Marketing Wizdom » Lead Conversion

Is Relationship Selling Dead?

Robert Clay — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 05:37:48 +0000

This excellent guest post by Jill Konrath, author of SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies, hits the nail on the head. She perfectly describes the challenges you face when trying to sell to businesses in today’s pressured world. And she kindly agreed to share the piece with you here.

So is relationship selling dead?

It sure feels that way today! You rarely reach your prospects on the phone and when you do, they quickly brush you off. When you’re in meetings, they want you to get right to the point.

Sometimes they’re so busy multi-tasking, that you’re not even sure if they’re paying attention. Even your long-term customers fail to return your calls for months, making you wonder what you did wrong.

Welcome to the new normal! Your prospects are suffering from Frazzled Customer Syndrome, a debilitating condition brought on by increased expectations, excessive workloads, unrealistic deadlines and fewer resources.

They’re good people who are doing their very best to survive in a frenetic workplace. Their calendars are overflowing, they’re constantly falling behind and they feel powerless to stop the escalating demands on their time.

The truth is, they don’t need another “relationship.”

They barely get to see their best friends anymore. They even eat lunch at their desk everyday so they can get more done. It’s all work, work, work. New relationships are a low priority.

But you want a relationship! Of course you do. You’re a relationship seller. Your best customers love you. They value your work. They refer others to you.

And, you love them back even more and take great care of them. Working with people like this feeds your soul – and pays well too!

Wanting to replicate these strong relationships is natural. But establishing that great connection can be a real challenge when dealing with stressed out people who seem more intent on pushing you away than inviting you in.

Here’s the good news! Underneath all that rude, brusque behavior are normal human beings who desperately want relationships with people who they can trust to help them achieve their goals.

That person could be you. But first, you need to understand what’s going on in their mind in order to create the connection you want.

What Your Prospects Think

Whenever you deal with frazzled prospects their brains immediately start firing off alert signals: “Warning. Pay attention. Salesperson.” While you may not see yourself that way, they do and that’s what matters.

They evaluate your voicemails, emails and initial conversation to determine if having a more in-depth conversation with you is worthwhile. They make lightning-quick decisions to allow you access to them based on these criteria:

Is this aligned with what I need to accomplish?
How big a priority is it? What’s the urgency?
Does this person provide value?
How simple is it? Will it take lots of effort?

Unless you can convey all this very quickly, you won’t get your foot in the door. But it doesn’t stop there. To retain or grow a relationship, you have to keep your focus on these decision-criteria at all times too.

Relationship selling today goes far beyond the warm fuzzy feelings that you get from working with people you like and vice versa. It’s about creating partnerships where you’re a contributing team member, working towards your client’s short- and long-term success objectives.

SNAP Rules Change the Game

You need to follow the new SNAP Rules to be successful with the “new” relationship selling. Here they are:

Rule 1: Keep It Simple

Your goal is to ensure maximum simplicity in everything you do. That’s going to require you to look at all aspects of your interactions with your prospects to see where complexity can be eliminated or minimized.

When you keep it simple, you make it easier for your them to buy from you.

Rule 2: Be iNvaluable

Today’s crazy-busy prospects want to work with sellers who “know their stuff” and bring them fresh ideas on a regular basis. Perhaps you’ve never even seen that as your role. But today it’s essential to turn yourself into the competitive differentiator.

When you become invaluable, people choose you over competitors, are less price conscious, and remain loyal.

Rule 3: Always Align

This is all about relevance and risk. At the onset of your relationship, clients need to see an immediate connection between what you do and what they’re trying to achieve. As they move through their decision-making process, they need to know that the alignment extends into core beliefs they value in the people they work with.

When you’re aligned with their critical business objectives and core beliefs, clients want to work with you.

Rule 4: Raise Priorities

It’s an absolute imperative to work with frazzled prospects on their priority projects. With their limited capacity, that’s all they can currently focus on. Because your prospect’s priorities are constantly shifting, you need to be alert to what’s going on in their organization.

When you raise priorities, your sales process goes much faster and you get the business with less competition.

Relationship selling isn’t dead. In fact, it’s more alive than ever before. You still need to connect with your prospects on a personal level, but it’s no longer sufficient.

You have to earn the right to have a relationship with them first.

They want your expertise focused on their priority business objectives, issues and challenges. They want you to continually bring them fresh ideas and provocative insights. They’re looking for you to simplify the complex and make their life easy.

When you do this, they’ll be friends forever.

Want to learn more about the new rules of selling to crazy-busy prospects? To get four FREE sales-accelerating tools and download two chapters of SNAP Selling, visit www.snapselling.com or email jill@snapselling.com

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Robert Clay is an entrepreneur and marketer who has been growing businesses since age 19. He has studied and mastered more than 200 of the world’s most successful marketing strategies, building-up an unprecedented 1.8 million page knowledgebase. For a decade he conducted an experiment which transformed the thinking of hundreds of entrepreneurs, and has now launched an extraordinary new program that helps aspiring market leaders to create breakthrough marketing results.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and want to be notified when other new articles come up, just click here. To get your free copy of Robert's well regarded book “Learn how to grow your business … in just two hours: An introduction to low risk/high-return marketing strategies that will help you transform your business”, click here. If you would like to share any of your personal experiences, observations or the results you’ve achieved using these or similar tips, please leave your comments and/or thoughts below. We always love to hear from you:

What is effective selling?

Robert Clay — Sun, 16 May 2010 09:06:19 +0000

People sometimes say “There’s a born salesman!” But I’ve never yet read or heard in the news of someone who gave birth to a sales person, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.

Nor have ever I heard of someone who gave birth to a lawyer, or a doctor, or for that matter a criminal. Birth is given to boys and girls; everything after that is down to choices that are made and skills that are learned. And sales skills are life skills.

Many people would never view themselves as a sales person. Yet any time you’re in a conversation in which you try to express an opinion or influence an event, you’re actually selling.

In reality everyone is constantly trying to sell an idea, a belief, a proposition, an opinion or a goal. We all use sales skills throughout the day, every day. You use it on your spouse or partner, your kids, your colleagues, your neighbours, your friends, your parents, people you meet, when you buy different products or services, or when you go out for a meal.

There isn’t a single area of your life where you cannot benefit from sales skills. Teachers use sales skills every day. Preachers use sales skills. Police officers use sales skills. Mother Teresa used sales skills. And sales people use sales skills. Regardless of what you do, sales skills will increase your probability of success and your ability to motivate, instruct, encourage, coach, communicate and reach people.

Increasing your skill and awareness, and doing the same for everyone in your team can therefore boost your business to new heights of success. It is relatively easy to do this and it can produce an instantaneous improvement.

The amazing thing is that hardly anyone in business has ever had formal training in selling technique or strategy. Most people don’t understand the psychology of how people make decisions. Nor do they understand the dynamics of persuasion and influence. Yet they’re invariably in a business where persuasion, influence and selling are critical factors for the success of that business.

It’s as if they think that by divine guidance everything will be OK for them, and they’ll suddenly wake up one morning with these supremely competent selling skills. Of course, it doesn’t happen that way, does it?

Don’t blindly do what’s always been done

It starts with sales training. But that’s where things often start to go wrong. Most businesses are guilty of using a “tribal” method of training, i.e. passing information from person to person in the company, which leaves you at the mercy of knowledge and expertise that becomes weaker, more watered down and less relevant each time one person passes it to another.

Granted, experience can be an excellent teacher. But doing what has always been done is often not the answer, especially in today’s fast-changing world.

To make the point, I love a story related by Chet Holmes about a woman whose husband was watching her prepare a roast. At one point, she took a large knife and sliced off the two ends of the cut of meat. He asked her, “Why do you cut the ends off the roast?” She replied, “My mother always did it this way.”

But the question stuck in his mind. He really couldn’t see any reason why cutting off the ends would make a better-tasting roast, and it certainly wasted plenty of perfectly good meat.

That night it so happened that his wife’s mother was joining the couple for dinner. As they sat down and his wife brought out the roast, the husband asked, “Why did you teach your daughter to slice both ends off of the roast?” The mother, a lovely lady over 90 years old, replied, “Well, when we were young we could only afford a tiny little apartment and a tiny little oven. We could never fit the whole roast in that tiny oven, so we just lopped off the ends.”

By learning how to sell from your predecessor you may be just blindly doing what’s always been done and throwing out a large percentage of your prospects or business.

Yet developing your selling skills and those of everyone in your team can be one of the easiest, most powerful and most significant instant transformations your business will ever embark on. It all starts with an understanding of what constitutes effective selling.

What is effective selling?

Effective selling is NOT just a matter of learning a sales spiel, having the gift of the gab or using clichéd or manipulative techniques.

Instead it is the process of leading, guiding, educating and directing your buyers more than anyone else might do to help them solve a problem or achieve a desired outcome.

The finest sales people in the world are helpful, not pushy. Some of the highest performing sales people are introverts, not the stereotypical extraverts. The most important attribute of any sales person is their attitude. The best sales people believe in the value of what they do and in their product or service … and their most important skill is to ask the right questions and listen to their buyer’s responses.

The right questions will vary depending on the product or service, but in general terms they will work with their buyers, nurturing and learning about them to identify exactly what those buyers are looking for, what problems or concerns they want to solve and what outcomes they’re seeking.

Then, and only then, a good salesperson will provide meaningful recommendations, suggestions, counsel, direction and advice on the buyer’s buying decisions and the products and services they should choose and the strategies they should use based on their personal experience of what actually works.

This allows their buyers to make an informed decision based on what is in their best interest. And of course a good salesperson also needs to know how and when to ask for the order!

None of this is particularly mysterious or difficult … and anyone can be trained to sell effectively in this manner.

Learning to sell this way is probably the easiest, most powerful and most significant instant transformation your business will ever embark on because the moment your staff are better trained in selling principles, methods and understandings, they’ll handle every prospect, lead or enquiry they ever deal with more effectively.

Do you agree with this definition of effective selling? Please rate the article and add your thoughts and comments below.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Patience & Persistence: Two Drivers of Sales Success

Robert Clay — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:58:54 +0000

Skip Weisman of Weisman Success Resources Inc., recently paid me the great compliment of writing the following post in his Champion Organizations blog, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom. It was inspired, he says, by a post I had previously written: Why 8% of sales people get 80% of the sales.

I read it, liked it and agree with what he says, so asked him if I could reproduce it here in it’s entirety. He kindly agreed, so here it is:

Skip Weisman: “A couple of years ago I hired a new business coach to help me restructure my business and move it in a new direction. The first question out of his mouth before agreeing to take me on as a client was, “what is your business model?”

I’m embarrassed to say as business coach and consultant having been in the business for four years to that point, I couldn’t answer the question, at least not succinctly enough for his liking. He agreed to take me on anyway and that is where we started.

It’s been a huge transformation for me as I now have a systematic process for creating what he calls “marketing gravity,” which is having business prospects gravitate towards me instead of me always reaching out trying to attract them.

It’s been a great transformation, yet even with that approach some prospects who come into sphere of influence become clients quicker than others, and some never do. One case in point is that last January I met a business owner who attended my “End Procrastination NOW!” workshop and inside of 60-days we negotiated a six-month consulting project.

However, another who has been on my prospect list since 2003 and whom we have discussed various potential projects with which I could help him has yet to bring me onboard, that’s six-years.

The point of this post is that as marketing and sales professionals who are the “rainmakers” for our businesses it is vital that we, a) know our business model, and b) follow it consistently.

I recently read an excellent blog post by Robert Clay titled, “Why 8% of Sales People Get 80% of the Sales” in which he makes note of a various research sources that have consistently shown that 44% of sales professionals give up after just one “NO,” another 22% give up after the second “NO,” 14% more after the third “NO” and another 12% after the fourth “NO.”

The only “NO” I accept as permanent is the one in which the individual tells me to never contact them again and asks to be taken off my mailing list.

Other than that, all prospects once in my marketing reservoir are always considered prospects because you never know when they will need what I have. One former mentor who helped me get started in my own business always encouraged me to ask the question, “is that ‘no’, forever, or just ‘no’, right now?” Few people ever say “no” forever and allow me to keep in touch with them and send them marketing materials for my latest product or workshop or pieces of value like articles I’ve written that is pertinent to their business success.

My philosophy is the more value I can provide in my correspondance with the prospect it will gradually move them closer to seeing me as the expert they can turn to when they have a need.

In Robert Clay’s article he noted that only 2% of sales occur when parties meet for the first time. In my business I don’t believe I’ve ever closed a deal on first meeting. I have closed business in two meetings, however, and that is what I shoot for. And, I do it now with a systematic process where I know exactly what my purpose is at each stage of the interaction with my prospect.

Depending on where the prospects come to me through my marketing gravity system is how I determine the purpose of in the intial and each successive meeting. You must pre-determine in your mind what the next step in your business model is to move towards closing the business. Many times it will not be closing the business but just closing on a next meeting with a higher purpose that moves the process forward.

What’s your business/sales model look like and how patient are you in following it so that you don’t get ahead of yourself, and how persistent are you in making sure you consistently follow up”

I hope you’ve enjoyed the post as much as I have. Click here to view the original post. Skip Weisman is based in Poughkeepsie, NY. Thank you Skip!

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Create an avalanche of qualified leads

Robert Clay — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 12:45:26 +0000

Identifying prime prospects for your product, service or expertise can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. But that’s an easy challenge to overcome when you employ “Packaged information offers” in an effective manner, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.

Packaged information offers are one of my all-time favourite low-risk/high-return strategies for generating an avalanche of high quality leads at low cost. Essentially, it is the concept of offering information as an inducement to get your prime prospects to raise their hands and identify themselves to you.

This will typically be the same information that you give away free of charge every day of the week when prospects call you, contact you, interact with you in person or go to your website. It’s information that demonstrates that you know what you’re talking about and that you have expertise in your field. That information can easily be packaged into a booklet, audio CD, DVD, special report, bulletin, guide, white paper, e-book … or indeed many other forms.

This information is probably common currency in your business, which means that it costs you very little to package it. At the same time it is likely to be very valuable and useful to your prime prospects, who probably know little about your product, service or expertise. When they’re in the market for what you offer they’re seeking guidance to ensure that they make the right choice, deal with someone they can trust, who is competent … and can deliver to them the outcomes they’re seeking.

Once you’ve packaged your information, you should advertise or promote it. This is a very effective way of generating qualified leads. Generally, the only people who will raise their hands and send for your information will be those who are in the market right now for what you are promoting.

In other words they’re qualified prospects who are seeking answers right now to a problem or need that you can potentially satisfy. By responding to your packaged information offer they’re communicating a keen interest in what you’re offering and that they’re ready to do business now or in the near future. These are the very people you need to focus on right now to maximise your chances of success … and they’re raising their hands and identifying themselves to you. It doesn’t get much better than that!

One of my clients was a recruitment company who specialise in finding jobs for the cream of the 16-24 year old school and college leavers. They were short of good candidates at one time, so rather than advertise each individual job, we persuaded them to offer a packaged information booklet titled “How to win at an interview.” The headline of the ad was “School leavers guide to success” and the body of the ad explained why the booklet would be valuable to any school or college leaver who wanted success. Instead of their normal 3-4 responses per ad, this ad generated 160 enquiries the first week it was placed … and continued to generate similar respones each week it ran. And everyone who responded was a school or college leaver who wanted success.

Another client, a photographer, uses a packaged information offer in his Yellow Pages ad. He offers a “Free guide on how to get the most from your portrait sitting”. Who is likely to respond to that offer? Right … someone who is in the market right now for a portrait. So when they respond he knows who they are and exactly where to focus his attention and future marketing activities.

As a result of that offer, for the first time in his business history, people started booking portrait sessions over the phone, without first visiting his studio and taking up his time. Not only that, but his average sale increased from £110 to £498 in a matter of months. He ended up doing twice the business at almost five times the price. Nearly ten times what he was achieving before.

When we promoted a packaged information offer by direct mail for the UK’s most successful financial adviser, we achieved over sixteen times his normal response. A single mailing achieved over 1,200 responses, every one of them a prime prospect for his services.

The recipe for effective packaged information

The first step in creating your packaged information is to identify precisely who you want to target. Who has the capacity, desire and motivation to buy your product, service or expertise right now? Who already uses or is familiar with your type of product or service? These will be your prime prospects.

Next, identify what information these prime prospects are seeking. They want to make an informed decision, so they’re very likely seeking information and hard honest facts that will give them unbiased answers to their fears, frustrations, concerns, issues and uncertainties about buying your product, service or expertise. Your packaged information should satisfy that craving.

As such, it should contain, in an easy to read style, all the questions and answers a prime prospect would want to ask. It should also contain all the thought provoking questions they may never have considered. It should be completely unbiased and packed with solid answers. It should explain how to avoid potential disappointments or disaster. It should educate your prospects on the vital issues in their decision making process, and alert them to things they wouldn’t otherwise have known, thus positioning you as an authority in your field, and someone who is on the customer’s side.

Consider adding a key questions checklist so that your prime prospects can compare competitive offerings. Don’t lay it out as an ad for your product, service or expertise. People are astute. They can see through a thinly veiled ad a mile off. When you give people an unbiased, factual, thought-provoking package of knowledge, they value it. It should be so useful to your prime prospects that they will want to keep it, use it and refer to it well into the future.

Isn’t that exactly the sort of information you crave when you’re in the market for a product or service? If someone offered you information like that, wouldn’t you be much more drawn to them than you would be to their competitors? That’s why this is such an effective strategy.

Never forget that whilst what you know may be everyday currency to you, it could be of immense value to your prime prospects. So even if you offer this information for free, I recommend that you put a monetary value on it. That will make the information even more desirable and stimulate even greater response.

Overwhelming benefits

The benefits of using packaged information correctly are immense. It is a terrific lead generation tool. You can use it to dramatically boost response to your ads, sales letters and email campaigns. It qualifies and flushes your prime prospects out of the woodwork. It tends to produce better quality leads at a fraction of the normal cost. It rapidly builds a database of names, and not just any names, but the names of prime prospects who raise their hands because they want what you offer.

As well as educating and informing your marketplace, it positions you as an authority in your field. It also induces the law of reciprocity, which states that when you give something useful and valuable to people they feel obliged to reciprocate.

Correctly done and positioned, it can put your business ‘on the map’ as never before. The media can often be persuaded to share your knowledge and expertise as public service information. They will sometimes do free write-ups on your business that would cost you £ thousands had you bought the same space as an ad. It can even result in you becoming an industry spokesperson, invited by the media to comment on issues relating to your industry.

Packaged information is therefore one of the most powerful marketing tools you’ll ever use to create immediate results. We use it all the time with clients in every industry you can imagine. Done correctly, it always works, and if you’d like to explore how to use this strategy effectively in your business, please contact us now.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

The key to profitable long-term business right now

Robert Clay — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 12:22:24 +0000

The concept of acquiring new customers at a breakeven or slight loss sounds crazy to some people, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom. Why would you even want to do it? After all, staying in business requires you to make a profit on every sale … or does it?

Acquiring new customers at a breakeven or slight loss, in the right circumstances, can be an extremely cost- and time-effective way of achieving substantial business growth. It is also one of the most overlooked and under-used methods of business growth available to you.

While this strategy shouldn’t be used by businesses that make one-off or infrequent sales, it can come into its own if a substantial portion of your sales and profits occur when your clients return to make repeat purchases from you over months, years or decades.

Simply put, you won’t start to benefit from any of that profitable repeat business unless you first get people to make their initial buying decision.

Get new customers started sooner rather than later

The idea then is to get as many prospects as possible into your buying stream as quickly and easily as you can, even if the initial sale is made at breakeven or a slight loss. The sooner you can get people to make that initial buying decision, the sooner you will start to benefit from all the repeat business, add-ons, referrals, and ancillary products and services that represent the bulk of your profits. And that’s where this strategy starts to make sense.

To make this strategy work you need to make it as easy and irresistible as possible for your customers to start doing business with you. Many companies have been catapulted from obscurity to market leadership as a result.

Here’s an example that illustrates how a struggling startup company used this strategy to run rings around huge established competitors, overcoming massive odds to became a giant in its own right in the corporate world.

The AOL Story

That startup was AOL, and back in the mid-’90s it’s CEO, Steve Case, faced overwhelming competition in the race to dominate the internet. His competitors at that time were the likes of CompuServe and Prodigy who were owned by wealthy corporate giants like Sears, IBM and H&R Block. They could have obliterated AOL at will had AOL even been on their radar.

Prodigy spent $500 million launching their online service. They were selling their software through 500 Sears stores for $39.95 and charged $9.95 a month for their service. They were also spending $20 million a year on advertising, and had signed up 500,000 subscribers. The other big player, CompuServe, had around a million subscribers at the time and were the world’s largest online service providers.

There was seemingly no way that AOL—which by this time had 300,000 subscribers, annual revenues of $40M, and needed more investors—could compete with these big spending giants.

That was when Steve Case decided to shift AOL’s focus away from trying to make a profit on the acquisition of new customers, and instead decided to make their real profit on all the repeat purchases that resulted from those new customers.

Millions of disks

His strategy was to unleash the fury of millions and millions of AOL computer disks on an unsuspecting world. These disks allowed you to install AOL’s software on your computer free of charge and you could also connect to AOL for a month free of charge.

AOL initially just wanted to discover how many people would use the disks to log on and become paying subscribers if they gave them away. They spent $250,000 distributing the disks as computer magazine cover disks in a sealed plastic bag. They found that for every 100 disks they gave away, 10 people became paying subscribers. With that kind of response they could easily afford to distribute more and more disks … until the disks were being distributed everywhere.

If you bought a computer magazine, you got one of AOL’s free disks. If you bought frozen supermarket steaks you got a free AOL disk. If you got a bag of peanuts on some airlines, you also got a free AOL disk. If you ordered certain mail order goods, you got a free AOL disk. If you attended certain sporting events you got a free AOL disk, and so it went on … You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t get dozens of free AOL disks in the mail. Indeed some people could probably have re-roofed their house with them.

Before this strategy was unleashed AOL’s giant competitors didn’t even think it was a serious contender. It was beneath their radar … and they certainly didn’t see what was coming.

When Steve Case pushed his marketing button in January 1994, AOL gained 70,000 new customers the same month. Eight months later it had signed on more than a million, and over the next few years this number grew to 33 million.

Within two years of implementing this strategy AOL’s revenues had grown from $40 million a year to $298 million a MONTH! And this, remember, was from a company that wasn’t even taken seriously by its competitors.

The strategy was so successful that AOL were overwhelmed for the next twelve months and had to fix a range of customer service issues to ensure that its rapidly increasing body of customers could even get online when they wanted to. It was a struggle to keep up, but they eventually fixed the problems because they had all this new cash rolling in each month.

Had you been been working at Compuserve or Prodigy when this strategy was unleashed, you’d have thought that AOL had gone nuts. These companies had spent fortunes trying to persuade you to buy their software so that you could spend still more money using their services, whereas AOL just said “Just stick this disk into your computer and try it. You’ll get free email and the first month’s usage for free. You can go to a computer store and buy a competitor’s program for $39.95 or you can have AOL for free, which will you take?”

Market explosion

This strategy didn’t just result in an expansion of the online market, it resulted in an explosion, and AOL quickly took the lion’s share of the market. As its subscriber base grew, it freely stole customers from its competitors and eventually absorbed Compuserve. Prodigy disappeared and within a few years and AOL became powerful enough to gobble up Time Warner, creating the world’s largest media company.

While the AOL Time Warner merger turned out to be one of the worst mergers in corporate history, the fact that it happened at all is testimony to the power of this strategy. So it really wasn’t a crazy strategy after all.

Book, CD and DVD clubs have used the same strategy successfully since the 1920’s to generate revenues of £10’s of millions a year from customers to whom they initially sold at breakeven or a slight loss; Credit cards offer interest-free balance transfers as an inducement to switch; Printer manufacturers virtually give away their inkjet printers and make their money on the expensive ink cartridges you’ll be buying for the next few years. Tetra Pak make € billions a year supplying reels of their packaging materials to thousands of packaging companies who use their machinery to make over 100 billion cartons a year … and I can give you many more examples.

Free strategic planning day

I know a highly regarded firm of accountants who were offering a strategic planning day with one of their partners free of charge. At the end of the day they suggested that if the day had been valuable you should just pay them what you thought it was worth. Most people put a value on the day of around £1,500, which they paid. But more significantly, every time they ran one of those days they picked up an average of £10K in extra business, most of which continued for years to come.

Being accountants, there were some partners who just couldn’t comprehend why they should offer anything for free … and of course those partners missed out big time. Ironically, even when the results were there for all to see, they still couldn’t see that they were losing out!

So what would it be worth to your business if you added 10, 100 or 1,000 more customers this month and every month, if you didn’t make a penny on the initial transaction, but made enormous profits on all the repeat business you did with them over the months and years to come?

If the numbers stack up for you, your first step in using this strategy should be to identify and understand just how much combined profit a customer represents to you for the life of their business relationship with you. This will tell you how much time, effort and investment you can afford to invest upfront in acquiring each customer … and whether or to what extent you can afford to make all of your profits on the repeat business.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

You have a great story to tell … so tell it!

Robert Clay — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 08:22:38 +0000

If you really want people to buy into your product, service or expertise, it is incredibly important to fully and deeply educate your prospects and clients about what you do, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.

I frequently come across people in business who claim very high success rates once they can get their prospects to meet them face to face; or visit them in their premises; or see how they operate; or to see their processes in action. Each of these situations represents a valuable education opportunity. When you educate your prospects and clients properly, it brings out the uniqueness of your business, sets you apart from all of your competitors and dramatically increases the chances that you’ll end up doing business together.

Unfortunately, each of these interactions can also consume massive amounts of time and resources. That means you’re limited by the number of prospects or clients you can handle. But that limitation no longer has to exist if you develop a compelling “behind the scenes” story for your business.

To illustrate the power of education that this represents, let’s say you read a compellingly written article in a magazine or newspaper like the Sunday Times. When you first spot the headline, you probably have no more than momentary or passing interest in the piece.

But let’s say the headline grabs your attention and, as you start reading, you learn about a fabulous travel destination. You may not even have been aware that the place existed and you’ve certainly never considered going there before. Prior to this article, you may have known little or nothing about the place, its people, culture, scenery, climate or magnificent buildings.

Yet, as you read the article, you’re more and more drawn to what you’re discovering. By the time you’ve read the article you want to visit the place. You may even be ready to book a trip right away.

The point is, do you believe it’s possible in a single reading of a well-written article to go from passing interest at most, to actually wanting to experience what the article describes?

I’ve asked that question hundreds of times, and ninety-nine percent of people tell me that a well-written article has that power. A single reading of a well written “behind-the-scenes” story like this can take people several rungs up the buying ladder in a single step, dramatically speeding up their decision-making process. And if it’s possible for mere ink on paper to have such a powerful effect, then why aren’t we all using that power every day in everything we do?

Critically important

That’s why a behind-the-scenes story can play such a critical part in your marketing success. In my experience every business has a story to tell. Yet less than one business in a thousand has ever developed such a story. But those that do are often catapulted from obscurity to market leadership in their field. For example:

One client, a 23-year-old entrepreneur operating a business from his spare bedroom, went to No.1 in Europe in his field within four years of developing his story.

Within six years he had won the national Ernst and Young Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (the previous winner being Stelios from easyJet). A year later he was mentioned in the Sunday Times Rich list for the first time. A year after that he sold a stake in his business to a private equity company, and pocketed £ millions. Three years later, in December 2007, his business was sold to another private equity company for £75 million. Today it is a well-known and highly respected brandname. But this would never have happened if we hadn’t helped him to put his “behind-the-scenes” together.

As a result of their story, another new client immediately won two contracts worth some £2.5 million in extra profits. In another example, the right story helped a new start-up business to achieve it’s first year’s objective in its first month of trading. In the next 8 years they went on to build a group with annual revenues of over £100M.

These stories should tell you that creating your “behind-the-scenes” story is critical to your marketing success. In fact it is so important that we always make this the very first task we undertake whenever we work with a new client.

Creating your story

If we were to go through this process with you it would start by getting the all of the key leaders in your business to respond to a long list of questions that will give us deep insights into your business; how your clients view it; who you compete with; what sets you apart from your competitors; who your ideal clients are; what their concerns or issues are; where your biggest opportunities lie … and a variety of other factors.

The responses are then analysed and deconstructed virtually to a molecular level. An outline of the compelling story that needs to be told is then built up over a number of days. Along the way we will develop a long list of additional questions to ask.

A comprehensive customer survey is then carried out to build a profile of your ideal clients; to understand their attitudes and perceptions of your products and services and your industry; to discover where you can (or do) add the most value; to measure how well you perform in many different areas; to establish how you can serve your clients better .. and a whole lot more. This exercise alone often produces hundreds or even thousands of pages of incredibly valuable data.

Alongside this your competitors will be analysed using a combination of desk-based research, telephone calls and face-to-face visits. Many facets of your competitors’ businesses will be analysed including their product or service offering; their marketing messages; how they handle enquiries; their competence; their effectiveness; their strengths and weaknesses; and what, if anything, sets them apart.

The information assembled from these exercises is then used to create a 30-50-page brief for a professional copywriter who will have the task of creating an incredibly powerful “behind-the-scenes” story for your business.

It normally takes many drafts to get the story right, and many more questions will arise in the process. Once the job has been done to everyone’s satisfaction, it will be tested in the marketplace. Feedback from those tests will then be incorporated into the final draft.

Your story, once completed, will do nothing less than revolutionise the way that you, your team, and your prospective clients will perceive and understand your business. It will dramatically speed up your prospects’ decision making processes, your existing clients will do a lot more business with you … and it will give you a sound basis for dominating your marketplace.

Best of all, you can put your story to work in front of tens, hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of people simultaneously. Without spending a lot of money. And the right story will produce far better results for you than you could ever achieve using any other method.

Creating a story that produces results of this magnitude is no trivial task. It has taken years to develop the robust procedures we use to do this and it’s quite normal to invest around 750 hours of our time whenever we do this for a client. I use the word invest because we don’t normally charge for our time when we do this for you (although you will have to pay any out of pocket expenses incurred). Instead our fees will normally be based on a percentage of the results you achieve that you wouldn’t have achieved any other way.

Updated Feb 2010: You have a story to tell in your business. And you need to tell it! If you really want people to buy into your product, service or expertise, it is incredibly important to fully and deeply educate your prospects and clients about what you do, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom.

The point is, do you believe it’s possible in a single reading of a well-written article to go from passing interest at most, to actually wanting to experience what the article describes?

Critically important

One client, a 23-year-old entrepreneur operating a business from his spare bedroom, went to No.1 in Europe in his field within four years of developing his story.

After six years he won the national Ernst and Young Young Entrepreneur of the Year award (the previous winner was Stelios from easyJet). A year later he was mentioned in the Sunday Times Rich list for the first time. A year after that he sold a stake in his business to a private equity company, and pocketed £ millions. Three years later, in December 2007, his business was sold to another private equity company for £75 million. Today it is a well-known and highly respected brandname. But this would never have happened if we hadn’t helped him to put his “behind-the-scenes” together.

Creating your story

We no longer offer one-to-one consulting, but when we did, we evolved an in-depth process for developing a world-class “behind-the-scenes” story.

The process would have started by getting the all of the key leaders in your business to respond to a long list of questions that provided an array of deep insights into your business; how your clients view it; who you compete with; what sets you apart from your competitors; who your ideal clients are; what concerns or issues the story need to address; where your biggest opportunities lay … and a variety of other factors.

The responses were then analysed and deconstructed virtually to a molecular level. An outline of the compelling story that needed to be told was then built up over a number of days. Along the way we would spot gaps in the story, or need further information so that we could elaborate on certain points. This would result in another long list of questions.

A comprehensive customer survey (and I mean really comprehensive) was then carried out to build a profile of your ideal clients; to understand their attitudes and perceptions of your products and services and your industry; to discover where you can (or do) add the most value; to measure how well you perform in many different areas; to establish how you can serve your clients better .. and a whole lot more. This exercise alone often produces hundreds or even thousands of pages of incredibly valuable data.

At the same time we would analyse your competitors using a combination of desk-based research, telephone calls and face-to-face visits. Many facets of your competitors’ businesses would be analysed including their product or service offering; their marketing messages; how they handle enquiries; their competence; their effectiveness; their strengths and weaknesses; and what, if anything, sets them apart.

The information assembled from these exercises was then used to create a 30-50-page brief for a professional copywriter who would have the task of creating an incredibly powerful “behind-the-scenes” story for your business. These stories would run anywhere from 20-70 pages, depending on the business. The finished stories were used as internal working documents, “master” stories, if you will, from which all subsequent marketing messages for that business were extracted and developed.

On the subject of copywriters, we found that most of them are not that good, and some are truly useless. But we would occasionally find ones who were really excellent, who would get the job done right first time, every time. Copywriters like that are rare. And worth their weight in gold. We used to keep copywriters like that very busy.

It normally takes many drafts to get the story right (fewer if you have a really good copywriter), and many more questions would undoubtedly arise as we picked up on points we particularly wanted to develop or emphasise. Once the job had been done to everyone’s satisfaction, it was tested in the marketplace. Feedback from those tests was then incorporated into the final draft.

What your story will do for you

Your story, once completed, will do nothing less than revolutionise the way that you, your team, and your prospective clients will perceive and understand your business. It will dramatically speed up your prospects’ decision making processes; your existing clients will do a lot more business with you … and it will give you a sound basis for dominating your marketplace.

Creating a world-class story that produces results of this magnitude is no trivial task. It took years to develop the robust procedures we used to do this and it was quite normal to invest around 750 hours of our time whenever we did this for a client.

We now teach this process to the aspiring market leaders who participate in our invitation-only Eureka program. We also recommend selected third parties who can provide one-to-one help with this process, as appropriate.

If this seems like a lot of work, it is. If you’re bothered by that, you should know that it’s quite possible to craft a decent story with a fraction of this effort. But the result is unlikely to be anything like the 20-70 page world-class story that emerges from this process, and which has been the catalyst for many businesses to emerge as market leaders in their niche.

So do you tell your story? What do you say? Have you articulated it in writing? Where and how do you use it? What’s your experience when you do? We’d be very interested in your thoughts, feedback and experiences.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website

Why 8% of sales people get 80% of the sales

Robert Clay — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:00:29 +0000

You can sometimes be so close to your business that you can miss the simple solutions for growing it, where the greatest opportunities often lie. Solutions that are blindingly obvious, once you’re aware of them … but are amongst the best kept secrets on the planet if you’re not. For example:

Only 2% of sales occur at a first meeting

People in business often hope and expect to do business the first time they meet a prospect. Yet studies reveal that only 2% of sales occur when two parties meet for the first time.

The 2% who buy at a first meeting tend to be people who have already looked into the subject matter, and already know what they’re looking for. If they meet someone who ticks all the right boxes and they get on well, then business may well be transacted. But that is far from the norm. The other 98% will only buy once a certain level of trust has been built up.

Anyone who believes they can go into a sales situation armed with “101 sure fire sales closes” and make sales is seriously misinformed … and about 20 years behind the times. Professional sales people get to know their prospects; understand their issues; solve their prospect’s problems; and provide irrefutable proof. They build relationships and trust by engaging in on-going dialogue (otherwise known as follow-up). They don’t just peddle their products and services with an armoury of closing tricks.

There are many reasons why people who could benefit from your product, service or expertise do not buy. At least not without further prodding. Inertia. Lack of time. Too many other things on their mind. Concern about cost. Cashflow. Budget constraints. More pressing matters. Your failure to do enough marketing to establish your name in your field so they’ll buy without question … and more. None of the these, by the way, is a negative. They are just psychological and transactional realities you must become aware of and recognise … which is why follow-ups are SO important.

Yet isn’t it amazing how often you express interest in a product or service, but never hear from the person or company again? It happens all the time. Research shows, amazingly, that only 20% of sales leads are ever followed up … in other words 80% of potential opportunities are lost without trace simply due to lack of follow-up

People and companies who don’t follow-up; who do nothing to build up that trust and relationship cannot succeed, especially in today’s tough economic climate. People need to be sure they’re making the right decision before they commit to a purchase.

Tenacity pays off…

Different studies carried out at different times, in different places, by different market research companies over a number of years all reveal that 80% of non-routine sales occur only after at least five follow-ups.

Think about that. It takes at least five continuous follow up efforts after the initial sales contact, before a customer says yes. FIVE!!

There are some fascinating statistics on this:

44% of sales people give up after one “no”
22% give up after two “no’s”
14% give up after three “no’s”
12% give up after four “no’s”

That tells you that 92% of sales people give up after 4 “no’s”, and only 8% of sales people ask for the order a fifth time.

When you consider that 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes”, the inference is that 8% of sales people are getting 80% of the sales!

Introduce a five “no’s” follow-up strategy

Once you’re aware of these statistics you should stack the odds in your favour by introducing a “Five no’s” strategy, where you maintain contact with prospects until each one of them has said “no”, or “not now”, or “not yet” … at least five times. Every time you’re in contact you have an opportunity to advance and build the relationship.

Businesses with a “five no’s” strategy will always enjoy a conversion rate many times higher than their competitors who have no such strategy. What strategies do you have in your business right now to ensure that you contact your prospects regularly in a gentle and meaningful way so that you win their business and their loyalty?

“Top of Mind Awareness”

There’s also the fact that 63% of people requesting information on your company today will not purchase for at least 3 months … and 20% will take more than 12 months to buy.

Contacting your prospective and existing customers every 3 months or sooner builds trust and professionalism and keeps “top of mind” awareness. In this context, your customers do not regard contact for orders, payments and appointments, or the obligatory Christmas card as a meaningful communication.

What meaningful communication strategies do you have in place right now to maintain “top of mind” awareness once someone has been in contact with you? How do you nurture your clients so that they learn to trust you and see you as a professional organisation?

This simple strategy could be critical to your survival in the current economic downturn. Implement it and prosper. Ignore it at your peril.

Brought to you by Robert Clay - Visit Website