Social media has infiltrated the purchasing funnel, helping consumers make informed decisions, from what to have for lunch to where to go on vacation. Depending on the decision, sometimes you turn to your social graph, and sometimes you turn to Google. So, as a brand marketer, you need to know what online channels you should be targeting in order to reach the ideal audience for your product.

But regardless of what kind of consumer you’re trying to reach or what you’re selling, your SEO better be top notch — search is still the most important influencer on the web.

The infographic below, featuring data from M Booth and Beyond, analyzes the differences between high and low sharers and various purchasing decisions, helping brands to understand how to target consumers more effectively.

What kind of consumer are you? Let us know in the comments below.

Certainly there are some sales skills that anyone can learn. For example, it’s easy to teach how to ask reflective questions.

Reflective questions begin with who, what, when, where, why and how. If you ask reflective questions instead of questions that can be answered with yes or no, prospects usually share more information with you. This increases your chances of uncovering “pain points” that can eventually lead to sales.

“Pain-point” is widely used business jargon, and a word that many investors like to use. They may ask you “so what is the pain-point you are trying to solve with this idea?” If you can identify a pain-point which many people (globally even) can relate to, but no-one has resolved previously, you are probably on to something big. So, in other words, you can find opportunities in the market by solving, what a sizable group of people would describe as a “pain”. For example, since the battery in your laptop dies fast and people tend to find this a “pain”, many companies are currently working on alternative ways to charge PCs and keep batteries running longer. These companies are effectively trying to resolve a well-known pain-point.

You can learn how to ask reflective questions by participating in a simple role play. In this role play, you’ll play the salesperson and I’ll play the prospect. Every time you ask me a yes or no question, I’ll answer “no.” Getting stonewalled with a bunch of “no” answers will break you of the yes/no questioning habit pretty quickly!

Other sales skills are tougher to learn. A good example is teaching salespeople how to ask questions and follow the thread; in the answers. To explain this concept, let’s use another role play. In this role play you’ll ask me reflective questions. I’ll respond with answers that contain some “pain points”. If you recognize the pain points and drill down into them deeply enough (by asking additional questions), you’ll eventually be able to “sell” me.

Do you know what my experience has been with this role play? Some salespeople learn how to “follow the thread” easily. Others struggle, but they eventually learn how to do it. However, some just never get it, no matter how hard they try!

Why can some people learn this critical skill, but others can’t?

I struggled with this question for 14 years. I used to believe that anyone could succeed at anything if they wanted it badly enough and were willing to work hard enough. However, my experience with the “follow the thread” role play made me start to question that belief. As I continued reading and researching over the years, I eventually uncovered two pieces of information that really opened my eyes.

KEY DISCOVERY #1

In their book, “Now, Discover Your Strengths”, Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton report that great managers and average managers have different expectations for their employees. According to Buckingham and Clifton, average managers assume that “each person can learn to be competent in almost anything”, while great managers assume that “each person&’s talents are enduring and unique”.

Most sales books and training programs seem to take the average manager point of view. In other words, they seem to assume that anyone can learn how to sell. Their unspoken promise is that all you have to do is invest enough time, effort and money to learn the skills they teach. If you put in the time and effort, you will learn the skills and eventually succeed in sales.

Unfortunately, there are countless examples of sales books and training courses not producing the desired improvement in sales performance. Think about some salespeople you know personally. How many of them are struggling to make their quotas? Why are they struggling?

Is it the state of the economy? (If other salespeople are making their numbers, blaming the economy won’t earn them much sympathy.)
Is it because they don’t work hard enough?
Is it because they don’t have enough product knowledge?
Do they need to work harder on their selling skills?
Do they need more coaching from their manager?
What if the “great manager” point of view is correct? What if everyone cannot become proficient in sales? What if success in sales requires a unique set of talents?

KEY DISCOVERY #2
Herb Greenberg, Harold Weinstein and Patrick Sweeney report this very conclusion in their book, “How to Hire and Develop Your Next Top Performer”. After correlating hundreds of thousands of assessments that were performed over several decades with actual sales performance measurements, they reached these startling conclusions:

55% of the people earning their living in sales should be doing something else.
Another 20% to 25% have what it takes to sell, but they should be selling something else

Wow! Those are some sobering statistics! They indicate that more than half of all salespeople are never going to make it in sales. Another quarter have some chance of accomplishing sales success, but only if they find the right job selling the right kind of product or service.

How can you identify whether salespeople have the talents required to succeed in your company’s sales positions?

One reason why companies suffer from 80/20 performance is because their processes for hiring, training and managing salespeople rely almost entirely upon subjective information. After all, what are resumes? They are an individual’s subjective portrayal of their capabilities and experiences. What occurs during an interview? Interviewees attempt to package their responses to questions in a manner that will make the best impression. Meanwhile, interviewers are forming personal opinions about candidates’ qualifications for the position.

I’m not suggesting that subjective information is useless. Subjective information is a valid and valuable component of any “people decision”. However, if decisions based solely upon subjective information produce an undesirable result 80 percent of the time, doesn’t it make sense to consider making a change?

One way to introduce objective information into sales hiring and coaching processes is through use of specialized sales assessment tests. I’m not referring to personality or behavioral tests like Myers-Briggs or DISC. Those types of tools are useful for learning how to communicate more effectively with someone, and may provide some insights into an individual’s motivations. However, they are not effective for predicting whether or not someone will succeed in sales.

The specialized sales assessment tests that I’m referring to identify how quickly an individual learns and how good they are at “reasoning”.

Reasoning – especially verbal reasoning – is a critical component of the talent for asking questions and “following the thread” in the answers. Plus, the most useful sales assessment tests identify an individual’s strength or weakness in a variety of other important sales-related attributes. These include the following:

Sales Drive: Does the individual enjoy presenting, persuading, negotiating, and motivating others? How much do they enjoy these activities?
Emotional Toughness: How rapidly does the individual rebound from rejection? Do they learn from their experiences and move on quickly? Or, do they suffer a sustained reduction in productivity?
Reasoning Ability: Does the individual ask good questions? Can they dissect answers and pick out the pieces that will help advance the conversation toward a desired end result?
Service Drive: How friendly and agreeable is the individual? How interested are they in building relationships and helping others?
Assertiveness: How self-assured is the individual? How effective are they at convincing others to take action?
Attitude: How positive is the individual’s attitude? Do they perceive a glass to be half-empty or half-full?
Communication Skills: How precisely does the individual communicate, both verbally and in writing? Are their communications clear and effective?
Competitiveness: How competitive is the individual? How does their competitiveness manifest itself?
Energy: How energetic is the individual? Are they always “on the go”, or do they need to be prodded into action?
Independence: How readily does the individual accept direction from others?
Learning Rate: How rapidly does the individual learn new information? What styles of learning are most productive for them?
Tolerance for Administration: How willing is the individual to perform administrative activities? How much attention do they pay to details?

The assessment test scores for the preceding characteristics can also be used to predict how effectively a salesperson or sales candidate will perform the following critical job functions:
Are they a Hunter or a Farmer? Do they prefer to pursue new business, or do they prefer to manage existing customer relationships? Or, are they capable of performing both functions effectively?
Are they Internally or Externally motivated? Internally motivated salespeople are capable of directing their own activities. Externally motivated salespeople require frequent direction and support from their manager in order to be consistently effective.
How effectively will they Prospect? How aggressively (and consistently) will they pursue new opportunities?
How willing are they to comply with Administrative Requirements? This may include updating records in your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) system and providing timely and accurate forecasts and opportunity pipeline updates.
Will they be a good Team Member? Will they work cooperatively with their fellow sales team members, as well as other departments?
How can specialized sales assessment tests help existing salespeople who are struggling?

They can help in two specific ways. First, they can determine which salespeople should be in sales. If an individual doesn’t have the talents required for success in your company’s sales job, there may be other roles in your organization where their talents and interests can be applied to mutual benefit. If there aren’t any such positions available, the kindest thing you can do is to let them go.

How can firing someone be kind? Because it is NO fun to struggle in a job that is a poor fit. If you share the assessment test results with these individuals, they can gain insights into their strongest talents and interests. The sooner they can migrate into roles that are compatible with their talents and interests, the sooner they will reap the benefits of improved productivity, motivation, and job satisfaction.

The second way these assessment tests can help struggling salespeople is by identifying their unique training needs. If you identify each salesperson’s individual training needs, and you supply targeted training to address these needs, you can dramatically improve their performance. Here’s an example:

Two fictitious salespeople, Beth and Bill, work for the same company. Beth is weak in Sales Drive, which makes her reluctant to ask for orders. Bill is weak in Emotional Toughness, which makes him sensitive to rejection and limits his prospecting effectiveness. If Beth and Bill go through the same sales skills training course, how much improvement in sales performance should they expect to see?

The answer is little or none. Why? Because Beth and Bill have completely different training needs that will not be addressed by basic sales skills training.

Beth would benefit most from attending an assertiveness training class. She also needs coaching to help her recognize that failing to ask for orders denies her customers valuable solutions to costly business problems.

Bill needs to learn to not take rejection personally. He might also benefit from attending a class that teaches positive thinking and other motivational techniques.

Unfortunately, unless these two salespeople are made aware of their unique training needs, and provided with targeted training to address them, there isn’t much reason to expect their performance to improve.

Conclusion

Many companies struggle with “80/20″ performance disparities in their sales organizations. These disparities usually result from an over-reliance on subjective information when making salesperson hiring and coaching decisions. The proposed solution is to add objective information gathered via specialized sales assessment tests to the “people decision” process. This one change can help companies increase the proportion of top performers on their sales teams and improve the performance of existing sales team members.

where there is competition… there is money to be made
where there is no competition, one has to wonder why…

I love competition!
If they have been around in this niche for at least a few years and they are surviving then, this is music to my ears. It means that the market needs this product or service and that there are people out there willing to open their wallets.

As a service provider, we want a share of that wallet in exchange for services delivered that help our Client achieve their objective(s). If there were no competition, business would be a lot more like solitaire than something like golf or the high-jump. We just love placing the bar a bit higher, don’t you?

If you are curious, we just raised the bar again in the tablet publishing space. Now our Clients get far more flexibility, dozens of extra value adding features and a solid, customizable Reader App that Apple just loves all for one low price. See for yourself, never before has tablet publishing been so easy.

I don’t know how the confusion started and you can look up the definitions in any dictionary if you are so inclined…  our preferred definition goes like this:

Good Marketing Is Like
Getting The Needle To Jump Out Of The Haystack
Sales Is The Fine Art Of Sewing

The first one was uttered by an incredibly good salesperson who refused to pitch anything until he knew what the person he was communicating with wanted. This salesman used a brilliant, easy-going method to uncover his Customer’s desires, objectives, wants, needs etc. and then orient the pitch around helping the person (his Customer) achieve his goals. Among others, his trademark follow up was:

“What would you definitely buy from me today if only I were smart enough to offer it to you?”

If you are ever on the receiving end of this question, have your wallet ready because the psychology of the query is more powerful than most people realize. This is a killer line and there really is no escape from it once it has been thrown into the court.

Going in a completely different direction, here is a quote that is simply remarkable.

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists“

Each week we meet with senior executives with professor doctor titles running multinational corporations. Most are convinced that they did everything by the book and can not understand what is going wrong – why is their business not performing as expected?  Their concerns almost always deal with situations that were not described in reference books or textbooks in years past. While education is important, a continuous cycle of learning is even more important.  Today’s business managers need to equip themselves for an age where the only certain thing is uncertainty in a climate of constant change. You need to be a learning machine accepting that what you learned yesterday might not help you tomorrow. The quote above was written in the 1950s!

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.

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.

Yes, whether you like it or not, marketing your services is key to your success and just like any other professional service such as business consulting, legal services or even psychological counseling, your services oriented company is a business that needs to follow the fundamental rules of marketing in order to succeed.

The cornerstone of any successful marketing method begins with an understanding that not every person you or your firm comes in contact with, is ready to become a Client. In fact, many prospects will never become Clients.

In other words, your marketing efforts will generate leads and these leads go into the top of the sales funnel but only a small percentage will drop out of that funnel as Clients. If the percentage of conversions is greater than 50% then you simply need to market to a broader audience – the shape of your sales funnel in this case will appear more similar to a pipe than a funnel indicating that conversions are unusually high.

Many firms tend to concentrate (generally to the exclusion of all else) most of their marketing efforts on improving the conversion rate or closing rate which amounts to the percentage of prospects that they have converted to Clients.

This helps to explain the fascination with networking, luncheons, presentations, meetings, seminars etc. The idea being: “If we spend more time trying to build relationships we will close more new deals.”

So called “thought leaders” tend to foster this approach and sadly it’s very misleading as a marketing concept. Please allow me to illustrate. Charles Green, author of the book “Trust Based Selling” has written an excellent article titled: “Why Your Sales Process Matters Less Than The Psychology Of Selling.” The article is well written with numerical analysis of an entire sales pipeline start to finish. Unfortunately it misses the whole point of what a sales funnel is supposed to do.

An ideal sales funnel is designed to generate the maximum amount of QUALIFIED prospects possible from within a given marketing universe. It is from that pool of qualified prospects that we might apply the concept of relationship building so that prospects are converted into new Clients over time.

Here is the point of today’s article.

Regardless of how skilled you are at relationship building, you simply will not close any deals if you don’t have anyone to sell to. Here’s the good part, the more people you have access to, the more new Clients you will likely acquire (even if your relationship building skills need work).

Here’s a simple example.

Suppose you are a sales superstar “relationship” builder and you have 10 qualified leads to work with. Over the course of a year, you wine them, dine them, schmooze them, golf with them and literally do anything they want using the company’s marketing budget as your weapon of choice.

Let’s say that at the end of a year, you were able to sign up 60% of them and thus 6 new Clients were acquired for the firm. If the main success metric your firm used were conversions from prospect to Client, you would be considered a “sales genius”. In reality, the average sales professional closes around 14% of qualified prospects in today’s competitive world.

What if I on the other hand, through my integrated marketing efforts have created a pool of 100 reasonably qualified prospects. I’m just an average person so I close 14% of these prospects over a twelve month period. This is not a bad ratio it is simply average.

Pop quiz: If all deals are of equal size, who made more money?

I will have 14 new Clients and you will have 6.
You are almost 330% better at closing (read “building relationships”) than I am.

Please reread the above until you understand it.

Even though your interpersonal skills are 3x better than mine, I have made more than twice the amount of money you made during the same twelve month period.

The lesson here is if you are able to cost effectively convert prospects into Clients, you need to open the flood gates and fill your sales funnel with qualified leads. Good examples of tactics that provide you with tons of leads are going to be the subject of upcoming articles. In the meantime, if someone were to give you 100 highly qualified leads, what would you do with them to improve your relationship building skills and make more money next year?

I don’t know how you answered the above question, but I’ll take those leads any day over solely relying on my relationship building skills and I think most of you out there would agree.

More highly qualified leads equals more money no matter what business you’re in.

That is called results.

No disrespect to “thought leaders,” but I’d rather be a results leader wouldn’t you?

On a bustling corner of São Paulo’s quita district, street vendors pitch the latest “tecnobrega” CDs, including a few by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns where they plan to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That’s OK, because selling discs isn’t Calypso’s main source of income. The band is really in the performance business — and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet. Not a bad way to offer free software we thought.

Back at ground zero, our developers were asking for their paychecks and our freelancers were requiring payment for Apps that had just been accepted for launch. We can’t blame them for wanting money after all, they need to eat too but, this same generation of gotta-haves want to get paid for their time and yet expect most things that they need to be free – someone is going to have to pay for all this free stuff if you read your college ECON 101 textbook it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under scarcity.” The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they’re made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later, it could just mean that someone else is picking up the tab. Money is not the only scarcity in the world today… the other items include time and reputation. if you build on reputation, you gain respect especially in the troughs of a given niche market. If you increase attention you can actually build a business as you convert from reputation to traffic and traffic as many of us in this digital age know, can be converted into cash. There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. This ‘free mentality’ shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in Euros, Dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

How a company presents an offer for a product today differs in many ways from the past in that the price of each individual component is often determined by using psychology, not cost. Your mobile phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes — it keeps that fee low because it knows that will be the first thing you will compare when picking a carrier — thus another component, your data volume and your monthly voicemail fee is pure profit to the carrier. So you see ads for free phones but I have yet to encounter free calling plans.

You get the pipes for free but the water passing through those pipes is expensive. So, what are we to do about our dilemma? Many of our target prospects want something for free and yet our developers need to eat. If we were to offer a free ‘lite’ version, then we would encounter higher dev costs and support costs but the idea has crossed our mind.

Wait, there is another way… How about building real value into your offering so that people won’t mind spending some spare change if an App helps them do something that they wanted to do before but were not able. If an App were to focus on leveraging those scarce resources that we listed a few paragraphs above such as helping a user to save time, gain respect or save money – the App would pay for itself and that, in essence, is currently our favorite model of ‘free’.

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.