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Promotions | Lead Generation and Databases | Selling without Salespeople |
Dominating the Market | Testimonials and Case Studies
Executive Summary
PROMOTIONS
Promotions stimulate activity. They give people an incentive to try your services or products and they set your company’s products or services apart from the competition. Your promotion should be so exciting, worthwhile and enticing that potential customers feel compelled to take immediate action.
Why have promotions?
It might be a time of year when traditionally your sales dip. Maybe you have an over-supply of stock. Perhaps you want to counteract someone else’s promotion. Or the competition is hotting up so much that you need your products or services to stand out. You might want to acquire new leads and customers.
Many business owners consider promotions to be gimmicky or risky and believe they are only appropriate for supermarkets. Those business owners are missing a massive opportunity for business growth. Remember, airlines do promotions. No-one says British Airways is ‘tacky’ because it does a ‘two for one’ promotion. Harrods, the department store, does promotions and Harrods is certainly not tacky.
What you must consider before a promotional giveaway
Giving a product or service away – free of charge – is a very fast way of generating business but if you don’t have any other products or services to sell to those customers, you’ve just generated costs for your company that you might never recover. You must have a back-end product to sell to those ‘free sample’ customers to recover the huge cost of providing those enticements in the first place.
Having the infrastructure to support the promotion is vital. It has to stack up financially and it has to be logistically manageable. That doesn’t mean you have to suddenly employ 20 extra staff in your office: you can manage a large-scale promotion even if you’re a one-person business.
It takes courage to do a promotional campaign and you will need to calculate your risk. You will have to ask, “If we do this – is anyone going to pay us? If they do pay us – are we going to have enough money to keep going?”
Types of promotions
Price promotions are the most obvious type of campaigns and three of the most popular are:
‘Two for One’
You get two of whatever it is for the price of one – so you get two car washes for the price of one, for example.
‘Buy one, get one free’
Buy one product and receive the other product free of charge.
‘Half Price’
If you buy a product, you only have to pay half the normal price.
Out of the three, the most successful is the ‘Buy one, get one free’ – and that proves that people don’t necessarily buy on price. They would rather have something of additional value than something half price.
With a ‘buy one, get one free’ promotion, you’re not cutting the price; you’re actually giving something additional away. Price cutting maybe the first promotion you consider but be careful because it can devalue your customers’ perception of your product or service.
Other Promotions To Consider
You could do promotions where you leave the price as it is but change the method by which people pay. For example, if you have always demanded payment up-front, offer a staggered payment plan. If you have only ever accepted cheques, accept credit cards as well. You can time delineate that and say, “For the next two weeks, any new customer can spread the payments over the next six months – interest free.”
‘Try before you buy’ is a great way of allowing people to sample what you do. It’s very reassuring. Allow people to experience it and then say, “If you like what you experience, you pay. If you don’t like what you experience, then you don’t pay.” It’s as simple as that.
Competitions and surveys are very effective promotional techniques too. Combining and packaging things together make a great promotion. It’s about building value. This is the key to a successful promotion – creating an irresistible offer. This is the goal – creating something that someone would have to be stupid to walk away from.
You can partner with other companies so you run promotions for each other. You can combine the joint venture with a promotion – and that’s very, very powerful too.
The Refer-A-Friend type of promotion is often considered boring but if it is done properly, it can really boost the growth of your customer base.
When you promote something as ‘new’, ‘first time in the UK’ or that has ‘never been seen before’, you create an element of excitement, buzz and mystery which is very important. It also stimulates the word-of-mouth advertising, which brings enquiries into your database.
All of these things are intrinsically linked. If you can do all of these things and get them working together – you don’t have to have a particularly clever plan to get them working together, just do them and watch them all sort of start to integrate – then you will find that your business will grow and grow and grow. It will happen so much quicker than if you simply allowed things to happen.
Why You Need To Explain To Your Customers
You must provide your customers with an explanation about why you are doing the promotion.
Giving a reason ‘why’ helps customers to see that the company can slash prices and still operate. You have to say: “The reason why we can drop the price here is because…” It doesn’t have to be a complicated reason. It can be: “It’s my birthday and I thought I’d send an extremely special, fun, birthday offer.”
It builds that trusting relationship within your loyal customer group because they feel included. They know why you’re doing the promotion.
The Key To A Successful Promotion
You must add a time limit to your promotional offer if you want it to really succeed. Tell people what they need to do and how little time they have left to do it.
Conclusion
Creating a powerful, compelling and absolutely irresistible promotion is the key to differentiating yourself in a market – however crowded it may be – and if you can do that, then you have something unique… your business success is completely assured.
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Executive Summary
LEAD GENERATION AND DATABASES
Why is it so important to have a database? Why collect customer and prospect information? The simple answer is if you have information on your customers you can look after them properly and you can return to them with new products and services.
The clever business owner knows the more information you have on people who are interested in your business – the more often you can return to them with additional offers. Just because someone doesn’t buy today doesn’t mean that your product isn’t good, that your service isn’t interesting or that they don’t want it. It just means that they’re not going to complete the transaction with you at this time.
Without a prospect database you have to continuously spend money to generate new leads. With a prospect database, you can return to old leads and enquiries and reactivate them.
Two of the biggest assets of any business are the customer database and the prospect database, the people who haven’t yet purchased.
Segmenting your database allows you to target the right message and the right offer to the right kind of people. The more information you collect about the preferences of your prospects and customers – the more efficient and the more tailor-made you can make your offer.
You need multiple ways of getting people into your database. Direct Mail and the Internet are two obvious ones. Another is advertising in general magazines and newspapers and in the trade press too.
You need to spend your advertising budget carefully and ensure you receive maximum returns. And you need to measure your investment regularly to determine how many leads become customers.
You need Direct Response Advertising – by which you can track the response. Your advertisement – whether it’s press, radio, TV or outdoor – must encourage people to pick up the telephone and call your company or to visit your website. You need to stimulate the person who is reading, hearing or watching the advertisement to take action. You have to offer something which has sufficient value for that person to overcome inertia. Put a time limit on the offer (which might be a free CD; a free book; a free report; a free starter kit; free instructions; a free ticket; a free consultation; a free gift; or a free Mystery Gift).
In the trade press you can do inserts as well. An insert works eight times better than an advertisement because it’s physical, it jumps or falls out, it’s in the person’s hands, and it’s separate from the publication. The best combination is the advert in the publication plus the insert so you have a double-whammy. Give customers three response mechanisms: they phone, visit your website or fill in the card and freepost it to you.
Advertising in directories works very well too as does advertising in card decks (lots of inserts or postcards put together and mailed). Card decks are an excellent way of generating qualified leads.
Other ways of generating leads include going to events, running seminars and attending networking groups. In fact, anything you can do to get in front of customers will help generate leads. The more people you can get in front of through advertising, face-to-face contact or doing seminars, the better. You’ll build your database and the database is the key to a successful business.
Referrals don’t cost anything and statistics show that a ‘referred’ prospect is seven times more likely to buy than a cold, unreferred prospect.
The problem with word-of-mouth advertising is that it’s dependent upon the amount that people talk. Your priority with your product, your service, and your business is to make it worthy of being talked about! You need to give everyone an irresistible reason to include your product, service or business in daily conversations.
Joint Venturing can actually help the word-of-mouth referrals as well. When you look for a Joint Venture partner, look for a person who has the type of database that you want to tap into, and who has credibility, a great reputation and a willingness to participate.
Consider Joint Ventures with your competitors. People mistakenly assume that every other company in their industry is a competitor. But they’re not. Why not get together with your competitors and share your unconverted leads?
On the Internet, two ways that you can leverage lead generation instantly are:
- Joint Ventures and going to other people with similar websites.
- Pay-per-Click – Having an advertisement that you pay for. On Google, you can get it up and running in 30 minutes – maybe even less sometimes – and you can be getting people clicking through to your website pretty much instantly.
You can go to Exhibitions and Trade Shows and generate leads. Someone else has done the hard work to get thousands of people interested in a certain industry or profession together and you have access to those thousands of prospects all for the price of renting a stand. To take advantage of the opportunity, you need to have something to give away to those prospects. You say, “Give me your details and I’ll give you this.” The giveaway must be irresistible. Then you have something more valuable than you could ever imagine: the details of several hundred people who are interested in your product or service.
Do the follow-up. Put their details on the database and categorise them. Focus on the people who do want what you have to offer.
What do you actually do with the data once you have it?
Get the information the person requested into their hands quickly. If you respond fast, people are impressed. Send something out in the post and then have Tele-Sales follow-up. You get the edge on your competitors because they probably won’t send it quickly and probably won’t follow-up.
It’s about building relationships with people who have asked to receive information from you. And then, it’s about building that relationship over time. Just because someone did not buy today does not mean they won’t buy next year, the year after, or the year after that. You don’t quite know when they’re going to buy, but the database allows you to keep in touch – so that you have at least the opportunity to present your product, your service, over a period of time.
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Executive Summary
SELLING WITHOUT SALESPEOPLE
If you want to increase the sales of your product and service you don’t have to employ a sales team do it. There are other ways of doing it which produce the same (or even better)results with less effort, less money, and less stress.
How? It’s easy. You let your marketing do all the work. Think of it this way: salespeople can only talk to a certain number of people a day. They have off-days and they have on-days. There are many reasons why salespeople have suppressed sales. However, your marketing can be multiplied and replicated thousands of times without having to hire thousands of people.
Let me give you an example: If you want to sell your product or service to a potential customer, you (or your salesperson) have a conversation that lasts at least 10 minutes either over the telephone or in person. Your potential customer might be interested and might buy it. They might not but you (or your salesperson) will still spend 10 minutes in conversation, regardless of the outcome. In a day, there are only so many 10-minute conversations you can have.
What if you wrote a letter to that potential customer instead? How about if your letter was sent not just to one potential customer but 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 of them? In fact, what about if your letter was sent to as many people as you can find who might be interested in your product or service?
By using direct mail, you can contact many people with the same sales message.
Your potential customers all read it within the same 24-hour period and react. They say, “Okay, do I want it? Or don’t I want it?” In fact, up to that point, it’s the same as if you were right in front of each of those people! If they are interrupted, they can return to your letter later on. They can pass your letter onto other people – which they can’t do with a telephone call.
You offer them a huge incentive to take action, to make the purchase or the booking. What are the kinds of offers and promotions that would stimulate a list of prospects to get in touch with you?
- Time limited – phone today
- Claim something free
- Add in a bonus gift
- A special offer
- A buy one, get one free promotion
- Something that’s running out
What you’re looking for is a promotion that creates action NOW – rather than later.
In your letter, you’ve explained what they need to do. “If you want this, this is what you do. Pick up the phone and call this number, and speak to one of our team.” One number, one person.
You’ve told them what sort of person makes an ideal customer. “You are perfect for this product if you fill (this criteria), (this criteria) and (this criteria). But if this is you – this, this, this – no way, it’s not for you.”
It means you’ll only be speaking to qualified prospects – people who’ve read what you do, know how much it costs, and who fulfil the criteria. They phone you and say, “I’m interested!”
“Fantastic! Well, what else would you like to know?” You’ve already answered all of the questions they may have about the content of the letter – because you also put in a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) sheet. Usually, all people want is to hear a nice voice on the end of the phone that says, “How can I help you?”
Once you have that personal relationship – they either buy, or they don’t buy. If they don’t buy, something’s gone tragically wrong since the phone was answered.
All you need is someone responding to the phone calls at your end. If you don’t have anyone, if you’re a one-person business – either it’s you doing it, or a call centre and they take all the calls, take the messages and email them to you, and then you can respond to them one after the other.
Compare that to your army of telesales people phoning out and speaking to possibly two people that qualify in a day. I am sure you’d rather have one person accepting incoming calls from qualified prospects than an army of salespeople making phonecalls to unqualified prospects.
And as a business owner, you’ll agree that managing one person who takes incoming phonecalls is far less stressful than managing a team of people!
Now, many businesses choose to have a salesforce because they feel the need for personal contact and to build a relationship. If you’re adamant that your product or service can only be sold voice-to-voice then you use this technique: you use the letter to drive people to a teleconference in which someone highly qualified (you, your best salesperson, one of your presenters, trainers or your Managing Director)talks about the product for 40 minutes in a sufficiently interesting way and then answers questions.
The questions will be from people who have been interested enough to pick up the phone and listen for 40 minutes – not tricky questions! Your spokesperson answers the questions and then incentivises the callers to take immediate action. “Phone in the next hour to buy and you’ll receive…” Which means every time that phone rings it’s a sale!
It’s all about removing the necessity for employing huge numbers of people and making a process that you can do at any time on any day of the week. The alternative is to have a big sales floor with dozens of people making outgoing phone-calls, massive phone bills, huge wages and very high stress levels.
Once you have that system there, you only have to tweak it occasionally if circumstances change. Keeping an eye on the system is easy compared with keeping an eye on a team of human beings.
So you:
- Send someone a letter
- Drive them to a teleclass
- Send them an email
- Do a voice broadcast
Combine those four things and you have an automatic Business Creation machine.
Conclusion
It is possible to sell more of your product or service using an automated system that works 365 days of the year. It’s easy and it works!
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Executive Summary
DOMINATING THE MARKET
Dominating your market doesn’t mean you have to be the biggest in a particular industry, profession, or marketplace. Being smaller sometimes allows you to be more agile than larger companies. If you’re going to play to win however you want to be the most successful business in your marketplace and there are certain things that you can do to position yourself in that way.
It’s a lot easier to dominate your market if you’re very clear about what your market is. Who are your customers? People who believe everyone’s a customer have a hard battle on their hands. To have a generic product which suits everyone is difficult because:
- You have such a large marketplace you don’t know where to start
- You can never specialise
- You can never become expert in a certain field.
If you have a specific niche market for your field, your product or service, it becomes extremely easy to become the leader in that marketplace.
When you niche your product or service several things happen: you know where to focus your marketing and where to find your customers. When you do that, you become expert in that marketplace because:
- You have the same type of customers
- You’re providing the same service or product
- You become better and better at what you do.
You increase the referrals you receive because when you are an expert people will refer you to others. When you are an expert in your niche your charges increase because people are willing to pay more for an expert than a generalist.
It can be more profitable for a business to cut out some of what they do and focus on one particular area. Typically, 20% of your income is provided by 80% of your customers, and 80% of your income comes from 20% of your customers. It means most of your business income derives from 20% of your customers so you focus solely on them. When you focus on those people – you will attract other people like them because those 20% say, “This guy only specialises in people like us.”
Creating a segment of the market gives you the power to dominate that market. People pay money and go straight to that one place because it provides the product or service they want. You need to position your company as the only place to go.
Part of this involves education: if people don’t know about your company and its specialist products or services, they’re not going to buy from you. You need to educate your customers as to why you are the expert. You do that by determining what makes you an expert. Is it because:
- you have more experience?
- you have staff that has more experience?
- you have been in the business longest?
- you have the biggest range?
- you have exclusive supplies?
- you can do special orders?
- you provide an unsurpassed service?
You’re not just taking money from your customers in return for a product or service – you’re also providing backup and a support mechanism that they won’t find elsewhere. You’re offering all of those things. By doing this you attract a clientele to your business that wants the best. And do you know something? They’re the best customers – because they appreciate you more.
Being specific about who your customers are is the first step. One way to find out is to survey your customers. Ask them:
- What should we start doing?
- What should we stop doing?
- What’s just right?
- What should we do more of?
- What should we do less of?
Offer people an incentive to complete and return the survey.
Focusing on the benefits rather than the features does help people to understand why they should pay that little bit extra. It’s positioning you away from simply offering a commodity that everybody’s offering to offering something special. It says you really understand your customers and what they actually want. It’s no longer about a commodity: it’s a service and a product combined.
Ideally, you want to move away from a transactional relationship – the sort you have with your supermarket: you give them money and take your groceries.
Part of the key to that is actually:
- Capturing the details of the people who are visiting your website
- Understanding what they’re buying, and
- Being able to predict their buying habits.
There are other ways of positioning yourself in the marketplace. One of the fastest ways to position yourself at the top of your marketplace is to be an author. If you have written a book then people automatically perceive you as an expert. You become a trusted advisor.
When you position yourself in your niche, you become far more focused in your marketing than you could ever do if you were just being a generalist. It opens up so many opportunities.
Once you’ve dominated one niche – you can develop a second niche. But again, select a niche rather than trying to be all things to all people.
Conclusion
- Decide who your customers are or who you want them to be and focus on dominating the market by positioning yourself as an expert
- Focus your marketing
- Know your customers – love your customers
- Service your customers so that you become the ‘go-to’ company for those people.
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Executive Summary
TESTIMONIALS AND CASE STUDIES
One of the most powerful things you can do when you are marketing your business product or service is to show that it does what it’s meant to do. If it’s a product – does it work? If it’s a service – does it provide what people want?
The easiest way to do that is to have testimonials from people who have bought your product or used your service. Testimonials provide the social proof that other people have bought your product or service, taken the risk, tried it out and found it to be of great value.
Most people don’t use testimonials effectively and don’t see the impact they can have. They don’t even see the necessity of collecting testimonials from clients. But if you get the right testimonials from the right people, it builds respect, prestige and your professionalism. It elevates you in the eyes of the person reading the testimonial. They say, “Well, if this person says she’s good – she must be good!”
Now, if the person whose opinion counts says, “Don’t like it”, say: “I am going to impress you so much. I’m going to go away to remodel and recreate my product. I’m going to improve it and I’m going to come back to you in four weeks’ time and ask for your opinion again.” In four weeks time, you return and they say, “You know something? That is absolutely amazing” and that endorsement will probably end up stronger that it would have been originally.
How do you approach somebody to get a testimonial? The best time to ask for it is when that person has just experienced your product or service and is feeling good about it. If they say immediately after using your product or service, “This is the best thing I have ever bought!” you should say, “That is such a compliment – could I put that on my website?”
You must get that testimonial immediately (before their euphoria disappears) – ideally in writing then use it on your website, your business card, your brochure and at the end of your emails.
Writing testimonials can be quite difficult for people so you have to help them. You go to your computer and you write: ‘Hi, You said to me that our product “is the best you have EVER had”. Is it okay if I quote you saying this on my website? Just whip me back an email if it’s a “Yes”.’
They reply and say: “Yeah, go ahead!”
Fantastic – there’s your testimonial. You’ve actually done the hard work for them.
The key is to get testimonials about different aspects of your service or product. Think of it as a CAT scan – providing clarity from every single angle and providing absolute transparency so there is zero doubt in the prospect’s mind that buying your product or trying your service will be the best decision they ever made.
What makes a good testimonial? It doesn’t have to be entirely positive. A good testimonial can actually begin in a negative vein (and obviously finish in a positive one) because it shows a change in attitude and highlights the sort of thoughts and doubts that other prospects might have.
Don’t use testimonials that just say ‘Fantastic!’ etc. They don’t really have any weight. Similarly, don’t just feature someone’s initials at the end of the testimonial. You need to build up the layers of detail and you need the person’s full name, their title, their location (for example, London, UK) and their job title with sort of description of their job function (for example, CEO or IT Manager).
When people see that they say, “Hey, I’m an IT Manager. That person’s an IT Manager – they loved it. So will I.” So, you’re building rapport through the printed word. You also need their Industry and Profession, for example, IT Manager in the frozen food industry. It could be translated into the kind of consumer market. It might say, “Jenny, Mum of two – ‘I loved this product, my kids loved it’.”
Then you add a date. If your testimonials are more than a year old, you get new testimonials. You should collect testimonials and rotate them all the time.
You should also add a photograph of the person giving the testimonial. It’s all about building credibility and making it believable so the social proof just gets stronger. It helps to build rapport because it shows that you understand people like them, and people like them are already buying from you.
If you have hundreds of testimonials collected on your database and you know the professions of those people, you categorise them. On your website, have a drop-down menu that says, “Find your occupation here” and let’s say a teacher is looking, he or she clicks on the ‘Teacher’ section of the menu and there are your teacher testimonials. You are connecting your testimonials with a person, rather than leaving it to chance.
You can also use video and audio testimonials on your website or you can put them all onto a CD and send it with your initial information pack and say, “Don’t take our word for it, listen to what our customers have to say.”
The people who listen to it are the people who need and want the additional proof. It’s worth it for the very small amount that it costs to produce a CD. You could put those on your website too – ‘Click here to play’ and there they are. You can do exactly the same with video – you can put it onto a DVD or onto your website, so people can see video testimonials on your web site. People like to see things, or hear things or be able to read things to get a sense of what a product or service is like. If you can put video and audio on your website – you’re appealing to all of those senses.
The case study is typically longer than a testimonial and it takes a particular set of circumstances and shows a journey where the use of the product or service is transformational in some way.
The essential elements of both case studies and testimonials are: credibility, believability, variety and an endorsement of your product or service. If you have good testimonials and good case studies, you make it so much easier for potential customers. You lower the barrier.
If you add in the right testimonials and the right case studies to support what you provide in your business – will it make a difference? Absolutely it will make a difference. In fact, you’ll wish you’d done it years ago.
