Client Magnets Official Blog

Archive for the ‘Business & Money’ Category

What’s the worst that can happen?

This is a question that I encourage you to ask yourself. Too often, we don’t allow ourselves to do something because we’re worried about the sky falling in. When you feel that way, consider the worst case scenario.

For instance, perhaps you are uncomfortable making cold calls, but that is your primary way of generating business. As terrified as you may be to pick up the phone, think about the worst possible thing that could happen.

The prospect might shout at you or hang up on you. While that’s not pleasant, it certainly isn’t the end of the world. Because after that, it’s then over. The person isn’t going to start a Twitter campaign telling the world that you called him and he didn’t want to buy from you. Nothing else will happen.

Considering the worst case scenario will help you to learn how to take risks in your business. It will toughen you against the possibility of any little thing going wrong, and will give you the confidence to move forward in spite of that possibility.

The thought of losing money holds a lot of people back from taking risks or making changes. They are afraid their investment won’t pan out and they’ll look foolish for having lost money.

One thing I have personally learnt from considering the worst that could happen is that it’s impossible to lose money. If something doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would, don’t consider it as lost money. You just didn’t get the expected return on your investment, but you didn’t lose.

When this happens, view it as an educational experience. For example, a few months ago we had a mistake happen in my business that cost $20,000. While, yes, that is a lot of money, it was also a $20,000 education for me and the team members involved. That mistake will not be made again. We didn’t lose money; we learned a valuable lesson.

In fact, we couldn’t have bought that particular education. There isn’t a $20,000 seminar that could teach us what we really learned through that one mistake. We didn’t just learn it in theory; we learned it in the muscle, where it will always stay.

When you are considering making an investment or a change of some sort in your business, don’t set yourself up for disappointment. Face the worst case scenario head on. Once you realize what might go wrong, you can handle it. And, if it does, view it as a learning experience, not as a loss.

You will find yourself moving into areas of growth that you never thought possible.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

When you’re marketing your product, you must spend some time establishing your product’s value. Before you explore pricing with your sales prospects, you must convince them that your product is truly valuable for them. They need to feel like they want your product, or no price tag will make them buy. If you do a good enough job of presenting your value proposition, you can charge far more than you think you should charge, because you’re letting your product sell itself; you’re not relying on the price to sell your product.

Establish a Problem
First, you must establish a problem that your potential prospects face. For example, one of my students offered pain solutions for back pain sufferers. In her case, the problem that her clients faced was back pain. Think about what you’re trying to sell, whether it’s a seminar, class, or product, and what problem it addresses. That’s the problem you want to establish in your sales material. By introducing the problem that your product solves, you’re setting yourself up to provide the solution.

Show How Your Product Solves the Problem
Once you’ve established the problem, show your potential prospects how your product solves the problem. For my back pain student, her product reduced and eliminated back pain – chronic back pain that her clients simply couldn’t eliminate. Talk about how your product does what it does, and what your client will gain by utilizing your product. If possible, talk about other solutions to the problem, and why your product does it better.

Add Testimonials to Build Value
If you have them, this is a great point to add testimonials. After explaining how your product solves a problem, let one of your clients show the value of your product by including a testimonial about how they had success with your product. For pain sufferers, a good testimonial might be someone saying something like “I had back pain every day before I used this product, but after only a few days, I’m pain free! No more expensive chiropractor visits, endless pain pills, and living every day in pain!” Adding testimonials helps to build the value of your product and add credibility.

Quantify What People Gain
Don’t assume that people will inherently see the value in your product once they know what it does. You have to tell them why your product is good. Quantify what they gain. For back pain sufferers, they gain an end to back pain. But they’ll also be able to stop spending a lot of money on expensive chiropractor visits, pain pills, specialists and other expensive pain-related products. Spell all of this out to your prospects so they’ll see what they gain in writing; don’t just expect them to figure it out for themselves.

Present a Value Proposition for Every Product
You must present a value proposition for every product you sell. Whether you’re selling e-books, coaching programs, seminars, workshops or physical products, you must always establish a value proposition. If you do it well, your product will sell itself – you won’t have to convince people to buy, because the product will convince them!

Value is a subjective term, a relative feeling.  If someone perceives the value of a product or a service to be high, he or she will naturally be willing to sacrifice more (time, money, etc.) to take advantage of its value.

So along that vein, if you want to build the price tag of your teleseminar (and I’m sure you do), you must increase its perceived value.  Consumers naturally think in a “what’s in it for me?” manner.  When you create a belief that what they’re getting from your teleseminar will greatly outweigh their investments of time and money, you have managed to increase the perceived value of your event.

Here are some ways to accomplish that high-value factor:

• Promise to disclose secrets. True secrets would be those things that aren’t common knowledge.  Or, even better, they are those things which you have discovered; things which you invented or uncovered that can make your teleseminar participants’ lives better.

• Promise to divulge your mistakes. Some failures, especially small ones, are inevitable, and can be instrumental in learning for success.  But if you can share the mistakes that you’ve made, to save your audience the time and grief that can come when they make those same mistakes, you will increase the perceived value of your teleseminar.

• Save your audience some time. When the information that you have compiled for disclosure on your teleseminar will save your participants hours, days, or weeks of research, you move them toward their goals more quickly, which is for most, invaluable.  For instance, if you can offer succinct, successful methods for doing something on a 30 minute call, for which people would normally spend 2 or more hours researching, you have created value.

• Quantify the cost. Ask yourself how much it would cost participants to unearth the information, on their own, that you’re planning to convey.  Consider resources they would have to buy, the traveling they might have to do, the phone calls they may have to make, and the time away from revenue-building that they would have to spend.

• Limit participation. If you limit the number of spaces on your teleseminar to 10, for instance, you will increase value.  Registrants will know that they won’t have to compete with 100 other people during question-and-answer time, and they’ll attach a noted value to that opportunity to have a voice.  You may have only expected to get 10 people on your call anyway, but by making a statement of limits, you increase perceived value.  This not only ensures that you get 10 people who are very interested in your topic, but will allow you to convert a stumbling block into a selling point.

• Offer extras. Gifts like transcripts, reports, templates, memberships, e-mail support, participation in a follow-up question-and-answer session, critiques of participants’ work, etc. will add perceived value and increase your revenue, as long as the gift you’re giving doesn’t out-cost your price tag differential.

Remember, if you create a high perception of value before your teleseminar, you must deliver on your promises.  Some of your best teleseminar customers will be repeat ones, so you’ll want to make sure that you do everything that you say you will, or your offerings will be viewed as fraudulent.

Success with higher price tags is all about perceived value.  Offer your audience what they’re looking for in a teleseminar, and incorporate the tactics outlined above.  Doing so will raise their perceptions of value…in a direct, upward relationship to your bottom line.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Operating your own business requires an intensity and creative energy someone employed in a regular job can’t comprehend. Because that’s true, you may have reached a point when you need to start hiring people to help get things done. Here’s a strategy for hiring the right people for the tasks that get in the way of growing your business.

You may have been handling the details of your personal and professional lives on your own for so long that you don’t recognize when it’s time to start outsourcing. Let me give you an example of how outsourcing one routine task could free you to focus on building your business.

Let’s say your favorite dry cleaning firm is an hour round trip from your office. What could you be doing in that hour that creates more business, instead? When you multiply the time away from business tasks times your standard business fees, you begin to understand why delegating that kind of routine task can improve your bottom line.

Maybe your routine tasks are business related—answering phones, shuffling through email or making travel arrangements. Whatever it is that’s keeping you from actually focusing on finding new customers or creating products, it may be time to let someone else do it.

Your greatest need may be as simple as being able to rest once in awhile.  You maybe trapped in the cycle of working long hours, late into the night and every weekend. Wouldn’t it be more productive to work with a team and have them take over tasks that don’t require your personal attention, and actually balance work and rest?

Finding the right team to take over things that keep you distracted from work can make a huge difference. Decide what kind of help would do the most good right now. Do you need a personal assistant to handle dry cleaning pickup and delivery or a virtual assistant to schedule your newsletter?

For each business owner, it’s something different. But at some point, it isn’t optional if you want your business to grow. Insisting on doing everything yourself is a sure-fire way to keep your business small.

Finding skilled team members to lighten your load can surprise you in another way. You’re going to find there are things you simply aren’t suited for; for instance, you might slog through ironing your own clothes but why focus all that effort on something that can be outsourced to someone who does it well?

So consider where your team would do the most good. Decide what can be outsourced and then find people with the right skills, whether virtual or local. Remember, it doesn’t matter if the team member who posts articles to your website is in Australia or anywhere else in the world, so long as they do a great job and free you to do the things you need to do.

You want to outsource tasks to free up time, to grow your business or simply to get enough rest.  Start thinking about hiring a team to support you in your business. What kinds of things would make your life simpler, allow you to focus on your business or find some balance?

Once that’s clear in your mind, you’ll know who to look for and what kind of skills they need.  Then you’ll be on your way to building a great team. And that team will make all the difference in your life, your business and your peace of mind.

When it comes to your business, are you playing it safe or are you putting it all out on the line?

You are the only person on earth who can answer that question. But, the catch is, you have to answer honestly. There is no point in trying to fool yourself.

Somewhere inside of you, do you know that you could be playing a bigger game, reaching more people, raising your bar, thinking bigger, and getting bigger results? If these feelings resonate with you, you have to be honest with yourself about whether or not you’ve been playing small.

I had to do this myself some time ago. I realized that I had achieved a good deal of business success by most people’s standards.  But, I also knew that I had been playing it safe, that I hadn’t been putting it all on the line as I had in earlier years of my business. I had become a little bit complacent.

So, I made the decision to step up.

If you discover that you have indeed been playing it safe, the first thing you must do is make a decision. Make the decision to step up.

If you want to reap the huge rewards, you need to take the big risks. You need to make that leap of faith.

I highly recommend that you read Napoleon Hill’s book, Think and Grow Rich, to help you make this decision to step up. It will give you the insight and inspiration to help you recapture that feeling of burning desire.

How long has it been since you’ve really felt a burning desire to do anything? Not just a desire, but a burning desire.

Last year, that feeling inspired me to set a goal for myself – to make a half million dollars from a single project. I knew how to make that much money working all year, but I had never made that much from a single project before.

I ended up exceeding my goal by $130,000.

Focus on the aspects of your business that truly excite and inspire you.  Think about the goals you’d most like to achieve – the ones that might seem more like wishful thinking to someone else – but that you have a burning desire to accomplish. If you’re willing to set those big goals, then you must be willing to step up and do what it takes to achieve them.

The results you want to achieve are within your reach. In order for you to reach the fruit of the tree, you’ve got to make the decision to step up and go out on a limb.

—–

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. Read about her amazing new programme, Stepping Up! http://www.clientmagnets.com/steppingup

You’ve made a sale.  The customer’s credit card has been approved, you’ve booked their seat or ordered their product, and you’ve added your new customer’s email address to your newsletter list.  You’re already tallying your net profit in your mental bank register, and you’re resting comfortably in the pleasure of another sale well-done.

Not so fast…

If there is any time lapse between the closing of the sale and the delivery of the customer’s product or service, at some stage you will need to address the “buyer’s remorse” phenomenon.

If your customer falls under the weight of buyer’s remorse, he or she might have feelings of guilt associated with a high price tag, credit extension, or disapproval by others.  The client might begin to fall off of their “purchase high” and start to consider their new, reduced spending power; or they might wonder if they should have done more research or waited for a better, newer version of your product or service.

Your job is simple:  you must keep buyer’s remorse from ever showing its face…by using a Stick Strategy.

A Stick Strategy is simple.  It involves offering a gift that fulfills your customer’s need for instant gratification, and then staying in touch with them to reinforce the benefits of their decision, until they receive the product or service that they purchased.  In other words, remind them regularly that they’ve made a good decision.

Example of a High-Cancellation-Risk Sale:

A motivational speaker offers two types of events:  a 1-day workshop and a 2-day weekend seminar.  She starts marketing and taking reservations for the 1-day workshop only 6 or 8 weeks in advance.  But for the weekend event, she starts accepting bookings up to 4 months ahead of time.

Her customers who book 4 months prior to the 2-day event are much more susceptible to the effects of buyer’s remorse.  A lot can happen in 4 months – people move, their family situations can shift, their employment might change – and that might prompt them to eliminate her seminar from their new schedule.

It’s especially important that this business owner stays in contact with her weekend seminar customers during those critical 4 months – to make sure that those clients remain interested and on-board, without regrets.

Follow these simple steps to keep your waiting customers on-board:

• Immediately following your customer’s booking, make a good-will gesture (e.g.  a digital report, an insider preview of your service, a free sample, coupons to use in the meantime, or anything that will reinforce their spending decision as a good one).

• Keep a list of people who have signed up for one particular service, and use that list to send industry tips, answers to commonly asked questions, or special bonus offers throughout their wait – and be sure to reference the date of the upcoming service in every piece of correspondence.  This will keep their interest piqued, their energy levels high, and will shoo away that bothersome remorse bug.

• You can also send a friendly note part-way through their wait. A simple “Hello, can’t wait to meet you at the conference,” or, “Here’s the seating chart and your nametag.” can boost their obligation to the commitment that they’ve made.

• Keep customers-in-waiting involved. Maybe you’re thinking about making an addition to your service – send a note asking for their opinion on the change.  Or, ask them for feedback on the booking process.  In short, make them feel that their opinions are important.

Maybe you have felt buyer’s remorse yourself.  If you have, think about how much better you might have felt if you’d gotten a free gift right away, or if someone had contacted you to ask for your input.  Would you have been more willing to “Stick?”

Make your customers stick with you…all it takes is a healthy dose of communication and a little dollop of good-will glue.

Bernadette Doyle created Client Magnets Ltd to help self-employed people solve one of their biggest business problems: attract a steady stream of clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

You’re gathering a database of prospects and marketing to those who have shown an interest in what you’re selling… you’re sending out direct mailings and e-mails, and you’re promoting your next event… you’re taking calls, you’re booking seats, and you’re realizing profits that are just short what you’ve dreamt of.

STOP. Every method listed above is a piece of the money-making puzzle, but there’s at least one element listed there that can be expanded to include an explosion of profits – profits of a caliber that you may have not considered possible.

That element is the “call.”  If you’re talking to one person on the phone, answering his questions and moving closer to a single booking, imagine the potential it could have if you were speaking to 50, 100, or even 150 people at once.  And furthermore, imagine if you were charging money for each of those people to participate in that call.

Hadn’t considered the teleseminar until now?   Here are a few points that demonstrate the profit-making ability of these super-calls.  You can:

• Charge a participation fee: When every person that’s participating in a teleseminar (or simply listening to you speak), has paid a fee (e.g. $50), you make a significant profit.  Just think, a mere 10 participants equals a cash realization of $500.  If you can book 150 participants, that a whopping $7,500 for 1 or 2 hours of your time!  $50 is a small investment for each individual caller, but equates to an astounding profit realization for you.

• Charge for transcripts. You can make participation in your teleseminar free, but then sell written documentations of the content after it’s over.  For this method, you must ensure that your content is so fascinating (and packed with indispensable information), that a generous portion of the audience can’t resist owning their own copies for future reference.

• Charge for recordings. Much like the selling of transcripts, you can sell recordings of your teleseminar.  Remember to make your seminar worthy of a second listen.

• Charge for transcripts or recordings in packages. Maybe a caller has dialed into her first teleseminar, and is so fascinated that she wants more information from past teleseminars.  Or, maybe your call times aren’t ideal for a few of your patrons.  In cases such as these, you can wrap up packages of transcripts and/or recordings and sell them to bring in profits.

• Recycle teleseminar information. Use your teleseminars to compile the information necessary for writing a book, an e-book, newsletters, or articles.  Again, you can realize profits above and beyond that initial call.

There are plenty of reasons to get excited about the teleseminar – including:

• the contagious energy that comes with speaking to a large audience
• the ability to take questions that simultaneously satisfy hoards of people
• the platform to spread the word about upcoming events
• and the chance to get the feedback that’s indispensable to your marketing plan

But possibly the biggest motivator?  The enormous cash-making potential of the teleseminar.

Utilize these tips and come up with your own ways of making teleseminars profitable for your business.  The goal is to do the work once, and to then develop ways to use that information again and again – and to generate profit with each turn.

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

Do you think your database of customers isn’t large enough for you to reach your sales goals? If you think that the only way you can make big money is with a bigger list, don’t believe that for a second longer.

Even if you have only a very small database, you can extract very large incomes from it.

Plenty of successful people started with no database and were able to meet their goals, including me and many of my mentors. I did not have a database when I began. I created one as I went along.

Don’t use what you perceive to be a lack of potential clients on your list as an excuse for not making the money you want. You don’t need a large database to make a lot of money. You can still reach your sales goals. You just have to want it badly enough.

What you need, more than a larger list, is to believe in yourself. If you present your product or service with a positive belief system, the customer list you have will pay the type of prices you’re asking.

One of my mentors, has a mastermind group with only 12 people. A very small list, but they pay $100,000 a piece. If only 3 of them sign on for a product, that’s significant earnings.

Of course, you can change the amount to a figure that more closely represents your product or service, but the message is clear. My mentor, believes his program is worth the price, and he believes his database will pay it. You should believe the same about yours.

As you go along, you will obviously learn how to grow your database, but your ability to make money is more about your self-worth.

Not only do you need to believe that you would spend the money on the product you’re offering, you have to believe that the clients on your list would spend that much money, as well.

Believe that, and it won’t matter what size database you have. Self-worth controls your income. Not the size of the database. Not where you live. Not the clothing that you wear or the people that you know.

If you increase your self-worth, everything can be taken away from you and you will instantly have it back overnight. You will always make money because your income is definitely directly tied to your own self-worth.

It doesn’t matter what your product is or how many potential clients are on your list. If you believe you’re worth a million, you will go out and generate a million.

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 come across a successful business, on the face of it, looks really simple and straightforward? You look at the website, at the marketing, and the products, and it seems like the winning formula is one that you could apply to your own business. Whatever they are doing can’t be rocket science, so you won’t have to be a genius to mimic it and get the same results.

So many people do this when setting up their business. They look at people who are getting the results in their business that they want in their own and think that it looks easy. It’s pretty simple to copy what other people are doing, apply it to their own business, and watch the profits roll in. They tell themselves that they can figure it all out on their own.

They are wrong.

If you think that you can easily follow someone else’s roadmap to success without direction, you will fall into the same trap. This is one of the lies that we tell ourselves, because it’s so much easier to think that we can teach ourselves than it is to seek that advice from others. You can use someone else’s experience to fast track your own success but it has to be done the right way.

There’s a simple method of doing this: invest in mentoring. It will help you realise how much you are holding yourself back by simply trying to copy other people.  You can also be assured that your investment will be returned more times than you can imagine. It’s amazing how much mentoring gives back to you.  It’s not just the information that mentors share with you, but also the fact of having someone who is already getting results believing in you.

Let me give you an example of the power of mentorship. One of my mentors is Yanik Silver, and my business has really changed since I joined his mastermind group. Just before I held my first big workshop, I talked to him about my plans. I was really nervous about it, because I’d never done a three-day workshop of that size, and I had never charged £1,500 for people to come to the workshop. I remember saying to Yanik, “I think this might be possible for me.” He looked me right in the eye and said, “Yes, I think you can do that.”

That simple sentence was the value I got from investing in him. It wasn’t that I needed specific information from him or advice on how to run my workshop. Instead, it was the fact that someone who was already very successful was able to tell me that I could be as well. I needed to hear it from someone more experienced than me, and it gave me the confidence to run the seminar the way I had planned it. That seminar was a great success – both for me, and, I hope, for the people who attended.

On the other hand, before one of my conferences, I did a series of preview calls.   A number of people emailed me at the end of the series telling me that they had gotten so much from the calls that they didn’t think they needed to go to the course. A year or so after the course, I did a bit of sleuthing, and from what I can see, none of these people had made any real progress. Not one.

I’m not saying that if these people had come to my conference, they would all now be multi-millionaires – I’m not trying to suggest I have all the answers for everyone. But it did make me wonder how many “goose chases” and “blind alleys” they have been down because they tried to progress on their own, or because they kidded themselves that they could do it without help.  I’ve tried that track and I know it doesn’t work.

My message to you: invest in a mentor’s help. And you will get help. There are too many pitfalls you will come across when you think you can figure it out on your own. If you keep telling yourself that you don’t need someone’s help, one year from now you will be no further forward in your business. You have a chance to do things differently, so take that chance and start achieving!

—–

Bernadette’s Stepping Up! members have been making amazing progress. This program includes ongoing support, free admission to one of her live events, and so much more! If you’d like more information: http://bit.ly/SteppingUP

Most people buy what they want, not what they need. Take for example, the new I-Pad that Apple recently rolled out, or the Barnes & Noble electronic reader, the Nook. Nobody really needs these things, but people certainly do want them.   When you create a product, the number one step is to find out what your market really wants, not what you think they need.

If you have an intuitive sense about your market; if you think you have an innate “feel” for what the people you are trying to reach really want, follow your instincts and your heart. This is what I call heart-based marketing.

Heart-based marketing relies more on your observations and feelings, rather than on market research analysis or consumer surveys. By simply paying careful attention to the people around you, listening to their conversations, comments and complaints, you can uncover the results they are really looking for in their business.

In other words, create your products by putting yourself in the shoes of your target prospects. Ask yourself the same questions they ask themselves, so that you can create a product that delivers the answers.

Don’t underestimate the importance of this. For example, someone who is a coach might develop a product designed to give clients more balance in their lives. While “balance” may well be what his clients need, it isn’t necessarily the thing they want. It’s the coach’s perception of what they want. And if the coach develops and markets the product from his perception, clients aren’t going to want to buy it.

Think the same way your clients think. In the example of the coach, clients are not looking for a tool to give them balance. They are looking for more time, less stress, and more quality interaction with their family. There is a subtle, but significant, difference between what the coaching tool provides and what the clients say they want. The product or tool needs to offer a solution that clearly will give clients more time, less stress. In the long run, they will achieve balance, but that is not the thing they want.

Listening to clients with your heart will increase your opportunities to develop successful products.  Focus on what clients actually say they want, then highlight those wants when you create and market your product.

Staying open-minded, tuning into your target market, and really listening is the heart-based approach to identifying what your clients really want.

When you’ve discovered that very thing your prospect really wants – move on to providing and delivering it to them.  You’ll not only have a very happy customer, you’ll have a very healthy bank account!

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, then sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com