Defining a budget for software development projects is something of an art form. Most cost projection tasks are the result of Client requirements, guesswork, gut feel and estimations that have little bearing on reality. Our Clients demand fair prices and solid proposals that they can go to their boss with for signature knowing that a reliable partner is standing by, waiting for the green light. These proposals need to be based on realistic estimations of our costs and our risks for delivering the level of quality that our Clients desire at a rate they can afford and in a time period that they want. Not many people are willing to discuss the topic but, the fact is, it has become a real challenge to deliver both a competitive quote and high quality result for Clients this past decade. The primary reason seems to be a lack of serious, responsible, dedicated and reliable individuals that are skilled in providing services on time, on budget and at the highest level of quality. One of our good fortunes is to have a strong team of A players already on board but a key component to delivering results that make our Clients happy is to deliver within 5% of our estimate.

Since hourly rates for coding, additional costs for rapid development and pricing of tools and other resources can fluctuate based on circumstances beyond our immediate control, we offer the following guidelines to help you create a consistent and justifiable budget that is also realistic.

The Basics
A budget is one of those pivotal tools that is used to make decisions in many areas of a company. When creating budgets please keep the GIGO rule in mind and input quality data as often as possible. For developers, budgets dictate the amount of time they can spend on specific areas of an application. For the project manager, it’s a baseline used to determine if the project is on track. For our Client, the budget correlates directly to the success of the effort. Regardless of circumstance, a number of basic philosophies can help your budgeting immensely by protecting it from subjective review. By understanding the basic concepts, and making sure that everyone involved understands them as well, you’ll be on the right track toward an accurate projection:

Identifying project costs 

When you’re identifying the costs of development, stay as close to reality as possible. Look at performance of the team members on past projects to get a feel for how long it will take them to program a given amount of code. Consult with your lead developer. Watch out for braggadocios estimates & consider multiplying your developer’s estimate by 3 to pad for your risk assessment stage. Remember to include costs for integration, meetings, security certificates, license fees, quality assurance, debugging, documentation, material costs, testing, deployment and planning time are all areas that need to be included in your estimate. Whether we will be billing our Client for these items or not, they are all valid and substantial expenses of a project. Including them will help you accurately measure the profitability of the solution down the road.

Be sure to itemize estimates for features that were not included in the specification. These are items that you suspect will be requested later on or those that would be beneficial to the final product. List these as options in your proposal and budget for them. Another good thing to up-sell is developer support time for about 60 days after launch. Often when a project is rolled out, support groups aren’t in place yet and thus many questions get deferred to the developers – plan for this eventuality.

Once you’ve got your costs outlined, it’s time to look at the probability of staying within those boundaries.

Risk
Risk assessment and assignment is very important to a successful budget. Without it, the crises that occur regularly and are an inherent part of any project, will affect your bottom line. Values in your estimate need to have this padding built in – it should not be considered a part of sales mark-up. Risk represents actual costs incurred over the course of development. Risk line items should include things like development team experience (or lack thereof), obscurity (supportability) of the technology used, planning time shortages, number of development teams, location of development teams, number of modular components, proximity and availability of the project driver, product dependencies such as databases or third-party software, server side technology, hosting configurations (cloud etc) and any unknowns.

Once you’ve determined your risk items, assign a scope and percentage to each. For example, if one part of your application is to be built in C and another in PHP, and your team consists mostly of C programmers, the PHP component may have a higher risk assignment under the ‘developer experience’ line item. The percent assigned should be applied only to the relevant portion of the project.

All projects have a certain amount of risk involved that can be attributed to human nature. People get sick, take vacation, disappear without notice etc. No one is an expert in everything. I always assign a percentage risk to this area – in addition to other considerations. Here is a sample of how we assess risk: An average 10-developer, 6-month project justifies a risk assessment of 7 percent of the total project costs. For longer projects and smaller teams, it will be higher; for shorter projects and larger teams, it will be lower. If your overall risk assessment is between 20 and 30 percent of the total project cost, you are within our operating norms.

Your actual total risk percentage will depend on your experience in evaluating the team and the pending effort. If, after calculating an estimate, your numbers are coming out too high, look at other projects delivered by your company. Did they actually fall within their budget? If not, your numbers may be justified. If so, you may be giving your team too little credit. Rectify project-to-project discrepancies before presenting your estimate to the project driver.

Regardless of how close you come to reality, a Client will be much happier if your project comes in below budget rather than over it; however, too high a risk value can create sticker shock, revealing inexperience and creating misgivings about your management abilities. By following the guidelines we’ve suggested and applying some common sense, you are more likely to deliver your upcoming projects on time, on budget and meeting your Client’s quality expectations. Remember that Time, Quality and Cost are interrelated. If you modify one of them, it will more than likely impact the others.

Having assessed and coached hundreds of executives including over 100 CEOs and presidents over the years, I have an idea about what ticks them off. One of their daily irritants is the way many people choose to communicate with them. The top three are stalling, withholding information and offering too much detail. Can you guess which one of these three has the highest potential to get an employee fired?

Communication allergy number one is Stalling.
When a person responds to a CEO’s question they should try to refrain from using phrases such as “It depends” and “I’m not sure but..”
The truth is that when a person responds in this manner, they state the obvious and then confirm that they either really don’t have a clue and can’t actually answer the question or that they don’t necessarily want to tell the truth.

If you want to keep your CEO happy, give a direct response in one to two sentences. Be honest, brief and intelligent. If your boss wants more of an explanation, they will ask for it.

Communication allergy number two is Withholding Information.
Your CEO is there to help solve problems and manage risks. If you decide that you know what you’re doing and deliberately try to solve a problem with a key account before involving the CEO, you are probably going to be looking elsewhere for employment and perhaps a bit more education. It’s amazing how many managers actually do this, risking their jobs and reputations at the same time.
Why would someone hide important information from the CEO? Simple, they know the CEO will blast them with questions: “Why didn’t you anticipate this? Why didn’t you do X, Y, and Z to prevent it? Why haven’t you done A, B, and C to fix it?” If you want to keep you CEO happy, summarize each situation that presents adversity, do a PPA on it and seek input from your boss – perhaps there is something that s/he can do to influence the outcome of this threat. A successful Swiss CEO that I know well used to have a boss who would send an army of analysts to question the team if he suspected that one of his directors was not telling him the whole truth. In order to put a fire out before it even got started, this successful CEO told his former boss during the first month of his employment at the firm: “I hear that you don’t like negative surprises, so I promise to keep you in the loop within a few hours of identifying and verifying that we have a problem. Please give me a day or so after that to investigate why it occurred and then I’ll get back to you with what we believe to be the most probable cause, what we’re doing to get back on track and how we plan to prevent it from recurring.” My friend and current CEO of the very same firm, was never was visited by that army of analysts.

Communication allergy number three is Too Many Details.
CEOs typically guard their time vigilantly so try not to waste a single moment with details on ‘how’ you plan to do something unless you are asked for such details. Use your time wisely and come to the point as quickly as possible. Never use suspense as a tactic when delivering information or responding to your CEO’s queries. This may sound like a no-brainer but it is amazing how many people choose to bore CEOs to death with details rather than getting straight to the point delivering information directly, honestly and succinctly – yes, even bad news. The folks that wish to justify their verbal output in some way before actually responding to a question are primary targets during downsizing cycles… need I say more?

So in summary, don’t stall, don’t withhold information and don’t bury your boss in details. Just prepare in advance, do some careful thinking prior to the meeting and then present your case concisely so that you encourage input, guidance and a solid basis for decision making. Feel free to test the above with Clients as well… it could possibly improve your closing rate.

After overhearing some totally off base comments regarding twitter today, I thought that I’d do some community service and publish a few helpful Twitter definitions

Tweet
A “tweet” is a post on Twitter. It is 140 characters or less.

Twitter Search
Twitter has a search function that allows you to search for words, phrases, people and more within Twitter. This finds Tweets that have been published as recently as the past minute and as long ago as Twitter has been around – it’s like using a real-time search engine!

Hashtag
A hashtag is a series of characters preceded by the # symbol. It is used to tie posts from multiple Twitter users together on one topic or event so that you can track them (or at least view them easily)

Hashtags make searching for information about products, events, companies and other topics easy – just search for the hashtag, and all related posts are shown.

To create a hashtag, you simply start using it and encourage others to use it as well. Try  typing your hashtag into the search function at Twitter before starting to use it, just to be sure that its not already in use. Also, remember to keep it short… you only have 140 characters for your post!

Replying/Commenting/Recognizing
To tweet publicly (where your followers can see your tweets) to another Twitter user, just use the “@” sign in front of their username. For example, to get our attention, tweet: @tedbox and well be sure to see the tweets!

Direct Message
If you want to reply to someone – but don’t want your followers to see what you say, simply direct message the user. Instead of “@USERNAME”, youll use “d USERNAME” (the letter “d”, a space and then the username).  This will go directly to the user and be hidden from other users. Just remember that you can only DM your followers.

Want to learn how to get Twitter to work for you by helping you generate leads for your business? Just get in touch with us and we’ll explain the process.

In order to make sure that your meetings are both effective and efficient, here are a few suggestions that have worked well.

1. Create and distribute an agenda in advance and be sure that the meeting’s objectives are clearly stated.

2. Begin on time, end on time and stay focused to accomplish your goals.

3. Increase retention by eliminating distractions -require that email and other forms of text messaging be turned off during the meeting and do not tolerate distractions caused by mobile phones – simply turn them off and use voicemail.

4. Respect attendees time – If a person is only needed briefly – no need for them to sit through the entire session.

5. Accomplish the primary objective during the meeting’s allotted time.

6. Use technology. You have a phone, you have your agenda… set the phone to vibrate every 10 minutes so that you have a physical reminder that the meeting needs to move forward.

7. Have a person take notes and follow up with distributing the meeting protocol.

That’s it folks… it doesn’t get much easier than that.

I decided that NOW is the best time to invest…
and you can quote me on that one.

Hey, it beats the heck out of Clients calling to cancel projects because they decided to act like
blinded deer at night standing in front of a speeding truck full of ‘industrial disease’.

I don’t care what anyone says… now us the time to invest… if not in the markets, then in ourselves.

Get out there and learn something new.

shameless plug: we give exciting courses on how you can dramatically increase your sales even in slow markets – hack, we even back it up with proof from our Clients and a money back guarantee… are you brave enough to challenge yourself?

Hey there,

Why is it that most people in business think that they are going to sell what they have by delivering a list of features along with a few reasons why someone should buy their product?

The truth is that there is a much deeper psychological process behind making a decision to buy something than most business people realize.

When selling to Consumers, the pitch must appeal to a buyer’s emotions or the sale is simply not going to take place. When selling B2B, keep in mind that the buyer is still a human being with needs and a strong desire to succeed – a benefits oriented approach has been proven to be more successful than any other technique we tested during the past 20 years.

If you’re ready to sell something, we are ready to help you create a winning pitch.

The first step is a bit of homework so grab a pencil and some paper and get ready to answer a few questions:

• Write down a list of your competitors and their websites
• Write down what they’re doing, what they’re offering etc.
• List their product’s benefits

Ahh, now we come to the core purpose of this article…

Do you know the difference between features, advantages and benefits?

A feature is what a product has. In essence, the core components of your product or service; sometimes referred to as the bells and whistles or buttons, knobs, levers, switches, format, platform etc.

An advantage is what the product does or how it performs against a competitive product. A vacuum for example, is a product that might have the advantage that it doesn’t need bags. Another advantage would be that it can clean the floor in a room without you being present. In a services business one advantage would be the number of years of experience you bring to the table or your level of certification. Some common advantages include words like fast, easy, simple, cheap and good.

A benefit is what a given feature means to your prospect in terms of emotion and passion. A true benefit goes really deep and says something about how it makes you feel – a really great benefit gets a consumer excited because it means something special to the buyer.

Here’s a good B2C example. One of our Clients sells a facial cream online and she called it something like, microderm abrasion emulsion – essentially it is a cream that helps reduce wrinkles.

On her website she listed several features such as ‘it reduces wrinkles’, ‘it comes in an easy to use home care kit’, ‘it is pH balanced’ etc etc etc.

When she came to me to help increase sales, conversions and traffic… I asked her to:
Take a piece of paper and create three columns.
List as many features as you can in the first column.
In the second column, list what you believe are the top benefits.
She wrote down ‘because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger’ and ‘because it comes in a home care kit, it is easy to use at home’ and the third one was ‘because it is pH balanced, it’s gentle on your skin’.

As politely as possible I let her know that those are really advantages not benefits so we continued the exercise and I asked her to list in the third column what she felt the ultimate end result for her Customer was going to be – in other words, ‘the ultimate benefit’.

Here is what she wrote:
‘If it makes you look younger: then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will know your true age, you’ll fall in love all over again and you’ll be able to attract that person you’ve had your eye on.’

‘Since it’s easy to use at home: you won’t suffer embarrassment by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home.’

‘Since it’s gentle on your skin: there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like surgery or those harsh chemical peels people usually buy.’

We had arrived…
These were descriptions of how Customers would feel before, during and after they used the product. They were a few of the true benefits this product offers its Customers.

In a very short time she was able to list several of the true benefits her product offers to her Customers. She took this piece of paper and changed her website to reflect the benefits. She also adapted every piece of marketing material including all advertising (online and offline), all landing pages, sales letters and Customer communications and within two months her sales doubled. One month later sales doubled again. Then she adapted the packaging to reflect the new text and sales doubled again. Sure we did some work on conversions and six months later, she was not able to buy as much traffic as she wanted – not even from Google ,Yahoo and MSN combined… Folks, this stuff really works!  I’ll let you guess if I am referring to the creme or the marketing process here.

Remember, real benefits go deep. They live within the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person wanting or using your product. In order to increase your sales you will need to tap into that sweet spot and then use the real benefits in everything you produce to help sell the product.

Begin by figuring out what your prospect’s current emotions are regarding the things that your product addresses. Understand which of those emotions are the strongest, most compelling, most “dominant” in his or her life. Then identify the benefits your product offers that will most effectively enhance your prospect’s strongest positive emotions and/or resolve his strongest negative ones.

People buy for emotional reasons far more often than for merely rational ones. If you want people to act on your copy and buy your product, first determine how your prospect is likely feeling right now . Then, use your benefits as bridges to activate the emotions that will compel him/her to buy!

Now, let’s venture into the world of B2B with a comment or two and some real life examples. First my comments; B2B has specific demands that don’t apply to the B2C world. Most of the time these demands orient themselves around the concept of ROI. A few of the thoughts running through the heads of many buyers include: How will my business benefit if we were to buy your product or use your services or implement your widget? If you can orient your sales message around the benefits that your product offers to your target market then you have a much higher probability of closing a deal over your competition – and you will probably be able to reduce your sales cycle at the same time. Here is one of the best B2B examples I have ever read:

“Amazon S3 is based on the idea that quality Internet-based storage should be taken for granted. It helps free developers from worrying about how they will store their data, whether it will be safe and secure, or whether they will have enough storage available. It frees them from the upfront costs of setting up their own storage solution as well as the ongoing costs of maintaining and scaling their storage servers. The functionality of Amazon S3 is simple and robust: Store any amount of data inexpensively and securely, while ensuring that the data will always be available when you need it. Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it.”

Notice that they are not listing bells and whistles here… this text is crafted specifically to get the business buyer emotionally involved. They decided to use the concept of freedom to achieve their objective. If you were a developer, wouldn’t it be nice to be ‘free of worry’ regarding at least one mission critical component of your site that has the potential to shut down your online business if your product suddenly becomes an instant hit?

As I encounter more brilliant examples like this, I will add them to this article. If you have a submission that you’d like us to review or even add as an example of how to do it, be sure to let us know by filling out our contact us form.

Two of the services we frequently use with our Clients are Idea Generation and Problem Solving. We approach both challenges with very different, process oriented methods but there is one thing that remains constant – Our ability to think laterally and come up with novel concepts by looking at situations in new and different ways. Many of our Clients are so deeply involved in an issue such as their daily business that they find it hard to change perspective and see things from an alternative angle. This is where we come in… we tend to see things that are ‘outside the box’.

Vertical thinking, also known as logical thinking, takes an idea and carries it forward. Lateral thinking, on the other hand, provokes fresh ideas and essentially changes the frame of reference in almost any situation. Vertical thinking tries to overcome problems by dealing with them head-on, lateral thinking attempts to bypass obstacles using a variety of different approaches.

In essence, Lateral thinking is a tool that helps us change our way of thinking about something often by modifying our perceptions.

With logical thinking you start out with certain given components and boundaries wrapped in a process. This is similar to the situation in chesswhere you start out with specific pieces and are expected to play by the rules. The issue is that in most real life situations, we can not use the chess model or logical thinking to solve problems because you don’t know what the pieces are, what they represent or how many pieces actually exist… knowing the rules is almost irrelevant to solving a problem or generating new ideas.

Throughout our lives we are handed several different rulebooks (cultural, social, business oriented etc). When we get these rulebooks we just assume that the components that the rulebooks refer to, simply exist and we tend to accept that certain boundaries and limitations are present because they were mentioned in the rulebook. Lateral thinking throws out the rules and assumptions as well as the boundaries and limitations so that we are free of our social, cultural, geographic and demographic bonds.

Lateral thinking focuses on changing some element to enable a new and fresh perspective of a given situation. Lateral thinking deals primarily with perception. By using lateral thinking techniques we can organize the external world into the pieces that we can then process. Perhaps more importantly, by observing lateral thinking in others we can generate new ideas and better understand how they perceive the world around them.

The brain is a self-organizing information system that forms asymmetric patterns. In such systems there is a mathematical need for moving across patterns. The tools and processes of lateral thinking are designed to achieve such lateral movement to accomplish a given result.

A famous person once said that you can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper. Think about that for a moment… If you were driving in a car on the highway but your intended destination is behind you, driving faster while keeping the car on the same heading will not get you to your intended destination.

If you were to continue thinking about a problem or a solution in a given way, this may not be as useful as changing tact and trying something completely different. Additional effort in the same direction will not necessarily help you get the results you were after but applying some proven tools designed to turn the car around, may offer you options that you never knew existed. It’s a format of thinking ‘out of the box’ and our Clients believe that we are very good at it. It may be because we do it frequently.

If you have a challenging problem or need some new ideas, please, fill out our form and allow us to get in touch with you today.

Marketing is: The science of finding prospects and turning them into profitable Customers for your business. Let’s have a look at the 3 core elements in this statement:
- Science:
When I use the word ‘science’ here, I am referring to the methods and approaches that have been carefully tested and refined over time that deliver successful results. In marketing, doing things right incorporates metrics to measure results, testing to understand what works best and ROI accountability to know what elements and methods deliver a better return over time.

Here at BoxOnline we have been testing and retesting hundreds of approaches since our launch in 1999. We have followed the scientific method to eliminate all sorts of approaches that do not work well. We have also identified a few amazingly good approaches that seem to deliver exactly what our Client’s want time and time again. These sort of methods are what we refer to as proven methods. Today, we only offer proven methods to our Clients.

- Finding Prospects:
We often start by building a profile of your prospect(s) so that when your sales message reaches one, it connects with them and they find your offer irresistible. If we did not do this, the sales message would likely fall on deaf ears.

- Turning them into profitable Customers:
Our objective is to persuade prospects to act in a measurable way. We want to be able to measure our performance and know how well a given approach is working and what the difference is after a change has been made to a campaign.

Our marketing formula is based on something that has been dubbed the Business Friendship Model.

Consider how people make friends. The actual process is:
1) Get someone’s attention
2) Connect with them based on a common theme
3) Emotionally commit to do something with each other in the future
4) Act on the commitment by getting together again or doing something thoughtful for them such as buying a gift.

Often a business owner wants his business to appear larger and mightier than it actually is and thus they try to create an image of being a large corporate firm. We rarely support this sort of thinking because our experience has shown that when you try to behave like a big company, you de-personalize your relationship with prospects. In our research, small businesses grew faster when they were fueled by relationships rather than by expensive image campaigns.

So, what does a business typically do when they want to build a relationship with a new prospect?
1) Run Ads to get their attention
2) Relate to the prospect in the Ad
3) Get prospect to respond and commit emotionally
4) Get prospects to act

Well, Consumers don’t necessarily want to follow this process because they have needs of their own and based on our experience here is what prospects actually want:
1) that you, (the business) pay attention to them
2) that you, want to connect with them
3) that you, want to make a commitment to help them
4) that you, want to act on that commitment and are ready to deliver a desirable result to them

Does this make sense to you? If you are able to think like a prospect, it should. If it doesn’t, let us know… We’d love to hear your opinion – especially if you have a product to sell.

I have been asked countless times for my recommendation, my review, my feedback and even my thoughts on a given service that I had experienced or consumed. Often this occurs after purchasing some sort of service in a hotel, a restaurant or a hip retail store. Now, those that know me well understand that I have a particular attitude when it comes to paying for a service and then getting a request from the service provider to deliver my recommendation (my services) for free.

So, in such situations, I typically ask the question… What’s in it for me?

The standard (and often rehearsed) response from the staff is:
“well, if it is too much to ask, then we won’t bother you with this but we would like to improve our services and we have heard from others that your advice really works well so, your feedback could help us…”

and then I get to deliver my favorite retort:
Did I come into your restaurant and request a meal expecting to get it for free?  No.  So, can you imagine how my paying Clients would feel if I were to offer you free advice that actually improves your bookings, your profitability and your overall business performance?

My day job focuses on helping our Clients sell more of whatever it is that they are trying to sell. This is what I do for a living. The typical result is that our Clients double their sales in both new and existing markets. It’s no wonder that my Clients spread the word around.

So, how do you do it? I guess now would be a good time for me to come up with a segue into the main topic of this article which without a doubt is The Single Most Powerful Force in Marketing.

Do you know what it is?

If you can answer this question correctly, your name will be entered into a draw to win free access to our newest online course, coming out VERY soon.

No, this is not a trick question.

Yes, there most definitely is a right answer.

But even if you know it, I can almost guarantee most of what you’ve been taught about it is dead wrong – and I will prove it to you in full detail over the coming 4 days.

Post your answer in the “comments” section below to enter the draw. We’ll pick 4 of you, so you have a good chance to win.

OK… it’s now 4 days later and the responses are in and four winners have been selected and informed via email of their success.

For those of you still reading this, here were the winning responses:

“It is Word of Mouth but only when Trust and Credibility have been established.
I have recently been enjoying a referral group called Business Network International (BNI) and the leads do not come in until the relationship is built. People do not care one bit about who you are or the features of your product. I have found the the ears really perk up when a benefit is mentioned. The old WIIFM…”

“Word of mouth – from satisfied Customers who have had a fantastic experience with your product.”

“Word of Mouth is the single most powerful force in Marketing. Product endorsements create sales. The more people you can influence with your endorsement, the more sales you will make.”

“The most powerful force in marketing is word of mouth recommendations or as Dr. B calls it Viral Buzz. A recent example: THE SECRET. Regardless of what you thought of it, they did no advertising that I’m aware of and the thing spread like wildfire to millions of people. It’s the first time in my life I can recall having so many different friends and co-workers and strangers recommend a product to me.”

Sure, there are boatloads of books on this topic so I’ll do my best to keep this article brief, helpful and to the point. First, this page is dedicated to the many kind folks I meet each day who really need help selling their products and services.

Products and services are wonderful things from both the perspective of the consumer or Customer and the person or company that is offering or selling the products and services. For starters, the consumer gets some form of benefit from the products or services otherwise there would be little reason to purchase them. The seller, likewise receives a benefit in the form of compensation, usually monetary. The difference is that the consumer gets value whether perceived or real from the transaction or the receipt of the product / service.

How the consumer perceives this value is the topic of this article today.

From here on out when I mention the word ‘products’, please understand that I mean both products and services.

Here are my suggestions when you want to sell a product to a given target market.

1) Know your target market well.

That means that you need to understand who they are, how they tick, what they like and dislike etc. If you have hundreds or thousands of Customers this goes for you too – that is what databases are for!

Let’s start with something basic like Motivation Strategies.
Are your Customers motivated TOWARD something or Motivated AWAY FROM something?
If you were to ask them why they purchased your product, what would they say?
More importantly, what would you learn from their response?

If you were to ask your Customers something neutral such as “What did they do this past weekend?” and then follow up the question with “Why did you do X this past weekend?” Chances are good that you will learn something about their motivation strategy.

If they were to answer that they “went to the mountains to ski” this would indicate that the person is likely to be motivated TOWARD something and thus, they tend to know what they want and they will move toward their goal of getting what they want.

If the response to question 2 were “to get out of the city” then you might guess that this person is motivated AWAY FROM something and this sort of individual knows exactly what they don’t want.

In order to sell to these two very different types of people, you need to be able to identify their motivation strategy quickly and then apply a marketing tactic even quicker. Your first step is to create two sets of marketing tools from business cards and form letters to signs, messages and selling phrases that you will learn by heart. Your purpose is to communicate with your prospect effectively using their choice of motivation strategy so that your message is accepted with gratitude and your offer is given priority consideration.

If you wanted to sell a massage to a person that is motivated AWAY FROM something, your marketing message may be something like:

- Want to relieve stress?
Come visit our Spa on the 3rd floor right now.
(special offer limited to the first 5 people, today only)

- Need to get away from it all?
Experience our 100 minute vacation
(Hurry, we only have 4 slots left)

If you wanted to sell the very same massage to a person that is motivated TOWARD something, your marketing message may be something like:

- Are you ready to relax?
Our experienced massage therapists are waiting for you on the 3rd floor.
(special offer for first time Clients – today only)

- Would you like a treatment that is usually only offered to top athletes?
Sign up for a medical massage on the 3rd floor today – there are only a few slots left.

In addition to knowing your Client’s motivation strategy, learn all you can about them and take notes so that you can communicate in a very personal and meaningful way in the future. For example, if you do not see a Client after several weeks, why not send them a thank you note for their last visit and mention a few personal things in the note that would perhaps encourage them to get back in touch with you. When they contact you, present them an offer that they would find hard to resist.

2) Always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS include a benefit in your marketing message. Just to be clear, I am referring to a benefit that your Customer experiences when they do business with you.

3) Incorporate some form of scarcity in your offer – there may be thousands of X available but to many people, the perception of scarcity is a very powerful magnet.

4) Upsell and Cross Sell at the appropriate moment but do it as often as possible. This is a lesson learned from McDonalds and it pays off royally. Have you ever been to a restaurant where they asked you if you wanted fries with your order? That would be an example of a cross sell. If you heard someone ask a Customer if they wanted a large order of fries for only 20 cents more, that would be an example of an upsell. Do not miss out on this essential element of profit building unless you really want to leave money on the table.

5) Practice each of the above suggestions with Clients, Customers, Prospects, Friends – you have nothing to lose

6) Test variations of the above to improve your results and keep track of what works and what does not work.

7) Reserve time in your schedule for building relationships. Many of our Clients are so busy delivering products that they forget to keep relationships warm. The result is that they have to work extra hard to acquire more new business. It is much easier to keep a Client than it is to find a new one so, spend a few hours each week, keeping tabs on your Customers and going out of your way for the ones you really want to keep. The idea is to grow the business you do with your best Customers in such a way that you build a lifetime of value into the relationship. Build those relationships and they will pay off big time.

Naturally, we offer our Clients courses in the above areas with the implied benefit that knowledge will increase their sales but we do things a bit differently over here. We select our Clients very carefully, only a few applicants are accepted each time we open the doors but those that make it through have a compelling business case and a determined desire to succeed. These are the kind of folks we enjoy helping. We could guarantee that our methods will double your sales or you get your money back but instead, we often opt for a success based fee thus, we only get paid if our efforts deliver results. Have you ever worked with a company like that before? Come on, give it a try and apply for a chance to be one of our top performing, revenue generating Clients today.