“You KNOW the sheik who is holding my husband hostage! You also know he’s not a patient man. God only knows what he’s doing to my husband right now. So I don’t have the time. What I want you to do is call the network affiliate in Morocco and get a camera crew here right away.”
–Eden, Santa Barbara, 1991

You have a movie inside you.

And, like the Poltergeist, it needs to come out.

What form will it take? If you have a business, movies usually take the form of sales pages.

I hope you weren’t expecting Mark Ruffalo.

We don’t read sales pages with as much interest as we watch movies. But we do scan them. We’re optimists at heart. “Maybe this sales page will be the one for me.”

And, if your headlines look as dramatic as a soap opera plot, people might actually read that sales page. And then they might do something about that call to action at the end. We can hope, right?

As the director of your own sales page, you get to create your story, and you get to decide what happens next.

So, you want to direct. Let’s get started.

What I want you to do is call your camera crews in Morocco.

Now, do you have popcorn made? I’ll wait. You like popcorn.

Take a seat on your big, plush director’s couch. There are no director’s chairs for sales pages. Only couches.

Also, turn off the internet. Hit the lights. Close your eyes.

Well, read the rest of this post first, then close your eyes.

Ready to get started? You’re probably not ready. How about a nap first?

Go ahead and take a 10-minute nap. You like naps.

When you wake up, insert the movie of your Clients and press PLAY.

Don’t forget to play your favorite movie soundtrack. Mine is Beaches.

Now that the movie is playing, you’re not thinking about benefits and features and pie charts and problems.

You’re not thinking about what words to use.

All you’re doing is watching the movie in your head.

Bette Midler’s character doesn’t want to make more money in less time.

She wants to become a performer, and part of her wonders whether anyone will ever take her seriously, and even though her mother drives her crazy with the over-managing and stress, she wants fame so much she’s willing to do anything to get it, even put up with her mother, and she doesn’t care if she sings too loud on the boardwalk. She has feelings and she needs to let them out.

Bring the drama! Let it all play out.

As you watch The Client, you’re making director’s notes.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

• What did they want?
• What did they really want, underneath all that?
• How did you know that’s what they wanted?
• What was at stake?
• What happened when they finally got what they wanted?
• Why was that so surprising?
• Why was it so important?
• How difficult was it for them to decide to work with you?
• What came up along the way that made everyone keep watching?
• Where are they now?
• What do you think is possible now that wasn’t possible before?
• What’s something they used to do that they’re no longer doing anymore?
• What are their friends telling them? What are their friends and family noticing?
• What happens next?

When you feel moved by a story, you write differently. You stop worrying so much about whether you’re bragging or whether you’re using the right words.

You’re just watching, taking it all in. You’re starting with those feelings, those images in your mind’s eye of what your clients’ lives look like. Once you know that story, you can tell it in a sales page. You can address the problems, the benefits, the uniqueness, without resorting to awkward questions that spoon-feed the obvious right back to people.

Like sand through the hourglass, so are the sales pages of our lives.

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