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

In business school we learn that are two approaches when it comes to branding:
a) a manufacturer’s identifier
b) a promise of a Customer experience

I’d like to introduce a third which focuses on a single idea that your company owns that tilts sales in your favor.

That single idea can be described as the Sales Moment.

For example, if I were to say:
- “Family fast food” odds are that you would reply “McDonalds”
- “Family Entertainment” you’d be thinking “Disney”

There is just too much information available in the world today. If people can’t quickly understand what you stand for, then you will not break through the clutter. With so much competition, people gravitate to those that make things easier for them. If you want to create a powerful brand that increases your sales, you need to communicate one single idea and you have to keep it simple so that people can see how you fit into their world.

Think about the single idea that you need to own in order to tilt sales in your favor. If you think tactically, you will not succeed at this level because your focus will be on building a website, creating a brochure, buying some ads etc You need to think strategically and start at the beginning with the Sales Moment and your brand strategy.

To discover your Sales Moment you need to either triangulate your Customer’s Desires and your Strategic Advantages with your Competitor’s Exploitable Weaknesses or simply contact us using the form below and we’ll guide you through the process.

A powerful brand makes it easy for your target Customers to understand how the brand is relevant to them and this will increase your sales.

So, if you are prepared to consider rolling up your sleeves and working on your brand strategy, we can help you… If you insist that what you need now are tactics, then sorry but, this article is probably not what you’re looking for… on the other hand, it just might just change the way you think about branding forever.

A brand is a single mental image that tilts sales in your company’s favor and it is made up of 4 major elements:
1 the Name
2 the Logo
3 the Tagline
4 the Ad Campaign

From a potential Customer’s perspective the above are experienced simultaneously.

To create a powerful brand, all 4 elements MUST quickly communicate the Sales Moment.  If they don’t do this, the brand is weak and will confuse the target Customer. The Sales Moment is the one thing that can be said of your company’s products or services that actually makes the sale and converts a prospect into a paying Customer.

Businesses grow rapidly when the mental image from the four brand elements trigger the Sales Moment.

1 THE NAME
When you create a brand, the name MUST help to create a mental image based on verbal cues. There are six different types of names used by the most successful brands of all time. Each of the types helps the brand achieve a particular objective and at the same time communicate the Sales Moment.

Think about the idea that your company is trying to OWN…  and how you might be able to do it more effectively with the right name.

Creating a powerful brand name begins with understanding the different naming types:
- Functional
- Metaphor
- Energy
- Morpheme
- Historic
- Family

Functional:

• Liquid Plumber
• Toys R Us
• ThinkFun

If you select a functional name, be careful with the other brand elements (logo, tagline, ad image etc) so that  the company does not appear cheap or unsophisticated compared to other brands.
Functional names use a key product feature that you want to own.

Metaphor:

• TransparentValue (an asset mgmt company)
• Amazon (name conveys size)

The focus here is on creating strategic value using a word that suggests an important value of your brand.

Energy:

• Big Ass Fans (yes.. that is the company name)
• OshKosh B’Gosh (it’s just fun to say… esp for the target mkt of little girls)

Energy naming uses words that convey emotion, action or tone of the brand to achieve effect.

Morpheme:

• Microsoft
• Verizon
• FedEx

Morphemes use small syllables of a word or words to conveys essential meaning and can be combined to form a new word like FedEx from Federal Express and Microsoft.

Historic:

• Rembrandt toothpaste
• Baby Einstein
• Con Edison

Historic naming uses an historic event, character or location to embody a brand.

Family:

• McDonalds
• Ford
• Samsung

Family naming uses either real or fictional names usually from the founders to convey the sales moment effectively especially when one needs to differentiate from competition.

Once you have a clear brand idea to work with then develop names in all 6 areas… Then you can determine which type of naming works best to convey the sales moment and helps you to own your brand idea.  Then do trademark searches on the best names to see what is available. Choose the name that is the most memorable and best owns your strategic idea.

CAUTION:
Do NOT select a company name that you like best or one that others like best.  You may not like your company name at all… The results are in and after 50+ years of studying successful brands the ones that succeed are the memorable ones that best own their Sales Moment.  If you let your ego get in the way and you decide that you ‘don’t like it’ then you will be missing out on best practices and you will be making a decision based upon a limited perspective of what you, personally are comfortable with.  It is much better to make such a decision based upon your Customer’s perspective answering the question: What name communicates the sales moment to the Customer in a memorable way.

So we can not brand a company based upon what you or I or a bunch of friends think is cool nor can we brand the company for you, me or your friends using some inside meaning that is only relevant to us. Your Customer likely does not share the same perspective as you do… We can’t choose the company colors based upon what we like either. Instead we select each of the brand elements based on what performs. These elements create an ownable mental image. Whether we like it or not is irrelevant. What matters is that your brand makes it easy for your target Customer to understand how it is relevant to them. That will increase sales.

A few more tips:
Avoid names that are challenging to spell or difficult to pronounce easily. Do some research and drop names that have negative connotations in languages that are important to your market.

2 THE LOGO
Simplicity is the key to a great logo as long as it is memorable. Customers need to be able to construct the logo easily in their mind so that they have a clear an unique mental image of your brand.
The stronger your mental image, the more likely they are to remember you. The four main attributes of successful logos are that they are simple in a symbolic way, memorable, differentiated from the competition and that they tell a story. The story MUST be closely related to the Sales Moment. Does your logo tell a story that communicates the Sales Moment?

The logo must support the mental image of the brand in such a way that you own the strategic idea stemming from the company name and supported by the tagline. Be sure that your logo is different from those used by your competitors.

3 THE TAGLINE
Great taglines bring a brand to life. They should NOT include a description of your products or services. Great taglines communicate why your brand is relevant to your target Customers by calling up the Sales Moment. There are 3 types of taglines.
- Promises
- Calls to Action
- Memory taglines

Promises are based on a key brand attribute.
Calls to Action are invitations for a Prospect to join us because they share a similar philosophy.
Memory taglines play off the name or logo to help people remember the brand.

Examples:
Timex – it takes a licking and keeps on ticking (promise)
Apple – think different (call to action)
Army – be all you can be (call to action)
Maybelline – Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline? (memory)
Prudential – own a piece of the rock (memory)
Duracell – you can’t top the copper top (promise & memory)
Volvo – For Life

Here’s another angle on creating killer taglines that I think you will enjoy. The following taglines all have a few things in common. They focus on the user’s experience (the UX) in addition to that, each of them offers a comparison and lastly, each is a highly memorable brand that achieved fame in part due to a superb tagline.

ClubMed – The antidote for civilization
GLAD – Don’t get mad, Get GLAD
Memorex – Is it live or is it Memorex?
Outback Steakhouse – No rules Just right
Secret Deodorant – Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman
Target – Expect more. Pay less
United Negro College Fund – The mind is a terrible thing to waste
US Marines – We’re looking for a few good men
MasterCard – There are some things that money can’t buy. For everything else there’s MasterCard.

If you’re in the United States, and over 30, there’s a good chance you recognize them all. What’s more, I’ll bet you can even envision how the advertising looked and sounded once you read the tag line…

Below are a few more. These companies have powerful ad agencies and multi million dollar brand creating budgets yet, how many of the following brands’ taglines do you remember from your UX? Each of the following taglines relates to their product or service… not the UX.

Ernst & Young – Quality in everything we do
Fancy Feast – Good taste is easy to recognize
Ford – Bold Moves
Honda – The power of dreams
Pepsi – For those who think young
Wells Fargo – The next stage
Aflac – Ask about it at work
Bank of America – Higher standards
Cheez-It – Get your own box
CNET – The source for computing and technology

Does your tagline quickly explain why your brand is relevant to your target Customer and, at the same time, differentiate you from your competitors?
tip: wrap your tagline around the desired UX and compare / contrast it with something that your target Customers want / don’t want to experience.

4 THE AD CAMPAIGN
In the history of the world. there have been only 4 types of advertising campaigns that build brands and drive sales. If you’d like to learn about them, enter your contact details below and we will share a few more of our best practice secrets with you shortly.

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PS.

If you are not using one of these four types of advertising campaigns to build your brand and drive sales, your marketing is simply not working.

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.

Since the villagers considered the monkeys a real nuisance, many of them went into the jungle and began setting traps to catch them. The man bought thousands of monkeys at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers reduced their efforts. When this happened, the man announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each.

This reinvigorated the villagers efforts and they started trapping monkeys again. Gradually the number of free monkeys diminished even further making hunting efforts much more challenging and time consuming – people started going back to their farms. The offer was increased to $25 each, until it was difficult to find even a single monkey, let alone catch it!

The man then announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf. As soon as the man was off on his journey, the assistant let the villagers in on a secret. He invited all the hunters and their relatives to have a look at the monkeys in the big cage that the man had paid for. And then he made them an offer that they simply could not refuse.

“I will sell them to you for $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each as he promised.”

The word spread like wild fire and before long, most of the villagers gathered their savings and managed to buy every single monkey held captive in the massive cage before releasing them into the jungle so that the hunt could begin anew.

They never saw the man nor his assistant again.

In the above article the names were changed to protect the innocent. The ‘financially sound’ structured products were represented by monkeys in the story but the facts remain the same; this was no accidental occurrence it was simply a version of the now popular Ponzi game. You probably already know this but, a ponzi scheme is a scam where the perpetrator collects money from new investors and uses these new cash inflows to pay high returns to past investors, so that these influencial existing investors believe that their capital is intact and working for them. All the while, the scam artist has been spending the initial capital on himself rather than investing it as advertised. To attract a special breed of greedy investor, such schemes often are promoted as exclusive clubs as in ‘by invitation only’ thus toying with the wealthy and famous have-it-alls psyche to the point where they absolutely must be part of this exclusive ‘winners circle’ in order to maintain their image.

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.

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE.

If the site does not help visitors accomplish at least one of those two things, then the site provides very little benefit to the business.

That’s basically all there is to it.
Buy, join, or leave.

There is no other option.

With that in mind, here are three things to consider:

a) Is your website optimized for converting prospects into paying Customers?

b) Do you already distribute an industry newsletter that your prospects value?

c) If you answered yes to both (a) and (b) above, Are you looking for more qualified traffic?

Most of our prospects ask us for help with conversions, traffic and process optimization or automation advice.  Here are a few things to get you started in the right direction:

a) Avoid the temptation to create the perfect ‘home page’. There simply is no such thing. In business, especially small and medium sized businesses… the only thing that counts is leveraging the media to generate more sales. It is really that simple.  Sure you can educate your Customers but the purpose of the ‘education’ is to increase the probability that the prospect buys from you. Thus, you may find it helpful to focus on building a landing page that converts prospects into Customers on autopilot. Our Clients test landing pages constantly to out perform their controls and improve conversions on their sites.

b) Every business has some special knowledge (well… almost every business). If you consider that most prospects are not ready to buy from you when you first meet them. They need some time to get to know you better, time to digest the information that they received, time to compare offers, time to decide that they are now ready to actually make a decision. When a person discovers your website, do your best to capture their contact details to be able to follow up with them in the future with information that is relevant to the problem that they are trying to solve. If the average consumer needs to see an ad seven times before acting on it, then think about distributing a newsletter to your prospects with tips, ideas, strategies etc that help them move forward in their decision to do business with you by demonstrating your expertise, your Customer service principles and the reason why they should be doing business with you. Have you got a newsletter already? Are you building a list of prospects and Customers? If not, setting up an auto-responder would be a very good first step in the right direction. Always remember to use criteria elicitation and tap into benefit’s based selling methods like WIIFM to get the most out of your efforts.

c) Traffic… the holy grail of a website owner. We love to help our Clients generate traffic BUT ONLY if they have reasonable conversions and the desire to build a list. Think about it for a moment, there are really only 2 important processes that you absolutely have to get right when you use the internet in your business and those are conversions and traffic. Hey, it’s not rocket science.. it’s basic maths. You need to track those downloads, keep good clean statistics and test what works best for your business every chance you get then rinse and repeat.

Folks, if your goal is to make more money online, then do something about it and let us know your objectives right now – perhaps we can put you on the right track – the fast track to success online. BoxOnline’s b6group has a team of professional, business process consultants dedicated to helping people like you sell more, earn more and basically get more sales results via the internet for your business.

One small note on the core purpose of a website: Above we are referring to your main business website; there are other reasons for creating a website these days and one of these is to create a network of feeder sites that ‘feed’ your main website traffic, leads, subscribers etc. Often blogs are used for this purpose but they can also be used to create your own affiliate product network or PPC landing pages with high quality scores – just something to consider. If you want more information on the topic and would like to see how we can put your site on Google’s first page of results, just give us a shout using the link above.