Help Clients Make The Decision To Buy

February 25th, 2010

You may be fully aware of the tremendous difference that your services make to an organization or an individual, but you have to find a way to link that difference to end results.

One of the really important things you need to do in your business is identify the results you achieve.

One way that you can ascertain the results you’ve helped a client achieve is to go back and ask them. If your contact has told you that since they used your services or product, they got X number of results, find out the implications of those results – in terms of time or money.

I did some negotiation skills training for a client, who told me, “it really made a difference.” That’s all fine and good, but I asked them to quantify what difference it made.  In their case, they were able to measure what their goodwill budget had been the year before compared to the current year, and I was able to get a statistic from that.

If you’re a coach, and you’ve been able to save a particular client 2 hours every week in their work week, that’s valuable time over the course of a month or two. But, if you factor those hours at the rate that client gets paid, it could work out to your helping the client make additional thousands of dollars a year.

You have to look at what you’re doing in terms of increasing sales, or reducing cost, or saving time, and then work through it that way. Calculate what the net benefit is for the client. Always remember, clients make the decision to buy something based on the benefits.  You may need to do a bit of research to make those connections.

Think of yourself as a salesperson who is putting together a presentation that quantifies all the benefits. Or, as a bit of a lawyer, arguing in court and putting together a case. You have to bring together different pieces of information and statistics to make your argument.

It’s not that you’re stating you are definitely going to help a client save this amount of time or money, but you’re getting people to think in terms of end results for their business.

To get your potential clients those results, you must first prompt your existing and satisfied clients for a specific answer about how your service benefits them. Be willing to go back to your contacts and talk to them about the difference you’ve been making. Ask them to quantify it.

They won’t think about it until you ask them. But, by asking the question, you’re also raising your value in their eyes too.

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

Help Clients Make The Decision To Buy

Make More Sales By Gaining Trust and Confidence

February 22nd, 2010

You know that you’re the best, but your customers need to believe that too. There are several ways for you to gain their confidence and trust so you can earn their business.

Sway potential clients in your favor by taking away the risk of doing business with you and making your offer irresistible.

•  Offer a  guarantee. Personally, I have a guarantee when I’m offering my products or workshops. There is some grey area here, however. Some of my higher-value coaching services are more time intensive for me and don’t include a guarantee. The reason I don’t offer one is that I don’t want to give people an opt-out clause. When these high-caliber people step up in a big way and want to get the results that a high level coaching from me can deliver, I want to know that they’re fully in the game.

It’s a big challenge to make a massive transformation or a big leap in business. You don’t want clients like these to be running for the door or the emergency exit the moment the going gets tough. So, in some cases, guarantees are counter-productive and could actually end up helping clients resist what you’re offering.

So, you have to decide whether or not a guarantee is right for your market.

•  Alleviate their fears. Sometimes people won’t sign on or purchase something because they’re skeptical that what worked for other people won’t work for them. You need to show them how, even if they may have failed in the past, this time they will succeed. Include additional follow-ups or features that your competition doesn’t provide to show that you can help them accomplish their goal or fulfill their need. Be creative and really give some thought as to how you can remove the risk for your potential clients.

•  Make your offer irresistible. Pile on so much value that there is just no way they can lose. Include all the things your targeted clients could possibly want so that they just can’t pass your offer by.

There are few different ways to do this. Quantify the benefits of your services. For example, if you’ve got a program where for a $1,000 investment, your client will be able to make or save $10,000 in the next three months, you need to tell them that. Don’t assume that they will figure that out. Quantify the benefits specifically.

If there isn’t an easy financial comparison in your business, you do need to dig a little because this can really help you and help your clients. They will be able to wrap their heads around what you’re offering and make an informed decision because you’re giving them all the information they need.

The more you quantify, make your offer irresistible, and remove risk, the more successful you’re going to be.

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Make More Sales By Gaining Trust and Confidence

SYSTEM Stands for Save Yourself Time Energy And Money

February 18th, 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

SYSTEM Stands for Save Yourself Time Energy And Money

Eight Steps to Attracting More Clients

January 11th, 2010

There’s a logical sequence to building a business, whether it’s online or offline. There are certain things that must be done in order to see your business grow. By committing to follow these eight steps, you can attract more clients and have the kind of income you want.

Step One: Get Clear On Who You’re Targeting

Before you begin any marketing, you must find your target audience. Do your research and discover who your products or services can help the most. Without a clear understanding of exactly who you’re targeting, your marketing can’t be effective.

Specializing your approach will definitely help your conversion rate. It may make you nervous to think of narrowing your options, but it’s the first step in attracting more long-term clients. Here’s one more benefit to narrowing down your focus: each time you specialize a little more, you’re able to charge more for your services.

Step Two: Understand What They Really Want Emotionally and Logically

Once you’ve identified your best target audience, it’s time to learn what they really, really want. What do they dream of accomplishing? What keeps them awake at night?

There’s no point in marketing your products if you aren’t sure what your target market wants. Here’s a key concept: people buy what they want, not what you think they need. Get to know your market and you’ll find making sales much easier.

Step Three: Package What You’re Offering Toward Desired End Results

Because you understand your market so well, you know the desired end result they’d like to achieve. The closer you get to that desired end result, the better you’ll do in business. Package your products toward that result, so that you’re always meeting the needs of your clients.

When you’re really tuned into the needs of your target market, you’ll experience the rush of business running smoothly. You’ll stop having to push and shove to make sales and see how it all flows together—the needs of a group of people, and products packaged to meet those needs. What’s the takeaway? People don’t buy because they understand something, they buy because they feel understood.

Step Four: Create an Irresistible Offer
What, exactly, are you delivering with your products, and what must the client give in return? To be effective in marketing, you need to be able to answer that question in one sentence. Here’s an example: “Give me ten minutes per day and I’ll give you the body you’ve always wanted.”

You want to state your offer in a compelling way that has people raising their hands to say “I want that!” Work on developing your one-sentence offer; it will form the basis of all your other marketing.

Step Five: Go Find Your Target Audience
Where do the people most likely to buy your products hang out? Do they congregate on online discussion forums? What publications do they read? Which organizations do they join?

If you’ve done good market research in the previous steps, you’ll already know the answers. Now, go out there and make your irresistible offer to them in ads, talks, comments on forums and whatever way you can that makes them affordably reachable.

Step Six: Practice Great Follow-up
You’ve done your research, created great products, packaged them to meet the needs of your target audience, and made your offer where they congregate. To maximize all the hard work you’ve already done, you must follow-up consistently.

What’s the best way to make sure that happens? By automating and systematizing as much of your follow-up as possible. Here’s the rule: Always follow up, and find ways to make it automatic.

Step Seven: Close the Sale
This one gets stepped around so often, and that’s a shame, because it’s essential if you want to succeed. Learn how to ask for their business. For some companies, that might mean a face-to-face meeting, and for many others, the entire sales process can be automated. Unless money changes hands, you’re not really in business.

Whichever way you chose to close, you must give your prospects enough information that they can buy with confidence. Automate that information-sharing as much as you can, with webpages, sales letters and brochures, so that you can expand your impact in less time.

Step Eight: Make Additional Offers
The bulk of your profits are going to be made from additional sales to satisfied customers. You’ve already built a relationship with them and they know you can be trusted. Create products you can offer them as you continue to listen and hear what solutions they need.

These long-term clients give your business stability, and you’re not out chasing new clients constantly. Learning to make additional offers will make the difference in whether your business lasts.

Following the eight steps puts you on the path to attracting new clients and earning more income. Keep working through them until you’ve perfected your products and your offer. Automate as many of your processes as you can, and don’t forget to offer additional products to satisfied customers. By doing so, you’ll be on the road to the income you want.

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

Eight Steps to Attracting More Clients

Converting Interest Into Income

December 18th, 2009

If a hundred people express an interest in your business this month, how many of them will be paying clients by the end of the month?

Once someone has raised their hand and expressed an interest in you or your business, what is the process they go through to become a paying client?

If your answer is, “it depends,” or “it changes according to every client,” that’s a tremendous mistake. You can’t grow your business that way. You will only grow exhausted if you must be personally involved in every single sale.

This aspect of conversion is really, really important. Everything else you do may give you visibility, but it’s not going to convert client interest into paying business unless you have this conversion process in place.

All of the methods, all of those other things you focus on, all they will do in and of themselves is raise your visibility. They’ll let people know about you. But they are not, by themselves, enough to get someone to put their hand in their pocket, take out cash or a credit card and hand it to you.

It isn’t enough just to get your name out there. That alone isn’t magically going to bring you paying clients. To make that happen you must have a conversion process.

So, if you’ve been working diligently, and doing all of the things that you need to do to increase your visibility, but it’s not converting into paying business yet, you need to focus on conversion. Right now.

Focusing on the answers to these questions will help you to articulate your conversion process:

1. What am I actually doing to encourage people that are interested in me to spend some money with me?

2.  How easy or difficult am I making it for them to trust me to spend money with me?

3.  How well am I spelling out the benefits of what I’m offering so that clients want to spend their money with me?

4.  Can clients clearly see the return on investment they’re going to get?

5.   Can they see the improvements that they’re going to enjoy or the quality of life they’re going to enjoy as a result of spending money with me?

These questions apply across the board and the answers will help you to implement a process to convert interested consumers into paying clients.

© Bernadette Doyle, 2009

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Converting Interest Into Income

Sales Proposals That Sell

December 3rd, 2009

Wouldn’t it be nice if you never had to put together another sales proposal?  Certainly the concept of becoming a Client Magnet is about attracting clients and eliminating those time consuming steps for which we’re not paid.  But there will be times when you need to submit a proposal.

Make sure you’re not relying on a skimpy one page document with a price and overview as a sales proposal, you should be offering much more than that.  The proposal needs to be a selling document that takes someone through the whole process and establishes you as the logical choice to assist them with a particular problem or issue.

To help them reach this conclusion, which seems so logical to you, you need to:

Predict questions the clients may have and address them within the proposal.

Hopefully you’ve had the opportunity to build relationships with people within the organization before submitting your proposal, even if you were only there to observe people at work, meet people informally or conduct interviews.  That’s a prime opportunity to start winning friends and for delving into the internal politics of the organization.  But another benefit of this contact is that it is going to give you an idea of concerns and issues within the organization and you will have the opportunity to address within the proposal.  That’s a good way to avoid delays and stalls while your proposal makes its rounds.

So, if you put yourself in your client’s shoes, and put together a good offense in your proposal, it will certainly avoid you having the difficult task of defending your proposal as it’s making its way through the hierarchy.

Avoid complacency.

Even if you have a wonderful contact within an organization and they seem ready to hire you, there’s more than one person in the larger companies that make the decision.  Make sure your proposal doesn’t rest on the laurels of your cozy contact relationship.   Use your proposal to sell yourself to every single person within the organization.

Avoid scaring your client.

Now I know that sounds odd, but what frightens clients is the very product that you are offering, and that’s change.  Who wouldn’t want the change your service is offering, improved customer relations or increased sales?

I’ve done a fair amount of research in the psychological outlook of managers at both the senior and middle level, and one thing that really stands out is how fearful they are of change.  So how do you get past this Catch 22?  Avoid using words that signal a big change on the horizon, words such as transformation or dramatic results.  Use more moderate terminology to show how your product will fit seamlessly within their organization.

There are plenty of specifics that will help you produce a winning proposal.  I’ve not only outlined them in my Attracting Corporate Clients system, but I’ve gone through and pulled winning proposals from my files.  I’ve put together not only specific tips, such as binding methods so your information doesn’t become separated or methods of submission.  But these general tips outlined here will put you one step closer to avoiding the skimpy sales proposal syndrome that doesn’t sell your services properly.

Sales Proposals That Sell

Crunch Time – Reevaluate Your Sales Process

November 10th, 2009

We all have reached a crunch time in our lives. The crunch time is that point where we’re standing there trying to decide whether to purchase petrol or groceries with our last few dollars. That crunch time shouldn’t be our breaking point; it should be our turning point. That crunch time needs to be the point in which we take stock of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. That crunch time needs to be the time we reevaluate our selling practices and honestly decide what’s working and what’s not. That crunch time should be an opportunity for change.

In other words, crunch time should mean out with the old, in with the new. If something is not helping your business, why are you doing it? Take the traditional sales process. When someone else is paying your salary, you make calls, you prospect, you make appointments, you do your presentation and hope you close enough to make your target percentage.

That process is not going to work when you’re not pulling a salary. If you’re self-employed, time-consuming prospecting is not cost-effective and it doesn’t buy groceries and petrol. Time is money and if you’re just starting out, it’s likely you’re going to be short on both. You need to shorten the selling process; you need to shorten the time between that first contact and closing the deal.

Take a look at your last successful sale. Write down every single step you took to make that deal. Next to each step, rate it on a scale of 1-10 in how much it helped seal the deal. Take stock of the steps that rated highest on your list. Take stock of the steps that rated the lowest on your list. Can you remove those lower rated steps and shorten your sales process?

Ask yourself why you’re doing those lower rated steps. Is it because you’ve always done them in the past? Don’t do those steps just for the sake of doing. Do those steps that help you make your sale. Take a fresh look, reevaluate and keep an open mind.

Evaluating your selling process is not going to be easy. You’re taking everything you’ve ever learned in selling and starting fresh. You need to keep your mind open and be prepared to admit that your 1-2-3 selling process is not what’s going to make your business successful and it’s not going to pay the bills.

Remember, you don’t get paid to do cold calls. You don’t get paid for chatting up the gatekeeper. You don’t get paid for networking. These are time consuming and it’s grunt work. Eliminate the grunt work, set yourself up for attracting clients without these steps.
How? By getting the client to come to you. It’s just that simple. They call you. You need to attract clients to eliminate the steps that aren’t profitable and aren’t closing deals.

This isn’t going to be an overnight transformation. It can take weeks and months. But every decision you make needs to be aligned with getting yourself to that point. That point where you can forget about the grunt work and be a true Client Magnet.

Crunch Time – Reevaluate Your Sales Process

Overcoming the Bigger-is-Better Mindset

November 5th, 2009

So, you want the big corporate clients, but they don’t want you.  Or so you think.  Big corporations can be the ‘cash cows’ of our world.  Along with their big size, they have big training budgets and that’s what we like and what we need.  But since they’re big, aren’t they only looking for big companies to provide their training?  Not necessarily.  You need to convince them that small is good.  Turn it to your advantage.  Make it a negotiating factor.

Your first obstacle to overcome in getting large corporate clients is their preferred provider list.  If you’re not on it, you can’t provide services.  Or can you?

One of my longstanding clients is the department head of a multinational corporation with over 150,000 employees.  They have the dreaded preferred provider list.  He shared with me two important pieces of information.  First, there are many instances in which he can overturn the preferred provider listing when choosing external consultants.  Second, he prefers using smaller companies.

The reasons he gave me for preferring smaller organizations are ones that you can use to help sell yourself:
• Smaller organizations value your business more and will give you better service.
• Smaller organizations understand the client’s needs better.
• Smaller organizations can provide a more personalized service.

So, use your small size to your advantage.  Let that big corporate client know that even if you’re a ‘one man band’, that’s a good thing, as it allows you to better serve their needs.

Another important point to remember in overcoming the ‘bigger is better’ mindset is the basic business concept of supply and demand.  There are only so many clients looking for training services, therefore, your service is a commodity with limited demand.  Any trainer can provide a commodity, right?  Wrong!  You need to prove that your service is scarce and valuable, not a commodity.

How can you prove to a client that you have a valuable service?  You need to believe it yourself.  It’s an attitude that you need to carry with you at all times, it’s an attitude around which you need to structure your business and it’s an attitude that will set you up for success.

But, it’s not about overconfidence – it goes back to the basic concept of supply and demand.  As a one-person show, you have only so many hours in the day.  Your time, therefore, is valuable.  Your goal in selling yourself is to provide more demand for your limited supply of time.

You need to put yourself in the power position.  Put yourself in the position where you have more prospects than you can handle.  When you can look a potential client in the eye and say with all honesty “If you want to work with me next month, these are the two days that are available.  And you need to let me know by the end of the week whether you’re going to take these two days because I have two other clients that are interested”, you are creating a sense of urgency.  When you create that sense of urgency, you are putting yourself in the power position.

I’m not suggesting that you should pretend you have a full dance card when you don’t.  People can see right through that.  I’m saying that creating more demand for your limited supply of time is part of the cycle that will create the sense of urgency which in turn puts you in the power position.

Use your small size to your advantage. Overcome the “bigger is better” mindset and you will be able to get your client to overcome it as well.

Overcoming the Bigger-is-Better Mindset

Let Go of Beliefs That Inhibit Success

October 1st, 2009

When you’re struggling in business, it’s easy to see yourself wrapped in chains, struggling to break free from failure. What if I told you the key to those chains might be located within your own mind? If you’re ready to step out into freedom, let’s look at how your beliefs might be inhibiting the success you crave.

Inhibiting Belief Number One: Nice People Don’t Do Sales

Whether your product is coaching or castor oil, you’re going to have to sell it to someone else to be successful. For many entrepreneurs, the commitment to success ends when it comes time to actually market their products. They’re great at visualizing, designing and creating products, but they’d really rather not have to ask someone to buy them.

The underlying belief keeping them from success may be that “Nice People Don’t Do Sales.” Before you discount that entirely, consider the stereotypes you’ve heard about used car or door-to-door salesmen. Society, in general, has embraced the notion that selling is somehow unsavory.

Here’s the truth that will unlock your chains: Some of the nicest people you know are in sales! They’re the business owners who find the people best served by their products and make them available at a reasonable price. They’re the gifted folks who’ve developed ways of helping others succeed and are reaching out to a grateful audience in return for a fee.

Learning to market your products effectively makes you a savvy business owner, period. Free yourself from the notion that offering quality products for a reasonable price is anything other than good business.

Inhibiting Belief Number Two: Asking for Money is Rude

In a fantasy world, we could have anything we’d like without having to pay for it. In the real world, we expect to pay for the things we need and want. The products you’ve worked so hard to create are no different. Reasonable people expect you to ask for money when you deliver the goods.

Here’s probably what’s at the root of your anxiety, if you somehow feel rude when quoting a price—someone along the way, a parent, perhaps, told you it was rude to talk about money.

Let’s separate the wheat from the chaff…bragging about how much money you make at a dinner party may be rude, but quoting a price to a customer to complete a transaction is what’s at the core of every business.

Inhibiting Belief Number Three: Entrepreneurs Don’t Have “Real” Jobs

Here’s one that’s pervasive in Western cultures. From the time they start school, youngsters are guided toward “real” jobs like being accountants, doctors or attorneys. The problem is that many people feel a pull to own a business and serve the public some other way.

Striking out in the world of entrepreneurship can be lonely if friends and family keep asking when you’re going to find a “real job.” If you’re struggling to become successful marketing your products or services, you may have doubts that what you’re doing is legitimate.

Here’s a reality check: if you’ve created quality products and are offering them in ethical ways to serve the needs of others, you have a “real” job! You’re part of what keeps economies growing. As a business owner and entrepreneur, you’re in great company with others who are willing to take big risks for big payoffs.

If you begin to doubt yourself, and thereby sabotage your own success, consider the contribution pioneers in technology and industry have made. I’m willing to bet someone, somewhere along the way, told each of them to “get a real job” instead of working past obstacles and creating their own success.

Marketing and sales are what keeps the business world turning. Nice people all around you ask other people for money in return for great products. And being an entrepreneur is as real as it gets in the world of business. Free yourself from the self-sabotaging beliefs that can keep you from enjoying success. Stop apologizing and start enjoying the benefits of being the best at what you do.

Let Go of Beliefs That Inhibit Success

Reinvent Your Conversion Process

August 26th, 2009

Do you recreate exactly the same steps, from start to finish, with every single new lead?

Though you may think that you have to rigidly follow your game plan each time, the way you’re doing it isn’t really generating more business.

What you’re doing is giving you unpredictable and inconsistent results. Because you keep reinventing the wheel.

I know this, because I did it too. Years ago I worked as a sales trainer, and any time a customer contacted me and expressed an interest in my training, I was reinventing the wheel. Every time.

I had one-to-one conversations with every new lead. I had individual meetings with them. I wrote tailored proposals for each and every one of them. I reinvented the wheel. Over and over again.

What that did was not to generate more leads, but to create a bottleneck in my business. I was too busy working on each individual lead to think about developing a conversion process.

Imagine that your lead generation is working well, so you’ve got traffic to your website. But what happens when someone visits the site?   They might request information from you. And when you send them that information you are inviting them to have a one-on-one consultation with you.

And during that consultation you use a set of questions or other methods to convert them into a paying client.

Do you see how this is a much more streamlined process? For every lead that comes through, make that invitation to a personal consultation and then have the conversation that will convert that lead into a paying client.

Once you have this process in place, conversion becomes so much easier. You’ll know that for every ten people that go through the process, four will become paying clients.

When you’ve got this in place, you can focus on new ways to generate more leads.

So stop reinventing the wheel, and start reinventing your conversion process.

Reinvent Your Conversion Process