4 Highly Effective Selling Tactics

July 30th, 2009

Many businesses overlook these 4 simple but highly effective selling tactics. How many are you using?

1. Avoid “What To Buy” Choices
Promote only one product or service at a time. It limits your prospect’s buying decision to a simple “yes” or “no”.

Don’t complicate your customer’s decision making process by including a “which one” option. Some customers will have difficulty making a clear choice.

They will avoid the risk of making a wrong choice by making NO choice – and you will lose a sale unnecessarily.

You can develop separate promotions for each product or service you sell. Or you can combine several products and services into one package for one price. But always make your prospective customer’s buying decision a simple “yes” or “no”. It produces the maximum number of sales.

2. Offer Many “How To Buy” Options
Offering choices of WHAT to buy reduces your sales. But offering choices of HOW to buy increases your sales.

Offer many different ways for customers to buy from you. The same method is not convenient for everybody. Prospective customers are more likely to act immediately when their favorite way of ordering is available.

For example, many online marketers only accept orders online. They could easily increase the number of sales they get by including options to order by phone, fax and postal mail.

3. Use A Simple Buying Procedure
You can get more sales by making it easier for customers to buy from you. Look for ways to make your buying procedure easier and faster.

For example, many online marketers use a shopping cart to process their orders – even when they are selling only 1 or 2 items. Don’t force your customers to endure the complicated process of a shopping cart just to order 1 item. Some of them will abandon the process… causing you to lose sales unnecessarily.

Use a simple online order form instead of a shopping cart when you only offer 1 or 2 items.

4. Follow Up Every Sale With Another Offer
Customers are very receptive to more offers immediately after they buy from you. Offer them another product or service related to the one they just bought. Many will accept your offer, producing an easy sale for you.

If you don’t already have additional products or services, find or create some.

For example, offer instructional material related to your customer’s original purchase. It can be a printed book or e-book, a group of books or e-books, a training course, computer software, membership in a fee-based web site or any other type of instructional material related to their original purchase from you.

Tip: Look for an affiliate program selling the kind of instructional material you can use. All you have to do is sign up as an affiliate and announce the product or service to your customers.

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Posted in Marketing, Sales | 3 Comments »

Understanding the Corporate Buyer

July 29th, 2009

Selling your services to corporations is an attractive proposition. The contracts are larger than with small businesses and individuals, and often longer-term. There’s the possibility of repeat business worth many billable hours at respectable rates.

But the best clients are not always the easiest to get. If you don’t grasp the realities of the corporate environment, you may sabotage even a hot lead. Here are five important keys to working with the corporate buyer.

1. Managers are busy. This is just as true in economic downturns as during a boom. When business is slow, unnecessary employees get laid off. The people left behind have to pick up the slack.

Busy people ignore unsolicited email and letters, and will not return your phone calls. Even when you are in the final stages of closing a deal, your contact may not return your calls for weeks. If you accept this as normal behavior instead of obsessing about how you may have caused it, you will sleep better at night and use your daylight hours more productively.

2. Hot buttons open doors. If you want to capture the interest of a busy person, you need to tell them exactly how you can help them. Calling just to introduce yourself will not get their attention.

What do the people in your target market perceive to be the greatest problems they face, or the biggest goals they wish to achieve? Ask these questions of the people you serve and the other businesspeople who serve them. Read trade literature or special interest publications and educate yourself on the key issues in your marketplace. Then tell your prospects in every communication how you can help address these needs.

3. Every choice must be justified. When you sell to the owner of a small business or to an individual for his or her own use, your buyer is free to make purchasing decisions based on instinct, whim, or gut feeling. But every corporate sale must be justified to someone else in the organization.

A supervisor must justify choices to a manager, the manager to an executive, the executive to the CEO, the CEO to the board, the board to the shareholders. Each one of these people wants to look good to the next link up the chain, and dreads making a public mistake. If you want your sale to go through, you need to provide your contact with EVIDENCE why you and your solution are the best choice.

4. The bottom line rules. When you provide your evidence, it had better include dollars and cents. If you are more expensive than your competition, what added value will you provide? If hiring you will cost more than solving the company’s problem in some other way, what tangible benefits will they receive that make the added expense worthwhile?

Individuals and small businesses buy services in the category of nice-to-have, often to improve their quality of life or that of their employees. Corporations, especially in lean times, don’t. You must sell them something they actually NEED and prove how it will enhance their bottom line. Real-life examples of results at other companies can speak volumes. Illustrations with charts and graphs are more convincing than any brochure.

5. No budget; no project. Even when the company needs what you have and thinks you’re the best one for the job, the deal won’t go through if there’s no money in the budget. You can ask your contact to try for a budget variance, but no budget usually means your project will be deferred until the next fiscal year.

Always ask if the client has a budget at the first meeting. Don’t necessarily expect them to tell you how much it is — price negotiations will come later. But if your contact can’t answer budget questions, it’s also a strong clue you are not talking to the decision-maker.
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Posted in Marketing, Sales, Sell | 2 Comments »

Cracking the Billable Hours Ceiling

July 24th, 2009

How many of you made as much money as you wanted to last year? Don’t be shy; raise your hands. Hmm, I don’t see too many hands out there. What would you say is the cause of this gap between your goals and your earnings?

While you could certainly name the economy or inadequate marketing as the culprit, I’d like to suggest a third alternative. It may be the constraints of the billable hours model that keep you from your financial goals.

Let’s face it, there are only so many hours you can actually bill to clients. For example, the national average for consultants is 22 billable hours per week. You can only raise your rates so high and still find enough customers. And if you spend more time on marketing, that’s less time you have available to bill.

But there’s a way out of this trap. No matter what type of business you’re in, you can use intellectual property to crack the billable hours ceiling. Here are just some of the ways to start tapping into this resource today:

1. Package your process. What if every time you began work with a new client, they paid an up-front fee before you spent even one hour with them? If you sell a process rather than your time, clients will pay for access to your previously developed materials. Examples are workbooks, forms, assessments, surveys, games, self-paced programs, and train-the-trainer packages.

2. Give a class. When you assemble a group of people to learn together, you can earn more per hour than working with them separately. Classes can be given at your office, at a rented (or borrowed) facility, on the phone, or on the web. Your market for classes is not just your clients — think about what you could teach your colleagues as well.

3. Record a tape, CD, or video. The simplest way to make recordings is to capture your live classes or speaking engagements on audio or video. Make your unedited recordings available immediately on the web or by phone. More polished recordings can be made with the help of a local studio or editor, or you can learn to do this yourself with the right equipment.

4. Write a white paper, workbook, or booklet. Short publications like these are easily within your reach, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer. A simple 20-page booklet might have as few as 4000 words in it. If you’ve written four articles to promote your business, you’ve probably already written this much. These are perfect formats for e-books, which cost you nothing to print.

5. Author a book. This might seem an impossible task, but if you write one page a day, five days a week, at the end of a year you’ll have a full-length book. If writing isn’t your strong point, find an editor, ghost writer, or even a co-author who has the skills you lack. You don’t have to wait until your book is finished to start selling excerpts as articles and white papers.

6. Market other people’s products. If you don’t yet have your own product, don’t let it stop you. You can begin earning passive income by selling other people’s books and tapes, becoming a re-seller for software or assessment tools, licensing someone else’s process, or joining affiliate programs.

Any of these products can be marketed in conversations with prospects and clients, in your standard marketing kit, in mailings or newsletters, on your outgoing voice mail message, and on your web site.

If you’ve been counting on hourly fees for your entire income, you may be surprised at the impact developing your intellectual property will have. It will add not only to your revenue, but also your professional credibility. And in poor economic times, you will find that prospects who hesitate to pay for personal service will still purchase classes and information products.

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Posted in Marketing, Product Development | 3 Comments »

5 Marketing Mistakes You Can’t Afford To Make

July 23rd, 2009

In virtually every area of business, there will be pitfalls along the way. Marketing is no exception. Time and time again I see retail stores large and small making the same costly mistakes. By knowing how to avoid these mistakes, you will save energy, disappointment – and money.

Mistake #1: Eliminating marketing efforts when times get tight.
When cash flow slows, advertising, direct mail and other forms of marketing are the easiest expenses to reduce, right? But cut these, and you eliminate the very activities that will bring in new customers to turn your business around. This is the time when you may be spending more time analyzing the results of your marketing efforts. But by stopping marketing efforts, you will be setting yourself up for additional loss of business.

Mistake #2: Not measuring results.
Don’t wait until times get tight to start measuring the results of your marketing efforts. By constantly analyzing these, you will be able to reinvest in what is working, and drop those that aren’t. Ask customers how they found your business, and then track the results. Use in-store or on-line coupons, or host a focus group of a variety of customers to discover what attracts them to your business.

Mistake #3: Putting all your marketing dollars in one area.
If your entire marketing budget is used on just one method of promoting your business, you won’t realize the highest return on your investment. Diversifying your efforts will increase the frequency and reach of your messages and stretch your marketing dollars.

Businesses can get hooked into one large advertising program with a local newspaper, magazine or radio station, and put the majority of their marketing dollars there. They feel as if they have to advertise with the same media source, just because they always have or fear they will lose ground since their competitors are advertising there as well. I have actually known some business owners that stay with a company for fear of upsetting their sales associate. Remember, it’s your money and your investment. Don’t ever let anyone talk you into an advertising program that is not producing the best results for your business.

I know this can happen, because it happened to me. My advertising dollars were spent mostly on the same magazines for years until I started to focus on measuring the results more effectively. Start to measure the results of your advertising dollars spent vs. the income received from your advertising on a consist basis.

Many business owners tell me they only do a few direct-mail programs a year, targeted to their existing customer base. Your customer base and mailing list is gold, make sure you have budgeted a large part of your marketing dollars to advertise to your existing customers. They already love you, so keep them coming in by sending promotional (promotional – not just sale) postcards to them at least six times a year.

Mistake #4: Allowing your ego to get in the way of common sense.
Ego can tempt a very bright person to do dumb things. Your marketing decisions should be based on factors that will positively impact some area of your business – usually the bottom line. Buying full-page ads or covers featuring yourself and not focusing on your business’ unique offerings may result in money out the window.

Mistake #5: Not getting help when you need it.
If you find you’re too busy to handle your marketing efforts or that your materials aren’t looking as professional as they should, it’s time to call in the reinforcements. Hire a full-or part-time employee to allow you more free time to work on the “business end” or hire an independent business consultant to bring in new concepts and fresh ideas.

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Posted in Business Management, Marketing | 1 Comment »

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