True Marketing Tactics for YOUR Business Principle #6

You are in the best negotiating position with your customers when your marketing generates deal flow which exceeds your capacity.

Have you ever taken one of those negotiation classes? Who has the most power in a negotiation? Well, it’s the person with the most options! If your customer has more options than you do he is in charge and thus can dictate the terms and the price of the deal. If your marketing system is delivering a consistent amount of quality leads each day you will end up with all the power in the negotiation. A customer who senses that you don’t need him is more likely to buy from you right?

If you have enough deal flow, then you can chose customers who match your capabilities rather than taking whoever you can get. You have more negotiating power because you can safely walk away from a deal. Potential clients have more respect for you because you didn’t chase them down. You can anticipate variations in your available capacity and revenue streams and open up or tighten your sales funnel as necessary rather than scrambling at the last minute.

You don’t have to alter your systems or processes to accommodate customers who’s needs don’t match your capability. Your time spent with customers is much more productive because when they call you they already understand what you do, what is unique about you, and how you can help them. Plus, you are able to focus on the nuances of solving the customers problems and building real relationships with them, rather than worrying about whether or not you can close the deal.

Principle #7 coming soon…

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True Marketing Tactics for YOUR Business ~ Principle #5

Every time that you communicate with your customers you should reinforce the core ingredients of your sales message….

People forget and it is never good enough to say something just once. When your prospects, have first contacted you, after that, they should regularly get things from you that reinforce what you told them the first time and every time you talk to them you must communicate your core sales message.

It’s very easy to get tired of constantly saying the same thing all the time and it’s easy to stop doing things that work just because you get bored with them. But you have to resist this temptation and consistently, persistently reinforce your core sales message. Your message will never be consistent unless everyone in the company agrees on what it is. If you change your message every month you will never get real traction in the market place because customers will only have a vague idea of what you do.

Principle #6

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True Marketing Tactics for YOUR Business ~ Principle #4

Your Marketing and Sales Message must effectively Answer The Following Four questions:

1. Why should I read or listen to you?

2. Why should I believe what you have to say?

3. Why should I do anything about what you’re offering?

4. Why should I act now?

These are very basic questions but most people have a very difficult time articulating them. There are all kinds of sales people and companies who are the greatest in the world but they can’t even give you a real solid explanation of what they do or why it matters. The precise answer to those four questions as it relates to your specific kind of customer is your Unique Selling Proposition (USP), your Core Sales Message and it will elevate you above your competition.

This message must be clearly defined and focused, it must be written down and you must be able to repeat it in the middle of the night when your partner kicks you and wakes you up from a deep sleep. Every thing you do should answer those things with that message either directly or indirectly and this goes hand in hand with the next principle.

Principle #5

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True Marketing Tactics for YOUR Business ~ Principle #3

A true marketing and publicity system delivers a predictable number of quality sales leads to you every day, month after month, year after year, so your sales people only spend time with people who already understand what you do and who have proactively asked you to help them solve their problem.

Our Modern world today is only possible due to automation. For example, if new cars were assembled by hand instead of machines they would cost $100,000 instead of $20,000. If we use pony express to deliver our post, each letter you send would cost $50 instead of 65c. A finely tuned marketing system is automated. It’s like a machine used in a manufacturing plant. If you power it up and put raw material on one end, it produces qualified results, i.e. prospects on the other end, predictably and reliably. Around the clock each day and every day 24/7/365.

One of my most interesting successes was creating a web page that sold mortgages on the internet. It was a one page sales letter that used a time tested marketing formula and got customers to move from mere casual interest to filling out an online mortgage application form that captured an incredible amount of personal and confidential information about each applicant. The system then booked them in with an appointment with my sales consultants, not in their home or business, but in MY offices, automatically. The website had to do all the work by itself. That web page successfully converted 1 out of every 10 visitors and I got 200 visitors per day (you can do the math!) It ran like clockwork, a selling machine that works on autopilot.

You can’t do much better than that can you? The product and the website together are like an annuity that worked for me 24hrs a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and it put money in to my bank account month after month all with no maintenance and no annoying phone calls. Wouldn’t you like your business to run that way? Wouldn’t you like your sales process to be a machine that runs on autopilot constantly generating leads or sales orders whether you are awake or asleep or in the office or on the golf course? I’m here to tell you that your business can run that way.

Please understand that it’s not likely that anyone is going to order a $10,000 Product or service with their visa card as though it were a €9.99 book from Amazon.com. However, you can get lot’s of quality sales leads from that same machine exactly the same way if you know how to do it. I can absolutely assure you that once you have a system like that in place, your life as a business owner selling services to other businesses or individuals, will change for the better forever. You will NEVER go back to the old way of selling again. When you have that kind of marketing machine working for you, you’ll make more money, you’ll have less stress, you’ll have less month to month variation in your sales numbers, your sales people will be more motivated, you’ll attract better quality reps and distributors, you’ll get more mind share from your sales people because they don’t have to work nearly as hard to get appointments and sales.

Marketing on autopilot is not some fantasy or theoretical ideal. It is a fundamental cornerstone of literally thousands of businesses and it quite literally is the difference between failure and success for many people. If you look around at all the really successful people you know, they all have systems that work for them when they are playing or working on other projects. They are not using manual labor. If you can make the transition from manual labor grunt work sales, to marketing on autopilot, you would’ve literally built a foundation for business success.

If your company is making cold calls, think about it, your telesales people spend an incredible amount of time on cold call grunt work for new business. The turnover of the staff is massive and they are constantly causing you headaches with sick days, bad quality appointments, bitching and moaning, costs you hundreds of thousands each year and oh, don’t forget the politics that comes with it. Let me tell you a sure way to double your productivity and income.

Convert that wasted prospecting and grunt work time to productive sales time. Generate a steady flow of potential customers who call you and want you to help them, then, make sure your sales people are spending 90% of their time in front of those people. Eliminate the time wasted in getting past gate keepers and your effectiveness will go through the roof!

There are several other huge benefits to this by the way:

Firstly, the life of your sales people dramatically changes for the better. The stomach churning rejection and constant stream of “NO, NOT INTERESTED”, “NOT TODAY”, “CALL ME IN THREE MONTHS”, “YOU’LL HAVE TO TALK TO THE BOOKKEEPER ABOUT THAT AND SHE ISN’T IN TODAY CALL BACK NEXT WEEK” all that goes away, it’s a lot less tempting to procrastinate when you know that every one you are calling is somewhat interested in talking with you and having you help them in solving their problem. It’s a lot easier to roll out of bed in the morning when you know when you get to the office every day you will have a bunch of hot leads on your desk that came from the website, email, fax or voice mail from people who understand what you do and are waiting for you to help them solve their problem.

Second, it’s easier to attract and keep good sales people whether they work directly for you or are commission only representatives or distributors. If you use this marketing system, you won’t have any problem in getting serious potential customers to raise their hand and express genuine interest in your services. If you use this system you’ll know how to educate those prospects at very low cost before you make any significant investment in them and you’ll be certain that they are pre-disposed to buy before the sales people get in their car and go to see them.

I don’t think that any prospect should be visited unless they are, on a scale of 1 – 10 at least a 5 in terms of likely to give you their money. If you have potential customers that are 4’s, 5’s 6’s 7’s and 8’s then your sales people will be much more eager to go and visit them because they are genuinely interested in your products and services.

Now on to Principle #4

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True Marketing Tactics For Your Business ~ Priciple #2

A prospect who finds you first is more likely to buy from you, than if you found him.

Has your medical doctor ever called you on the phone, asking if you might need help fighting a flu bug? I don’t think so. He doesn’t find you, you find him. And when you do see him, he tells you what medicine you need to take and you take it. If he says you need surgery, you might seek a second opinion, but you’re willing to pay good money for that opinion. Most likely you take the advice, no matter how painful or inconvenient. Do your customers respect you as much as they respect their doctor? No! Why not? They don’t know him any better than they know you. His diagnosis of problems are not correct more often than yours are. You went to school. You have expertise. You know how to solve difficult problems. So what’s the difference?

The difference is positioning. The doctor is perceived to be an expert, so you seek his counsel. You believe what he has to say while the cost to see the doctor goes up every year. The truth is the medical industry knows things about marketing and positioning that most people in our industry are simply ignorant of. Most people just imitate their competitors, and everyone gets dumber every year.

In the world of corporate sales, people are still doing things the exact same way as they did 20, 30 or even 50 years ago!  And they consume enormous amounts of effort!  But when you replace manual labor grunt work with automation, the difference is enormous. I endured a bitter struggle with this before I finally figured it out. I thought that the problem was that I wasn’t motivated enough. I listened to audios constantly, read books learned the power of positive thinking I smiled every where I went and shook peoples hands. I remembered their names, I chatted with them about golf and fishing and their grandchildren and the placks in their office. I looked at myself in the mirror every morning and said “I’m good enough” “I’m smart enough” and “people like me”. Well isn’t that pretty much what most sales people learn how to do? Believe great things, be nice to people, work like a banshee and think positive until success sweeps them off their feet and their bank account is filled with cash. Well that’s what I did and I was working very hard at it because I’m not a natural sales person, but it wasn’t working for me and each month it just became an uphill struggle.

You can only do this for so long before something finally gives and I knew that I had to do something before I came to the breaking point. I remember when and where I was when I found the answer to what I was looking for. It was February 7th 1997 and I was at a Re/Max sales conference at the Hilton hotel in Somerset west just outside of Cape Town, South Africa where I was once again trying to get more motivated. They had all kinds of speakers and many were from the US who were going to motivate me to achieve great things in my career. But one of the speakers didn’t not talk about motivation at all. He talked about how to bolt a marketing turbo charger on the front end of a sales machine so that my customers would call me instead of me having to call them. He said if a sales person had a steady stream of qualified prospects to talk to he wouldn’t have a motivation problem in the first place.

Now, I’d be lying to you if I told you this speech instantly solved all of my problems. It didn’t but it was the tip of the real iceberg. It radically and permanently changed my perspective on the entire problem and finally pointed me in the right direction. I eventually realized this whole motivation thing was a decoy, why? Because I was already motivated to begin with. The problem was, I was trying to dig a basement with a shovel when I really needed a bulldozer! I didn’t need to be more motivated because no matter how motivated I was, the laziest guy in the world could still move more dirt with a borrowed bulldozer than I could with my little shovel.

I learned that with a good marketing system, you could have people literately lined up to have you help them solve their problems. You can be a welcome guest instead of an unwelcome pest. I began to understand why the old way wasn’t working. In hind-sight these were the problems:

Companies have marketing and advertising budgets.  And they certainly do attempt to generate sales leads.  But here’s the thing; Most business-to-business marketing and publicity is simply terrible.  Everyone just copies everyone else, and the whole industry gets dumber and dumber every year. The sales leads are low quality and there aren’t nearly enough of them.  If you‘re going to get better results than everyone else, you‘re going to have to do something different.

You shouldn’t spend your time prospecting any more than absolutely necessary. Your time is too valuable and expensive. You should only spend time with qualified, interested potential clients, discussing your solutions to their problems.  A good marketing system, which helps customers find the sales person, can do this for far less money than paying the sales person / telemarketer to find the customers. When the sales person has to find the customer they end up spending so much time and money prospecting, they don’t have enough time to devote to selling activities.

Once an effective marketing system is in place, you can spend twice as much time in front of interested customers and double even triple your income. There’s a hidden benefit to this; When the customer finds you, instead of you finding the customer, his perception of you is different. He perceives you as a consultant, not just another salesperson.  Customers don’t respect salespeople as reliable information sources. You are improperly positioned as a peddler and can never accomplish what you are tying to achieve.

Next ~ Principle #3

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