Client Magnets Official Blog

Posts Tagged ‘types of buyers’

Many entrepreneurs, small business owners and other professionals find themselves focused on earning an income, finding new clients and the day-to-day struggle to survive.  Having enough income and cashflow to grow your business rapidly is not an uncommon problem.  I often hear people talking about their expected income for the next day, weeks or months ahead.  They focus on knowing where the next paycheck is coming from because they don’t have enough confidence in their existing client base or cashflow.   They fear their income will dry up.

Have you ever felt like that?  If that sounds like you, then it’s time to STOP focusing on your income.  It’s time to start focusing on a long-term plan for success and diversification.  But how?  How do you free yourself from the day-to-day financial worry and really start to thrive?

The answer simply lies in starting your own high-end coaching program.   A high-end coaching programme (when designed and delivered the right way) will provide enough guaranteed revenue to enable you to stop worrying about money and be free to focus on your long-term success!

This is how the strategy works …

Sell Once a Year to Generate Guaranteed Revenue

• With your high-end coaching programme, if you market and sell the right way, you will only need to focus on the selling once and then you’re done for the year.

• Create a program with a limited number of spots, and you’ll only have to sell long enough to fill those spots and then you can focus on serving your clients and creating alternate revenue streams.

• Create a program with a fixed time limit, such as my annual programme, and you only have to sell those spots once per year. Then you’ve got the commitment for the income, and you’re free to focus on other areas of your business. No more worrying month-to-month whether you’ll have enough cash for next month; with a high-end coaching program, you can earn enough money to free yourself up for other pursuits.

Free Yourself Up to Look at the Big Picture

One of the biggest benefits for you and your business of creating a high-end coaching program is freeing yourself up to look at the big picture. If you’re like most people, you spend countless hours per week working on finding enough business, and the rest of your time goes to satisfying your existing clients. You never have time to think about the long-term plans for your business, or how to diversify your revenue streams.

Once you have the committed income of a high-end coaching program, you can stop spending so much of your time selling yourself and your services because you have a guaranteed revenue stream. Instead, you can focus on creating the other steps to achieve success in your business, and put together a long-term plan for your business!

In order to truly become successful in your own business, you’ve got to stop focusing on immediate income so you can begin to build a road map for long-term success.   Worrying about your day-to-day income is short-term thinking and can seriously hamper your long-term business success. When you start a high-end coaching program, you get financial commitments for a large portion of your revenue and begin looking at other ways to improve your business success.

So if you want to see an end to your day-to-day financial struggles and the beginning of long-term success, it’s time to start your high-end coaching programme!

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

Picture this image of two boys playing in a garden, trying to catch some birds.

One of the boys rushes around frantically with a net trying to catch the birds. Every time he gets close, the birds fly away. There’s lots of squawking, and feathers flying. The other boy stands quietly, holding out some birdseed.

One boy is trying very hard, and is probably exhausted, while the other hardly seems to be working at all.

Which one will get the results he’s looking for?

Instinctively you know it’s the boy with the birdseed who will be more effective, and a lot less sweaty.

When it comes to marketing and trying to attract clients, you want to act more like that second boy. Unfortunately, though, most people tend to act more like the first.

A lot of the things you might be doing, that are considered to be traditional marketing techniques, might actually be counterproductive. You could well be chasing people away.

Effective marketing techniques used on the wrong market will only provoke resistance, and build defensiveness. You could be running after people, figuratively speaking, with barrages of email, rounds of cold calls and direct mailings, and quite possibly be achieving the exact opposite of what you want.

For example, no matter how effective cold-calling may be for me or someone else, if you detest doing it, your negativity will prevent it from being effective for you.

Even if you are using marketing techniques that are proven to attract clients, if you do them with the negative energy of chasing – if you give off the sense that you are giving simply in order to get – you will end up like the boy who is chasing the birds. Tired and without any bird in the hand.

You want to break down the barriers between you and your prospective clients, not create more of them.

Make sure that the things you are doing marketing-wise, both online and offline, will attract clients to your business. Doing what everyone says is the right thing, but doing it with the wrong energy, won’t produce results.  Do the things that feel right to you. That will bring the positive energy into your marketing, and your clients will feel it.

You’ll know when you’re being a client magnet because it will feel easy. It should feel enjoyable, and you will have an abundance of clients.

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

Writing a sales letter is a practice in anticipating what your prospects will think, and overcoming their objections. When you’re writing your sales copy, it’s invaluable to be able to put yourself in your prospects’ shoes and predict what they’ll think when they read your copy. It may be difficult to predict all of the objections that your prospects will have to your sales letter, but one thing you can easily manage is this: catch the catch. Explain why you’re offering such a great deal or such a great product to your prospects, or they won’t believe your pitch.

Prospects Look Out for Deals that are Too Good
From an early age, most of us are told “if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” By adulthood, most people feel that they can judge whether a deal is good or not, but that little doubt lurks in the back of most people’s minds. If you do a great job of establishing the value of your product, and justifying your price, people might have trouble trusting you or your sales copy. If you make your product sound “too good to be true,” you have to explain yourself to your prospects or risk loosing sales.

Reasons for Offering a Great Deal
A few key phrases can help diffuse worry over a deal being “too good” and convince your prospects that you’re on the up-and-up. With one technique, you explain to your prospects why a product like yours normally costs more, and how you’ve managed to change the production method to realize a cost savings. Then, you can say something like “I can pass along my cost savings to you.” This lets the prospect know that you know you’re offering a really good deal, and gives them a reason for you offering a good deal. If you don’t explain this to them, they’ll think that you’ve misrepresented the value of what you’re selling, and will turn away from your product.

Another technique involves presenting yourself as the “good guy” and responsible community member to your prospects. For example, you could tell your prospects that a colleague has recommended that you charge more for your product, but you’re “not greedy,” so you’ve chosen to offer it for less. One successful copywriter said “This is such a valuable skill set that I’m offering it at this price so as not to price it out of the hands of the people who need it most.”

In most cases, it doesn’t really matter how you overcome the “it’s too good to be true” objection – just that you address it somehow. When you re-read your sales letter, look at it from the eyes of a potential prospect. If you find yourself thinking “What’s the catch?” then you probably need to re-work your copy, or add in some language explaining why you’re offering such a great deal. With this technique, you can overcome the mental objections of the prospects, and you’re that much closer to making a sale!

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

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

If you want to place a call to someone in particular, would you pick up the phone book and call every number until you reach the person you’re looking for?

Of course you wouldn’t. That would be a foolish waste of time.

But that, in essence, is exactly what you are doing if you try to recruit anyone and everyone as your clients.

There’s a huge learning curve you’ve got to adapt to when you go into business for yourself and try to do your own marketing and selling.     It’s a real shock to the system to discover that you don’t need – or want – to sell what you’re offering to the whole world.

The most important thing to remember about selling your product or services is that you don’t have to try to get every person you encounter to become your client.

You need to focus on finding the right type of client for your business. You need to find a way for the people who would be most interested in what you have to offer to come to you. To get more clients, focus your time and attention on those people who have, in effect, already raised their hands.

Focusing on clients who express their interest in your type of business will drastically cut down your selling time. You will be focused on people who are already interested and prequalified to buy, rather than wasting your efforts and energy on people who are never going to be interested or qualified in the first place.

Make sure this concept of reaching a group of people who’ve raise their hands really strikes a chord with you. Don’t let the numbers of potential clients influence you. Would you rather market your offering to 1,000 random potential clients or to 100 viable clients you know are interested in your type of service?

It’s very important that you make the distinction between the number of names that you have and the quality of the relationships that you have with those people. You can easily open up the phone book or the yellow pages, or buy a mailing list with thousands of names on it, but that doesn’t mean that those people are predisposed to buy. They haven’t done anything to indicate that they are interested.

As you build your list, look to create a responsive prospect list so you get those people who have done something that tells you they’re interested.

You will get much better results and spend less time marketing.

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

What’s the absolute best time to ask for teleseminar registration and payment from your prospects?

And how many hoops should they have to jump through to complete that process?

On your teleseminar registration page, you’ll call prospects to action by illustrating how your teleseminar can save them money, make money for them, save them time, or spare them grief.  While that illustration (the picture of their new, richer or more relaxed, life) is fresh and crisp in their minds, ask them to register.  Right then.  Don’t hesitate.  If you give them the space in which to click away, they may never come back.

And in response to the second question posed above, “None.”  Your prospects’ lives are complicated enough.  Give them one more phone call to make, e-mail to send, or hoop to jump through, and they will be more than willing to abandon the quantification of cost, time, or emotion that they just made in their own minds.  In a nutshell, if your payment process is complicated, your teleseminar, no matter how enticing it was only seconds earlier, will no longer be worth the effort.

Here are a few tips to incorporate when setting up your easy payment process on your teleseminar registration page:

• Use an ecommerce solution like 1ShoppingCart to set up your registration page’s shopping cart.  It’s secure, easy to implement, easy for your customers to use, and will keep your clients’ payment efforts to a minimum by processing credit card payments quickly and simply.  You won’t have to wait for your 1ShoppingCart registration to start accepting payments.  Set up a trial, and you’ll be ready to accept payments almost immediately.

• Link your shopping cart to a payment managing tool like PayPal, and your customers will have seamless access to a universal, fee-free, and secure channel through which to send their registration fees.  You won’t need a merchant account, and can begin to channel money to your teleseminar’s registration without delay.

• Your payment process must be fully automated. If action by you is required for any function, it’s not fully automated.  You want the money to roll in, whether you’re running errands, sleeping, or on vacation.  Additionally, you wouldn’t want to ask your clients to wait around for you to complete a payment.

• The payment process must be super simple. No phone calls, return phones call, e-mails, or return e-mails should be necessary for processing payments.  Make yourself available by phone and e-mail, of course, in case a question should arise, but convinced prospects should be able to complete their registration and payment in one sweeping motion.

• Give your prospects plenty of immediate opportunity to sign on for your teleseminar.  Any delay could allow doubt to creep in and annihilate your call to action.  People are most motivated immediately after they’ve uttered their first internal, “Yes.”

By fully automating your teleseminar registration and payment process, you not only simplify the process for your clients, but you simplify the process for yourself.  When you associate every chunk of income with an additional amount of work for you (phone calls, e-mails, red tape), you might eventually come to dread the orders that you once hoped for.

It’s okay for the money to roll in without your awareness; in fact, that’s the goal.  Plan well.  Your prospects will appreciate the ease of payment, and you will appreciate the ease of receiving that same payment.

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

Have you ever ordered an item online or from a shopping catalogue? If you have, you probably know that feeling you get when your anticipated purchase arrives in the post. The satisfaction of finding a great product is nothing compared to the thrill of actually laying your hands on it.

If there is any potential to present your business offering in the form of a product that your clients can physically see and touch, you need to take some time to explore this option.

By physical, I mean something that is in a box, something that you can physically send to a client’s home or office. Physical products can be anything from books to audio recordings to DVD video. Your physical product might very well be in multiple formats, where you offer a combination of audio, video, and written material.

It may require considerable time and effort on your part, but creating a physical product can make a huge difference in your business revenue. Here are six strong reasons for you to seriously consider creating your physical product:

•    One of the major benefits of producing a physical product, or any product for that matter, is the fact that you do the work once. But, that one product can sell over and over and over again. While you’re sleeping, enjoying dinner, shopping or vacationing, your product can continue to make money for you.

•    You can charge more for physical products. It’s less expensive to download an ebook or mp3 recording than it is to purchase a hardcopy, printed book or a CD. By their nature, digital products have a ceiling. Clients are not going to pay £500 or £1,000 for a digital product. But, people absolutely do pay that much for physical products. The client’s perception of the value of the product is changed when it’s physical. They’ve got something to have and to hold.

•    A physical product also increases your brand awareness. Because your product is in some way, shape or form, concrete and tangible, clients will have some ties to it. They have to handle it.

•    In a sense, your physical product is serving as built-in follow-up for you. Your best prospects are always those people who have actually bought from you already. They’re the people who are most likely to buy from you again. Your product, out on their desk, will constantly remind them of you when they look at it. Being reminded of you through your physical product is a good way to continue your relationship with your clients.

•    Physical products increase the user’s consumption. It’s easy to download a digital product from the internet, which I am a big proponent of. But often, clients will read the information when they get it, store it somewhere on their computer and never go back to it again. You don’t want people just buying your products, you want people using your products and having success with them. It makes sense to physically create and send products. Even if it’s just a CD sitting on the corner of their desk or on their bookshelf or in their car, it’s sitting there as a reminder. “You bought me, use me.”

•    A physical product increases your exposure. Someone may see it on your client’s desk and inquire about it, or it will be fresh in your client’s mind to share their discovery with others. Word-of-mouth sharing is your best and least expensive way of advertising.

It’s well worth your time to assess your business, and take into account all of the criteria to see if physical products make sense for your market. Physical products can be complex to create, but there’s nothing complicated about their payoff.

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

What if you could enjoy genuine client abundance: all the clients you want, whenever you want, paying the fees that you want?  One answer is to only target those people who are truly interested in what you’re offering – those people with their hands raised in response to your proposed solution.

Though rejection is an inevitable part of business and life, it doesn’t have to be a dominating factor.  In fact, it can be a miniscule, barely noticeable speck in a sea of limitless clients.

You can’t sell to everyone.  You don’t have the time or resources to do so, and no single product will appeal to every member of any population.  In order to identify those who are most likely to buy, you need to devise a method to pick out the prospects with their virtual hands raised, who are ready to accept your single solution to their shared problem.

There are two types of disappointment when you try to sell to people who just aren’t interested.

• First, you might feel that you, yourself, have been rejected. It’s easy to convert rejection of a product into rejection of yourself, and without the tools to manage those feelings of rejection, negative effects can flow into your business dealings.

• Second, you might be able to sell your product to people who aren’t truly in need of it, or aren’t interested in it, simply because you are a smooth operator.  The consequence of this scenario will most likely leave you with a sleazy feeling, knowing that you’ve manipulated other human beings into doing something they weren’t comfortable with.

In order to increase your bank of yes and deplete your bank of no, it’s important to ask the population, “Who’s interested?”  When you do that, a percentage of the population will raise their hands.  Consider that group of raised hands to be your new sea of prospects.  Don’t worry about those who have kept their hands in their pockets – they would have had no choice but to say “no” anyway.  Though your product might be a God-send for some, it’s never going to be right for everyone.

Isolating the group with hands raised saves you time, effort, and the fortitude that it takes to recover from rejection.

Here’s the progression – from getting those hands up in the air, to optimizing their potential:

• Find a lead generation system that plants the seed, poses the thought-provoking questions, and sparks enough interest to spur interested people to raise their hands.

• Offer a free report. Ensure that your report aligns fluidly with your product.  Like a chain with all links unbroken, your message must be kept uniform and in order.  This way, you’ll ensure that the people you’re attracting are the same people who are likely to buy. Remember, your initial contact with prospects must align with what the market is searching for.

• Shift your marketing focus to those who show an interest in what you’re selling. They are your true ‘prospects’.  This is the group that is predisposed to buy.

• Tell the people with their hands raised why their instincts are correct. When hands are raised, it means that the owners of those hands have a problem, and they think you might have the solution.  Let them know they’re right.

• Keep your message (your solution to their problem) uniform from first taste to final sale. Your execution must be as groundbreaking as your great ideas.

Your product is wonderful, problem-solving, ingenious…and there is a group of people out there just waiting for it.  It’s your job to find those people.

Make the effort to isolate the hands that are raised, using a message that not only attracts, but delivers.  Doing the right things, in the right way, in the right order, puts money in the bank.  When you execute seamlessly from the beginning, you will learn to view the raised hand as a springboard to raised revenue…a virtual deposit slip for your growing bank account.

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

“I want to buy that.” This is the immediate reaction you want people to have when they first see your offering: You want them to have that reaction before they even know the price.

To make that happen, you need to create products that are irresistible. There are a few universal principles to develop truly appealing products.

1. Find a hook. Recognize the “miracle cure” the public is looking for, and present your product as the closest thing possible to that miraculous fix.

One example is Yanik Silver’s Instant Sales Letters product.  Yanik has achieved great success with this product. They are his “miracle cure” for people who need to create effective sales letters, but don’t have enough time to write them. So he put together some fill-in-the-blanks templates to make it easy to prepare sales letters.   Of course, clients may have to do some tweaking to make a template work for their specific purpose. But the point is, they work.  Even if the template needs to be revised, they’ve still got a Sales Letter. And that is very attractive to people with little extra time.  The Instant Sales Letter product is a hook for them – the “miracle cure”.

2. Focus on the content first and the format second.

When you are planning your content, think about what you’re going to cover rather than how you’re going to cover it. Don’t decide that you are going to offer an e-book or a teleseminar until you know what information you will be including.

The format should be secondary. It should be based on what makes the most sense for your market, and what fits best with the product.

As you are mapping out your content, outline everything that your product will cover. You don’t need to include every single detail you know about the topic. Include the information your prospect needs in order to get the results they want. Include the detail that will get their immediate attention because you’re providing the solution they need.

Brainstorm all of the things that your end user will need to get the results that your product will deliver. Write the question “what will they need” in your journal, or put it up in your office. It will act as a prompt for your subconscious mind to come up with the answers.  Use can these answers to create your outline.

3. Use the “why-what-how-what if” format.

Why is each particular point important?
What is the specific item or step in the process?
How will the user implement it?
What if things don’t go according to plan?

Using this format helps you to bring the pieces of your product together.  It allows you to edit as you plan. You are assembling what you already know, putting it together quickly and editing it quickly into a usable format.

4. Be flexible and open to the fact that your outline may change. That’s okay. You will still have the main outline, the “bones of the structure”.  You can always move the main elements around until you get the right fit.

5. You don’t have to create your product in the order that you’re going to deliver it.

Create your product in the way that will allow you to get it done quickly. Start with the areas that are easiest for you. That will give you some momentum to keep going with the more challenging elements of your product.

Once you’ve paid careful attention to these points, you will be able to quickly create a product that clients will be clamoring to buy because it resolves their needs and wants.

Use these steps to get started on creating your irresistible product.  Give your clients what they are asking for, give them what they WANT!

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