Little Kids Ask Until They Get What They Want

Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, can I have an ice cream? Can I, Can I, Can I, Can I? Please, Please, Please, Please. I’ll be good for a whole year. I promise. Just give me a dollar. I won’t ask again for a long time. Pleaseeeeee!

Regular, repeated mailings are the way to create big predictable results. When you mail every 30 days for a year you will cause a dramatic growth in your business.

People respond to repetition. If you are a parent you know how hard it is to refuse repeated requests for an ice cream or a desperately wanted toy.

If you are not a parent, I’m sure you remember asking, even begging for a toy, a treat or permission to stay up past your bedtime, until your parents finally gave in. Your customers and prospective customers are similar. They need to be asked repeatedly too.

Who You Should Ask

You should be asking 3 groups of people to do one of 3 things:

1. The first group is your house customer list (your own list of existing customers). You should be asking your existing customers repeatedly to contact you about some offer you make to them for your products and services. A clear offer with an easy way to contact you should be made, like: We will give you 5000 full color postcards for $299, simply give us a call at 800-628-1804 to set up getting your postcards.Or some other offer you reasonably believe they will be interested in based on your personal knowledge of them and preferably based on their actual previous buying behavior.
2. The second group is your house prospect list (prospects you have caused to inquire about your products and/or services through your own marketing efforts). This group of people is interested in your service but hasn’t made the decision to go for it yet. They will be the most likely to respond to a special when you offer it to them.
3. The third group of people are people who can reasonably be expected to be interested in your products and/or services, but who have never purchased anything from you and have never inquired about your products and/or services either. The likely reason they haven’t contacted you is that they don’t know that you even exist. You remedy that by contacting them with a series of postcards offering free information about how they can benefit from your products and services. If this list of people is properly selected and if you make an offer that a reasonable person will find very, very difficult to refuse, then your response rate will be high.

That is the whole game in a nutshell. Create or get a list of people who have demonstrated they are interested in the type of product or service you offer. AND/OR Get a list of people extremely likely to be interested even if they haven’t already proved they are by buying from you or one of your competitors.

Once you have these lists of people contact them with postcards which offer them the benefits of your products and services and keep making them offers until they inquire and/or buy from you and then ask them to buy more on a regular basis.

If you do what you have just read about you will have more business than you can shake a stick at. You will have a smile on your face just like the little kid with a belly full of ice cream he/she convinced mom to buy.

I’m reading one of their “FREE Reports” called The Edge of Success, 9 Building Block to Double Your Sales and decided it made more sense to write my notes here to share with everyone.

First key message is to “master the moment,” to be there when your prospect is ready to buy as … “People buy when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell.” So let’s move on to the building blocks … and creating moments of interaction (automated).

How Can You Improve Sales & Profitability?

Supercharge Your Website

The average adult spends up to 3 hrs/day on the Internet; 70% of the US population uses the Internet regularly … and giggle, they called the days before the Internet, the dark ages. Websites need to focus on the customer in order to standout from the crowd and visitors want to do something (think about kids in a new room). Recommendations:

• Pictures & descriptions of your product/service
• Interesting facts, statistics, etc
• High interest stories … case studies, before & after
• Customer testimonials (I still need to work on this)
• Forums or other forms of interaction
• Most important, capture visitor’s contact information! by offering a free report, content or something else they want.

Fill the Funnel

What you do with your leads once you have them, i.e. hopefully getting them into your database … as you must generate AND KEEP, your leads. It’s about gathering, sorting and using the information to create moments of interaction.

Simple example (simple math) to illustrate long term value of leads. It’s meant to illustrate why you want to treat each prospect as if they were already your customer. You never know what is keeping them from buying your product or service.

• Spend $2,000 on marketing, generating 100 leads
• 5 become customers, with revenue of $18,000 over 12 months … a decent ROI.
• What if 20 more leads became customers after 1 year, generating $72,000 in years 2 and 3?

Convert Your Funnel

Interaction, messages need to have a purpose or some value (in eyes of the receiver) attached in order to be effective. Conversion is based on the type of messages & sales tactics used to move prospects to customers … often called salesforce automation. Offered are 3 conversion techniques:

• Offer value without hard sell. Offer content rich materials, and not necessarily discounting which any company can do. Examples:
  • Sporting goods – give schedule for upcoming games.
  • Mortgage company – report explaining difference between fixed and variable interest.

Visibility >> sense of obligation >>> building trust

• Get personal and reveal your personality as people want you to be real with them, and not a salesperson (so why can’t we all stop trying to be that salesperson?). What people like:
  • View prospects and customers as friends. New idea I read suggests writeingto one person, to make it more personal – haven’t tried it yet, but makes sense.
  • Use conversational language (not corporate speak which I honestly have a hard time letting go of when I write.)
  • Laugh at yourself and your mistakes.
  • Share your personal life with prospects and customers as it makes you more real. Talk about “unlearning” the corporate way of doing things, especially for women!
  • … and folks, blogging is the perfect vehicle to do all of this as it’s meant to be a journal, not a published book!

• Show, don’t tell your product to your prospects, in the privacy and comfort of their own home or office. Keep it simple, keep it short and keep it interesting and most important, why you! This is a rather tall order for me, being a geek by training and practice (30 yrs in corporate America.)

Win Lifelong Customers

Someone who buys from you once isn’t a customer! A customer is someone who buys from you on a regular basis and this type of customer loyalty isn’t dead, but it is something you have to work at. You have to make your customers feel special! What does that take?

• Keep a database. Here’s a conversation you can have the data. Nancy calls to ask if you have any more widgets. You respond “Nancy, I remember when you were in here last. You had your kids with you. How are they doing?” and she says “They’re doing well. Thank you” and she’s stunned you remembered. “We do have more widgets in stock. Will you be in to pick that up today? I know it’s tough getting around with 3 small children.” You just gained a loyal customer!
• Target your follow-up campaigns to match customer interest and buying habits. I never thought about segmenting by spend (our software doesn’t differentiate) but it helps to understand and respect a customers budget based on purchase history.
• Deliver as promised as humans want things to be predictable, and keep it simple. Make the customer feel special (I liked wow, i.e. give them more than they expect), understand their values and deliver your product or service as promised.

Flip Your Funnel

I liked the following timeline … prospect >> buyer (1st time) >> customer, but only after a GREAT buying experience, follow-up and other efforts to build a lifelong relationship. Once you start to earn trust as a lifelong supplier, you can extend the relationship.

Flipping the funnel is when you are able to upsell and cross sell to your existing customers. You need to “master the moment” to create win-win opportunities where you can deliver what your customers need and want. Why do you want to do this?

• Upselling – If you sell to 100 customers and you make the effort to up-sell, say a premium product for $120 versus the standard product at $100 … that’s an extra $200 and some of those customers already wanted the upgrade so you just have to ask (I’ll have to think about this for my handyman business.)
• Cross Selling – We all know it, and likely we’ve all responded to one or more upselling techniques – Amazon tells us that people who bought book X also bought books Y and Z. It works so why not do it?

So when I read Amber’s post differentiating advertising from marketing, it really caught my attention. Amber Noble-Garland is a member of Active Rain, the best social media network for anyone involved in real estate.

Amber shared the Top 5 things I took away from the “Millionaire Maker Potato Chip Marketing” seminar. Here is the number 1 tip (you should read them all). I’ve modified the format to help emphasize what I believe is important: “The #1 mistake most real estate professionals make is they confuse advertising with marketing.

• Advertising is to generate attention and create awareness.
• Marketing is to position something to actually compel someone to buy it.

“Personally, I assumed that every real estate professional knew the difference, but looking around the room I got the sense that wasn’t the case. It was an eye-opening revelation for many to learn that while the two are related, they also have very distinctly different functions.”