How Well Do You Know Your Vendors?
It’s extremely important to build relationships with your vendors and those around you can bring in new customers/clients and increase awareness of your company branding.
The people you work directly with on your products and services are really the ones with the most to gain when you find success. By taking the time to get to know them, you’ll find a whole host of opportunities you didn’t realize were there.
Look for great ways to offer your vendors rewards for helping grow your business and everyone wins. One of ways you can do this is by offering performance based incentives that are much larger than their normal charges.
Here’s the step-by-step process to putting together a partnership with a vendor:
- Approach all the vendors you work with and offer an incentive based on performance.
- Put the generous incentive plan together from their perspective, even take suggestions.
- Develop a clear, concise and easy to track incentive plan, this will increase competition between vendors and therefore higher performance levels.
- Encourage subsequent sales instead of focusing only on the initial sale. By doing this you can give away more of the profit from the initial sale to your vendors and make higher profits off the back end products. Encourage:
- Future sales
- Upsell better and more profitable products/services
- Cross-sell to additional products
5. Create an incentive plan that’s irresistible to your vendors by offering generous, exclusive compensation.
Think of all the vendors you work with and the creative ways you can put together an incentive plan that entices them to be part of your business. Use their talents, capabilities and connections and you’ll both be winners.
Putting together an incentive plan doesn’t have to be a complicated process.
Use our GUIDED TOUR to come up with some great ideas and put your incentive plan together for maximum results.
Telemarketing is NOT Evil!
Today you’ll learn how to use direct mail marketing and, yes, telemarketing to your full advantage.
I know, the word “telemarketing” might as well be four letters, but there is a way to help customers feel like they are getting personal attention and keep them from blocking your number!
With the success direct mail marketing has had and the availability of computers, these can be used as a powerful marketing tool for your success. Telemarketing is best for high priced, high margin products/services.
Here are the key steps to putting together a highly effective direct mail marketing program:
- List all benefits customers will get from the purchase of your products and services.
- Pick the single most powerful benefit out of that list.
- Build an attention-getting headline around that benefit. Remember to use emotion-fulfill the desire to be young, wealthy, desired, popular or successful.
- Develop a sales letter using the headline you created to grab attention, provide information and motivate customers to act.
- Put together supplementary items, such as a brochure, order form, reply envelope or note that encourages them to read the letter.
- Rent or purchase a mailing list.
- Compare cost of mailing vs. cost per order.
- Continue to test and refine your direct mail marketing plan.
You can see how direct mail marketing can help you find a local or even country-wide target market to send letters or postcards to and draw in new clientele and customers. Fine-tuning your marketing campaign will bring better results and therefore lower the overall cost of the campaign.
To be successful in telemarketing you need to:
- Put together a plan, so you know exactly what you want to accomplish during the call.
- Develop a list of topics to discuss and the questions you want to present around these topics.
- Input verbiage checking to see if you are calling at a good time.
- Include enough questions to keep the conversation interesting, but not too many to sound like you are interrogating.
- Start with broad questions and narrow your focus as the conversation continues.
- Offer feedback to show them you are paying attention and appreciate their time.
- Don’t insult their intelligence or manipulate them.
- Listen first, talk second.
- Be relaxed and conversational.
Telemarketing doesn’t have to be the trauma it’s made out to be. You can put together an honest, personal and effective telemarketing campaign that is endearing, informative and gets the job done. Think of how you would want to be treated on a marketing call. Ask your friends and family what they hate most about the telemarketing calls they get and work hard to craft your plan in a better way.
“When selling by telephone, you have approximately thirty seconds to convince the customer to listen to you. You need an opening statement that captures their attention, conveys who you are, what you want and why the prospect should listen.” Jay Abraham
It’s easy to see how direct mail marketing and telemarketing can positively affect your business by bringing in new customers and increasing the level of awareness about your products, services and company branding.
Our GUIDED TOUR offers the resources and tools you need to work through these processes and put together the best marketing plan you can.
Turn Prospects into Customers Overnight!
Today I’d like to talk about how to turn prospects into customers and retain them for future marketing to.
While, your marketing is doing its job, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal.
You need to be:
- Inviting
- Informative
- Enjoyable
The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded buyer’s remorse. You want to avoid this at all costs and this should be mitigated if you’ve provided a quality product/service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made.
However, this can still occur.
There are two ways to deal with this:
- Offer to refund money-no questions asked
- Offer a bonus they can keep even if they return the product
These offers alone will also mitigate buyer’s remorse because the customer will trust you more, just for offering these things.
There are number of other ways to turn a prospect into a customer:
- Offer a special price as an opportunity for you to test the market.
- Offer a lower price with the reason of pushing inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s’ braces, or another tangible reason. Customers love that this makes you feel so much more human.
- Offer a referral incentive.
- Offer a smaller, more inexpensive product first to build trust.
- Offer package deals.
- Offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer.
- Offer extra incentives-longer warranties, free bonuses if ordered by a set date.
- Offer financing options, if applicable.
- Offer a bonus if they pay in full.
- Offer special packaging or delivery.
- Offer “name your own price” incentives.
- Offer comparative data or other comparison tools.
- Offer a trade-up or upgrade to something they already have.
- Offer additional, educational information to help them make the decision.
The options really are as limitless as you make it. You can use these or other ideas to find what works the best for your business, products/service and target market.
Remember this…
“By making it inviting, easy, informative, non-threatening, educational, inspiring and fun to do business with you, you’ll loft your company above the competition.”
– Jay Abraham
Need help with figuring out the best strategy for converting prospects into customers?
Our GUIDED TOUR gives you exclusive access to a mountain of resources and tools, along with information from some of the greatest marketing minds on Earth.
Make it Pop! Ads That Work…
There are 5 major components to good advertising copy: (The order of these is essential to success)
- Command Attention
- Showcase Benefits of Products/Services
- Prove the Benefits
- Persuade People to Embrace the Benefits
- Call to Action
Advertising is sales in print. So, you need to think about the unique benefits your products/services offer and showcase that in a persuasive way. You need to emphasize results, not features.
Let’s take a minute to talk about each of these components:
- Command Attention: This is usually accomplished with the headline. You need an attention-getter that makes people want to know more about your products/services. The best headlines give a vivid portrayal of the benefits or show how a problem can be avoided with your products/services. The headline is the advertisement for the advertisement.
- Showcase Benefits: You have to showcase the benefits of your products and services and, more importantly, show how they will solve or prevent a problem. They need to know what’s in it for them. Include useful, factual and clear information to show precisely what the benefits are and how they are going to help the customer.
- Offer Proof: This is where you prove what the advertisement is offering. You need to establish you have a method to deliver. Consider information that establishes credibility and past performance.
- Persuade: You need to add compelling reasons for your potential customers to purchase your products/services. Use a hard sell approach and create scarcity. This will enact your potential customers to feel like they have to act now. Which leads into the last component.
- Call to Action: You need to compel your potential customers to DO something. They need to check out your site, sign up for your newsletter, purchase your products, contact you about services…something. Offer a freebie-a booklet, sample, product, bonus, demo, consult, limited time price…the list goes on. There are lots of ways to get potential customers excited about ordering and help them feel like they are getting an amazing deal.
Good advertisements include all of these components and are not complete without any of them. You can sit down and think through any one of these components, then figure out how to best place them together for the most effectiveness. We can help you with this too.
Try our GUIDED TOUR to learn how to put together great advertisements from some of the best in the business.