Archive for February, 2009

Generating sales leads doesn’t have to be an expensive or lengthy process. There are plenty of rapid low or even no cost ways to get tons of potential customers, whether it’s online or offline. Business start-up consultant Doug Brown says “Lead generation doesn’t have to be expensive continue

You may love or loathe asking for referrals but they are the best form of advertising for your company. Think about it: the customer who comes via a referral is already convinced of the value of your product or service – someone else has done all the hard work of continue

Dr Ken Blanchard is a world-renowned leadership and management expert. He is the co-author of The One Minute Manager which has sold upwards of 12 million copies as well as 40 other books including Raving Fans, Gung Ho! and Whale Done! He and Don Hutson, the CEO of US Learning, wrote The One Minute Entrepreneur. SuccessTrack: What attribute do you consider the most important for an entrepreneur? Ken Blanchard: “One continue

Here’s why ‘WHY’ is such a profit-making marketing trigger. “Stop taking two and three plates of food,” my mother said to me angrily. I was at a wedding and seven years old. Back then, at a lot of the weddings we used to go to, the food would continue

Marketing experts say you must woo your prospects, offering them low or no cost samples, then something that is a little bit more expensive and so on until they are familiar enough with you and your company to consider your highest priced products. Doing it this way makes purchase continue

1. Ask your caller or visitor how they heard about you and what motivated them to contact you. (Remember this information may not be reliable. Not everyone is comfortable saying, “I was looking for the cheapest price” or “You were the first listing on the page.”)

2. Use different phone numbers – Have a separate phone number that you use exclusively for your advertising efforts that you include in your advertisements.

3. Coupons and mailers – Offer coupons or ticket stubs and ask your customers to bring them in to redeem them. Online, provide discount codes that can be used at the ‘checkout’.

4. Requests for information products – When you offer a free information product in your ad you should track results in order to build your mailing list. This list could become your most profitable target for subsequent offers.

Many businesses just put their ads out to the public and don’t take the time and effort necessary to track their profitability. Don’t let one of them be you.

• Create a plan before you begin; don’t give out assignments haphazardly • Make time to train the person if necessary • Be very clear about the standards you expect and the outcome you want. Explain what needs to be done and why and provide a deadline. • Ask people to continue

When you market, your goal is to make an impact on prospective consumers with your unique brand. Your brand distinguishes you in the marketplace and expresses your commitment to providing the highest quality/service. Your brand identity is comprised of the name of your company and whatever graphic image you have continue

Recently I sent out an email asking people who want to work with SuccessTrack to get in touch with me. Nearly 160 people responded, so I got to see how scores of different business owners would sell themselves (or not, as the case may be). continue

Do you have customers that leave suddenly? You were doing an outstanding job for them, lavishing them with truckloads of service and yet they disappeared without a word.

The key operating factor here is ‘without a word’. That’s the scary part! The silent ones are always the most dangerous. If you would like to learn how to keep your customers, you’ve first got to keep them noisy. Read this marketing article to find out just how you can make complaining clients one of your biggest assets.

Imagine you run a pizza parlour.

You have all these neighbourhood families that pop in at least once a week for some pizza, garlic bread and Coke. On an average, one customer spends about £30 per week. But let’s assume they spend just £20. Imagine you did something that bugged this customer, but he or she never told you about it. What would you stand to lose if they left?

Its simple maths: You lose £20 x 50 weeks. That’s equivalent to £1000 a year.

If you lost just 10 such customers per month, you’d lose about 100 clients a year.

That’s £100,000 that could be in your back pocket if you were a little complaint-conscious.

That Doesn’t Happen in Our Business: The Denial Syndrome

Overtly it won’t. In a Bain & Company survey of major corporations, they found that on average, U.S. Corporations lose half their customers in five years. Notice, it wasn’t ‘one year’ or ’suddenly’.

Clients have a tipping point. They get unhappy bit by bit and then it’s camel-back-breaking time. So, if you think that all your customers are happy with you – they aren’t. It’s a basic fact of life.

What’s really weird is that you can’t measure how much business you’re really losing. A study was done on a bank, they found they had as many accounts as they had a year ago. What they failed to measure was how most of the people had ’silently’ transferred the money out into other banks and the closure of the account was a last measure, somewhere down the line.

The same thing applies to your customer.

Like a patient Buddha, they will seemingly appear to put up with everything, until suddenly you find they don’t use you anymore. This is a classic flight of business. You hear nothing of it, until it’s almost gone and it takes a mammoth effort just to hold on to the business.

If you look at it from another perspective, you might even be getting equal to or slightly less business from your customer. Naturally this doesn’t ring any alarm bells. However, if you’ve been watching carefully, your customer has probably grown bigger and richer in the past few months or years. If your business with them has not grown exponentially, you are actually LOSING OUT.

continue