How To Reach Your Target Audience

January 26th, 2010

Where do the people in your target market hang out? That’s a question you’ll want to answer in order to grow your business quickly. Online or offline, people with similar buying habits tend to read, join and discuss in the same places. By doing some research, and creating a list of established points of connection, you can affordably reach more people in your target audience.

Where Do Your Target Prospects Flock Together?
The old saying about “birds of a feather” really applies when it comes to people likely to buy your product. They probably read the same publications, hang out on the same websites and belong to the same associations. What’s more, they’re likely hanging out together in significant numbers.

This is where good research pays off. Once you learn where your target prospects congregate, you can find ways to leverage relationships other people have with them.

For example, if they’ve paid to subscribe to a magazine, there’s a relationship established with that publication. Someone else might already be selling their products regularly to the same group of people.  Many members of your target audience may also belong to the same trade associations.

The point is, any way you might be able to connect with your audience through an existing connection should be added to your list. Media contacts, possible joint venture partners, associations, and online discussion groups are all valuable assets to be leveraged while growing your list.

If this sounds like a lot of legwork, there’s some good news. Once you begin to find these places where your target audience congregates, a snowball effect will kick in. You’ll talk to one or two people, and then learn of more and more connections. Rather than painstakingly tracking down each place, your new prospects will begin to show them to you.

Find common connections between the people in a specific market. Look for books and publications which give lists of trade magazines or associations.

Ways to Reach Your Market
Remember, the key is to gather information on your list that allows you to reach your market. That means not starting from scratch trying to sell to your audience if there’s another way in.

You might choose to advertise in that magazine your target audience likes to read, or submit some editorials. As you research your list make notes about who accepts advertising, articles or editorials.

A joint venture with a company already selling products to your intended market is another good way to break in. Look online at companies you might once have considered your competitors. If your products complement theirs, a joint venture could benefit you both.

Another possibility is to offer to give talks to the groups you find your market tends to join. Keep notes on who needs guest speakers, how often they meet and whether you can sell from the back of the room.

Again, all this will take some research on your part. Even if someone else could tell you exactly where members of your target audience hang out, they don’t know your product like you do, so do your own homework.

A final tip about reaching your audience: don’t waste your money trying to reach your market through large publications. The expense to advertise in national, regional or even large local publications is enormous, and you’ll be paying for circulation beyond your audience. Target niche magazines and newsletters, instead; your return will be much more profitable.

Devote some time to researching where your target market hangs out and keep your eyes open for opportunities to leverage existing relationships. Expanding your list of marketing prospects will become much easier once you multiply your impact through these avenues.

How To Reach Your Target Audience

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Posted in Advertising, Business Networking, Business Plans, Business Success, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Joint Venture, List building, Marketing, Niche Marketing, Online Marketing, Success Secrets | No Comments »

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

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Posted in Advertising, Business Plans, Business Success, Closing The Sale, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Law Of Attraction, Niche Marketing, Personal Productivity, Sales Motivation, Small Business Ideas, Success Secrets, target audience | 3 Comments »

Open Your Mind to New Ideas

January 8th, 2010

Do you know what is wrong with the following two statements?

“I already know that.”
“I can’t see how that applies to my business.”

Both will put a lid on your income.

You’ve likely uttered them at some point. They may seem like perfectly reasonable statements, but they are not. They are blinders that will prevent you from seeing new opportunities to grow your business and increase your revenue.

It is so important that you keep an open mind about new ideas for your business. It is important not to dismiss something simply because you’ve heard it before, or think it doesn’t apply to you.

In business, repetition is a valuable tool. For instance, in my business. I use the same principles, the same processes over and over. And I get results, over and over.

When you hear or read about something you’ve come across before, you may be tempted to say, “I already know that.” But there is a big difference between knowing something intellectually and knowing it, as dancers say, in the muscle.

So instead of tossing the idea away, challenge yourself a bit. Try the “Dr. Phil test” – ask yourself, “How is it working for me?”

If you are producing the results that you want, only then may you can say you truly know something. But, if your external results aren’t quite where you want them to be, then there is something that, at some level, you still don’t know.

You may grasp the idea intellectually, but you may not have it fully integrated and absorbed. There is always a chance that you can learn more about something that you think you already know. Keep your mind open.

The second problem statement is related to keeping an open mind. Just because you can’t readily see how an idea applies to your business, doesn’t mean that it isn’t applicable to your business.

For example, you might hear about a great marketing technique for selling to individual clients, but think, “I can see what you’re doing, but I’m selling to corporates, so I can’t see how it will work for me.”

Or if you hear about a product idea, you think, “What I’m offering is more intangible. It’s not a hard offering that’s going to help people make more money. So how do I map that over to my business? I can’t see how it would work.”

Even if you can’t immediately see how it applies to your business, it doesn’t mean that it’s not applicable. It just means that you can’t see it yet.

To get beyond this, start paying attention to the difference between the external form and the underlying structure of the new idea.

E-mail marketing may not be the right tool for your type of business. But if you look beyond the external form of the idea – the e-mail – and consider the underlying reason behind it – reaching more clients simultaneously – you might find that it leads you to the tool that is right for you.

You need to start looking beyond the face value of things. You need to start looking beneath the surface. Delve into the underlying reason behind an idea.

When you do this, you will find that there is more to an idea than you already know. And you may find a way to employ a new or different technique to increase your income.

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

Open Your Mind to New Ideas

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Posted in Advertising, Business & Money, Business Plans, Business Success, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing, Online Marketing, Personal Productivity | 1 Comment »

Don’t Give Up – Follow-Up

January 3rd, 2010

One of the best tips I can give you about converting potential clients into paying clients is this: Add one extra follow-up step.
That step can make the difference in bringing that client to finally making a decision. It can bring in extra sales. That one extra email, that one extra card, that one extra phone call, can be the thing that brings in those extra sales.

It’s very tempting for you to give up too soon. I realize that, especially right now. It would have been really easy for me to give up too, when I wasn’t getting the sales I wanted for a recent event. It would have been really easy for me to say, “Okay, it’s tougher this year than it has been to fill events. I give up.”

That would have been so wrong for me to do, on so many levels. How could I have that kind of attitude? I simply can’t allow for that when I am trying to inspire and educate you and the rest of my clients. That’s not good enough.

In addition to that, what does it say about me if I’m not doing every single thing possible to ensure that the right people are in that room at that event? I know that it’s life transforming, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that every person that’s got any question about that event, receives an answer.

Although this took some planning and organizing because I was traveling with my children to Belfast at the time, I made the two hours for the phone calls that needed making.

I added an extra follow-up step and made it happen because it was important. It’s important that I walk the talk. It was important that I do every single thing to make sure the people who could benefit from that event benefited from it.

And that’s what I want and expect from you. When you think about what you’re selling, if you truly believe that what you’re offering is so great and can make such a difference, you should stop at nothing to make sure that the people who most want and need it are using it. Leave no grey area – inform them, educate them and get them everything they need.

Don’t make excuses to give up. It’s easy enough to create reasons for giving up too soon. You’re too cool for school; you don’t want to be seen as needy; you don’t want to be pushy. Except, those reasons aren’t reasons. They’re excuses – obstacles that you are putting in your own way.

If you’ve made the connection with prospective clients, presented your offering, followed up a couple of times – what more can you do?

Well, you could drop back, you could stop going that extra mile, which effectively says you don’t believe enough in yourself and your business to keep trying. My gut tells me that you won’t do that. That’s not good enough for you.

Be inspired and motivated to follow up, and do it more thoroughly. Think about the different ways that you might be able to follow up and how you could add another step to your follow-up sequence.

Stop at nothing when it comes to reaching out to your prospects.

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

Don’t Give Up – Follow-Up

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Posted in Advertising, Business Networking, Business Plans, Business Success, Customer Loyalty, Customer Retention, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing | 3 Comments »

Mining the Gold of Repeat Business

January 1st, 2010

Going through the work of identifying your target audience, really getting to know them and developing products to meet their needs can be very rewarding. If you want it to be financially rewarding, you’ll also need to learn the art of making repeat sales. Repeat sales generate eighty percent of the profits for a successful business. When you’re ready to move beyond the one-time transaction, here are some ideas for mining the gold of repeat business.

Breaking the “Find New Customers” Cycle
It’s difficult to watch someone work very hard to build a business, only to leave the additional income from repeat business on the table. That’s what happens when you’re constantly chasing new customers and making one-time sales to them, rather than offering new products and services to existing clients.

If you think about it, it’s actually easier to sell a product to a satisfied client, isn’t it? So it doesn’t make sense to get caught in the cycle of “go out and find more clients and sell them the same old product.” In order to boost your income considerably, you must, instead, begin creating new products that meet the needs of your existing clients.

Once you make up your mind to pursue additional business with existing clients, you can step off the never-ending cycle of chasing new clients and watch your income move up at the same time.

Learning What Your Clients Need
You may be asking yourself, “But how do I know what my existing clients need?” You can actually use the same process that you used to create your original products. Here are some helpful steps:

• Look at your client base as a target market.
• What questions are those existing clients asking?
• What additional needs continue to be unmet after they buy your product?
• What add-on products complement your original offerings?
• How could your product line be expanded naturally to meet more needs?

Here’s an example that illustrates how a one-product company can create add-on sales to its existing customers. A hypnotherapist specializes in smoking cessation hypnosis. She has lots of clients who come to her for that service, but once they stop smoking, she doesn’t ever see them again. She’s spending a lot of time and money in marketing to attract new clients.

Because her existing clients know her smoking cessation sessions work, they’re the perfect prospects for additional services. By listening to her current clients’ concerns, she learns many of them are ready to take on new challenges in life, now that they’ve quit smoking. She offers to help with visualization sessions so they can focus on their new goals.

By expanding how she sees her existing client base, and focuses on their needs, she has opened the door to a whole new level of income. You can do the same thing. If necessary, take some time off from marketing to new target audiences and turn your complete focus on your existing customer base.

Develop the habit of listening to your clients’ questions and determining what needs still exist. Turn those needs into products that fill them. Not only will your clients be grateful, you’ll also see your income multiply substantially.

You will always have to do some marketing to bring in new clients, but there’s far less pressure when you’re making repeat sales of new products to existing clients. Once you stop chasing new clients and focus on building more products to help your customer base, your whole business will turn around. Learn how to mine the gold of repeat sales to build a strong, sustainable business and a solid base of satisfied customers.

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

Mining the Gold of Repeat Business

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, List building, Marketing, Motivation, Niche Marketing, Online Marketing, Small Business Marketing | 3 Comments »

Tips for Using Paid Advertising to Generate Leads – Part 2

December 31st, 2009

Defining your copy, deciding where you want to place ads and what companies you want to chance your money with through their lists are just a few of the things to consider about advertising. While the quality of your content and the audience of your advertising sources are critical, there are other factors related to your advertising success.

8.  Look at the “click-through rates.” If you are advertising through a list, your email might include details or a teaser that clients can click on. What percentage of people will actually click on it?  Ask list owners if any stats are available. If they can’t, you can easily track the click-through rate yourself to determine if you want to continue advertising on that list in the future.

In my own research, I’ve found that I typically get a 15% to 25% click-through rate. If 100 people open my emails, 15 to 25 are going to actually land on the page.

You can see how quickly that list of 100,000 can be drastically reduced in terms of the number of people who end up signing on with you.

9.  Make sure that your squeeze page is totally aligned with the message that you are advertising. It’s important that there are no inconsistencies or mismatches that would cause you to lose opt-ins right at the point of a sale.

10.  Be emotionally resilient. If you are serious about lead generation, one thing is certain. You will sometimes end up doing advertising that does not produce any results. As disappointing as that will be, you must push yourself to move past it. Having a balanced approach to spending your money will protect your emotional investment in your business, should your financial investment in advertising take a hit. Recognize that some things don’t work.

11. Look for different advertising opportunities. If you allow yourself to get hung up on the money you view as “lost” because an ad didn’t produce any leads, you’ll find it difficult to get back up and advertise again. The next time an opportunity presents itself, you’ll talk yourself out of it. That’s the worst possible thing that could happen. It is through advertising that you are going to reach all of the people who need to know about what you can offer.

If you can run ads that get you a $3-$5 return for every dollar you spend, those are your real cash cows. A guaranteed return like that takes time to find, as well as some trial and error. Take care of the things that you can: your content, where and how you advertise, and tracking your results so you can make well-informed decisions.

When you do hit upon advertising that brings you some significant return, be sure to evaluate it. Are there similar advertising opportunities available elsewhere that can bring you that kind of return?

Last, but far from least, remember to protect your mindset when you do start to pay for advertising. Don’t bet your child’s college tuition fund until you’ve tested what will work for you.

Tips for Using Paid Advertising to Generate Leads – Part 2

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Posted in Advertising, Business Plans, Business Success, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing, Niche Marketing, Online Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets | No Comments »

Tips for Using Paid Advertising to Generate Leads – Part 1

December 30th, 2009

No matter how good you are at what you do, if not enough people know about you and your product or services, your business won’t be as successful as it can be. Word-of-mouth recommendations will certainly help promote your business, but the best way to let prospective clients know you exist is through one-to-many advertising.

This means paying to get your company information on lists, on web pages, in publications and anywhere else that your market may be. There are several important things to keep in mind regarding how and where you should advertise.

1.  When it comes to buying NEW advertising, you must treat it as a risk.
Essentially, you are gambling on the results you hope to achieve when you try any NEW method of advertising. When you do buy advertising from a new source for the first time, view the money you are spending like chips you would plunk down on a roulette table. You won’t know for sure whether you’ve laid your marker in the right place until you give the wheel a spin – until you test the source and track the results.


2. Like gambling or buying stock, don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.

3. Trying to predetermine how many leads the money you’re spending on advertising will bring you is pointless. You can’t know for sure because there are many variables. Some of the variables are under your control.  Some are not.

4. The copy you send out should be one of the variables under your control.
Your content should say what you want it to say, in the way you want it said. Make sure you are consistent and clear with your message.

5. Research your advertising options.
When you hand over money for an ad, it’s guaranteed that the ad will go out and that a certain percentage of people will see it. So, you do have some ability to determine how many people you can potentially reach through certain means of advertising. Typically, look for publications online and offline that are targeting the audience you want to target.

6. Consider list advertising.
In addition to traditional advertising, you can pay companies to send a mailing to their list, both online and offline. Sometimes they have a collection of advertisements and send them all in one go. You can also do a “solo mailing,” where they will mail their whole list one email about your product or service. This is a great value in that you are not vying for attention with other advertisers, but it will cost you more money to stand out.

7. When you’re making a decision to advertise on a list, look not only at the size of the list, but at the owner’s relationship with the list.
Here’s what I mean by that. When you’re buying this kind of advertising, it’s easy to be swayed by the size of the list. The list owner may have a list of 100,000. You could argue the point that if only 10% of them open their emails, you’ll get 5,000 leads from that.

But, what influences the result more is the relationship that the list owner has with the list. Those really big lists may seem tempting and even look like a shortcut to you. “I’ll just advertise in these and sit back. This will produce all the leads I need.”

But, if the list owners send mailings to those lists every single day, they are not going to get the same attention as the list owners who only send mail once a month.

Some list owners might send out 100,000 emails, but have only an 8% open rate. It could be that only 8,000 people are even opening that email.

Ask questions like, “How often does your list hear from you?” “What are the types of things they hear from you?” “Can you give me any statistics on the percentage of opened emails you get?”

Look for Part II tomorrow …

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

Tips for Using Paid Advertising to Generate Leads – Part 1

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Posted in Advertising, Business Plans, Business Success, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing, Online Marketing, copywriting | 1 Comment »

Results You Achieve Are A Reflection Of Your Priorities

December 25th, 2009

If you have absolute confidence in the value of what your business has to offer, but you are self-conscious when it comes to your ability to sell your business, you need to evaluate your priorities.

Yes, your priorities. Because what’s essentially happening is that your desire not to look pushy or appear needy is actually getting prioritized ahead of your desire to make sales and make money. You are putting that first as your main concern.

Now, this is fine. It’s perfectly okay for you to have your priorities in that order – as long as you recognize that the results you ultimately achieve will be a reflection of the order of your priorities.

You can look at this from a couple of different angles. You can say, this is who I am, this is how I am, and it’s not going to change.  If this is what you make up your mind to do, your belief in your product or service will take you only so far. I’m not saying you won’t achieve success, but without promoting what you believe in, you are responsible for limiting the results you could achieve.

I recognize that sales is not everyone’s strong suit. It can be intimidating to try to convince someone to try something, to do something. People don’t like to feel pressured, and you don’t want to be the one pressuring them. That can’t possibly be good for your business – or can it?

Instead of merely accepting these self-imposed limitations, try viewing this from a different angle.

Think of it this way. If a friend or colleague knew of some groundbreaking thing, or something really special that would make a huge difference in your life, and they tried to tell you about it once, but you were too busy to listen, how would you feel later? Wouldn’t you say to them, “Why didn’t you tell me about that? Why didn’t you call me again about it? If I had only known about it, I’d have done it.”  You would feel like you’d missed out, whether it was a sale on a great product, a ticket to an amazing event or an opportunity for a life-changing service.

Just because past clients or current prospects haven’t followed up with you doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve lost interest.

It might mean that their circumstances have changed and what you were originally offering is no longer relevant. But you might also have changed or expanded your offering. If you don’t tell them – seek them out, be assertive and tell them – they won’t know, so they won’t buy.

More often than not, past prospects haven’t changed their mind about you; more likely they’ve forgotten about you because they just got busy with other things. You are not pestering them by getting in contact with them. You are actually serving them and helping them. You’re saving them a job.

Try telling yourself that in order to do the very best for your customers and your business, you have to put your personal priorities on the back burner. Instead of the never-ending struggle to bypass the sales conversation, address it head-on. Do it for your clients. Do it for your business. The one most likely to gain the greatest benefit from doing it, is yourself.

Results You Achieve Are A Reflection Of Your Priorities

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Marketing, Niche Marketing, Online Marketing, Personal Productivity, Sales Motivation | 2 Comments »

Great Copywriting Begins At The End

December 23rd, 2009

Whenever you are putting together a piece of copy, it is a good idea to follow the advice of Steven Covey and “start with the end in mind.” This is true whether you are writing an email or a long sales letter, a brochure or a page on your web site. The surest way to arrive at your desired destination is to know where you are going before you take your first step.

It follows quite naturally that the initial question you need to ask is “What are you hoping your reader will do at the end of this piece of communication?” How you answer this will determine not only everything you write, but also how successful your communications are in achieving results.

Always Go For The Goal

On a web site, for example, you may be writing copy for your opt-in page. What is your ultimate objective? Most likely, you are hoping visitors will identify themselves by giving you their e-mail addresses along with permission to send them mail. Everything you write on the page should be directed toward that end.

Or perhaps you are planning a seminar or workshop and creating invitations to send out by post. Obviously you want each recipient to book a place the event, but you can be even more specific than that. Ask yourself, “How exactly to I want people to respond?”

Do you want them to pick up the phone? Should they send back a pre-printed form? Or would you rather have everyone visit your web site and register there? Being able to visualize the desired outcome will help you direct your readers to that action.

Whatever you are writing, keep the end firmly in sight and limit your writing to the shortest course that will take the reader there. If you are putting together a lead generation advertisement, just stayed focused on generating the lead. You don’t have to do more than that.

Unfortunately, sometimes people put too much material into their copywriting – more than they need to get the job done. This can actually be counterproductive, distracting readers from taking the desired action. Avoid this, by all means. Edit out any copy that is off the mark.

A Caution About Copywriting

Having said all of that, it is also important to let you know what copywriting can’t do. All the best copy in the world cannot compensate for the wrong product or service being offered to the wrong market.

Whatever you are planning to sell or promote, be absolutely sure you’ve done your homework before you start writing about it. You need to be able to say with confidence, “I know that I’ve got something which is targeted to the right group of people, and I know there is some demand for it.”

That’s a critical first step. If for any reason you haven’t done it, no matter how much thought and effort you put into your copy, it will be wasted. On the other hand, for the right product being offered to the right target, copy written with the end in mind will really help things take off.

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

Great Copywriting Begins At The End

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Posted in Direct Mail, Direct Marketing, Email Marketing, Make Money Online, Marketing, Online Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, copywriting | 3 Comments »

Making the Leap to One-to-Many Sales

December 22nd, 2009

Everyone who offers a product or service to others is in the sales business. No matter how you feel about “sales”, you must be able to present your offer well if you hope to succeed. Most people start by making that offer to one person at a time. When you’re ready for greater success, though, it’s time to make the leap to one-to-many sales.

Why Should I Make the Leap?

What’s the most valuable commodity a small business owner has? A line of credit? A great business plan? Those are both important, but the most valuable asset you own as an entrepreneur is time.

Each of us has a limited amount of time to create products, market them, makes sales and run our businesses. Doesn’t it make sense to maximize every minute? By learning to present your offer to many people at once, your time is preserved for business activities other than sales.

Think of it this way—a great marketing campaign can bring potential clients to your door, but if you don’t have time to answer it, some of them are going to go away disappointed. Meeting with one prospect at a time is like dropping one single penny, rather than a handful of dollars, into your bank account.

Here’s another reason making one-to-many sales is a brilliant business strategy: presenting your offer to more than one person at a time increases your exposure to new markets exponentially. When the barrier to additional markets is removed by presenting your offer to a variety of groups, real success is within your grasp.

What If I’m Not Good with Groups?

If your natural selling style is one-to-one, that’s great! Not everyone can sit across the desk from another person and persuade them to buy a product. By all means, continue to build that strength.

As we mentioned above, however, your time is limited and you can only make so many one-to-one calls each month. You can do yourself a real favor by scheduling in one-to-many sales opportunities, as well. The increase in sales will help overcome your “public speaking anxiety” and persuade you to devote more of your time to reaching groups of people with your offer.

How Do I Jump In?

Many people are nervous at the thought of making a presentation to a room full of people. Try these steps to set up your first presentation:

* Ask existing clients for referrals to small groups they belong to. Anytime someone else is convening a meeting of people who need products like yours, that’s a built-in opportunity.
* Once you’ve booked your first group presentation, deliver information this group will find useful, whether they buy from you or not. The key is great content; once you’ve gained their respect by providing information they can use, they’ll be much more open to your offer.
* As your confidence grows, offer to speak to larger associations, clubs and other groups who regularly need guest speakers. Remember—great content plus your offer will build your reputation and your sales.

Making the leap from one-to-one sales opportunities to the compounding power of group presentations can be exhilarating. Get your toe in the water by presenting yourself to small groups, then dive in head first as you find yourself in demand as a speaker. Once you discover the advantages of one-to-many versus one-to-one, your business will prosper and you’ll actually have time to enjoy the results.

© Bernadette Doyle, 2009
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Making the Leap to One-to-Many Sales

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