Not only can inspiring your customers to buy from you more often reward you with higher profits, it can also translate to more predictable income. Here are just a few tips for compelling your clients or customers to come back more frequently.
A time-limited incentive — ever get a pizza delivered? What is attached to the box? Usually, you will find both a menu and a coupon to buy your NEXT pizza. They coupon, of course, isn’t valid forever — they put an expiration date on it. So you haven’t even eaten the pizza you just ordered, and they are already planting the seed for your next purchase! How can you apply this idea to your business?
A loyalty program — the above strategy works great for many types of businesses (you will have to put your own twist on it) but your client is probably inundated with offers from your competitors as well. How should our pizza shop combat coupon overload? Reward loyalty. In its simplest form all they would have to do is offer a free pizza for every X number ordered (“buy 9 and the 10th is free!”). Now when holding coupons from two different pizza places, our shop owner’s clients are likely to come back again and again because their loyalty is rewarded.
Verify the benefit of the last purchase — you probably hear it all the time, the key is in the follow up. But how can you call again without being a nuisance? Well your first follow up call should be to verify that your client is truly receiving the benefit of your product or service. Delivering the computer or painting someone’s living room is not the end. WHY did they want your product or service? After some time has passed, pick up the phone and find out if they got what they wanted. Are they now more productive with the faster computer? Do they feel better about inviting guests to their home because of their great-looking living room? Follow up to make sure your clients are truly realizing the benefits of their purchase, and you’ll likely stir up more sales.
Subscription or membership — would your clients benefit from an ongoing service from your business? What if you could stop chasing them to make additional sales and instead have regular revenue on a monthly or quarterly basis that you could count on? List the kinds of ways your product or service could be used regularly, then look around you for subscription ideas. They are everywhere: wine clubs, retainer-based consulting services, maintenance services, product replenishment, etc.
These are just a few ideas to get you started. The goal? Strengthening your relationships with your best clients, while delivering more value and receiving more business in the process. Additional ideas? Please share!
We’ve all heard the phrase “a level playing field” applied to a variety of situations. Whether one thinks the field is indeed level, or drastically slanted in one direction or another, depends on the person and the issue at hand.
One place where the field is inarguably flat (at least I don’t think I would get any valid arguments) is time. We all have the same number of hours in a day. Those that use them more wisely will do better than the rest. As my business has grown, my to do list has grown with it. Thankfully, as a student of time management, I have been able to stay one step ahead. As you may have read here before, I am a big fan of David Allen and the philosophy he laid out in “Getting Things Done” (GTD for short).
I recently seemed to outgrow my paper-based implementation of the GTD system. After wading into a few forums, reading reviews, and experimenting a bit, I came to www.toodledo.com. Wow! This free online tool has allowed me to get dozens of activities easily out of my head and into an intuitive system. It also offers an iPhone application (for just $2.99) that will stay in sync with my online list. If you have read David’s book, or have become proficient in the GTD methodologies through a seminar or other means, I strongly encourage you to check out Toodledo.com.
My second recommendation is something that has been around for some time. Now that I am a user, it’s hard to imagine why it hasn’t become more popular. After nursing sore wrists and fingers a few weeks ago, I decided it was time to investigate speech recognition software. A quick search brought me to a name I had heard many years ago — “Dragon.” At only about $40 on amazon.com, I got the standard version “Dragon Naturally Speaking.”
Another “wow.” I wasn’t expecting to shave up to an hour of typing off of my day. Even a fast typist cannot keep up with the spoken word.
If you are fortunate enough to have a private office where you can talk at your computer without annoying others around you, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Now replying to a list of e-mails, writing a new blog post, or creating copy for a client can be super fast, making it easier to concentrate on it as a task, not as a way to make hours vanish from your schedule!
Provide a “wow” experience: we do a lot of work behind the scenes to provide our service, create or deliver our products, and help our clients and customers succeed. Our clients cannot be fully aware of this effort — they only know what they experience in brief interactions, engagement with our staff or (God forbid) navigating our pre-recorded telephone tree. Jan Carlzon, former CEO of SAS Airlines, aptly named this dynamic in his book Moments of Truth. We can all benefit from looking at our company through our clients’ eyes. Where can you transform a blah experience into a wow? More “wows” = more customers interested in referring their friends, relatives, clients, and colleagues to you.
Be specific: just like defining our target audience, articulating specifically who can benefit from talking with us will yield much better results than trying to be all things to all people.
Ask for one and you’ll get many: try this experiment — think of “anyone” who is a sports fan. Do you have a strong reaction? I’m looking for sports fans, is there anyone you want to refer to me? Now try this — who is the most fanatical baseball fan you know? Now does someone come to mind? When someone asks us to think of the most, the best, the tallest, the oldest, the largest, etc. our brains take it as a challenge. There is an answer to that question and we feel compelled to find it. If my target audience were baseball fans, guess what I would ask after securing the most fanatical fan in someone’s life? “Who is the second most fanatical…?”
Talk about the benefit of contacting you, not of hiring you or your company: as we’ve discussed before, sales is a dating process. What both the referrer and the person you hope to meet need to know is how he or she will be better off after simply meeting or talking with us. We get better results by selling the meeting, not the value of doing business with us.
Teach them how: when we succeed in describing who would benefit from speaking with us, trigger the most likely person to have a problem we can solve, and make it clear how a simple conversation will help him or her, our referral partner will be eager to contribute. It stands to reason that we will be doing him or her a service by making it easy to refer. Have a plan about how you would like that introduction to go and make sure it’s easy for him or her to execute.
I would guess that most of you reading this post would place “increasing profits” as a high priority in your business right now. Great! If we throw in “not work harder” as a parallel goal to “increase profits,” I submit that what you are really asking for is a business that consistently attracts new prospects and converts a high percentage of them into profitable customers…like a machine.
The “specifications” of this machine: it brings good prospects to you, makes the job of converting them into customers easier, and tells you what needs “tuning” over time.
Contact Management Infrastructure — processes and information systems that allow you to: capture new prospect contact information quickly, categorize them, and ensure that proper follow up will happen. This same system should allow you to easily see how healthy your prospect flow, conversion rate, and profitability per client is.
A Refined Target — ask yourself, who can benefit the most from my product or service? You should also consider surveying past clients to learn why they decided to buy from you over their other options and focus on people who may have that same need or want.
Communicate the “Ultimate Result” — for marketing that gets attention, focus on the results you can help people achieve. When in doubt, think about marketing of diet programs and weight loss products. They get your attention with “Lose 20 Pounds in 20 Days” not “We’ve got the best diet, excercise, and nutrition products around.” When trying to get the attention of your target audience, forget about how you do what you do — talk about what results they’ll get…period.
An “Irresistible Offer” as a Call-to-Action — when your marketing successfully gets the attention of someone in your target audience, give them a “no brainer” reason to contact you. Read carefully — not to do business with you. I call this a “first date” call-to-action. What information, advice, product sample can you offer that any reasonable person in your target audience would say “of course!” to?
Follow-up Plan — with a compelling call to action, you must have a foolproof and thorough follow up strategy. Worried about feeling like a nuisance? Ever hear the phrase “the marketing is the product?” Many people have a negative reaction to that phrase, as if it means there’s no there there when someone becomes a client. Think of it this way, what if simply by participating in your marketing and your follow up, your prospects will get closer to the ultimate result that they want, and that you can help them reach faster if they become a client? Create a follow up plan that keeps your business in the forefront of your prospects minds while also offering them value.
Present Options — by offering multiple ways, levels, packages, bundles…through which your prospects can become your client, you give them more power in the buying process. Offer a single product, price point, or solution and you’re basically telling them to “take it or leave it.” And guess what, more of them will “leave it” than you would like!
For more ideas and examples to help you build your client attraction and conversion machine, simply click the “Seven Levers of Profit Growth” link to the right to request your free copy of our eBook.
Posted by sherpabizdev on May 5, 2010 under Uncategorized | Comments are off for this article
Hi All,
This page is exclusively for those who have requested access to the entire 1 hour workshop that I conducted for the San Ramon, CA Chamber of Commerce on April 23rd. The video is poor, so you may find it most useful to reference the slides while you simply follow along with the audio. The video should appear just below this paragraph and the handout I provided along with the slides themselves (both in .pdf format) appear below that screen.
The video cuts off at the 1 hour point, but we kept going for awhile longer. Nevertheless, you will get a whole lot more information and ideas than I could fit into the video snippet. If you have any questions, feel free to call me directly at (925) 683-1685.
7 Levers of Profit Growth (guess what…links to .pdf file). This includes a more extensive checklist and examples to help you put the “7 Levers” to use in your business.
I have recently given a few free workshops (sponsored by the Contra Costa Small Business Development Center and the San Ramon Chamber of Commerce). In them I outlined how to increase profits without relying so heavily on generating new leads.
Check out the 4 minute clip above for an overview of what else you need to be doing to increase profits other than slogging it out trying to generate new leads from cold suspects.
Ah, the cocktail party question. How well do you do with it? Ever wish you had a better answer at that chamber mixer or networking lunch? There is lots of good advice out there to help you, and I encourage you to soak it all up. There is nothing more important than answering that simple question.
In fact, I contend that your internal and external answers to that question form the basis of all of your marketing and selling success — it is that fundamental. There is a simple reason we all stumble over that question…
It’s the wrong question!
Don’t be fooled, it’s a trap. A perfectly innocent trap laid by well-intentioned people, but a trap nonetheless. As I have talked about in this blog many times, we should not focus our message on the products or services we provide (what we do), but should instead focus on the benefits our clients realize by working with us (what they get). Answer the question “what do you do?” and you end up right where you don’t what to be.
Here is the question you wish they’d ask:
“What is the ultimate result your clients experience by doing business with you?”
So what can you do about it? Don’t answer the actual question…pretend he or she asked the other one. Here is an illustration using my own business:
Innocent conversationalist: “So, what do you do?”
Andy: “I develop marketing and selling strategies for small business owners.” Or even worse “I’m a marketing consultant.”
Innocent conversationalist: “{silent groan} Oh, I think I hear someone calling me. Nice to meet you Alfred.”
So here is another scenario:
Innocent conversationalist: “So, what do you do?”
Andy: {silently translates question to be “What is the ultimate result your clients experience by doing business with you?”} “I help business owners create more profitable companies that require less of their time, energy and stress.”
Innocent conversationalist: “Really, how do you do that?”
Not only is it a more powerful way to answer the question, it starts a conversation by making it natural for the other person to ask “how?” Another way to think about this situation is to not talk about what you do and how you do it. Instead, talk about what your clients get and why they’re excited about it.
Many of you know that I was originally an engineer and that I like to talk about that a lot (you’re probably really bored of me pointing it out). I think it just helps to explain how I think, and how I help people. But anyway, a characteristic of an engineer is precision, exactness… This translates into a desire for precise language for many of us. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I agree, but I also submit that the rightword says it all.
So I am often on a mission to find just the right word to express something. I recently had one of those moments where a single word unlocked so much for me — “enrollment.” So where did I hear about it and what am I talking about?
I have spent the last 5 months participating in a great group coaching program put on by Bill Baren of San Francisco. If you haven’t heard of him, he is one of the premier business coaches in the area — in the country for that matter. I have been part of an intensive “Client Mastery Blueprint” program where he has shared many of his proven methods for gaining more clients (and helping more in the process). One of the most transformational concepts I picked up was the notion of “enrolling” clients into your program, service, or even product for that matter.
What a great term! “Sales” and “selling” are focused on what we as the provider are doing, or want from the relationship. As I have written about in an a variety of posts, we really shouldn’t be “selling” anything — we should think of our “sales” task as simply providing an opportunity for our prospects to experience the benefits we are uniquely able to deliver. Bill gave me the single word I’ve been looking for!
So I am taking up that term — enrollment. Next time you are planning to meet with someone to determine if purchasing what you have to offer is a good fit for them or not, think of this term. Isn’t it a great mindset? You will not be there to sell them anything. You will be there to articulate how you, your company’s service, or your product could help them, explain the fees you charge, and provide them the opportunity to enroll or not!
Intrigued? I encourage you to check out a new program that Bill Baren will be running. A series of 6 teleconferences focused on this very topic called the “Master of Enrollment” program. Sorry for the tight notice, but I didn’t realize that as a Bill Baren Coaching client I am empowered to offer a discount of $200 to my friends and clients.
The program starts Wednesday April 7th (first teleconference) and the discount goes away at the end of tomorrow (April 6th). I can personally vouch for the quality of Bill’s methods and content. Feel free to call me at (925) 683-1685 to discuss. If you are having trouble with enrolling new clients into your business, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
This is Bill’s eighth year as a successful business coach and what he teaches in this program is what has made his business a success. I believe Bill will give you the BEST possible training you can get for your business. Here’s the reason why:
There is NOTHING more important to your business success than turning potential clients into paying clients. These are people who want your help and whose lives would be better off by working with you! So here’s your chance to create an authentic way for them to be enthused to say Yes to you. EVERYTHING else is in your business is secondary to your ability to enroll. Period.
And becoming a ”Master of Enrollment” will help you do this.
During my seven years of leading and managing a national sales organization, my team and I often talked about wanting an “excuse” to call on a prospect or a customer. As a sales person one often feel like a nuisance — like you are looking to take more than to give. I had a flashback recently when working with one of my clients — we needed to “tee up” situations that would allow my client’s sales rep to touch base with current clients.
What did we do? We created a simple, but valuable, promotion that we plan to send out via email. I signed up my client with Constant Contact so we can do it quickly, make it attractive looking, and monitor our results (how many people opened the email, how many clicked through to visit the web site, etc.). Once that email goes out, the sales representative on my client’s team will have a reason to call — just to follow up on the promotion their customers should have all seen in their emails.
It may seem like such a simple concept — a little mundane, in fact, in this age of complex marketing programs. All she will do is call each of the people who received the promotion via email to:
Make sure they noticed it (it’s easy to overlook emails these days isn’t it?)
Ask them to either open it up, or send them another copy if they can’t find it
Explain a few details and ask if they have any questions
Who knows where the conversation will go from there, but this little two-step plan accomplishes a few things:
It communicates that my client doesn’t just blast messages at their clients and prospects. By simply following up, they are making it clear that the messages they send have useful information. They wouldn’t be calling to confirm receipt if they didn’t feel so!
Increases the likelihood that future messages will be noticed. It’s so easy to become numb to the emails you receive! Once the receiver makes the stronger connection between the message and who the sender really is, future emails will get more attention. Even when my client merely leaves a voice mail that is never returned, the exercise will be worth it.
Oh ya, it will increase immediate results. If you’ve created a good offer in the first place, you’ll get more people to pay attention and take advantage if you follow up with a call.
I urge you to not overlook the simple things when designing your next “system” for increasing profits through more effective marketing and selling.
As a business partner, I offer business owners who sign up through me (simply by using either link in this post) the same price as available by signing up directly. I ALSO provide a free 2-hour email marketing strategy consultation. If you’ve been kicking around the idea of email marketing, it may be time to take action! Let me help you get started.
With all the buzz about social media (justifiable as it may be), some useful, traditional marketing activities can get overshadowed. Take this post as a reminder that a simple press release can be a valuable tactic.
Moreover, when submitted for online distribution, it helps your web presence as well. Include some links to your web site in your release and voila — you have backlinks from reputable web sites that post it, adding “juice” to your SEO efforts. A few keys to developing a successful press release:
Make it newsworthy. As much as your new product or service excites you, is it relevant and exciting to others? An important aim of your press release is to get some attention from writers (traditional news and blogs alike). Be sure to test your message on friends, clients, advisers, etc. Does your “news” help people resolve a problem? Is it related to a “current” issue? Bottom line, think like a reporter.
Get it out. Simply posting your press release to your web site may help you stay positioned as a viable, active business to your existing visitors, but it doesn’t help you get additional exposure and traffic. Submit your release to relevant sites, or use a service like PRNewswire or Free Press Release to get it out there.
Follow up. You can’t make someone write about the topic of your release. If you’re calling writers and professional bloggers, they have busy schedules, deadlines, etc., and pestering them will only guarantee your position at the bottom of their pile. However, you can use their busy-ness to your advantage — outline the potential “angle” for an article they could write and leave a short message on voicemail and a brief email. Don’t keep after them, just drop that suggestion and only work with the responses you get. You may hit the right person at the right time who is happy to have a story idea handed to them.
I have put together a simple report to help you create the right message and get your business the exposure you’d like via a press release. This includes a MS Word template and samples of well-written press releases. If you’d like it, just drop your email in the form below and I will send you a copy. Not sure if a press release is right for you? Check the box for a free consultation, and we’ll set up a time to talk about your circumstance. I’ll help you figure out the right plan for you.
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Not only can inspiring your customers to buy from you more often reward you with higher profits, it can also translate to more predictable income. Here are just a few tips for compelling your clients or customers to come back more frequently.
