Introducing: Your Next Sales Super Achiever

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We all want to increase sales and grow our businesses. We also know that hiring and grooming a sales superstar is one surefire way of achieving those goals. Unfortunately, finding and retaining a sales superstar is a difficult task. Until you find the secret to make that a reality, here’s an alternate path to consider for reaching your sales goals.

Self-publish a book!

You read that correctly. One of the best ways to increase your sales and grow your business is to author and publish your own book. Self-publishing your book allows you to present your points to your target audience in an authoritative way — just like a sales superstar would.

Now, to be clear, we aren’t talking about writing a novel the size of War and Peace. Nor are we talking about writing a prize-winning book. This type of book is written specifically to bring you leads and the types of customers who are looking to buy what you sell.

They say everyone has at least one book in them, but no one tells you how to go about writing it. Being an author is on many people’s dream lists, but few go about actually accomplishing the tasks needed to bring a book to life. Perhaps that’s because writing a book seems so overwhelming. “It will take many years.” “I don’t know how to write a book.” “I don’t know what to write about.” These are some of the many excuses that stand in the way of making authorship a reality.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are five simple steps to get you going:

  1. Pick your topic title.
  2. Make an outline of your main topic and sub-topics.
  3. Choose three main subjects to write about.
  4. Think about ways you or your products/services go about solving your customers’ problems. Come up with 10-20 solutions.
  5. Write about and expand on one of those points one hour every day.

It really can be as simple as that. Within a few weeks, you’ll have the main part of the book finished and ready for editing. Finding nice cover graphics and having it printed is not difficult.

Imagine being able to hand a prospect your own beautifully printed book. Do you think that would establish credibility and open some doors?

Your own self-published book is the ultimate business card — and the sales superstar you can use to grow your business in ways not otherwise possible. What’s more, this kind of sales superstar has no ego and doesn’t call in sick either. There’s at least one book in you. Start writing it today.

The Five Dollar Workday

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Five Dollar Background

Henry Ford, the famous Ford Motor Company founder, was known for many things. Among them was his role in promoting the assembly line as a viable means for mass-producing automobiles, a process that made cars more affordable for middle-class Americans.

Ford had a global vision with consumerism as one of its centerpieces. He had an intense commitment to lowering costs through systemization and building a more process-driven company.

This focus made his next move (which is not as well known) quite a shock at the time.

The Five Dollar Workday

In January 1914, Henry Ford made a radical decision. He increased Ford Motor Company employee wages from $2.34/day to $5/day (equivalent to approximately $110 today) and reduced the workday from nine hours to eight.

While this was one of the most generous pay hikes of its time, Ford didn’t do this simply out of the goodness of his heart. At the time, the Detroit area was already becoming known for companies offering higher-than-average pay. In addition, the boredom of repetitious, assembly-line work led to higher employee turnover rates. One of the underlying reasons behind Ford’s move to increase wages was the desire to attract and retain top-notch employees by effectively creating golden handcuffs.

Ford used his PR machine and news journalist contacts to spread the word about the generous pay. Soon, there were thousands of applicants at every Ford factory, which allowed the company to hire only the best applicants. The fortunate hires stayed with Ford much longer than they otherwise might, since they couldn’t get similar pay elsewhere. In one bold move, Ford had managed to solve most of his company’s labor problems.

But higher employee retention was only one benefit of Ford’s plan. Within two short years of the pay raise, Ford’s profits increased by 200% to $60 million per year. Within five years, Ford Model T’s were rolling out at the rate of one every 24 seconds, much faster than the 12 days each had initially taken to produce. By the end of 1914, the 13,000 Ford Motor Company employees were producing 260,000 automobiles annually, while the rest of the automotive industry produced 280,000 combined.

At the time, much of corporate America did not view employees as an asset. Instead, they were seen as part of a company’s expense. With this single move, Ford was able to open the eyes of the corporate world. Ford had created a workforce that became a model for the eight-hour workday and HR departments of today. More importantly, he set the pace for the eventual rise of middle-class America. Ford employees could actually afford to buy one of the cars they produced.

With the $5-per-day pay hike, Ford was able to reduce employee turnover, increase the pool of high-quality applicants, reduce absenteeism drastically, and attract top-notch employees. The corresponding morale increase led to the highest productivity rates in history.

So what’s the moral of this story? What can we glean from it and apply to our own companies in the 21st century?

When companies shift their mindset from viewing employees as an expense item on the financials to an asset with vast potential, they can begin to see brighter possibilities for the whole company as well. Employees who truly believe they are appreciated and feel valuable to their company are much more likely to be highly productive and happy with what they are doing. Content employees are much less likely to actively seek opportunities elsewhere. Loyal, long-term employees lead to stability and customer satisfaction.

Henry Ford made a big splash with his five-dollar workday. The same kind of impact can be made today by implementing innovative ideas that show employees you appreciate what they do.

Studies and surveys have shown that higher pay is not the top motivator for employees to stay with their company. Feeling valued, being content in their role, and accomplishing larger goals are more important criteria. Find effective ways to instill those feelings in your employees, and you can make your own splash.

Your Unique Selling Proposition

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What’s a unique selling proposition (USP)? First the <em>Wikipedia</em> explanation:

<blockquote>”The unique selling proposition (a.k.a. unique selling point, or USP) is a marketing concept that was first proposed as a theory to understand a pattern among successful advertising campaigns of the early 1940s. It states that such campaigns made unique propositions to the customer and that this convinced those buyers to switch brands. The term was invented by Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates & Company. Today the term is used in other fields or just casually to refer to any aspect of an object that differentiates it from similar objects.”</blockquote>

A strong USP can mean the difference between being “just another company” and one that’s unique and memorable in the minds of customers and prospects. To do this, a USP must accomplish three things.

<ol><li>Each USP must make a strong appeal to the target audience. Not just words, not just product puffery, and not just window advertising. It must say to each reader: “Buy this product, try this service, and you will get this specific benefit.”</li>

<li>The benefit must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. In other words, it must be unique.</li>

<li>The proposition must be strong enough that it can attract new customers to your product or service on its own.</li></ol>

Here are some USPs you might recognize:

<ul><li>Nike: “Just Do It!”</li>

<li>Apple: “Think Different.”</li>
<li>Miller Brewing: “Tastes Great, Less Filling”</li>
<li>KFC: “Finger Lickin’ Good”</li>
<li>Subway: “Eat Fresh.”</li>
<li>Energizer: “It Keeps Going, and Going and Going…”</li>
<li>Head & Shoulders: “You get rid of dandruff.”</li>
<li>Domino’s Pizza: “You get fresh, hot pizza delivered to your door in 30 minutes or less — or it’s free.”</li>
<li>FedEx: “When your package absolutely, positively has to get there overnight”</li>
<li>M&M’s: “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand”</li>
<li>Metropolitan Life: “Get Met. It Pays.”</li>
<li>Southwest Airlines: “We are the low-fare airline.”</li>
<li>Walmart: “Always Low Prices. Always.”</li></ul>

Your USP is your unique answer to these questions:
<ul><li>Why should I listen to you?</li>
<li>Why should I do business with you instead of anybody and everybody else?</li>
<li>Why should I do something instead of nothing?</li>
<li>What can your product do for me that no other product can do?</li>
<li>What will you guarantee me that nobody else will?</li></ul>

There are two types of USPs: explicit and implicit.

<strong>Explicit USP</strong>
<ul><li>The message you lead with</li>
<li>Clearly stated in your marketing materials</li>
<li>Involves promises & guarantees</li>
<li>Aimed at new customers or first-time buyers of a particular product or service</li></ul>

<strong>Implicit USP</strong>
<ul><li>What customers love most about you</li>
<li>Things that keep existing customers coming back to you</li>
<li>May get mentioned by customers in testimonials & word-of-mouth referrals</li>
<li>You may go for years and never state it publicly: “We operate with absolute integrity.”</li></ul>

Whether you have a new business or an existing one that needs a stronger USP, here are some ideas to help you come up with a USP that translates to a benefit the customer wants. A strong USP can have some or many of these characteristics.

<ul><li>Faster service</li>
<li>More personal service</li>
<li>Services above and beyond the basics</li>
<li>Guaranteed on-time completion</li>
<li>Guaranteed delivery</li>
<li>Guaranteed friendliness</li>
<li>Guaranteed live phone support</li>
<li>Better prices</li>
<li>Exclusivity (“Ours is the only package that includes ‘x.'”)</li>
<li>Superior quality</li>
<li>Convenience</li>
<li>A better promise or guarantee of results</li></ul>

Your USP should be unique, useful, simple, and memorable. A well-thought-out USP can help you position your company in a powerful and strategic way. It’s never too late to strengthen your USP. Start today.

Is Your Business Card Bringing You Business?

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Typically, many hours are spent deciding on the logo, layout, and tagline to include on a company’s business cards. But not much time goes into thinking about strategies to make those business cards actually work to bring in customers. That is a mistake.

Business cards are like mini ambassadors for your business. They represent you, your company, and your brand. Business cards often provide the first impression a recipient will have of you and your company. They shouldn’t be just an afterthought in your marketing collateral mix.

To effectively market and advertise your business, whether through business cards, social media, or a website, the first step is to create awareness. Awareness is generated through uniqueness. The colors, stock, font, graphics, and unusual finishing touches like rounded corners or foil stamping and special die cutting can all add up to create a business card that stands out in a crowd.

Simple elegance and a clean, uncluttered layout work best. Sometimes more is learned about a business by the professional look and design of its business card than by almost any other marketing collateral. Prospects may forget about and toss out many other collateral pieces, but they usually keep an interesting business card.

Visually standing out is the first step to make a business card work to bring you business. The second involves the recipient and answering a simple five-word question…

What’s In It For Me?

The text on your business card must quickly and clearly explain the benefits of working with you. You can’t fit an entire brochure on the small area a business card provides (although some people try!). Most companies will list the services they provide. That is fine to do on the back of a business card.

On the front, however, where everyone looks first, you need to state clearly what results your products and services deliver. What is the primary benefit of working with your company? Make it short and sweet. Don’t hide it. Proudly display it on the front of the card.

The quality of the stock used, the font and layout, the finishing touches, and the copy used all work hand in hand to create a powerful, client-getting business card.

But those beautiful cards won’t do much good if they aren’t getting deployed. Take business cards everywhere you go. Put a stack in your car, in your wallet, and in your purse or briefcase. If you find the right target audience, hand them not one but several cards and ask them to pass the extras along to colleagues or friends who might be able to use your services.

Strategically thinking about the design, production, and copy on your business cards has the effect of creating a viral campaign for your business. Unlike the online variety, this is a viral campaign that can actually bring you real results and not just buzz in the marketplace.

Emotional Advertising

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Most advertising today is of the “me too” variety. When you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. The louder they yell: “LOOK AT ME!” the faster you want to toss the ad in the trash, change the channel, or click delete.

Open the yellow pages (if you can still find one!), look inside a magazine or newspaper, listen to a radio ad, watch a TV commercial, or take a look at your mail. Can you see any difference between most of the messages you encounter? Very few of the ads truly stand out.

Why does this ineffective method continue? Because competitors continually monitor each other. They conclude, without any real proof, that the competitor’s ads must be working. So they copy each other.

The line of thinking that goes with this method is to hit the audience over the head repeatedly until they cry uncle and buy something. This might work for a company with a massive advertising budget, but it is ineffective for smaller budgets.

If you want to create real wealth and grow your business, dump this method of old school, lazy, traditional thinking.

Start by taking a look at the most critical aspect of any advertising campaign: the message itself. Most ad copy lists a series of features. The better ones will also list some of the benefits you get from those features. But there is still something missing to make it stand out.

Most of us believe that we, as smart shoppers, make our buying decisions based on left brain logic. That may be true when we first start looking at a product or solution, but study after study has shown that most buying decisions are ultimately made with the right brain emotional side.

The way to hit a home run with your marketing messages is to appeal to that emotional side when prospects look at your product or service. To determine what emotional triggers work for your business, you’ll need to get inside your product or service to pull out what real solutions it provides. But that’s just the start. Next, you’ll have to tie the solution you provide to an emotion your prospect may feel about it. What pain does it solve?

The more emotion you can weave into your ad copy, the more effective your ad will be.

As an example, think about the luxury car market. Specifically Mercedes-Benz. Logically, it makes little sense to spend well over $60,000 to buy one of their higher-end models when a vehicle for less than half the price can get you from point A to point B just fine. How do they overcome this sales problem?

Sure, they provide a list of bells and whistles fit for a NASA space shuttle, but that’s not what really sells a Mercedes-Benz. The way they sell one is to appeal to the emotional part of the brain. The ads paint the picture of a countryside drive, sitting inside a quiet cockpit, where you can almost smell the luxurious leather. You can see yourself zipping around the curves while others look at you with envy. Mercedes-Benz is selling status, not just another car.

Emotions drive our purchasing decisions. We all tend to buy products from brands that make us feel good about ourselves or enhance our sense of self-esteem in some particular way.

Emotional advertising is not just for big brands with big budgets. It takes a little mental work to get to the message that will resonate for your audience, but the effort is worth it. Once you get to the core emotional hot buttons, your business and marketing messages will truly stand out from all the clutter.

9 Marketing Lessons to Grow Your Business In Any Economy

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Let’s get right to the lessons:

  1. Follow up.
  2. Follow up.
  3. Follow up.
  4. Follow up.
  5. Follow up.
  6. Follow up.
  7. Follow up.
  8. Follow up.
  9. Follow up.

Studies of sales practices continue to show that most salespeople don’t follow up more than one or two times after making a presentation or giving a quote.

Marketing is no different.

Most businesses will attempt to deliver one or two marketing messages and rarely follow up afterward. Unfortunately, one or two delivered messages will rarely produce tangible results.

We live in a world where people are bombarded by marketing and sales messages every day. So it’s unrealistic to expect one message — no matter how creative the graphics or how great the sales copy — will make it through that clutter.

Our logical minds would tell us that if our target audience wants the product or service we’re selling, they’ll take us up on the first offer we provide. But that’s not how it works in real life.

The reality is that most people’s busy, scattered lives often get in the way of acting on an offer, even if they had every intention of doing so. Whether we like it or not, the rules of the game have changed. For better or worse is debatable.

So what’s the solution?

Follow up. How many times? Start with two or three, and build from there.

Customers don’t always go for the lowest price. They buy from whoever they perceive will provide the best option. Businesses that communicate their value proposition regularly capture most of the attention and position themselves as the most obvious choice. By doing so, they make the buying decision easier.

Can you follow up without being a pest or nuisance?

The best salespeople aren’t pushy, but they are persistent. They present their case by providing valuable information so the prospect makes the best decision. That’s how your messages should be presented — useful information without the hype.

To get your messages read by your best prospects and your cherished customers, you must deliver them consistently and across several marketing channels. For most businesses, a combination of print, email, social, and web-based messages works effectively.

So what makes an effective follow-up marketing plan? Start by creating a compelling message that would have value for your audience. Spread that message across the most effective marketing channels for your business. Do it consistently. Rinse and repeat.

Following up on your marketing messages will make you stand out the same way as the salesperson who doesn’t give up after one presentation or quote. In the end, you’ll become the most logical choice when your prospect is ready to make their purchasing decision.

Please Don’t Ignore Me

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The bulk of marketing budgets is often reserved for acquiring new customers. Much energy, time, and money is spent pursuing prospects that have a marginally small chance of ever becoming a customer. There’s a flaw with this strategy.

The simplest and most effective way to boost your bottom line profits is to remember who brought you where you are today: your existing customers. If you aren’t consistently advertising and staying in touch with current and past clients, you’re missing out on the best way to continually grow your business.

For every month that goes by without making contact with your past and existing customer base, you’ll lose up to ten percent of the clients you’ve worked so hard to acquire. Retaining clients is therefore an extremely important business growth strategy.

Selling your services to new customers means earning their trust. It takes hard work to build this trust. When a prospect becomes a customer, you have only begun to earn their trust. You cannot expect to maintain that trust without consistent, frequent contact that adds some value for the customer.

One of the best ways to maintain and build that trust is to communicate regularly via a newsletter. An effective newsletter has a mix of about 80% infotainment (fun and informative content that may not have anything to do with your particular industry) and 20% information about your business or industry.

The recent trend of companies switching to all digital email newsletters is now reversing with the realization that actually getting the emails opened and read is far more difficult than many were led to believe. Also many survey respondents favor a printed newsletter that they can hold versus one more email that clutters their already overfilled inbox.

Sure, email newsletters are inexpensive and require no postage, but there is a cost involved when the recipients never see or open the messages. By contrast, a printed newsletter is still one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to stay in front of your customers without overtly selling them.

The Lifetime Value of a Client

Perhaps one of the reasons past clients are ignored is because some business owners don’t really know the lifetime value of a client. An existing client who is treated right, is not ignored, and is communicated with on a regular basis will not only return to do more business themselves but will also refer your company to those around them. Therefore the actual lifetime value is often five, ten, twenty (or even more) times the value of an initial sale.

That’s the power of relationship marketing and the reason why your existing customers should get the bulk of your marketing budget. If you treat your existing customers well and communicate with them on a regular basis, you may not need to chase as many prospects as you have in the past.

To learn more about defining and understanding your lifetime customer value, please visit: http://hbsp.harvard.edu/multimedia/flashtools/cltv/ (requires Flash).

Marketing That Works Today

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There are two broad categories of marketing you can use for your company, and it’s important you understand the difference. These two types of marketing are called brand/image marketing and direct response marketing. Although both can have a place in marketing your business, for small businesses one (direct response) is much more effective and efficient than the other.

Brand or image marketing works off the premise that you can create awareness for your business or products by building name recognition. As Wikipedia explains it, branding “involves associating a product name or image with certain qualities in the minds of consumers.” Successful brand marketing needs mass media like TV, radio, and billboards to push the message to a broad audience. For large companies with big ad budgets, this can be effective. Unfortunately, institutional marketing like this is difficult to track, making it hard to quantify a return on investment.

Fortunately for small businesses, there is a better way. It’s called direct response marketing, and it’s designed to generate an immediate response. This type of marketing has a message that — when delivered correctly — compels the receiver to respond by calling the business, walking into the business, or visiting the company’s website for a special offer.

Direct response marketing is typically delivered via print (catalogs, sales flyers, postcards, etc), radio, and the Internet. Ads are results-driven, so it’s easy to find out quickly if the campaign was successful or not. As a result, it’s much more effective for most businesses because it can be measured, tracked, and held accountable for its performance.

There are several effective direct response formulas. One of the most popular is: Attention, Interest, Desire and Action (AIDA).

Attention is captured with a compelling headline. The best headlines focus on benefits to the customer.

Interest is generated by telling a story. Explaining the process and care that goes into each of your products is an example of content that can generate interest to read further.

Desire is created with a compelling offer.

Action is prompted with a deadline (time sensitive: respond by) and a call to action (call today, come by to redeem, visit the website).

Whatever the formula, good direct response marketing uses reasons other than just price to get customers to call or visit. Using direct response marketing to tell your company’s unique story is a powerful weapon to help you stand apart from your competitors and increase the effectiveness of your ad campaigns.

Please Don’t Buy!

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One of the most important steps you have to take in order to attract ideal customers and grow your business is to actually know who those ideal customers are. That’s the first step that many understand. But there’s another, less understood and talked about step you should also consider, and it begins with a question:

What kind of customer should you repel?

That’s right. You need to figure out what types of customers you don’t want to attract and do business with. As counterintuitive as that sounds, it can be just as important as knowing who you want to attract.

The 80/20 rule tells us that in most businesses, 20% of the customers provide 80% of the profits. Knowing who you want to attract can help you greatly improve the odds of increasing the ratio.

At the same time, most businesses also have to deal with a percentage of customers who create the most headaches while providing little profit for the business. Knowing who you want to repel should help reduce the impact this group will have on you.

Knowing the types of customers you want to repel will have many side benefits besides simply increasing the bottom line. It will improve employee morale since coworkers will not have to deal with as many problem-causing customers each day. It will also allow you to spend more energy and resources on the customers who actually provide the most value and profits for your company.

Go through your existing customer list. Pick out the customers that provide the most headaches and the least profit for your company. Figuring out how to repel this type of customer could be as simple as raising prices enough to either make them not want to do business with you or, at the very least, make the pain of dealing with them more profitable and bearable.

The benefits of knowing what types of customers you don’t want can prove to be nearly as important as knowing who you would like as a client.

You Have to Be Easy

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Making it as easy as possible to do business with your company seems like a logical and simple concept, yet many businesses unwittingly create hurdle after hurdle for their customers to jump just for the privilege of doing business with them.

Customers are already overburdened with complexities, rules, and regulations. Companies that deliver with the least hassle win more business than others.

To be sure, there are some necessary steps and processes for each business transaction, but the task for every business should be to do away with as many of the unnecessary ones as possible.

Let’s take Apple computers and their packaging as just one example. An Apple product comes in a package that combines elegance, simplicity, and art. When you hold the typical Apple product package, you realize before even opening the box that this is a different kind of product. Everything has a place and reason. Much thought has gone into what is usually an afterthought with most companies.

Steve Jobs was known as an obsessive person. A big reason for his success was his obsession with removing complexity and simplifying. He knew that the company which removed the most confusion actually ended up gaining the most customers. Jobs wanted his products to be so simple and intuitive that they didn’t need an owner’s manual.

If you want to grow your business and for your clients to actually enjoy the buying process, you must obsessively work to continually remove as many obstacles as possible, while at the same time simplifying how customers buy from you.

Start by regularly asking yourself: “How can we make ordering from us even easier?”

It’s a process. You’ll know you’ve arrived when your customers actually have pleasant thoughts and smile when ordering instead of the typical angst most experience. Being the easiest to do business with will bring many long-term rewards.