Marketing Success
Five Ways to Beef Up Sales… Immediately
Last week, one of my clients—we'll call him Rick—had a demo scheduled with a prospect. The standard "show up and throw up" they typically did early in the sales cycle.
Trying to shorten the sales cycle, I asked naively, "Why does the customer want to buy? What are they trying to accomplish?" Rick couldn't tell me. I asked if he thought the salespeople knew. He said no. I gave him an assignment: he had to find out "Why," "Why now," and "What's it worth." Otherwise no demo.
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Lead Generation 101
Lead Generation 101
Part seven of a series on Turnaround Tactics
Once you get your streamlined sales force up to speed, (since you've gotten rid of all the dead wood) they're going to need more people to talk to. Leads-they need more leads.
You already have a lead generation program in place. But is it working? Is it sufficient? Probably not, otherwise you wouldn't be reading a series called "turnaround tactics." You have to stoke the lead machine.
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Marketing Brain Trust
Rest assured that no matter how smart you are, you do not know everything about marketing. You don't even know anything about marketing your product! You can't figure everything out yourself, or see all the angles, or provide every bit of critical thinking.
The solution? Create a marketing brain trust.
Use the mastermind principle which says more brainpower brought to bear on an issue means more ideas and greater insight. Gather together a mixed bag of thoughtful, intelligent people who have an interest in helping you create breakthroughs in your enterprise.
Adding brains to the brain trust produces non-linear results. Breakthrough results. Unreasonable results. Quantum Results. Because of the interactions among several people's ideas bouncing off each other, the increased thinking- effectiveness can be multiplicative or even exponential.
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Value Based Pricing, Not Price Cutting
The oldest tactic in the world to get a sale moving is to cut the price.
And it does work…but the question is, "At what cost, and can you live with the bargain?"
In the past three years it has taken longer and longer for your prospects to make up their minds, and for you to close a sale.
And one typical salesperson's response to people not buying-for whatever the reason-is to say, "Would you buy if… ?"
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Connecting with Customers
I just got off the phone with a friend of mine. Business is up he said, but he didn't know why. I asked him a few questions, but more we spoke about it the more concerned I became.
“What do you mean, you don't know why they're buying?"
“We never know why they buy," he told me.
“Never?”
“Nope. They just do."
My friend thinks he knows what is great about his product. They believe they understand it's applications, they just don't understand what drives sales.
And there's something else - it has to do with pricing and profits.
Since they don't really know why customers buy from them, it follows that they don't understand the full value customers get from their products. So they don't know what to charge! They discount to make sales - since they don't fully understand the customer's pain points - and that means - they always leave lots of money on the table.
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Marketing with the Psychological Power of Three
Two might be company in life, but in communication you can go all the way to three and still have a rollicking party. If you step over to four however, it's quite likely that you've stepped into the hara-kiri zone. Back up that truck a bit and learn how the power of '3' has the ability to make your communication soar.
Let’s Start With a Little Test
Here’s a psychological test. Lay out 10 business cards in a row and choose three that catch your attention instantly. Now don't cheat. Do this before you continue reading this article and you'll be quite amazed at the results.
So What Did You Find?
Isn’t it strange that there seems to be no real reason why you chose what you did? There doesn't even seem to be a very clear pattern emerging…
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25 Ways To Get More Business
Need more business? Who doesn’t?
Thankfully, new business is pretty easy to get, but you do have to do something to get it. Usually something you aren’t currently doing. Here are 25 ways you can bring in more business, and if you do things right, more profits.
These are not long term business strategies. These are short to medium term tactics designed to put cash in your bank account within the next 30 – 90 days.
1. Hire a salesperson. Or, if you already have salespeople, hire another one. You may not be able to pay them a salary, so make it for 100% commission, and make the commission generous. And of course, pay their expenses. This will work best if you have a sales process in place, and some kind of systemized knowledge that will bring them up to speed quickly.
2. Get some sales training. The Sandler Selling System is great for simple sales. Mike Bosworth’s Customer Centric Selling is great for complex sales. Of course there are many others, and any good sales training program will get your sales off whatever dime you are stuck on.
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How To Get Repeat Visitors To Your Website or Is Your Website a Super Magnet?
Ok, so you've got someone to visit your website once. What if you wanted them to visit again, and again, and again? Ooh, that's hard, isn't it? Not really. Find out how to attract them back without begging with this simple internet marketing tool.
First, The Myth
Ask most web designers what is more important: a unique visitor or a repeat visitor? Most will choose, the former. I tend to disagree.
Let's analyse a unique visitor. They could just be browsing, like shoppers in a mall, or they could be a potential customer. Now, don't get me wrong. Unique visitors might be important, because they are like new customers. However, with new customers, the onus is on you to prove your credibility. Existing customers already know what you do and how you do it. They don't need to a whole reselling exercise.
Why Is It So Important To Retain Existing Customers?
Because, it costs eight times as much to get a new customer than it does to retain one. That alone should make you want to keep them. Also, since you've developed a relationship with them, it's now easier for you to do business, to re-sell, up-sell and get referrals (really, really important).
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How to Use Product Repositioning to Make Your Business Far More Profitable
If you’re in charge of new product development, sales, or marketing for your business, you’re always looking for additional ways to increase the sales of your products or services. What this usually means is looking for new products to offer to your customers.
What this also means is that you may be overlooking a powerful opportunity for additional sales that’s right under your nose. The opportunity I’m talking about is repositioning an existing product (or service) to make it even more profitable. Regardless of whether the economy is going strong or is in a recession, repositioning existing products can give your sales a powerful boost.
In this article, I’m going to show you precisely what you need to do to reposition your product or service. And I’ll give you real-life examples that demonstrate how easy – and how profitable – repositioning can be for your business.
The Nuts-and-Bolts of Repositioning Any Product
First, let me get a little housekeeping out of the way. In order to save a little space, in the remainder of this article, I’m going to use the term “product” to refer to a product or a service. So if you sell services rather than products, just think “service” whenever you see the word product.
There are many ways to reposition your product, but in this article, I’m going to concentrate on four of the easiest, most profitable methods. My goal is to give you nuts-and-bolts techniques that will increase your profits as quickly as possible.The four repositioning methods we’ll cover are:
1. Do what no one else does
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Is Nature a Marketing Guru?
Technology rules. Yeah, for about five minutes–then natural instincts take over. Are you stupid enough to fight Mamma Nature? Well go ahead and rewrite the rules if you can, cause the Big Mamma knows one thing. She’s tried and tested it all. And if you want to play by her kooky rules, she is willing to teach you a thing or two.
The question is, are you willing to learn?
Do You Pay in Advance?
Have you noticed how big a brand Red Bull is today? Or how insignificant their advertising is? Red Bull shuns print advertising and has never done a triple back flip on a web campaign. Yet, it has found roots in over 50 countries. And has cemented its loyalty in the fickle land of teenagers.
So what’s Red Bull’s big secret?
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Why FREE is the Most Dangerous Word in Marketing
I’ve been advising businesses for nearly 20 years that a business model driven by attracting prospects through giving something away for free is almost always a model for failure. And it doesn't matter whether you use this model online or offline - it will nearly always fail.
Is This Dangerous Myth Killing Your Business?
For as long as I can remember, many so-called marketing experts have proposed that the best way to get as many prospects as possible is to give something away for free. Free samples, free subscriptions, free ezines, free content - free everything! The logic seems to be that marketing is a function of the numbers and if you can use free offers to attract large enough numbers, you only need a reasonable percentage of them to convert to paying customers to become avariciously wealthy.
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Target Markets
Target versus broad. Vertical versus horizontal. There are so many ways to slice up a market, while most marketers would rather go after the whole thing…
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The Customer's Conversation
Claude Hopkins said that in order to sell anything - that's anything at all - you had to first enter the conversation in the customer's mind.
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