I have a pitch to make today for a potential client. I only met him last week and discussed at length the business he has just purchased.
Like many clients, this guy has set his business up and has been running it for a few months. But it’s only now that he has recognised the need for marketing. Until now the business has not been marketed.
What I propose will almost certainly work really well. And the reason for that is simple:
Successful marketing is often completed by just doing something.
Run an ad, do direct mail, make an offer – do something to try and attract business and chances are good that you’ll attract business.
But do something each and every day. That’s the key.
Marketing is like shampooing your hair. Here are the instructions:
1. Test.
2. Execute.
3. Then check the results.
4. Repeat.
Regards
Brendon
Sell stuff.
That’s what I do. It’s what everyone does to an extent. I’m might be trying to ‘sell’ a media release to a journalist one minute, or ‘selling’ a a full advertising campaign to a client the next.
I’ve never thought I’ve been any good at it, but I’ve gotten better with experience. So much so that it’s almost intuitive now. Let me explain…………..
As the business has grown, the more staff we have put on. And seeing how they try and sell has made me realise that I actually know what I’m talking about when it comes to selling. And here’s all you have to do:
1. Ask as many questions as you need to get a full and complete understanding of what your customer wants and needs. If you sell suits and a customer walks in, don’t say “Try this suit on sir, the colour looks great and it’s a lovely fabric.”
Your questions should be along the lines of “What do you do? Do you work in an airconditioned office? Will you always wear the jacket? How often will the suit be dry-cleaned? What colour do you think looks best on you? What colour and type of shirts do you have? Etc, etc.”
A thorough analysis of your customer’s needs is critical.
2. Tell the customer his problem. “You don’t have a suit that is appropriate for the office and your new position. Appearance is very important in being perceived as management material.”
3. Then offer a solution. “Based on everything you have told me and our thorough analysis, I recommend the following………… I recommend this because the navy blue is the safest and most trusted colour. It is the ‘uniform’ of management. Your budget ensures we can have a suit with materials that will be attractive, classical and be able to weather the weekly dry-cleaning that will be required.”
4. Ask the customer to buy. “We’ve analysed your needs. We’ve come up with solutions based on your exact needs that provide the best value possible. You’ve agreed with our reasoning. Would you like to buy this suit?”
Okay, so it’s a pretty dull example! But the lesson is, hopefully, clear.
Don’t blindly ask your customer to buy before you know his needs. If you know his needs you can recommend a solution based on fact, knowledge and understanding.
And that’s the way it should be.
Regards
Brendon
Most people will tell you that to increase your profits you need to do two- (2) things:
1. increase your number of customers,
2. reduce your costs
And whilst they are excellent ways to grow your business, I’d like to add a couple more into the mix here. And I know just what you are going to do.
You are going to say, “Of course. That is so obvious.”
But even though it may be obvious to you and I, it isn’t obvious to the vast, vast majority of businesses I see.
Your customers are gold! Being customers, they have 2 fantastic things you should love about them.
2 FANTASTIC THINGS ABOUT CUSTOMERS
1. They are far more likely to buy from you again. That has to do with knowing you, knowing where you are and knowing they can trust you.
For most businesses, that costs plenty of money to achieve.
2. They tell their friends about you. A tremendous source of new business for many businesses is referrals from happy customers.
And it’s been our experience that referred customers will buy more from you than customers who find you through any other means.
But encouraging referrals, as excellent an idea as that is, isn’t what I’d like to talk about here.
One of the easiest ways to increase your sales
The first thing I’d like to mention is one of the easiest ways to increase your sales. This technique is so simple, so basic that I’m constantly amazed that all businesses don’t devote a major part of their efforts to it.
Because all successful operators do this. And I just guarantee that just about all unsuccessful operators don’t.
I’m going to use an example. It’s a boring example because every man and his dogs uses it. But I’ll use it because most people reading this will be able to identify with it. And that’s important.
Example # 1: “Would you like fries with that?”
What a magnificent question. it’s a simple question – a basic technique – that has generated millions and millions of dollars in sales.
They are called add-on sales.
Did you read above where I mentioned your customer is highly likely to buy from you again? Do you know when he/she is most likely to buy from you again?
That’s right…….the customer is most likely to buy from you again when they are already buying from you.
They are at their most receptive. They have indicated their trust in you (other they wouldn’t buy). They are in a buying mood.
Ask the customer to buy again whilst he is in the process of buying
Now is the time to ask them to buy again. Not sometimes. Not maybe. But every single time your customer buys from you, you should offer another item.
But be smart about it. Add value to whatever they have already purchased. Keep it related and relevant and you will make more sales. A ton more sales.
But get this. Even though this is an obvious and incredibly simple way to make a heap more sales, I cannot remember the last time anyone, anyone at all, offered me an add-on sale.
Let’s say you sell sofas. That’s a decent sized purchase for most people. How do you think you would go if you said,
“Madam, that’s an excellent purchase – the colour is simply divine. I’d like to show you something that I think you will love………this coffee table complements the lines of the sofa, etc, etc. Would you like to have the table to complement the sofa?”
Now, the customer isn’t going to say “Yes” every time. There’s no question about that.
But a good 20-30% of the time you will make that add on sale.
Give it a try and reap the rewards.
Maximise sales with this one- (1) easy technique!
The second thing I’d like to talk about is making as many sales as possible. And increasing the number of sales you make can be as simple as pie!
For this example, I don’t want to use McDonalds. I’ll use myself instead.
I’ve never considered myself to be good at selling. In fact I’ve never thought of myself as a salesman of any type. I very genuinely believe that I never actually sell anything.
But I’ve always been far more successful at having our clients buy our services than anyone else in our business.
So this is what I did. (And this made our sales jump by many, many thousands of dollars per year.)
Each of our team came along with me when I went to see prospective clients. We made notes of every variable we possibly could. Those differences were interesting, but not really relevant to the message here.
The message here is this:
Find the most successful salesperson you can find in your industry and copy him or her. And even benchmark against successful salespeople from any industry.
It’s that simple!
One of the most interesting things that our team discovered was that I didn’t ‘sell’ any of our clients.
We discovered that all I did was:
* asked lots of questions,
* listened to the answers,
* suggested solutions, and
* provided reasoning for the recommendations I gave.
The entire team started doing this – we practiced many a long hour – and immediately our sales conversion rates went through the roof.
Do what works!
* If it works, do it.
* If it doesn’t work, don’t do it.
* Examine the variables in your organisation. Survey your customers and find out why they purchased. Find your best salesperson and closely review what they do.
With all of that critical information you have a wonderful start to push you sales through the roof. Start today!
Regards
Brendon
One of the most effective ways to generate new clients is through positioning yourself as an expert – and one of the best ways to do that is through public speaking.
I’ve had quite a few requests for more information following this post – and in response have developed an e-book “How To Use Public Speaking To Get More Clients“.
This e-book takes you step-by-step through the process of finding, approaching and booking speeches and generating quality leads. Includes sample letters, booking forms and much more…click here for more
Hope it is of some interest.
Brendon
I’ve just come from a meeting with a client who we signed up today. The client wants a web site for her business.
We’ve won the job despite being 10 times the price of our competitor’s quote. That’s right – 10 times the price.
As we do with all of our clients, I asked why our proposal won the job. The client’s answer was pretty much what I hoped.
* We assessed her needs
* We provided a solution
This client needed a web site up and working asap, she needed us to write the copy for the site and she needed an idea on how to market the site.
We addressed all those, gave her some examples and got the job.
(P.S: The client told me the competition basically said, “How big do you want the site? What do you want the buttons to say?” And that was the assessment!)
Have a good day.
Brendon
(from August 2003 blog on www.tailored.com.au)
We’ve been in our present offices for 18 months. But until today, we had never marketed to our local area.
Today Bianka walked around the neighbourhood, distributed our newsletter and introduced herself (and us). The feedback was very positive and already a couple of people have requested more information about how we can help them.
Geographical proximity is a big choice factor in choosing almost any product or service. Marketing to those closest to you will usually yield the best results.
18 months……takes me a while to catch on!
Have a good day.
Regards
Brendon
(from August 2003 blog on www.tailored.com.au)
We ran a display ad in the closest big city newspaper on the weekend. Click here for the ad (it’s a pdf file).
Three- (3) things we considered when we ran our ad:
* A professional services firm needs to generate leads
* A firm like ours doesn’t generate leads via advertising
* We do generate leads from our web site
Having said all that, we always try different things so we tried advertising to generate visitors to our web site which would, in turn, generate leads for our business.
It worked well (which surprised me a bit. I actually think the ad is way too cvheesy.). We have meetings all this week and next with potential clients interested in marketing and web work.
Who saw our ad – we advertised in the business section of the newspaper. Obviously those more likely to be interested in business will read the business section.
We did a few things differently with this ad. We didn’t give a great call to action. We didn’t provide an incentive. We didn’t talk about benefits.
But what we did do was generate the type of people we want as clients to our web site (from where they contacted us). And getting business is what you want your advertising to do.
Regards
Brendon
(taken from www.tailored.com.au August 2003)
1. Call 2 old clients to say hello
2. Send out a newsletter detailing some offers you have
3. Post out 10 postcards to prospects
4. Send out a media release a day
5. Write an article for an industry magazine within your speciality
6. Send 3 clients an email offer of some sort
7. Send an offer with every invoice you send
8. Send a prospect something of interest (such as a press clipping)
9. Write to 1 industry organisation and offer a speech on your speciality
10. Read 1 web site like this one every day for fresh ideas
Business is about developing relationships. If you keep in contact with your clients they will continue to buy from you. If you get in contact with people who haven’t heard of you before, then they might buy from you.
Good luck.
Brendon
(from www.tailored.com.au August 2003)
The team here at Tailored have a drink after work on Friday afternoons. We finish up about 4 p.m, open up the fridge and have a drink and a bite to eat in the boardroom.
During this time we shoot the breeze on anything from weekend plans to work issues.
We often have some terrific ideas during these relaxed chats and last week…..
We had a magnificent idea!!
Now, I know we are a marketing business and we deal with marketing issues every hour of every day. And I’ve done this for years and years. But this next idea has never entered my head. Until last week. And what an idea it is!
A simple twist has made a huge difference!
As you probably gather from this site, we use a variety of marketing strategies to generate leads and clients. And I’m more than happy to share these things with you, for a couple of reasons.
1. I’m sure you are smart enough to realise that we are giving away the tricks of our trade. This stuff is valuable intellectual property and can be incredibly valuable if used the right way.
2. I have every confidence that you don’t read and think “Oh the sneaky little person!” I’ve even had a person email me and tell me that I would never get a client from this site because I show too much – wrong! This site simply demonstrates our expertise.
If you are a potential client you might recognise some strategies we use, but I believe most people see the strategies for what that are – good and decent ways to get new clients (I’d love you to use us of course, but I’d equally love you to follow the examples and do it yourself and make your business a great success).
Get on with it Brendon!
Okay, okay! Here it is.
We were discussing the results of the latest postcard mail out (we did 3 last week). One of the mail outs generated us 4 leads from 90 cards.
Bianka mentioned how funny it was that all of the people who responded have their businesses located very close to and knew personally one- (1) of the two- (2) people who we quoted in the testimonials.
My reply was pretty simple
“The biggest barrier to buying is the perception of risk. Every purchase is a risk. If you can remove the risk of doing business with you – maybe offer a 100% guarantee – then you will get more sales,” I said.
“Because these new clients know the people we quoted on the cards, they can very easily check up on us and be reassured about the perceived level of risk. Thus, people who know other people we deal with are far more likely to contact us.
It’s the very same reason that the vast majority of our business is provided by word-of-mouth referrals,” I said.
Stick with me here……it’s gold!
The response rate of that 90 card mail out was 4.4%. Not bad for a mail out.
We talked about that and a few other things.
Then it hit me like an arrow between the eyes!
We would, just like we did last week, generate a much better response to our mailings if we quoted testimonials from people that the person reading the card knew!
We would greatly increase our success rate by sending cards quoting businesspeople around the place of the person providing the quote.
So that’s what we did!
The results?
Spectacular!
We’ve only sent our forty- (40) cards so far, but we’ve already had four- (4) responses. That’s more than double the previous response. And a quick assessment of those four- (4) clients tells me that it could be worth $10,000.
All because of an easy chat over a wine and following a natural progression of thought. It seems so obvious now!
Regards
Brendon
(taken for a www.tailored.com.au article – article has since been removed)
Tonight my wife (Mel) and I are going to dinner with friends. Ange is one of my wife’s best friends and they haven’t seen each other for about a year.
Ange and her husband (Nick) are flying into town for a few days and we are going to a local BYO restuarant at 7.
Mel went out and did some shopping today and bought some beer and wine to take with us tonight. She purchased her favourite bottle of white wine – a fairly inexpensive drop at $10 a bottle.
But she was worried.
* She was worried that the wine wasn’t good enough.
* She was worried that she hadn’t spent enough money on the wine.
* She was worried about the perceived quality of the wine.
My question to her was:
“So you think you should go and buy a bottle of wine that is more expensive and that you probably won’t like? And this is because you don’t think you have spent enough?”
Different types of consumers
When you market your products there are different segments of buyers. My wife, because her special friend is visiting, has turned into an ‘aspirational’ type. She aspires to something better. In this case wine.
It’s the very same reason Mel has spent the day cleaning the house from top to bottom and that the kids aren’t allowed to make any sort of mess at all!
Ange and Nick are coming at 4 p.m for a chat and a drink before we go to dinner. Mel wants the house to be perfect for them, so they are impressed (That aspirational focus again).
The important marketing aspects I’ve been reminded about from this simple story are these:
1. Many people equate price with quality. There are different markets for your product or services
2. There are different consumer ‘types’ buying your products or services (and consumers can jump between them)
3. There are different motivating factors when buying your products or services
4. My wife is nuts
Take the first 3 aspects into consideration when considering your marketing positioning. For example, you might market to aspirational consumers – you may not need to market yourself as the lowest price within the market. That could actually turn your target market off!
P.S: Mel darling, if you ever read this I’m just kidding about you being crazy! I’m just doing it for dramatic effect! Please, please forgive me.
Regards
Brendon
(originally posted on www.tailored August 2003)