Client Magnets Official Blog

Archive for February, 2010

“System Secrets” – How to run a million dollar business while working just 3 days per week

If there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all you want to do, you NEED systems that make things happen automatically. Over the past 12 months, we’ve been SERIOUSLY investing in systems and I want to introduce you to my ‘systems’ guru – Beth Schneider. Beth has played a key part in enabling me to run a million dollar plus business while working just 3 days a week.

*MARKETING* MASTERMIND Call…
Tuesday, 23rd February, 2010,
8:00pm UK Time (3pm EASTERN, 12 noon PACIFIC)

If you want to discover one or two simple processes that put much of your repetitive work on auto-pilot and have your business running like a well oiled machine tune into this call.

This call is FREE for my hundreds of Marketing Mastermind and Stepping UP! members. They also get the CD and transcript of this call at no extra charge, plus a ton of other member benefits – such as access to our online members forum.

Not a member?  Then join the Marketing Mastermind Group today, so you can take advantage of this call and all the other member goodies each and every month.

I look forward to “meeting” you on our call.

——

Bernadette’s Marketing Mastermind is a special members’ group set up to provide ongoing information, support and motivation to people who want to attract more clients and build a successful business. Already over 450 members strong – and growing – we want YOU to join us and have more success, money and fun in your business. You can read about the Mastermind group here: http://clientmagnets.com/marketingmastermind

If there’s one challenge new entrepreneurs share, it’s the need to close more sales. They work very hard, but never seem to meet with enough people to reach their desired goals. There’s a better way to meet your goals and it’s called “sales automation.” Once you learn to automate some or all of the sales process, your closing ratio, and your income, will increase dramatically.

Getting Past Your Objections to Automation

When we’re talking about “sales automation,” it simply means putting your sales process into a format that doesn’t require your physical presence. That may mean writing a great letter that causes prospects to want to buy without needing to meet with you. It could also mean setting up a website and email system that reaches out to prospects and makes your offer in a compelling way that leads them to buy.

Right now, you might be saying, “Oh, no, selling my product requires face-to-face interaction!” Here’s the thing— there are only so many hours in a day and so many prospects you can meet with personally. If your company’s success remains tied to your ability to shake hands with every prospect, you’re severely limiting your future income.

Instead of being the bottleneck to your company’s success, find a way to package what you’re offering so that the sales process can be automated. When you do, you’ll be on the path to a big jump in income. Learning to use automation tools like sales letters, webpages and brochures as your sales force will increase your closing percentage exponentially.

Packaging Your Offer for Automatic Sales

The first step, is packaging your product so it fits in an automated process. Even if you’re the product, as coaches, consultants and other professionals often are, what you’re offering the client can still be packaged.

What do you say when sitting face-to-face with a prospect? Pull that together into a package that can be presented over and over without your actual involvement, and you’ve got the key to automated sales.

Get started by creating a sales letter that focuses on your product and the need it meets in your target audience.

There’s a lot of discussion about how long online sales letters can be, but it’s important to remember you must answer every question when you aren’t physically in front of the prospect. Otherwise, they’ll simply move on to the next offer.

So, practice writing your prospects a letter that answers every possible objection and points them toward a sale. Open that letter on your website, and make sure the sales process is completely automated. A well-written online sales letter can become a powerful “sales force,” automatically selling your product without any involvement on your part.

There are other ways to make sales more automatic. A carefully written brochure that moves the prospect from initial interest to “I’m ready to buy!” can eliminate the need for personal sales call.

Moving the people toward a sale really doesn’t require being eyeball-to-eyeball with them. It simply takes packaging what you do in a compelling message. Move past your own objections to sales automation and let it help you grow your business.

By putting your products in front of more people, without requiring your own time and effort, a good automated sales process can increase your sales dramatically. Find a way to package your product and increase your exposure dramatically through sales automation.

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. She publishes a free, weekly newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Have you ever watched the television series, The Apprentice? In one episode, each team was asked to create a business from scratch.

The interesting thing is that neither of the businesses created were really sustainable. Why? Because each team set themselves up in a business that revolved around them selling time.

One team did face painting; the other set up a gardening business. After each team had done the task for a couple of days, they counted how much money they had made. The actual figures aren’t important, because the money didn’t really count for anything. Both teams had to use the bulk of their income to pay employees for the time they spent performing tasks. So, neither of those businesses turned out to be profitable.

When Sir Alan Sugar, the host of the show, didn’t haul them over the coals more for it, I realized how strong this whole concept of selling time is in society.

As a business owner, you don’t want to follow this type of thinking. Doing this will not help you to build a profitable, sustainable business.

The solution is to build an information empire. The whole point of an information empire is that you don’t want to be selling your time. You do want to repackage your know-how and your expertise into products and programs that don’t require all of your attention all of the time. You may have to spend some time delivering programs, but not the bulk of your time.

This is the way to build a sustainable business. Because the paradox of selling your time is that the more successful you are, the less time you have. And, while you can always find more clients, you cannot create more time, no matter how hard you try.

But, with an information empire, time is no longer an issue. It will become possible for you to create more money, regardless of how much time you have. You simply need to stop linking the money you make to the time and effort you put in to your business. Once you truly understand this, creating more money will become easier to do.

It can be difficult to accept this concept. You might be thinking, “I don’t know that you can always get money. Making money has not been that easy for me.”

But the truth is, there is always money flowing. Even in this current economy, with the credit crunch and the recession, money is still flowing. It’s just flowing in different places from where it was flowing previously. It is up to you to find the source of that stream and collect it.

The key is to carefully examine your business to find ways of serving many clients at one time, rather than serving each client individually. Once you develop the products and services that allow you to do this, your business will be fully sustainable, without you having to wish for more hours in the day.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

People ask me all the time ‘Bernadette, I can see that your marketing strategies clearly work for YOU, but what about other people? Do your techniques work for them?’

The answer is ABSOLUTELY these strategies work for all types of businesses, and I’m ready to PROVE it to you with a special ‘Success Stories’ call I’m hosting this Wednesday 17th February

Get ready to meet:

• The mother of 3 who launched a new program and generated €30,000 in just 67 days (without even having a website!)

• The successful business owner who was frustrated with the margins in his traditional business model and approached me to help him repackage his expertise into a product that he could sell on ‘auto-pilot’. Sales so far stand at £75,000….

• The former financial adviser who started a business from home that now generates £100,000 a year – even though she works just 25 hours a week and balances running her business with looking after her young son….

Results like these are QUANTUM LEAPS, not incremental gains, and we’ll show you EXACTLY how they did it on this special call: http://clientmagnets.com/successstories

Register NOW to join us. You’ll be inspired by the amazing results they have achieved – in record time.

See you on the call!

http://clientmagnets.com/successstories

How easy is it for clients to say yes to what you’re offering? How aware are your potential clients of the huge improvements you can make in their lives?

It’s up to you to make them aware; to make it easy for them to say yes to your services. Basically it comes down to this: You need to make the intangibles of your business tangible.

Let’s say, for example, that you’re a healer or a coach. You’ve helped your clients lose weight, stop smoking, find the love of their life or double their business sales. Your process produced amazing results that literally changed their lives.

If you are able to create these incredible transformations in the lives of your clients, you have to be able to explain what it is that you do. You need to put your process into words so that new prospects are able to wrap their head around what you’re offering.

Generally, people can only experience the results of your services after they’ve tried you. In their minds, they are essentially taking a risk, because they don’t know exactly what the benefits are going to be for them until they try your service.

So, it’s your job and it’s your duty to make the intangible tangible.

How do you go about doing that?

Start by getting good at quantifying and spelling out the benefits of what you offer.

If you’re like many people, you may be resistant to this step. You may feel like you’re bragging. Or you might resist out of a sense of integrity. Maybe you’re worried about making a claim that you can’t follow through on. Maybe you feel that just because you helped one client drastically improve, you don’t want to assume that you can do the same for everyone.

Well, your that viewpoint is actually hurting you, and it’s hurting your potential clients.

Because while you’re not willing to make big bold promises or big bold statements, even about the results that you’ve already delivered for others, sooner or later someone else, who doesn’t share your integrity, will.

And all of those potential clients who are confused, looking for help and for solutions, will be seduced and taken in by the cowboy or the charlatan who offers a similar service, but doesn’t share your integrity.

While you’re sitting on the moral high ground, worrying about whether it’s okay to say something, there will be plenty of others perfectly willing to lure in vulnerable people in need of help. Your prospects will fall prey to them, unless you step up.

If you don’t, someone else surely will. And it won’t be someone with your abilities, values and integrity. It will be someone who is just focused on the money.

So, it’s time for you to get in the game. Instead of letting clients feel like they’re taking a chance on you, give them what they need to feel confident and assured in their decision. Make your services concrete. Once you spell out exactly what you do, how you do it and how it will benefit them, it will be easy for them to just say “yes.”

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Take a look at your calendar of appointments right now. If you’ve been applying the Client Magnets approach, you shouldn’t have much available space in that diary. Hopefully, you have a pipeline of prospective business that keeps your book filled.

So, getting clients isn’t a problem for you. That’s a nice situation to be in, isn’t it?

From the outside, it looks fine to be that busy. You may even be getting a decent daily rate for your time. The problem is, though, that while your client list continues to grow, the amount of time that you have to serve those clients does not.

Once you’ve gotten new clients to sign on, you’ve got to deliver results for them. And as your calendar fills up, it’s not uncommon to feel as if there isn’t enough of you to go around. You may find yourself thinking that there aren’t enough hours in the day to meet all of your clients’ needs. You may think the only solution is to do more work, to spend more time at it.

When you get to this point, you’re so busy trying to keep the wheels turning that the idea of having one more thing to do is unbearable. To prevent your business from reaching this unmanageable stage, act now to start building your information empire.

As more people approach you about your services and want to know more about what you can offer, the more important it becomes to figure out how to duplicate and leverage yourself in order to meet their needs.

I’ve heard too many people say, “I just want to focus on getting the clients in. When I’ve got enough clients, then I’ll start focusing on the products, or on automating the sales, or on setting up the ecommerce site.” But you don’t want to let your business get to that point. You want to act now.

You need to design a workable, customized roadmap, one that will get you from that situation to an information empire that will have you earning money in your sleep. A business in which you produce revenue without having to physically get up and see clients every day.

Think very carefully about your business offerings. Look closely at your products or services, and determine which ones can be repackaged to reach more clients simultaneously. Perhaps you’re planning a live event that can be recorded and sold as a CD on your website. Hire a virtual assistant to handle admin tasks so you can concentrate on the creative aspects of your work. Find the thing that you do best, and focus on that.

You have complete control over this. Your awareness, your decisions, and your creativity are the resources that will help you to deliver results that are not dependent on your time and how much you work.

Your willingness and ability to look at the situation differently will allow you to meet the needs and expectations of all of the clients who are anxiously awaiting your help.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

We’ve all heard the expression that “time is money”.  But let’s take a hard look at that saying.  Is it true?  Not always.  You can’t work 24 hours per day, 7 days a week.  You have weekends, holiday and sick days to contend with if you’re self-employed.  That time isn’t money for you, but it can be….

Since your time is finite you need to create alternatives to the normal business model of selling your time, particularly if you’re in the business of offering training services.  You need to have alternatives to this standard method of generating your income.  There are two solutions that are going to transform your business.  One can be used in the short term to generate cash flow; the other is a more long term solution.

Generating Cashflow Quickly
Say you have several proposals out to clients and you’re also waiting for payment for two workshops you’ve provided to corporate clients.  That isn’t paying the bills right now.  You need a quick fix to generate cash to shorten the time of your sales cycle, which is the time from your first contact to getting paid.

The quick fix for that particular problem could be to hold an open event.  The beauty of an open event is that you receive payment up front, as it’s standard to receive payments two weeks prior to the course date.  You have also set a finite time for the sales cycle.  Open seminars are generally set six to eight weeks out.  You set the date, book the meeting room and generate your marketing materials.  You’ve just taken matters into your own hands and solved two major issues that plague many small businesses, the issue of cash flow and the long sales cycle.

But this solution has another positive effect.  You’re gathering fees from more than one client for the same timeframe.  Since you can’t work more days than you have, you’ve just solved that problem as well.  It’s a win-win situation!

The Long Term Solution
Off the shelf products offer the long term solution to the “time is money’ conundrum.  I say longer term because they have creation and production time.  In fact, your short term solution of the open workshop can be the catalyst for your product.  In my case, I had someone come along to record one of my workshops.  I put the recording together with a manual and I had my first product.

Once you get your first product produced, you now have a way of generating income without you physically having to be there.  That’s a really nice feeling, particularly when you’ve been caught in the “time is money” challenge.

The bottom line is that the typical business model that’s based on you selling your time is not an ideal sales model for a small or solo business.  You need to put yourself on a path to beat the ‘time is money’ trap or you’re limiting yourself and your income.  Creating passive income streams, such as open events and off-the-shelf products, is just the solution for proving that this old adage isn’t always true.

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. She publishes a free, weekly newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

You know the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure?” You see this philosophy proven time and again, especially at flea markets, garage sales or “scratch and dent” sales.

The items are hardly “trash;” they are just no longer esteemed by the seller.
They are, however, of great value to the buyer.

In unloading unwanted, outdated or overstocked items, the seller creates space and generates some extra income. In finding something that fits their needs and their budget, the buyer feels like he got a great deal. Everybody wins.

Whether you are in a product-oriented or service-oriented business, you can create this same winning combination.

If, for example, your business is introducing a new product, your existing inventory may end up including too many choices. When there are too many products to choose from, customers can become confused and overwhelmed by the number of options. There’s a saying in marketing: “A confused mind never buys.”

You simply don’t want to confuse people when it comes to them purchasing a product from you. To avoid that happening, streamline the products you offer.

Here’s something I did that you can easily emulate. A couple of years ago, while I was restructuring my web site, there were products I no longer wanted to sell. They weren’t actually inventory because they were digital products. But I didn’t want them cluttering my website anymore. I implemented a “last chance” sale and offered the products at a 50% discount for one week only.

Amazingly, over the course of seven days, that sale generated £11,000 worth of business. Can you imagine discovering £11,000 worth of hidden money in your business? That money was there all along but I didn’t tap into it until I got creative and put it together as an offer. I gave people a reason to buy.

You can do this. You see it done all the time with clearance sales. If your business ends up with a whole lot of excess stock – stock that has been returned or stock that you’ve taken to events and didn’t sell out of – your inventory just builds up. Instead of storing it indefinitely, where it just costs you and doesn’t benefit you at all, offer it at a special discount. Chances are you’ll make some extra money and create some space in the office.

If you’re in a service-oriented business, your “stock” can be your time or your expertise. You don’t really have it laying around, taking up excess space. It’s difficult to have a clearance sale on your time. The variation is to offer a pre-sell of a program.

Though you’re not selling an actual product, you can pre-sell a program. Put together a coaching program or a teleseminar series where clients pay up front for the program you’re offering. It might be a six-week series, but you’re getting the cash flow up front.

Obviously, then, the onus is on you to deliver. But you don’t have to actually have that program created before you sell it.  Offering the program as a pre-sell will force you to stay on track while simultaneously putting money in your pocket.

So, take a look at your inventory. Out with the old, in with the new, as they say. Do some spring cleaning or fall clearance of your old products.  Have a pre-sale of your newest program or offering.  Your clients will appreciate the value of the savings and your business will benefit from the value of the earnings. Everybody wins.

——

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. She publishes a free, weekly newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Are you waiting for permission to be considered the expert in your field? Are you lingering at one level, waiting for someone’s approval to move on to that expert status?

Good things do not always come to those who wait. You need to stop waiting for permission and approval. No one is going to come along and deem you the expert or hand you an award. This is something that you must step up and claim.

Only when you have the guts to step up and claim it, will you be thinking and acting like a winner.

When I began my first business, at 26 years old, I had no track record. I had no past clients and no success stories to talk about. I had no marketing experience, and no budget.

I basically had every possible disadvantage.

The one thing I did have was alot of enthusiasm and a very positive mindset about what I was doing. I started positioning myself and calling myself an expert – long before anybody else came along and awarded me that title.

To think and act like a winner, you need to keep your focus on where you’re heading, not where you’re starting from.

Many people get crippled by this. Don’t be one of them. Don’t get caught up in this cycle of looking for some type of approval or permission that will suddenly make you step up and be the expert.

Once I chose to define myself as a cold-calling expert, I started acting like one and before too long, I did indeed become one. I was honest about it; not arrogant and thinking I knew it all. I brushed up my skills and learned the things I needed to in order to claim my expertise.

The same holds true for my friend, Carrie Wilkerson, who has an absolutely huge following on Twitter. A big part of how she gathered that following was that she just acted like the expert. Before long, people started treating her like the expert and inviting her to speak at events.

A lot of people call her “the overnight expert” because she went from zero to a million dollars in less than 12 months.

You have that ability too. The thing that you need, first and foremost, is a positive mindset. You need to be confident enough in your skills and your knowledge to step out in front and make yourself known.

You also need to be astute enough to research and master all of the things that your area of expertise requires. Make a list of exactly what an expert in your field needs to know in order to be considered “the expert.” You probably have all of those qualities and requirements already.  If you don’t, you will at least know what you need to do or improve upon to claim the role.

Once you know that you have what you need, you can begin to act the part of expert. Then you can pass on all of that expertise to your clients.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Is something stopping you from starting your online business and moving forward to achieve success in your life? Successful online entrepreneurs didn’t let their circumstances prevent them from getting started. No matter where you are starting from, you already have many of the assets and resources you need.

If your reaction is, “I don’t really have any,” I am going to prove to you how wrong you are. You’ll be surprised at how much you bring to the table.

You don’t need to have a huge marketing budget. You don’t need the technical know-how. You don’t need to have a website or a facility for taking payments online yet.

What you do need is an awareness of the resources that you can tap into.

•   Life experiences. Your experiences in life count for a lot. Make a list of all the jobs you’ve ever held, and all the work you’ve done for those jobs. All of this adds value to who you are right now.

•   Existing prospects. Do you have a list of people that you’ve been in contact with who have expressed an interest in your services? If you don’t, or if it’s a small list, you need to begin to build that up.

•   Existing customers. Your list might not have hundreds of customers, and it doesn’t need to. If you have a customer list, of any length, that’s an existing resource that you can use to get you started.

•   A  network. You have a group of people that know you, that like you, that value you. While they may not be direct customers for your business, there’s a good chance that they will participate and help you.

•   Email. Just send an email out to your prospects, past and present customers, old colleagues and other network lists saying something like, “This is a new project that I’m starting. I would really appreciate if you could hook me up with other people that might be interested.”

•   Your willingness to ask for help. Yes, this is an asset. Don’t take the path of least assistance. If you’re going to build a successful online business, it’s essential for you to get comfortable with asking for help. You’ve got to be okay with that. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s actually a sign of strength.

•   Existing products or programs. You might already have something that you don’t even recognize the value of. I turned copies of sales proposals I had used years ago to win training contracts, into valuable materials that I could share and sell. That was material that I had been undervaluing.

•   Your know-how and experience. Maybe you’re very good at what you’re doing and getting tremendous results, but can’t explain what you do. That’s okay. That can be pulled out of you and turned into training or a product that can give people similar results, without you having to work with them in person. Or you could map out what you know into a process that you can sell to other coaches. There are lots of opportunities to utilize your know-how.

•   Support and help. Do you have someone who assists you with admin? Or someone who helps with the technical work? If you don’t, it’s easy enough to get hooked up with that.

These are the some of the resources you likely have ready have access to.  You can build a successful online business if you have these.  Take inventory and see where the gaps are. The more resources you have to start with, the less time it’s going to take for you to profit. If you’ve got fewer resources, you have less of a margin for error, so deploy them wisely.