Instant Income – News and Advice

How to Craft Offers That Bring In the Cash

Typically in any ad, sales letter, webpage or other marketing device, you’ll want to talk about the features and benefits of your product or service first — before detailing the offer. (Remember that the offer includes elements like the price, purchase terms, any discounts, cut-off date to purchase and so on.)

If you’re writing a longer direct-response style letter or webpage, before detailing the actual offer, list what’s included in the product or service package you’re selling, the benefits a customer would receive, the new lifestyle they’ll enjoy once they own the product or service, testimonials and case studies, and any other compelling information.

All copy that sells the reader on the package being offered — before you ever mention the price.

This proven formula — of discussing all the benefits before discussing the price — is a formula that could literally transform the response rates you’ve experienced in your marketing efforts so far.

By the time you finally discuss the price — that is, the actual offer — you have two things in your favor:

(1) a committed, qualified reader who is interested enough to have read this far into your sales letter or ad, and;

(2) a potential buyer who is virtually pre-sold to the point where price almost becomes no object. In fact, if you’ve done your job of presenting your product or service in such a way that the reader simply must have it, price will NEVER be a deciding factor. If the reader wants it bad enough, they’ll find the money to purchase.

Start writing the offer by restating briefly what the buyer will get when they purchase and what their results might be if they buy. Then — and only then — mention the price of your product or service. When you structure your offer this way — and after reading about everything they’re going to get and the major changes that will happen in their life as a result of buying from you, the prospective buyer’s natural reaction should be, “Wow, I’d pay anything for that.”

Are you enjoying this continuing series of proven Instant Income methods? Watch for my next email and blog post — arriving in your inbox soon.

To guarantee you receive it, click to subscribe my RSS feed, or sign up for my FREE Instant Income Planner on the right.

Then, tell me about your idea for an offer: Do you have questions about what offers to make in your ads, sales letters and webpages? Want to ask about developing a compelling price or product bundle?

Leave a reply below and let me know.

Turn Customer Service Into Instant Income

This is the definition of great customer service: Constantly thinking of the customer’s needs.

In fact, you’ll find that if you pay enough attention to their needs, customers won’t leave you even if you (or they) move several hundred miles away.

How can you turn great customer service into instant income?

The easiest way is to watch a customer’s usage or purchasing pattern, then call to take their re-order before they run out of supplies and purchase from someone else out of convenience.

For example, I once heard of a veterinarian who calls pet owners just before their medications run out. Or what about the postcard and discount offer I receive from my car dealer just when I need to have my oil changed?

Assigning customers to a regular customer service person is another good way to create repeat business.

Dedicated customer service representatives can learn all about the customer, discover their business or personal  needs and greet them warmly when they call.

Not surprisingly, these reps make the best telemarketers for your special offers because the customer is more comfortable hearing from someone they know and trust.

If your customer service department is experiencing a slow period in this economy, it’s a great time to put them to work calling customers with new offers.

Help them change their posture today — from reactive to proactive.

Small Business Loan Defaults Threaten Massive New Wave of Unemployment

I thought I’d share my latest press release with you, as small business is really hurting as small business lending dries up… now is the time to take action.

(PRWEB) July 30, 2009 — First it was Wall Street. Now it’s Main Street that’s being buffeted by the economic crisis. But while Wall Street was bailed out with Federal stimulus money, there is no stimulus plan yet for the small business sector, which traditionally employs 95% of the American workforce. Countless small businesses are defaulting on bank loans, seeing their credit lines cancelled, closing their doors and laying off employees.

And that failure rate is skyrocketing threatening the economic recovery.

“The problem is really two-fold,” says Janet Switzer. “Current loan customers are failing to make their payments to local banks–which means banks not only have less money to lend to other small businesses, they’re forced to modify the credit lines they’ve written already. Add lower consumer spending to the mix, and small businesses just can’t get enough cash to keep their doors open.”

Only two choices face most small businesses now, says Switzer. “You can cut costs and reduce the business to a shell of its former self–or you can re-focus your entire company on creating cash that will replace falling sales and begin a new growth pattern. Too often, businesses fall into a routine where the majority of the focus in on maintaining the business–not on growing it.”

When slow times come, this “maintenance mindset” is not only hard to shake, it actually hastens the decline of the business as it prevents the owner from changing with the times.

“Fortunately,” says Switzer, “there are steps you can take.” Switzer’s upcoming Instant Income Program  helps small businesses create cash now, but also establish cash-producing systems in their business to prevent the need for stop-gap, emergency measures in the future. But before that program is available in late August, Switzer is making available her free Instant Income 10-Day Turnaround Program to help small businesses create emergency cash.

What are steps a business can take to create cash now?

1. Generate new customers through direct-response advertising techniques and other prospecting strategies that cause an immediate response from consumers. Make specific offers in your ads for appealing product or service packages.

2. Create a three-page Internet selling system that compels visitors to opt-in for a free download, then sells them on an entry-level product or service.

3. Get your sales force focused on following-up on leads–downselling prospects into less expensive packages if necessary. If you’re a solo entrepreneur, use voice broadcasting and email to follow up yourself.

4. Start monitoring your business’s key profitability indicators. If something’s not profitable, stop doing it. If something is very profitable, expand it.

5. Assign new-business development to a single staff person whose job it is to recruit referral sources, develop more distributors and dealers, find non-traditional sales opportunities and pursue other expansion strategies. In addition to the free Instant Income 10-Day Turnaround Program, her free Instant Income Planner describes 10 immediate expansion strategies small businesses can implement now.

6. Start using smart media strategies to garner free publicity in your local market. Determine what’s newsworthy about your business, tie your product or service to current news story or trend–then work with local editors to get an article in your local paper. Use Internet distribution of articles to drive sales by phone for unique product bundles.

7. Re-configure staff positions to create an offline promotions manager, Internet promotions manager, affiliate manager, and other jobs that can initiate cash-flow producing activity. Or use pay-for-performance hiring strategies to bring on cash-producing professionals for the first time.

Scarcity and the “Take Away” Close

In this continuing short-course about crafting compelling offers that generate Instant Income for a small business, two techniques we use on the sales floor that translate very well into written product and service offers are scarcity and the take-away close. 

Scarcity — or a limited supply — works well in crafting offers because it entices the reader to call immediately to purchase one of the few available units or book one of the few available appointments. This boosts your response rate, but also creates a more immediate response meaning more instant income in your bank account.

The take-away close is very similar.  After writing page after page selling the reader on your product or service — to the point where they’re sold but they just need to know the price — you actually take-away the opportunity and hint that they may not actually be able to purchase.  And what do people want when they think they can’t have something? They want it even more.  This technique tends to reduce price objections when you do finally discuss the price in your written offer.

One way to use the “take away” close is by stating that the reader must qualify to purchase.  Of course, in your promotion, you may not actually want prospects to fill out an application (which requires costly staff time to review), so instead you might have them call your sales department for an “assessment”… or you might have them submit specific documentation along with their purchase… and so on.  You can also ask the reader to pre-qualify themselves, using language in your written offer such as: “To qualify as a select client…”

What kind of scarcity or “take away” close could you use?  Think through the products and services you sell right now, then jot down some notes.  To help others learn, to, why not post your scarcity or “take away” offer on my blog?

Tell me by leaving a reply below.

Until next time,

Janet Switzer

P.S.  Are you enjoying this continuing series of proven Instant Income methods?  Sign up for my RSS feed , then watch for my next email and blog post — arriving in your inbox soon.

Offers That Bring In the Cash

When it comes to making compelling offers in your advertisements, sales letters and webpages, I like offers that say:

There’s only one package, it includes these items (or services), the price is this, and here’s why that price is such a great deal.

I never recommend gimmicks like bronze, silver and gold packages with different benefits and different prices. Too many choices can confuse the reader — and a confused reader will say “no” every time, rather than struggle through too many details.

Unlike the Two-Step Offer I talked about previously, a “straight sale” offer is designed to close the sale and persuade the reader make a buying decision solely from the piece they’re reading at that moment. This might be a letter, a newspaper ad, an email… even a postcard. It’s designed to induce the reader to act immediately on what they read and make a purchase from you.

What kinds of straight sale offers work? Here are the top five:

1. Limited Time Offer. It works well if you’re promoting a service with an upcoming start date or a product where the special pricing or combination of items in the product bundle won’t be available after a certain date. Why? Because there’s a time limit for people making a buying decision. Limited-time offers convey a “sense of urgency.”

2. Discounted Price Offer. I dislike random or percentage-off discounting because I think it sends the wrong message to your prospect — that somehow when you charged full price you were charging more than was reasonable or fair. But if you have a legitimate reason to discount, this kind of offer works well. If you sell equipment, for example, and recently bought inventory of the newest model, you could say, “We just received a shipment of the brand new XK-48 Widget. But we also have lots of the previous model left over. They’re still excellent units, but you know what? We need to sell them to make room in our warehouse. We have 127 units left. As a favor to you, we’re going to offer it to you, not at the original price of $995, not even at the discounted price of $695. We are going to offer it to you for our cost — just $422.68.”

3. Limited Availability Offer. This is a very effective offer for any kind of service that people are eager to schedule. For example, once the weekday morning downtime in your day spa is filled, you won’t be able to offer your premium aromatherapy massages at half-price anymore just to fill your schedule. There is tremendous incentive in these types of offers for people to respond before all spots are taken.

4. “Don’t Let Competitors Respond First.” This is a very compelling offer, particularly for high priced business products or services where you are able to limit who you sell to. Being naturally competitive, most business owners will jump at the chance to be the one and only person who captures the product or service you’re offering — thereby cutting their competition out of the running for your product or service. It causes prospects to decide more quickly…and to not think about it too much.

5. Free Bonus. You may have heard other marketers say, Sell the Sizzle, Not the Steak. What this means is that you create your offer in such a way that you talk more about the valuable bonus than you do about the actual product or service you’re selling.

In my next blog post, I’ll give you a short tutorial to help you write your own offers.

Have you registered to get the blog feed yet? Don’t miss what’s coming up. Click here to add my RSS feed.

Finally, feel free comment on what you’ve read so far. What changes, if any, will you make to the way you promote and sell your products and services? What kinds of offers are you making right now that work.

Tell me by leaving a reply below.

Until next time,

Janet Switzer

How To Make Offers That Compel Prospects to Buy

Direct-response copywriters have known for decades that one way to boost cash-flow immediately in your business is to write compelling copy — in your ads, sales letters and webpages — that causes the reader to make a purchase. But if you don’t have this specialized copywriting experience, you can still execute the Instant Income strategies and bring in the cash by remembering this key principle: Make specific product and service offers in your ads and marketing copy.

So many businesses say things like, “We have quality products,” or “We have low prices.” But instead of sounding like every other business in town, why not make an specific offer instead that has a sense of urgency about it and gets people to pick up the phone and call you to purchase?

If you have an air-conditioning service company for example, you could say, “For the next 14 days, we’ll install a brand new top-of-the-line heating and air conditioning unit for just $3,285 including a 5-year-written warranty and free replacement filters for as long as you own your home.” That’s a lot different from just, “We have low prices.”

Making specific offers like this is one of the easiest Instant Income strategies to execute because it’s just a matter of changing the way you advertise your products in print or tell people about your company when they call on the phone.

To help you formulate specific offers, take time now to jot down your most popular product or service packages, your most popular pricing plans, and any discounts that customers respond enthusiastically to. These elements — that is, the product or service being sold, the price, the buying terms, any discounts, the limited supply, cut-off date for purchasing and so on — are all part of any compelling offer.

Jot down what’s worked for you in the past — you can post your best examples on my blog to help your fellow small business owners formulate ideas of their own.

And if you still need help with offers that work, stay tuned for my next post when I’ll list the top 5 most proven types of offers.

Until next time,

Janet Switzer

Converting Two-Step Responders Into Cash-Paying Customers

A two-step offer that convinces someone to take the next step — to call for more information or to click through to a website or to schedule an appointment with a sales representative — will be successful only if the “next step” item is valuable and appealing — and actually converts the prospect into a cash-paying customer.

What can you offer?

• A free teleseminar about a controversial new law or other matter that affects the prospect’s livelihood, lifestyle, health or career. You can also record the telseminar and make that recording available for download at your website for future prospects.

• A free audio CD or DVD explaining a new process or service. You can also sell the CD as a $9.95 sampler product.

• A free printed special report—or less expensively, a colorful PDF file you can email to them (or have them download at your website) once they identify themselves to you.

• A free sample monthly issue of your ezine or other periodical.

• A free buyer’s guide that helps the prospect compare all suppliers of a particular item or service—written in such a way that your product or service ranks near the top. You can easily create this document using colorful graphics, then distill it into a PDF file for easy, free delivery via email.

• A free 14-day business short-course on a specific topic—delivered via email using an autoresponder service.

• A free weekend seminar or evening workshop where you present an expensive service or consulting package for sale.

• A free evaluation by one of your specialists (who are, in reality, trained salespeople).

• A free session with your assessment team to see if the prospect qualifies to become your client or customer.  If you have a high-profile consulting practice, sell exclusive dealerships by territory or otherwise limit whom you sell to, you can run a “see if you qualify” campaign to sift through prospects and choose only those you really want to work with. This technique also works to instantly boost sales from these prospects because it employs what’s called the “take-away” close.   It sets up the notion in the prospect’s mind that they might not be able to have what you’re offering. And how do people react when they think they can’t have something? They want it even more.

Of course, income from two-step campaigns is not as “instant” as other income, but it often gets generated more easily.

When you do the advance work of getting people to contact you for more information or to get something free or to see if they qualify, you completely change the sales dynamic and make it much easier to sell to these leads.

An especially good technique is the “see if you qualify” offer, since it often turns the tables and causes the prospect to start convincing you to let them buy what you’re offering.

Two-step campaigns, while more time-consuming, can also help you sell to a larger percentage of readers than you might by advertising your entire offer and your big price tag—which you can’t possibly explain or justify in a limited display ad space.

These campaigns very often save on advertising dollars, too, since you can run a much smaller ad or mail a short letter with a compelling headline and a few lines of marketing copy—ending with an invitation to “call or click” (by telephoning or visiting your website).

Are you enjoying this continuing series of proven Instant Income methods?

Then, tell me about your idea for a two-step campaign: Do you have questions about what to talk about in your ad? Want to ask about crafting your conversion package? Have you tried a two-step campaign before but experienced difficulty I can help you with?

Leave a reply below and let me know.

Until next time,

Janet Switzer

How to Run a Two-Step Advertisement

An ad that specifically offers further sales help or an information package, sample or other giveaway is called a two-step ad.

Step One is using your display advertisement to compel prospects to contact you for more information.

Step Two is converting the prospect into a paying customer through: Mailing a printed literature package, making a sales call to prospects who identify themselves to you, following up with future telemarketing or email offers, or making an in-store sales pitch when prospects visit your store.

Often times, smart marketers will use a variety of sales devices in the follow-up package: Audio CDs of interviews, DVD brochures, PDF files of a colorful brochure that can be immediately emailed to prospects (instead of a printed package that must be mailed through the Post Office), printed reports, and so on.

Successful two-step ads are most often written in “direct-response style.” You’ve probably seen these style of ads — full-page, half-page and fractional-page ads that look like articles with a headline and column after column of text.

Smart two-step advertisers use this type of display ad because direct-response advertising has long been known to generate greater response and more revenue than highly designed, graphically pleasing, more “attractive” ad agency-style advertisements.

Done right, display advertising is also one of the most cost-effective vehicles for getting information out about your products and services to thousands of people. Plus, depending on how your products and services are priced, the return-on-investment (ROI) can be substantial.

The best place to advertise if you’re selling products or services that cater directly to small businesses or large corporations is in trade publications.

Unlike huge consumer publications such as Newsweek or the Los Angeles Times, “trade pub” readers are more likely to want what you have to offer.

Plus, you end up paying only to reach people who are perfect prospects to buy what you’re selling. By contrast, Newsweek goes to millions of readers who will likely never buy your business-related product.

What if you don’t sell to businesses?

Even products and services that appeal to consumers can be far more easily (and economically) advertised in non-mainstream publications. Determine first who your consumer prospects truly are, then look for publications they likely read.

Are they sports fans? Arts patrons? Wine connoisseurs? Gardeners? Boating hobbyists or bass fisherman? World travelers? Executive women? Teenagers? Start compiling a list of likely publications—either local or nationally distributed—where you might advertise.

Write your ad as if you were selling the actual product or service. Craft a compelling headline that gets prospects to read the entire ad. Talk about how your product or service is a solution to the reader’s pain — or alternatively, how it will help them accomplish a goal or pursue a specific ambition.

Fill your ad with the benefits of your product or service (not just the features) and, of course, the benefits of doing business with you or choosing your product over the hundreds or thousands of other option they might choose.

Perhaps the most singular feature of these direct-response style advertisements is their focus on the reader—rather than on a list of reasons why your business is so wonderful.

What will your product do for the reader? How will it help them? What will their lifestyle, relationships, business, personal finances, career, free time, health, abilities, skills or other personal attributes look like once they are using your product or service? What has it done for other people? What is the superior customer benefit of doing business with you versus the competition—once the prospect has decided to buy this particular product or service? What are the further benefits of doing business with you? These are all benefits that you should be writing about in your advertising copy.

Be sure to include a copywriting element called a “Call to Action” or CTA. Detail exactly what the reader should do to respond and get the information package (Step Two of the two-step campaign) — whether it’s opting-in at your website or calling your office by phone.

In my next blog post, I’ll tell you what to do with the potentially thousands of prospective new customers who respond to your two-step ad.

Finally, feel free comment on what you’ve read so far. Are you beginning to think differently about generating new customers — and ultimately cash — for your business?

Tell me by leaving a reply below.

Until next time,

Janet Switzer

Two-Step Marketing

Two-step marketing is a prospecting system where you break the sales process into two or more parts. It’s often the best system to use when the prospect needs to be educated before they will purchase, when you sell expensive or high risk products (investing, advertising, cosmetic surgery), or when it’s important for them to try out your product or service before buying.

Here’s how it works:

In Step One, you use advertising vehicles — such as newspaper advertisements, radio spots, direct mail, press releases, contextual search on the Internet — to offer free information, sample items, a demonstration, a special report, an audio CD preview and so on to encourage prospects to identify themselves to you.

In Step Two, the informational item you promised does the job of converting the prospect into a buyer — or your salespeople follow-up with prospects once they’ve received or experienced the free item or service, then close the sale by telephone.

Just a few examples of two-step prospecting are:

• Expensive resort timeshares that offer you free vacations
• Ads that offer a free information kit when you call a toll-free phone number
• A martial arts studio that offers a free lesson or a health club that offers a free trial week

Why does two-step prospecting work?

First, your sales team wont be prospecting for cold leads, but rather will be focusing on well educated and well qualified prospects. Secondly, a compelling special report, audio CD, or DVD preview can be sent inexpensively to thousands of people at a time (or distributed free via the Internet at no cost) — converting a much larger group of prospects than you and your sales staff might ever be able to talk to personally personally.

In my next blog post, we’ll dig into two-step marketing in earnest by discussing how to run a two-step advertisement in the newspaper, a magazine, on the Internet and elsewhere.

Have you registered to get the blog feed yet? Don’t miss what’s coming up. Click here to add it to your feed reader.

Finally, feel free comment on what you’ve read so far. Are you beginning to think differently about generating new customers — and ultimately cash — for your business?

Tell me by leaving a reply below.

Until next time,

Janet Switzer

Prospecting For Instant Income

Prospecting smart is important. Why? Because the marketing of your business is just too big of an investment, too valuable an asset and too time-sensitive an activity to market any other way.

You can’t just look at a single random lead-generation campaign — done infrequently or haphazardly — and get any kind of definitive analysis as to how it will improve your business.

You can’t just focus on one ad or one letter or one commercial and hope that tweaking it will change your business.

You have to look at the whole process, from start to finish, and ask yourself:

• Who are my ideal prospects and how can I get my offer heard, seen or read by more of them?  How can I get more of them to open the envelope, call on the phone, ask for the information kit, respond?

• Does what I’m doing make sense or am I simply doing it this way because it’s how we’ve always done it?  How can I do it easier, faster, with less risk? How can I use one person or one business to reach many more of my ideal prospects while they’re in a buying mind-set?

• What method can I use that other industries use effectively, but that none of my competitors uses?

• What can I do to change my prospecting so I do more of it? Lower the cost? Run smaller ads?  Supplement with free press releases?  Automate the response method so my staff doesn’t get overwhelmed with phone calls?

•  Is it easy for my prospects to say “yes” to my offer and take action?

• How can I get endorsements from my customers, vendors, competitors, business neighbors or any other business that is already serving my ideal prospect?

Prospecting the Instant Income way means not only that you run prospecting campaigns consistently, but that you use more than one prospecting method AND make it easy for buyers to say “yes” to you.

Ready for the checklist of proven Instant Income prospecting methods?  Watch for my next email and blog post — arriving in your inbox soon.

To guarantee you receive it, click below to subscribe my RSS feed.  Then, tell me about your biggest prospecting challenges: Do you find yourself constantly start-stopping? Is it too expensive to reach the people who should be buying from you?  Are you frustrated as a local retailer because ‘everyone’ could be your ideal customer?

Leave a reply below and tell me your biggest frustration in getting potential buyers to look a your product or service.

Where to Find Prospects

One thing you’ll learn as part of the Instant Income series is to pinpoint — or home in on — those folks who might be ideally suited to buy your product or service…people who, as a group, might have a need for it or an even stronger want for it.

The fact is, the number of prospects you generate (and the rate at which you convert them into customers) will almost always be higher when your message is read, heard and seen by qualified buyers vs. the unqualified masses.

That said, the flip side is also true: No matter how good your lead generation device is, your offer is or even your product is, when your message reaches an audience that doesn’t have a need or want for it, your prospecting effort will be futile.

How can the perfect universe of buyers be found?

By knowing who your ideal prospect is and then looking at who is already selling to those people you
want as customers.

Do you cater to people with a particular desire, taste, hobby, job, pet, car, business, fashion or other preference?  If so, it’s likely there are other businesses who are already selling them complementary items — luxury goods, pet care products, hobby tools and so on.

Either replicate what they are successfully doing to generate leads, rent the names of their customers, or do a joint venture with them where they endorse you and your product or service to their customers.

Let’s look at a few examples:

• A winery could rent a list of local subscribers to food and wine periodicals, then invite them to special events at the winery.

• A nutritionist could rent a list of local consumers who subscribe to fitness magazines and who buy supplements through mail order.

• Real estate agents who specialize in selling estate homes know their perfect buyer also owns an expensive car, subscribes to upscale magazines & doesn’t clean their own pool.  The names of local car buyers and magazine subscribers could be easily rented.  And there are dozens of pool maintenance companies to approach with a joint-venture deal.

• An advertising firm looking for new clients could read the Yellow Pages and easily determine that any business with a 1/2-page or larger is probably a great prospect because they already spend serious money on their advertising.

• A marketing consultant I once knew sent his receptionist to the service bay of the local Mercedes, Cadillac and BMW dealers to record which radio stations the car owners had their radio buttons set to. That’s how he determined which stations his client should advertise on.

• An antique store owner could band together with other area antique store owners to create a printed guide that would feature an ad for each store and a detailed map of how to find them.  They could even sell advertising to restaurant owners to defray the cost of printing the maps for each antiquarian.

Where shouldn’t you look for your prospects?

Anywhere “mass media” reigns — local newspapers (unless your product or service truly appeals to “everyone”), shopping carts, billboards, flyers or business cards left door-to-door or on cars in parking lots, ad packs, card packs, ad specialty items like pens and magnets, placemat advertising, and on and on.

While there are some situations where these advertising methods are advised, they’re usually just too expensive and reach too few genuinely qualified prospects.

Just keep your eye on the ball — that is, on your ideal prospect.

Building Instant Interest for Your Product or Service.

I received a great question today on my blog, and it prompted me to share something I used today for my own business…

First the comment:

Hi Janet,

I’d say that prospecting is an incredibly important and very time consuming endeavor. I’ve gotten good at one-on-one prospecting through workshop facilitation, but it is a very slow road to success doing it this way.

I need some ideas that will help me attract a much larger audience, with a much quicker turnaround time.

I’m looking forward to your thoughts on this topic.

Kathleen

Great question Kathleen, here are two ideas for you that I have used to attract large audiences:

1) Distribute a press release online.

Today, I released a press release on the challenges that small business owners — specifically those working from home — face in the current foreclosure crisis.  For this group, the struggle with making mortgage payments not only threatens their family’s home, but also the place where they conduct their business.  It’s a dual problem — and one for which Monday’s much-touted “Small Business Stimulus” holds little in the way of solutions.

As you probably heard, the new Administration in Washington announced a new stimulus plan to support lending to small businesses that was, like all political announcements, sure to get generate a lot of interest.

Because we tied the press release to a current news item, it was an instant hit.  In fact, within two hours of being released it ranked #1 on Yahoo’s small business news page and been added to hundreds of websites.  The phone has been ringing like crazy with media inquiries and prospective client calls.

The most important element of the press release was that it was based not only on newsworthiness, but also on keyword research — it included those words that small business people are searching for online.  Press releases like these also need to be written with news value in mind — it can’t be overtly promotional.

Here are the 24-hour results of the test: More »

Are You Strategically Prospecting?

Strategic prospecting means using new-business development approaches that enhance all your other marketing and sales efforts.

For example, let’s say you have a bonus or special customer benefit that seems to be the common thread helping you close sales.  Strategic prospecting means you would make sure all your marketing and advertising prominently communicates that bonus or benefit to prospects.

In fact, if you make that bonus or benefit the cornerstone of your marketing effort, you could easily have twice as many prospects… and close many more sales than you are now — because you’ve ‘pre-sold’ them with your prospecting effort.

Strategic prospecting also means that generating leads — who can later be converted into buyers — needs to be a continual, consistent process… not just an emergency effort when you desperately need more business.

This ongoing lead generating is especially difficult for consulting businesses, one-person businesses and other kinds of businesses that must stop prospecting once they land a new client or customer… in order to deliver the work.

It’s a vicious cycle, this constant stopping-and-starting.

But there are ways to prospect continually, not only so you generate potential new clients, but also so you build momentum and ‘leading expert’ status in the marketplace.

Another benefit to daily prospecting occurs when you invest in prospecting beyond what your industry “norm” has always been — when you find a new way to reach and communicate with your ideal prospects that’s different from what your competitors are doing.

Why get better at prospecting the same way everyone else does when “getting better” will improve maybe 5% to 10% — at most — upon what others have already refined?

Try something new and different, and suddenly you become a helicopter soaring over the competition — doing 25% to 500% better in your prospecting efforts.

See the difference?  Strategies from outside your industry can provide tremendous pedal power.

In my next blog post, we’ll dig into strategic prospecting in earnest by discussing how to begin looking for these prospects — including who to look for, where to find them, how to communicate with them and more.

Have you registered to get the blog feed yet?  Don’t miss what’s coming up.  Click here to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Finally, feel free to comment on what you’ve read so far. Are you beginning to think differently about prospecting and lead generation?  Tell me by leaving a reply below.

Until next time,

Janet Switzer

Help Your Customers Sell More to Their Customers

If your customers resell your products or services to someone else, the best way to improve your sales is to concentrate on helping these accounts sell more.

One way to generate instant income is to help your dealers, distributors, retailers and accounts sell more to their own database of names — through a proven strategy called “co-op marketing.”

With a co-op marketing program, you put up promotional items and/or bonuses that help your accounts sell more to their end users.

While your first reaction might be that co-op advertising is too complicated for your small business, rest assured that it doesn’t need to be.  In fact, you can create a simple program that’s easy to manage and low-cost, too.

Start by surveying your dealers and distributors with the message that you want to help them sell more.  Survey your least active accounts first.  Ask them what they need in order to sell more of your products and services:

• Do they need training, stand-up displays, special incentives for their sales force?
• Do they need a smaller sized package, different case quantities, or a different bundle of services than you offer?

Based on the answers you get, offer to deliver on their requests if a dealer will present a special offer to their customers.  What you’ll create is a true co-op program — meaning that both of you must take action.

Be aware that some dealers might want cash rebates made directly to dealers.  Or they may ask for manufacturer’s discounts, that are then rebated to the stores selling the product.  Avoid these cash giveaways. Investigate other ways to sell your products and services instead.