domination of others and competition for scarce resources, perhaps letting the ego run the show was a good path to becoming a successful warlord or local king.

Times have changed. These days the path to success in business falls along the lines of getting people to voluntarily agree to buy stuff from you. Largely gone are the days when you could have a local market cornered.

Today’s consumers have a mind-spazzing array of shopping options – through the internet, catalogs, and local retail. Unless you have some sort of true exclusivity (such as a groundbreaking patent) you are competing for customers in your marketplace. In order for those customers to prefer to buy from you, they need to see demonstrable evidence that you offer superior service, lower prices, more convenience, or exclusivity of product your competitors do not offer.

Nobody (except your mother) will buy anything from you unless they feel they are getting value for their money. In today’s marketing environment, which is very competitive, to get more than middling sales results your customers need to actually feel they are getting substantially more value from your product/service than they are paying for it.

Selling on value isn’t the same as selling on low price. While price-slashing is a workable and proven short-term method for making sales, the practice of discounting also trains consumers to never pay full retail. If you train your customers to buy from you only when you are discounting, you’ll experience considerable problems in the long term.

You shouldn’t be selling at rock-bottom prices unless you are in the close-out business. If the only tactic you can use effectively to make sales is low prices, you won’t make much profit and when you are forced to raise your prices or go broke, you’ll lose most of your customers, too. The rather obvious reason is that when people shop on a low-price criteria, they are perceiving what they are buying as an undifferentiated commodity supplied by many vendors.

Because of the way our brains manage and sort information, consumers want to put their perceptions of your business into a “slot” in their brains. if you do your marketing smartly they’ll put you in a slot in their brains that makes them think of buying only from you when their need arises in the category they have your business pigeon-holed into.

We are all of us, if we are in business for ourselves, in the business of serving customers. It’s useful to think of yourself as a servant, like a butler. A butler’s job is to anticipate the needs and desires of his or her clients and do what should be done to make the client happy and comfortable.

Unless you’ve been trained in servitude, being subservient may grate on your ego. It will until you realize that being of service is not the same as being an inferior person to your clients. In fact, being of sincere service is very much where the money is. The hospitality industry is the perfect example – the best hotels charge the highest prices because they treat the customers like royalty, which makes them feel good. You cannot put a price on “feeling good” like it is some sort of commodity, because being treated like royalty makes you feel good in a different, more exciting way than feeling good from eating a bar of chocolate.

There is an element to doing this that I can best describe in terms that verge on the spiritual. To really serve well you have to get outside yourself and see things from the other person’s point-of-view in a way that is loving and empathetic. If you aren’t sincere about wanting to help and serve your clients, you’ll be arrogant and egotistical about it.

It is certainly true that some arrogant and ego-driven people climb the ladder of success, but if you aren’t a type-A personality you may want a gentler approach. Non type-A people (like yours truly) don’t want to build our lives around aggression and relentless ambition; we want to be “in the flow”, and learning to serve in the way I’m describing here is an amazing way to cultivate that “in the flow” feeling.

Effective advertising is counter-intuitive because in order to create it you need to put yourself in another person’s shoes: your customer. From your customer’s point of view she wants to hold onto her money until she is persuaded by some factor that buying from you is in her best interest. If she isn’t convinced of her own advantage in buying from you, she’ll probably pass on the purchase because if she bought anyway she would have less money to spend on other things. While customers can and will spend much more than you would think if you market your business to them, in general each individual customer has a finite ability to spend money.

By offering what people really value – emotional factors like “feeling good” or “feeling safe” or “excitement” – you remove their ability to make your product/service a commodity in their minds. When your business is not perceived as a vendor of a commodity, but a unique and superior provided of exceptional experience of some sort, you can increase your transaction size, your frequency of transactions, and your referals too.

The Buddhist’s teach that in order to subjugate your ego (to attain real inner growth) you need to have a strong ego in the first place. Your ego could be a strong sense of your identity and life direction, which tends to manifest in the form of career ambition and dedication to excellence in your skills.

On the one hand a strong ego drives you to be really, really good at what you do, so you can prosper materially.

On the other hand, in order to really empathize with the way other people feel and understand what they really want, you need to learn to push your ego down and get “underneath” other people so your own selfish interests aren’t getting in the way of serving them and helping them get those good feelings they really want. Those feelings: feeling safe, feeling good, feeling excitement – they are like money in the bank when you develop the ability to deliver them consistently in your business.

The first step in going down this road, after you know what you want out of life, is to find a way to get outside your own needs and see how what you can do to make other people feel more special in their own lives.

The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.