Client Magnets Official Blog

Archive for June, 2009

Are you brimming with exciting new ideas for your business, but short on implementation? Are you frustrated by projects you’d like to get off the ground but they still seem stuck? Ideas that stay in your head won’t ever generate income – it’s IMPLEMENTATION that counts. So how do you make sure that you follow through and act on your ideas? Here are my top 6 tips for getting things done.

Keep a list.

Henriette Anne Klauser author of ‘Write it down, make it happen’ says that by articulating your desires, you set in motion the wheels that will take you to your goals. I’m regularly amazed at how things on my ‘to do’ list get handled – even before I’ve had a chance to get started on them. (Doesn’t happen as often as I would like, but it DOES happen!)

Determine the Next Action.

There’s a good chance that your list is a mixture of specific actions e.g. ‘reconcile bank statement’ and projects that are actually dependent upon a series of actions e.g. ‘sort out the website’. Until you determine the next action for each project, they will stay on your list as a guilt-inducing immovable block. You’ll get a yucky feeling every time you think of it and 4 weeks from now you’ll be no further forward. Determine what the next action is for each project, then do it!

Don’t try to do it all at once.

Different actions on your list may require different levels of energy or mental concentration. You’ll get more done if you plan activities around YOUR best hours. For example, I like to schedule calls with my team early in the day when my concentration is higher. In the late afternoon my creativity dips, so I try to schedule routine tasks and activities that require little creative energy for that time of the day. Experiment to discover your best hours and plan accordingly.

Delegate.

You DON’T have to do it all yourself. Somewhere in the world there is someone who loves the jobs you hate! Thanks to the power of the internet and sites like http://www.elance.com, there’s never been a better time to hook up with the perfect help – at great prices.

Determine which tasks you can’t do or don’t want to do, then find someone to do them.

Hire a coach or mentor.

There’s nothing like reporting to a third party for keeping you accountable. The first time I worked with a coach I was amazed at how my productivity soared. Can’t afford a coach? Why not ‘buddy up’ with a friend for weekly accountability meetings?

Just make sure your friend is someone who inspires you so your weekly meetings are motivating – the last thing you want is some energy drainer who thinks your accountability meetings are an excuse for a pity party! (Accountability and networking are just two of the many features included in my highly affordable Marketing Mastermind Group.)

Keep track.

What gets measured gets done. Check in on your list regularly to track your progress and determine next action items. Despite the best laid plans, sometimes life can get in the way. Illness, family problems, unexpected set backs can throw you off course for good, or merely be a temporary blip, as long as you keep going!

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What’s your number? You know that number in your head that represents what you’d like to be making in your business each year? I’d like to invite you to think about how much money you would like to make over the next 12 months. And then I want you to calculate how many weeks you want to work for that money.

So let’s say you want to make £250,000 next year, and you want to take 6 weeks off. So you’re going to do that in 46 weeks. If you want to work a 30-hour week, that means that you will be working for 1380 hours (46 multiplied by 30). If we break that down even further, that means that for every working hour you need to be generating £181.16 for your business (£250,000 divided by 1380 working hours).

So if we just think about what you’ve done already TODAY, are the things that you’ve spent your time on today worth £181? Would you pay someone £181 an hour to do the things that you’ve been doing today? Because if you’ve been doing things like admin, fixing the fax machine, ordering paper, refilling the stapler, if you’ve been doing any of those things those are all jobs that could be outsourced or that could be delegated to someone who costs a lot less than £181 per hour.

Your numbers may be different from the example I have shown you here, but I URGE you to take some time to do these calculations for yourself and come up with a clear, precise number of what YOUR time is worth, because I can tell you from experience that this little exercise can transform your business AND your life.

I first did this exercise myself, and since then my income has soared.

After I calculated my hourly number, I wrote it down on a post -it note and stuck it above my desk as a permanent reminder to only focus on those tasks and activities that were worth at least that per hour. I keep it there today as a constant reminder because we’re all human and it’s easy to get distracted and it’s easy to fall by the wayside and end up spending our time on things that we shouldn’t be spending our time on. My little post-it note helps to keep me on track.

All day, everyday you need to ask yourself, “Is what I’m doing right now worth X per hour?” Don’t worry if the answer to this question is ‘no’ more often than it is ‘yes’ to start with. The point is that you have started to keep track, and once you start to keep track, you won’t look back.

If you’re serious about making decent figures in your business you need to work out what that hourly rate is for you. And you need to stop being cheap and be willing to hire someone to take on those jobs and those tasks that you’re doing yourself.

I recently met someone who told me she collected a whole load of business cards at a conference and she had actually sat at her computer manually imputing all of those details herself. My reaction was ‘That’s madness. How on the one hand can you tell me that you want to make £250,000 this year and yet you just spent a whole morning doing a job that you could have paid someone £10 per hour to do?’

If you’re stuck working IN your business when you should be working ON your business, you need to recognize you’re not going to get wealthy doing administrative work. And there’s a good chance there’s a lot of things that you’re doing that aren’t best use of your time. Calculating your hourly number is the first step to identifying those things and then either delegating or eliminating them altogether.

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One big question I hear over and over is ‘how on earth do I find time for marketing and selling?’ The challenge of running your own business is that typically you are not only the sales manager; you’re also the person delivering the service to your clients.

This is something I can strongly relate to, as I struggled with it myself when I first set up my corporate training business back in 1996.

What made the biggest difference for me was replacing one-to-one sales and marketing activities with one-to-many activities.

One-to-one sales and marketing techniques are just not effective for the small business owner. You can’t possibly reach all the people you need to reach, establish their needs, propose a solution, close the sale, deliver the goods and follow up effectively if you are doing it on a one-to-one basis. Trust me, that’s a very fast route to burn out.

When things really started changing for me in my business was when I dropped one-to-one marketing and selling and I turned it into one-to-many marketing and selling. What this meant was that I was making offers simultaneously to large groups of people, to both attract them as prospects and then to convert them into paying customers. Without cold calling. Without time consuming face-to-face meetings.

So let me give you some examples of some one-to-one activities that you may already be doing, and show you how you can transform them into one-to-many techniques.

Going to a networking meeting where you meet one person at a time, talk to them and exchange business cards is a one-to-one technique. However, if you arrange to be the speaker at that meeting and provide practical, solution oriented content along with a clear next step and call to action at the end of your talk, you’ve just turned it into a one-to-many technique.

Cold calling is definitely a one-to-one prospecting technique. There are a finite number of people that you can cold call over a period of a week. Send a well crafted direct mail piece, however, and you have replaced it with a one-to-many technique.

When I started my business, I couldn’t afford to hire a sales team, and I just didn’t have time to prospect by phone, have the face-to-face meeting AND deliver the training (highly ironic considering my specialty was cold calling) so I started using direct mail to promote my training courses. Suddenly, instead of me having to try 6-8 times to reach the MD of a company, his secretary was calling ME to request a meeting. (This technique isn’t for the faint-hearted though, and you need a cracking foundation in direct mail and copywriting techniques before you plunge in.)

Free introductory consultations is a one-to-one technique, but you can turn it into a one-to-many technique by hosting a teleconference that still enables you to connect with people, but in a group setting. I know of one coach who has built a multi six-figure business and he credits this one technique for his success.

Calling on a customer with a box of doughnuts is a one-to-one relationship technique. There are only so many customers you can see, (and only so many doughnuts you can eat!) A newsletter like this one is a one-to-many relationship building tool. For example, it takes me the same hour to write this newsletter each week whether 100 people, 1,000 people or 10,000 people read it. And I don’t have to eat a single doughnut! You do the same amount of work but your results keep increasing. And that’s what gives you the edge over people who are stuck using one-to-one techniques.

The main advantage of replacing one-to-one techniques with one-to-many techniques is that you get a better return on your investment of time, because in that hour you’re potentially reaching hundreds of thousands of potential prospects rather than just the one. So you need to replace your one-to-one techniques with one-to-many techniques.

If you want to grow your business exponentially and you want to be in a position where your calendar is full and you’ve got people knocking on the door for your services, switching from one-to-one techniques to one-to-many techniques is crucial.

Put this principle into action now! Write down all the things that you currently do to promote your business. Determine whether they are one-to-one or one-to-many techniques. Then brainstorm some creative ways that you can turn those one-to-one techniques into one-to-many techniques.

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I’m at Las Vegas International airport with an hour to spare before my flight, so I’m mooching round the stores and boutiques, not looking for anything specifically.

Then a window display catches my eye. I see upmarket ladies purses and handbags on display. ‘I’ve been thinking about getting a new handbag’. There are some beautiful red leather goodies on display. ‘Ooh, look at those.’

The next step is to venture inside, take a closer look, check out the prices. But do I? No, I hover uncertainly in the doorway. ‘Will I go in? No, I’ll leave it. But those bags are really nice. I’m not sure….’ continues the discussion in my head. After about a minute I reluctantly wander away.

I have just experienced what luxury retailing billionaire Alfred Taubman describes as ‘threshold resistance’, an invisible barrier to sales that prevents potentially qualified customers from approaching you. In this instance the threshold resistance was literal, preventing this interested potential customer from venturing inside but threshold resistance affects every business, whether you’re a retailer or not. Right now, ‘threshold resistance’ is almost certainly stealing potential sales, customers and clients from right under your nose. So do you know how it manifests and how you can prevent it? Here are a few pointers to get you started…

It’s emotional, not logical. My behaviour at the airport was bizarrely illogical. I was interested, had the need, the time and the money to spend, but something stopped me from going forwards. The doorway was open, the sales assistants looked friendly and yet I still didn’t venture inside. How many people see your ads, brochure or website and react exactly as I did? They’re sorely tempted but they don’t make the phone call. How many customers have you already lost this week due to ‘threshold resistance’? The better you understand the emotional components of threshold resistance, the better equipped you will be to facilitate your potential clients and customers through it.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Yep, I know you’ve heard this one before, but I want you to really understand at an emotional level what it’s like when someone is at the ‘I’d like to know more’ stage. Maybe they’re worried about looking foolish, fearful of what they’re getting into, or they don’t want to find themselves on the end of strong-arm sales tactics, or they’re intimidated, or they’re concerned that they might not be able to afford it. The more you are able to empathise with their fears, the better you will be able to overcome them. Make a list of all the things that might be scaring potential customers away, and then make a plan for how you can address those concerns.

Make it easy to take the next step. By easy I mean little time and effort required e.g. checking a box on a coupon takes less effort than completing a lengthy application. But I also mean making it emotionally safe for the prospect to take the next step. For example, years ago I was a regular contributor to a national sales magazine, and for a long time the blurb at the end of my article said ‘Bernadette Doyle is an expert on phone communication. Call this number for further information.’ Then one month we changed the blurb to make the offer more specific, and invited readers to dial in to claim a free report related to the topic of the article.

The number of enquiries rose dramatically, in fact we got 7 times more enquiries that month than any previous month. With hindsight, I can see it was because the new wording lowered the ‘threshold resistance’. Before the onus was on the caller to have a specific reason for calling. Now we had given them that reason, hence the increase in enquiries.

Threshold resistance can occur right before the sale too. That’s why whether you’re selling in person or in print it makes good sense to remind the prospect of all the benefits of using your product or service right before the transaction takes place. I like to remind my customers of my guarantees, so they can complete their purchase with confidence. How would this apply in your business?

If you don’t yet have all the business you can handle, then identifying where ‘threshold resistance’ is occurring in your business and doing something to prevent it may be a better use of your time than scrambling around to find more prospects. No point in drumming up visibility and interest until you have first removed the invisible barriers to the sale. So what are you waiting for? Get started today!

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As I use the internet and email to promote my business, many subscribers assume that I only promote my business online. Just this week I got an email from someone who told me that my ideas couldn’t possibly work for their business, as they were selling to an audience who don’t use the internet. The truth is, I’ve been using offline techniques, like direct mail, for several years now, and in many cases it is still my number one recommended technique.

So how can you tell whether YOU should be promoting online or offline? Here are my top 3 questions to determine what is right for you.

1. Is your audience online?

Email has several advantages – it’s quick and cheap obviously. And it’s a lot easier to make changes on an online sales page than it is to have 5,000 brochures reprinted. But if you’re targeting an audience that doesn’t really use this medium, then your marketing efforts ARE better placed elsewhere. No point having a fabulous website unless you are going to get the visitors. And you’ll only get the visitors is they are online.

2. Is your audience ‘easily reachable’ online?

I know this looks very similar to question number one, but the emphasis is different. Maybe you are targeting an audience that you know uses email, but are they actively searching for help online? Are they congregating in large numbers online eg are they members of certain websites or discussion forums? If not, don’t despair, that doesn’t mean you need to give up on the internet altogether, it just means that you need to use offline lead generation techniques to get the relationship started, and then, if your audience uses email, you can use email to stay in touch and build the relationship.

3. Could you combine online and offline techniques?

One of my favourite techniques is to use an offline method to drive web visitor traffic and build an online list. For example, a pet behaviour specialist recently contacted me to ask for help as she was struggling to market to her niche. Assembling a decent list of ‘pet owners concerned about their pet’s behaviour’ could take months using just online methods, and the fact is, there IS a quicker way to do it. You can rent lists of people segmented by gender, age, profession, geography, hobbies, affiliation with certain associations etc.

My recommendation was to rent of a list of pet owners, then send a postcard mailing to that list offering a ‘freebie’ to be collected from her website. With this you effectively kill two birds with one stone (if you’ll pardon the pun). You get the momentum of simultaneously reaching your target audience in large numbers, PLUS you get to build an online list so you can follow up by both direct mail and email.

The bottom line is that any marketing strategy which relies solely on just one medium e.g. internet or direct mail will hit trouble sooner or later. For best results, you should formulate a marketing plan that uses a variety of media to reach and stay in touch with your target audience.

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As you can probably tell, my preferred method for staying in touch with existing and prospective clients is my weekly email newsletter. Before technology made this electronic newsletter possible, I had to print and post anything I wanted to share with existing and potential clients. Sending it via email offers a great deal in terms of cost, convenience and speed of communication.

But I feel it’s important to remind you that the value of a newsletter is NOT the technology or the specific form it takes, but what it represents as a relationship building tool between you and your target audience.

Well before the advent of the web, the most successful salespeople were employing relationship building tools that gently kept putting their name in front of prospective clients and customers, and helped them to build trust and rapport.

‘Planting Seeds’ with your prospects

For example, marketing legend Joseph Sugarman shares an example of an insurance salesman who every once in a while would send him a relevant newspaper clipping or article with his card. Occasionally he would bring them in person, and at the end of his visit would remind him ‘Joe, you really should buy insurance.’

This went on for several months, until the day Joe’s next door neighbour – who was in his 40s – unexpectedly died of a massive heart attack. Joe was 36 at the time. The very next day he called that insurance salesman to make an appointment.

In his words: ‘I had finally made the plunge. Was it Howard’s salesmanship? Was it his persistence? Maybe. But Howard succeeded because he had planted enough seeds in my mind.’

So the value of a newsletter like this one, is it makes it possible for you to keep ‘planting seeds’ until such time that your prospect’s need moves from ‘I’ll get around to it sometime’ to ‘I need to do something RIGHT NOW!

The advantage of ‘one-to-many’ versus ‘one-to-one’

But besides that, a newsletter like this has a powerful hidden advantage in that it enables you to leverage your marketing efforts. That’s because it’s what I describe as a ‘one-to-many’ prospecting tool rather than a ‘one-to-one’ tool.

For example, it takes me the same hour to write this newsletter each week whether it’s read by 100 people, 1000 people or 10,000 people. And that’s what gives you the edge over a newspaper clipping insurance salesman!

If you’re prospecting ‘one-to-one’ as he was, there is a finite number of people that you can reach each week before you run out of time. But with a newsletter like this, you do the same amount of work however many people are reading. So whereas the insurance salesman needed time to ‘plant seeds’, you can turbo-charge your seed planting – and then it’s only a matter of time before your results flourish!

If you aren’t already publishing a newsletter, don’t delay another day. It’s never too soon to get started.

When you in place a ‘keep in touch’ system for communicating with your existing and prospective clients you will dramatically transform your marketing results – so it’s definitely worth making time for.

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Do you get price objections? Or do you attempt to avoid them by setting your prices according to what you think you can get, as opposed to what your services or products are really worth?

In this article I’m going to share with you a valuable technique that you can use to stamp out price objections – permanently.

When someone objects to your price, what they are really saying is, ‘You haven’t convinced me that I will receive value equal to, or greater than, the amount you are charging.’

So price objections are really VALUE objections, and they can be avoided when you take the time to establish – in advance of revealing your price – the value that your product or service represents to the buyer. You need to establish this value so completely, and demonstrate such a large and compelling return on their investment, that it is practically impossible for the prospect to say no, regardless of price.

This technique is known as ‘selling money at a discount’.

Let me give you an example. A consultant to retailers specialised in preventing theft from employees. He had boxes full of testimonials from store owners citing specific amounts of money saved in the weeks or months following his seminar. In many cases the savings ran into thousands of dollars per store. Some large companies reported savings as much as $100,000 in a couple of months applying what they’d learned from him.

The trouble was, he had no idea what he was worth. He was charging a paltry $500 a day for his seminar. Luckily for this consultant, he ran into a marketing expert who understood how to ‘sell money at a discount’. Together they revamped his entire marketing programme and geared it towards demonstrating that he was offering the store owner $10,000-$10,0000 in return for his new higher fee of $2,500.

And his business exploded. Of course it did. If someone could convincingly demonstrate to you that in return for $2,500 you would receive at least $10,000 within a matter of weeks, wouldn’t you take them up on it? I appreciate there might be some scepticism, but the key word here is convincingly, and that means taking time to spell out and quantify the return on investment so specifically, that it is proven beyond doubt.

And that’s why many people miss out on the benefits of this technique. It takes time, effort and creative thinking on the part of the seller. But the payoffs are huge. The consultant above increased his fees by 500%. How much are you leaving on the table by not sitting down to quantify, in precise and specific detail, the benefits to your clients? How much more you could be charging, how much more profit could you be making, if you started to apply this technique?

‘But that doesn’t apply to my business!’ I can hear some readers say. True, you may not be in a business where there are direct and apparent cost savings or profits easily demonstrated. Actually, that places you at a significant advantage by applying this technique, because I can guarantee that the majority of your competitors WON’T take the time to quantify the benefits in the way I am describing here, and that leaves an opportunity wide open for you.

So let me give you a couple more examples of services where cost savings or profit improvements are not readily apparent. Ingrid Burling is a coach who I once featured in my newsletter. She shared this story: ‘A client recently said to me that one of the tools I have taught her to use is saving her an hour every day and has completely changed the way she works. If you take her hourly fee and multiply this up over the year, she is effectively saving £9000 per annum. She achieved this in one standalone session with me – which was two hours of face-to-face work and for which I charged £400.’ Bingo! Ingrid now has one example that demonstrates more than a 22-1 return on investment.

Like Ingrid, you may need to take the time to delve a little with your existing clients and work with them to calculate their return on investment. A few years ago, I ran a day on negotiation skills for a client whose ‘goodwill’ budget was being cut, and they needed to learn to say no to clients without alienating them. When I followed up with this client a month after the training, they had seen an immediate improvement of more than £5,000 in their budget following the training. You can be sure that was one testimonial I made a point of including in my sales proposals to other clients from then on. But you’ll only get this type of information from clients if you take the time to follow up and ASK. I’m willing to bet that you have helped many more clients than you realise right now.

What if you’re not selling to businesses, but working with individuals? Let’s say you’re a hypnotherapist specialising in weight loss or smoking cessation. The smoking cessation is easy to demonstrate a cost saving with – because in the UK a 20-a-day smoker is spending over £180 a month on their habit. But there are costs too, like higher life insurance premiums that could also be taken into account.

What about your weight loss clients? Well I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t take much effort on your part to search the internet and get a figure for the amount spent per year on diet products, slimming club and gym memberships, books and videos, by the average yo-yo dieter. Establish that cost first (not to mention the emotional cost) and your fee – even if it is three times higher than what you currently charge – will pale in comparison.

Whatever business you are in, price objections will dissolve when you can demonstrate that your product or service – and not the buyer – pays for the purchase. It might take some creative thinking and some research on your part, but I assure you that the benefits you get from this technique are worth all that and more.

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If you are doing any sort of ‘direct outreach’ marketing, then sooner or later you will encounter the dreaded ‘gatekeeper’. In fact, ‘Getting past the gatekeeper and in front of the decision maker’ seems to be the holy grail of the sales world. Years ago, when I used to specialize in cold calling training, it was one of the key questions that came up time and time again.

My preferred method is to bypass the gatekeeper all together. Here’s how…

1. Focus on a specific niche, because that automatically makes you a specialist and a certain authority.

2. Get known as an expert in your field by speaking at events and conferences populated by your target audience, write articles and get them published in trade publications read by your target audience.

3. Raise your profile in the market place by running open seminars, training courses or events on your specialized topic. Boost your credibility and reputation by delivering great value!

4. At the end of your article or talk, offer a giveaway such as a free report that conveys your expertise, and provides valuable useful content to your reader. Give this in exchange for the reader’s contact details and permission to stay in touch over time.

5. Send a follow up sequence of messages (automated if possible) that drip feeds further valuable content to your prospect, and subtly conveys your expertise, your authority and lets them know about success stories other clients are having.

6. Resist the temptation to ask for a meeting immediately, the people who are really keen to meet you will call and ask anyway, the others may need more time to get to know you. Don’t risk scaring them off by pouncing for a meeting immediately. Being ‘needy’ for a meeting hurts your credibility too, because in the world of selling professional services, there’s an unspoken assumption that if you are any good at what you are doing, then your diary should automatically be full (I know that’s not how it works in practice, but that’s the bias you’re up against!)

7. In at least one of your messages, offer a meeting, but make sure you outline all the potential benefits of meeting with you. It’s got to be more inspiring than ‘free consultation.’ Ask yourself, what does the prospect stand to gain from meeting with you – even if he or she DOESN’T become a client immediately? Will they learn something new, get reassurance, have their awareness raised on a certain area? If you want to ‘sell the meeting’ you have to sell the benefits of the meeting.

8. Some people will respond immediately, others will need more time. Have a regular follow up (such as a newsletter like this) that keeps you in contact, and continues building the relationship with your prospects.

9. Get used to receiving calls from people along the lines of ‘we’re thinking of doing a new project and we’re wondering how you can help us’. Enjoy meetings which have a completely different dynamic from the meetings you secured via cold calling, because you’ve been invited in as an expert, and the prospect is already ‘pre-sold’ and wants to work with you. Notice that your conversion rate is higher at these meetings.

10. Tweak the process. If you’re not getting enough meetings, what needs to change? Do you need to get more people into your funnel at the front end, or do you need to improve your conversion process of prospects to meetings?

11. Enjoy the process as momentum builds and the ‘snowball effect’ kicks in. Enjoy being a Client Magnet able to pick and choose from a tempting array of potential projects.

Because of the steps involved in laying the foundation, many people shy away from the easy way. It seems like there is too much ground work involved! And maybe there is, in the short term, but you are laying a foundation that will continue to reap rewards over and over. And what’s the alternative? Another cold call?

If you don’t want to be at the mercy of random projects coming your way, and you don’t want to be tied to a desk cold calling for the rest of your life, then this is definitely the path forward that I recommend.

The steps are identical to the steps I followed when I was running my training business. Eventually – and highly ironically given my subject area – I didn’t have to make any cold calls, because all of my meetings were taking place at the request of qualified, ready to buy decision makers who had already decided that they wanted to work with me.

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To help a client move from ‘I’m interested, tell me more’ to ‘You’re hired!’, sooner or later you are going to need to make a presentation.

Depending on your situation your presentation may be in person, over the telephone, or in writing, but whatever FORM your presentation takes, in each case you are effectively saying, ‘this is the action I recommend that you take, and this is why it will be beneficial for you’. You are guaranteed to increase your conversion rate of enquirers to buyers if you incorporate the following questions and answers in your sales literature and/or conversations with customers.

Why you? This is where you spell out why this particular person or company will benefit from taking this course of action. The more time you have spent probing the prospects needs and requirements, the more effectively you will be able to do this. You need to understand what your prospect is really experiencing: ‘As a sales manager, you are fed up with constantly having to chase and motivate your sales team to make cold calls. It’s taking up valuable time which could be more profitably used elsewhere’.

Why me? This is where you communicate your expertise, authority and convey your credibility. My golden tip? Talking about RESULTS you have achieved works best: ‘I’ve spent the last 9 years helping sales teams to have more success on the telephone. I can typically help a team to increase conversion by at least 34%. 96% of clients say they would recommend my service to others’.

Why this? This is where you need to demonstrate the relevant benefits of the product or service to this particular product or service. You need to spell out why this particular solution is the answer to their prayers. ‘Our cold calling coach programme will help you because it will motivate even your most reluctant sales people to pick up the phone with confidence, you will see business results within the first 3 days, and best of all, those results are sustainable because of our ongoing coaching programme.’

Why this price? How and when you reveal your price is critical to whether the prospect perceives it as outrageously overpriced or astonishingly good value.

In a nutshell, what you need to do is build the value of your product or service first, by quantifying the benefits, THEN you reveal the price: ‘You told us that each face-to-appointment with a qualified decision maker is worth £250 to you, so even if we help you make just 3 extra appointments a week, then that’s a value of £750. You also estimated that you are spending 3 hours a week managing your team’s prospecting activity. Valuing your time at £150 per hour, that’s another £450.

So from week one this programme will be worth £1,200 to you. That’s £5,184 per month. Or £62,208 over the course of the year. Yet your investment in this entire programme is just £6,000.’ Notice that presented this way, the £6,000 is good value, giving at least a 10-1 return over the course of the year.

Why now? In my experience, this is the one element that most people miss in their sales presentations, yet it is crucial for injecting urgency and getting people to say yes today!

You absolutely MUST complete your presentation with a Reason To Act Now. What are some compelling ‘reasons to act now’? Scarcity is one. ‘There are a limited number available at this price’ or ‘This price will only be available to the first 10 people to respond’. Impending price increases are another ‘This is an introductory offer until Wednesday 7th June. On that day the price will increase’. If you use scarcity to compel immediate action, make sure that the incentive really IS limited, or you will hurt your credibility and damage your relationship with the customer.

The one thing I can promise you, is if you make sure your sales messages to customers answer these 5 questions, then your conversion rate will increase dramatically.

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I recently got the following email from a reader:

‘After having spent 20 years of my time as Human Resource professional in various organizations, I have now opted to work on freelance assignments. At this point, I am trying to balance taking initiative and not being pushy when speaking with potential customers. Do you think after a few calls/emails one should let go and wait for something to happen or can one do something better?’

In the time I’ve been writing this newsletter, variations of this question have come up several times. How soon is too soon to ‘let go’? No one wants to stalk a prospect, yet at the same time, you don’t want to miss out on potential business because you gave up too soon either.

There is no definite answer to this: eg three follow up calls, and then call it quits. It all depends on the prospect, their needs and also HOW you follow up with them.

If you commit to adding value on every single follow up, you can follow up as much as you like

The trouble is, most people AREN’T adding value on their follow up contacts. Their follow up calls are simply a variation of ‘are you ready to buy yet?’ There is no value in that for the client or the salesperson. These are the type of calls that become frustrating for both parties, ending up in misunderstandings and missed opportunities.

Commit to adding value on every single contact. And it will be much easier to do this when you…..

Agree a follow up schedule with your prospect the first time you speak

If you want to know how frequently to follow up and how many times, then ASK. The first time you speak with a prospect, take the initiative and find out what they want and expect from you.

• ‘What do you see as the next steps?’
• ‘When do you think we should speak again to progress this?’
• ‘When do you want me to follow up with you?’
• ‘When do you think we should be speaking again about this?’

Get as much information as you can on how they will be progressing what you have discussed. Who else is involved in the decision, what other options are they considering? What criteria will they be using to make their decision? If they have asked you to submit a proposal, how will they be using that proposal? If you end your first conversation without asking these questions, then it will be very difficult for you to follow up effectively.

Automate your follow up – so you get to focus your selling time on ‘hot’ prospects and can still stay in touch with other enquirers

The fact is that however keen a prospect is the first time you speak, priorities can change, so you need a ‘keep in touch’ strategy which is a low cost, low time method of staying in contact with people who have expressed an interest but for whatever reason, don’t buy immediately.

Many marketing experts suggest a minimum of 12 times a year follow up with people who have enquired about your product or service. Having a ‘keep in touch’ strategy can pay dividends, because it enables you to stay in contact with more people than you could by phone or person. And, if you get the frequency right, you can make sure that YOU are the person they call when they are finally ready to move forward. Make no mistake. Having a keep in touch strategy will work wonders for your profit margins.

In my experience, an email newsletter is an IDEAL solution because you can build the relationship over time, position yourself as an expert who provides value, and it’s a low cost method of staying in touch. It takes me the same hour to write my newsletter that now goes out to over 5000 readers as it did when I only had 50 readers, so this is a time-efficient method of follow up too.

If you aren’t already publishing a newsletter, don’t delay another day. It’s never too soon to get started.

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