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Archive for the ‘Cash Flow’ Category

Consider your role as a consumer. When you’re shopping, do you look at the products first, or the price tag first?

If you looked at the price tag first,
retailers would pick up on that and simply offer a collection of price stickers inside the front door. You would choose what you could afford, and then the actual product would be a surprise – possibly an unpleasant one.

You don’t shop that way, and neither do the people that you have identified as your perfect clients.

Prospects want to know your prices, but unless your prices are preceded by the benefits that you’re offering, consumers will have nothing to gauge those prices against.

Follow these four steps to eliminate your fears in revealing your price. Gain the confidence you need to make the most out of your requests for cash:

1. Present what you’re offering. Answer the timeless questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Keep it simple. If you make it too complicated, those raised hands might start to return to laps.

2. Summarize the benefits. Because you’re offering specific solutions to specific problems, this step should turn on light bulbs in your prospects’ minds. This is the step in which you convince them that you are their answer.

3. Introduce the price. By now, your listeners or readers are absorbed in what you’re offering. The benefits are foremost in their minds, as is the question of price. Reveal your pricing while the question is still in their minds; and before it reaches their lips. Perfect placement of price revelation makes it comfortable for you and acceptable to your audience.

4. Map out a direct route for the money. Make it crystal clear how easy it will be to sign up, jump on, or join in on your program. Prospects should leave your teleseminar, your sales page, or your conference without any questions about how to participate. Or, better yet, they should leave already having signed on. Make it possible for them to sign up immediately. Make it easy for them to do so.

When your appeal is placed correctly, while all of the most fantastic points of your product or service are fresh in the minds of your audience, you will not only feel more confident in asking for money, but your prospects will have more confidence in their spending.

After you identify your sea of raised hands (those people whose problems you can solve, and whose interests you have piqued), you’ll need to devise an effective method for telling them how much cash they will need to jump onboard.

The steps I’ve outlined here make up an excellent plan for starting to ask for money. As you proceed, you will learn to tweak your own presentation to meet the needs of the people in your particular niche. You will learn to identify the exact moment in time when they are most receptive to pricing, and when your presentation best complements that revelation.

When considering how to properly sandwich your asking for money in your presentation, consider your own shopping habits. You see the product. You consider how it could benefit your life. You look at the price tag. You proceed to the check-out. You leave the store with the satisfaction of knowing that you fashioned your own shopping experience.

Give your prospects that luxury. Take the time to learn about what price placement gets the most lucrative results for your business. You’ll soon discover that timing is everything – especially when it equates to money on your pocket.

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

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Do you dream about creating an amazingly successful business?

Do you have a plan mapped out inside your head?

Do you dream about creating an amazingly successful business?

Do you have a plan mapped out inside your head to get it started?

Or are you looking for miracles to make your dream a reality?

Whether your starting out with your business or planning for growth, both of these seemingly conflicting concepts
need to co-exist inside your head.

It is very important that you have realistic expectations.

If you don’t have a budget and you don’t have any spare time, can you really expect to make an extra £20,000 a  month from your business? While it is certainly possible to earn that much money, you’re going to have to invest a certain amount of your time, effort, and money to make it happen.

But before you do anything at all, you need to have a plan. What I would like you to do right now is to take a moment, grab a sheet of paper, and draw a long line on it.

At the first end of that line, write the words “me today.” This represents where you are now. At the other end of the line, write down the words “1 year” and “revenue target.”

Write down whatever that number is that you want to reach in one year’s time. It could be £100,000, £250,000, £500,000, or even a million plus. When you have this goal clearly expressed on paper, then you can work out the steps you need to take to get there.

The first step toward reaching your revenue target is to take stock of your current assets. Think about your time, resources, and money.

If you find that you don’t have an abundance of all those assets, don’t panic. Consider the marketing concept that addresses the balance of money and time and creativity. If you’re short in one area, expect that you will need to put in more effort in the others.

So if you’re short on money, for instance, you will probably need to spend a lot more time to get your business going. If you’re short on time, then you’ll probably think about outsourcing from day one in order to maximize the hours you can devote to reaching your goal.

If you’re short on both, then you need to put your creative juices to work.

Don’t let any of these scenarios deter you. Building your online business and earning the income you desire is a very realistic and very attractive prospect for you. An online business has a very low in startup cost. The overheads are low. And, the percentage of profit that you get to keep is high. Keep your expectations and your evaluation of your assets realistic.

At the same time, it is also important to remember this other concept –

Believe in miracles.

In fact, plan on them. This may appear to contradict keeping your expectations realistic, but really, it doesn’t. It is harder to quantify, but there’s definitely a magic in just getting started. Doors are going to open that you can’t even imagine right now.

Until you get started down that road toward your goal, you have no idea where it is going to lead you. Once you actually take physical steps on that path, the universe will take 10 steps toward you.

Balancing your realistic expectations with your belief that miracles await you will tip the scales in your favor and assure you a very successful year ahead! Go ahead, set your expectations high, plan for the future AND always remember miracles await you.

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

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Meet Bernadette’s online business mentor Yanik Silver.

Instant Profit Boosters – one of the things Yanik is known for is squeezing out additional revenue and profits from absolutely zero additional marketing budget, visitors or customers.

Yanik will show you how to look at your website and business to identify immediate profit increases.

Don’t miss this call!

My Next MARKETING* MASTERMIND Call

Tuesday, 22nd June, 2010

8:00pm UK Time (3pm EASTERN, 12 noon PACIFIC)

TOPIC:  *Instant Profit Boosters*

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 tonne of other member benefits – such as access to our online members forum.

Not a member?  Click here to 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.

Best Wishes,
Bernadette Doyle
www.clientmagnets.com

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In your quest for a million dollars, would you rather get:

A) get $10 from 100,000 clients,

B) $100,000 from 10 clients, or

C) $1,000,000 from 1 client?

If you’ve chosen option C, one single transaction, congratulations for having great business sense. But for the sake of practicality, let’s use the first two choices for a model of quantity versus quality.

You know that no single person can provide a service that’s perfect for every potential customer. To further that sentiment, I’d like to suggest that no person can serve 100,000 customers as well as they can serve 10 customers.

It’s simple math that results in the same $1,000,000 answer for both options A and B, but you, the business owner, benefit most from choice B.

It’s no secret that valuable time is squandered when you have to exhaust yourself chasing a large number of clients. Wouldn’t it be magnificent to be able to sit, give your attention to a few clients, and make the same, or more, money?

Consider the chain of benefits: More focus on individual clients leads to better results for those few clients; those clients will offer better testimonials; and those satisfaction ratings will attract more high paying, high quality clients. This a circular effect of good business.

Of course, your next question is, “How?”

Scoring those lucrative client relationships starts where all good business does – in the early planning stages, even before lead generation.

Think big before you attract clients. You can’t skip this step, because if you do, you’ll end up attracting small-fry clients, and when you present them with the top-quality, top-priced program, you’ll fall flat.

Here’s an example to explain: you’re selling a top-notch software program targeted at high-end, complicated tax processing. If you market to general accountants, you might be netting prospects that do anything from A-B-C accounting services to intricate, full time gigs with top corporations. There’s no doubt that you’ll strike out with the majority of your audience. Accountants that make their living on Joe Smith’s bread-and-butter will have no interest in a high-end product like yours. Instead, back up and find a creative way to market to only those accountants serving the best-of-the-best, super-corporations. They will be willing to pay what you’re asking. They’ve been around for long enough to see the value in it, and are successful enough to be able to pay for it.

When asking for the big bucks, keep these things in mind:

• Before you bring people to your website, before you send out your newsletter, consider the caliber of your product or service, and match it to the caliber of client that would be most likely to spend the kind of money you’re asking for. Do the research required to find these people, rather than spending time generating dead-end leads.

• Consider your prospects’ mindsets. Do they have cheeseburger budgets and milkshake level businesses? Or do they have filet mignon budgets and crème-brulee-level companies? Which would you rather have? Know that fast food customers won’t have the money, or the taste, for expensive steaks.

• Don’t make quality an afterthought, or you’ll have attracted prospects in vain. Aim high, and your prospects won’t bat an eye at your price revelations.

Don’t assume that high paying clients are high maintenance. Often, they’re more understanding and less demanding. They have the experience that it takes to understand the ins and outs of the business world. They understand your challenges, and are more likely to allow you the freedom to run with your expertise.

Low-paying clients are often new to the business world, and may either indirectly (or directly) look to you for advice beyond the scope of your work, or spend too much time highlighting insignificant details.

Don’t be intimidated by the lucrative account. Be drawn to it. Recognize it for the gold mine that it is – and for the quality that it can create for your business.

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

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Everything that you do for your business, everywhere you go, you should always be thinking about getting people onto your mailing list. Building that list is so important to the success of your business.

But, you can’t stop with simply adding people onto your mailing list; you’ve got to take it a step further and get them to actually buy from you. A thousand people on your mailing list is certainly promising business potential, but you need to focus hard on how to convert some of them into paying business.

While you don’t try to sell to anyone and everyone, you do want to try your best to sell to those people on your mailing list. Naturally, they’re your best chance for a sale because they’ve expressed an interest in what you’re offering.

You’ve heard the expression, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink? In a sense, you have to look at the prospects on your list in the same way. You’ve led them toward your business, and while you can’t make them buy, you can make them very thirsty for what you’re offering.

In order to do this, one of the things that you need to think about – even before you start building your list – is what your sales process is going to be.

Once people have joined your mailing list, what will you put in front of them that invites them to get their credit card out?

That first offer should make it easy for them to say yes by having a low financial cost and a low emotional cost.

If you set the bar too high, if the only way people can spend with you is by shelling out a lot of money or committing to a long-term program, you are making it harder for them to say yes. It’s just too big a jump.

Think of your business as a ship and your prospects are on the dock. You wouldn’t expect them to jump onboard straight from the dock – you’d at least put out a gangplank to help them come aboard.

Before asking them to take a huge leap, make a big change, a big investment and a big commitment, give them the opportunity to know and trust you first. Extend the type of offer that will make your prospects feel less vulnerable. An initial low payment offering is fine – just make sure to present something they can buy.

Keep this in mind, as well: The best time to have someone buy is immediately after they’ve signed up for your free offering, whatever that may be. When they sign up for it, they automatically join your list.
The instant that happens, put an offer in front of them. That will separate the people who are serious – the ones who are willing to invest – from the browsers.

The prospects who are willing to invest are proving themselves to you, and should get better and more offers from you.  Don’t spend too much time on the browsers until they indicate that they’re serious.

So think about a low-cost, low commitment initial offering, and then present it to people right after they join your list. That’s the time when most of them are ready to buy.

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

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I’d like to share with you a quote that has both inspired and delighted me, by author of ‘Think and Grow Rich’ Napoleon Hill: “When Riches begin to come they come so quickly and in such great abundance that one wonders where they have been hiding during all those lean years….”

You see, recently several of my clients have been having BIG BREAKTHROUGHS in their businesses:

• Katharine went from zero to $100,000 in just 4 months….

• Moira made $30,000 in just 8 days…

• Melina made more in the last quarter than she did in the WHOLE of the previous year…

• Hazel has QUADRUPLED her prices and is attracting the high quality, committed clients that she wants…

• Wendy has gone from charging $40 an hour to offering $10,000 clients…

I could go on, but you get the picture!

So what do all of these women have in common? Aside from that fact that they are ALL my favourite clients They’ve ALL been using this same strategy to experience these BIG income leaps.

Want to know what it is?

Then JOIN ME on this special webinar ‘How to Have BIG Income Leaps in Your Business – Without Working Longer Or Harder’ that’s happening Wednesday 9th June at 1pm UK time.

Register here http://www.clientmagnets.com/bigincomeleaps/

On this webinar, I will share with you:

• The critical MINDSET shift you must make to experience BIG income leaps in YOUR business

• The ‘invisible wall’ that blocks big income LEAPS – and how to bring it crashing down!

• The simple strategy that can help you QUADRUPLE your revenues this year – yes, really!
• A specific action plan for generating YOUR BIG income LEAP

Spaces on this webinar are LIMITED. So reserve your spot right now by going to http://www.clientmagnets.com/bigincomeleap/

I look forward to helping you discover how to have YOUR Big Income Leap!

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The process of justifying your price has two components: giving your prospects a reason to pay your price, and overcoming their objections to your price. If your price is in the high end range, I recommend offering  payment plans -  break up the payment into monthly payments or another payment installment plan. This enables you to overcome client objections about price, and increase your conversion by capturing more of your prospects.

When you’re offering a high-end product, some of you prospects may have a mental barrier to your price point based on their income, their cash-on-hand, or a variety of other factors that are beyond your control or your ability to predict. In many cases, this mental barrier can be overcome if you use monthly payments to justify your price. For example, if you’re offering a $1,000 workshop, someone looking at your materials might think $1,000 is more money than they have at the moment, or more money than they can afford to pay for a workshop.

On the other hand, if you offer them four easy payments of $250, that mental barrier of seeing the $1,000 number goes way down. It’s the same paying $1,000, but people don’t tend to think of it as $1,000 – they think of it as $250. This simple technique can go a long way toward overcoming the initial mental barrier about a price, and reducing your barrier of entry for potential clients, thus increasing your conversion rate.

In addition to using payment plans to overcome the mental barrier that prospects might have to buying your product, you can also use payment plans to increase registrations at your next event.   Use your payment plan options to encourage early registration. For example, if your event costs $600, you could give people the option of paying four easy payments of $150, or three payments of $200 or two payments of $300 getting closer to the event. While this all ultimately adds up to $600, many people, when given the option of paying $150 or $300, will choose to pay $150. This means you can get people registered earlier, as well as getting income from your registrations earlier, which can help you pay many of your event fees and costs before the event itself.

Recently one of my clients posted a query on my Mastermind Forum about payment plans.   They were concerned that a lot of people may register but fail to make all the payments. In my experience, very few people register, make one or two payments and then drop out. It’s very rare for this to happen.    Most people who register and make a payment,  stick with the plan and pay it all, or contact you to work out any difficulties. Using a payment plan isn’t administratively a lot more difficult than taking one payment up-front.

When you’re pricing your product or event, consider offering your prospects a payment plan. A payment plan can go a long way toward overcoming the mental barrier against your price, and can help you increase your conversion rate and get more people registered for your event!

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

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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!

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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

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No matter what you’re selling, whether it’s a training course or a marketing seminar or a physical product, you’ve probably spent a long time agonizing over price. Sellers almost always spend more time than they need to thinking about and setting a price. In reality, sellers think price is a lot more important than it actually is. The next time you’re pricing a product, keep these things in mind.

Price Isn’t as Important as You Think
Sellers almost always spend far too much time thinking about the price of a product. They agonize over whether they’ve priced their product appropriately for their market. In most cases, sellers actually under-price their products. When I work with people one-on-one, I almost always find that sellers are charging too little for what they’re offering. I spent a lot of time telling people to raise their prices.

While sellers may think that price is the most important aspect of marketing an event, that’s simply not the case. Research has shown that less than 10% of buyers are actually influenced by price as a primary factor when they make a decision. Realistically, it isn’t the price that matters, but how well you market the event.

Present Your Price Effectively
Many sellers think that if they price a product low enough, it will virtually sell itself. Sellers think that low prices are easy to justify in consumer minds, so consumers will want to take advantage of the low product and make the decision to buy or register. In reality, it isn’t the price that influences peoples’ decisions to buy; but rather, how well you present that price. If you don’t present your price effectively, the sale is over before it’s begun.

Beware of Sticker Shock
Sticker shock is a phenomenon that occurs when people present their prices too early. You don’t start off a presentation by telling people how much something costs, because then they’re fixated on that price. If they feel that the price is high, they’ll stop listening to whatever you have to say, and you’ve lost the sale. Instead, present the price toward the end of the sales presentation.

Build Your Product Value
To effectively sell your product, you must establish your product’s value. You must spend time showing your potential buyers why your product is a must-have product. Explain what they get from buying your product. Show them how your product solves a problem they just can’t seem to resolve, or how it does so better than anyone else’s product. Once you’ve established that your product has value, you can present the price of your product; after your buyer is convinced enough of your product’s value to listen to your value proposition.

In Summary …  Charge More, and Present Your Price at the Right Time
Don’t undercharge for your product. A low price won’t sell your product – good sales copy will sell your product. Price your product appropriately, and spend time establishing the value of your product before you reveal the price to your sale prospects. With the right value proposition techniques, you can increase your conversion rate and let your product sell itself!

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

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