Use ‘pre-sell’ in 2026 for less stress and more sales

If you’ve noticed people slower to respond to your offers, or more hesitant to buy than they were a couple years back, and you want to win in 2026, this article will help.

First though - I saw an interesting post shared earlier today on Black Friday sales.

Notable that Black Friday sales data shows a 9.1% increase spend from last year.

Sounds like a good thing, right?

…But: -1% in total item volume from last year. Prices +7% higher. Consumers bought on average 4.1% fewer items.

And: An 11% increase on buy-now-pay-later use. Klarna specific use up 45% by volume since last year

Meaning: Roughly 11% of ALL Black Friday spending was financed through BNPL. And 84% of all purchases were financed by credit cards, where 67% of those consumers expect to not pay the full balance in the first month.

This is the sign of a weakening and stretched consumer.

It’s funny how mainstream media is quick to point out the increased spending.

But the truth is, people are buying less, it’s just that prices went way up and everyone is jamming it on credit.

This ain’t just in ecommerce and products, but also for services.

Not only are people more selective with what they buy, they’re waiting longer to engage with businesses, and they’re doing more research on the companies they do buy from.

This is a massive shift from 2022, when you could put out an offer one week, and sell it the next.

Fact is, back then it was so good that the online business space got flooded with people who realised they could go online, and sell stuff.

Now? Much different.

And if you’re still trying to use a strategy from back then, you already know the game has changed.

The why, doesn’t really matter: Inflation, buyer fatigue, seasonality, market saturation, too many gurus, the low trust era, et cetera.

But what does matter is what you do about it.

One thing that we’ve been experimenting with this year with key clients is, the amount of pre-sell that we use.

Basically, pre-sell is when you channel demand for your offer or service, before it is available, through your marketing.

It’s often indirect, and sometimes downright vague, because, in a lot of cases while you’re kind of clear on your offer, you’re still making adjustments and tweaks.

The key thing though is you’re showing the benefits and starting the conversation early.

In the film and entertainment industry, this is obvious. Movie trailers come out months before the film release. Boxing and UFC fights are hyped way ahead of time. The first time I saw this really working with my own stuff was a book launch. With my first book, I created a campaign, and kind of just launched it by writing emails. It sold OK, and I was happy at the time.

With my second book, I talked about the concepts for over six months.

Basically what I did was every couple of weeks in an email I would mention how the book was going, and also touch on one of the ideas inside.

When I opened up the cart for the campaign, the first day 2% of the whole list bought the book.

For context, normally 1% of your list buying something is a good thing (across an entire campaign).

The book sold well through the rest of the campaign, and then in the last day when time was running out, there was a big jump in sales again.

This taught me that it wasn’t just how I put together the campaign, but also how important it is to have a pre-sell period before you start your campaign.

The next step is we started to increase the focus on pre-sell with some of our clients.

For example, one business we’ve helped over the years runs a quarterly workshop.

Their original marketing strategy was to send 4 emails to their list, in the week leading up to the workshop.

We did two things - we expanded the depth of the campaign (which went to 12 emails). And we started to talk about the benefits of the ideas in the workshop several weeks out, even though the workshop hadn’t been announced.

By shifting the conversation in the marketing to the topics that are covered in the workshop earlier, the audience was primed, and much more receptive to the higher volume of emails.

The attendance for the workshop went from 20-30, to over 110 people, with up to 20% of those attendees also wanting to buy more from the business.

This one change dramatically shifted the performance of the business.

Frankly, most service businesses are still stuck in reactive mode: They reactively realise they want to put out an offer to get more clients, which means they do their marketing reactively as well. A week or two ahead of time they tell you something exciting is coming, and stay tuned, then whammo, the cart is open, they want you to buy, and the next few days is a patch-work campaign until it’s all over.

And because there ain’t a lot of time, they have to focus on volume and hype.

Usually with mediocre results.

What we’ve noticed is, as markets have gotten louder, and people are more stressed, it doesn’t help to try and grab attention last minute. People are just too overwhelmed and stressed to notice. Plus, it’s the same game that everyone else is playing.

Instead, we choose to be quieter, and spend more time ahead of the campaign to get people ready.

In 2025 and beyond, people are absolutely bombarded with offers and marketing noise. If you want to be successful with your launches, realise you need to give them time to see your stuff and get excited about it.

And if you’re late, or worse - reactively late, you’ll be missing out.

There’s nuance to effective pre-sell. It’s more than just talking about ‘something is coming’. But whatever your key offers or events are for 2026, if you start your pre-sell earlier (even now), you’ll be surprised at what can happen when you finally do present your offer to your people.