Clayton Makepeace presents: The Total Package. Business-building secrets for growth-obsessed companies.

July 05, 2009
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Posted by: Troy White
November 28, 2008
Issue #556

Frank talk about Selling Lobsters
By The Boatload
Part 2

Fellow Business-Builders,

You are going to love the rest of this success story!

If you haven’t read the first half, make sure you go back to last week’s article and go through the details.

Brendan Ready shared with me his brilliant strategy for selling a commodity type product for huge margins over his competitors.

Some of the things he covered in our last week’s article …

  • Do what your competitors aren’t willing to do to open up new territories.
  • Go where the real money is … and charge appropriately.
  • Find areas that are not being served properly.
  • Be creative in how you pay your team members – get them excited about how much they can make … and how much of a mini-celebrity you are making them.
  • Charge very high premiums for a unique service and product that creates an unforgettable experience … one they can’t wait to share with their friends.
  • Plus a lot more was covered … make sure you read it!

back to the interview …

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Posted by: Michael Masterson
November 25, 2008
Issue #553

The Optimum Strategy
for Acquiring New Customers:
How to Discover and Implement It

"This may seem simple, but you need to give customers what they want, not what you think they want. And, if you do this, people will keep coming back."

John Ilhan

I believe that for every business, at any given time, there is an optimum strategy for acquiring new customers - and that the primary marketing obligation of the company’s CEO is to make sure that strategy is discovered and implemented.

What do I mean by an optimum strategy for acquiring new customers?

I mean a marketing and sales strategy that will produce the greatest long-term benefit to the company. Usually, that means finding and converting the greatest number of high-lifetime-value customers, i.e., customers who will continue to buy products from the company for years into the future.

Here’s an example …

Since its inception, EarlytoRise.com has recruited almost all its customers through Internet advertising. Of the many conversion strategies we have tested, two have so far proven effective:

  1. Selling informational reports on other websites and then giving buyers a free subscription to our daily e-zine, which then sells them all sorts of "back-end" products.
  2. Targeting search engine users on a pay-per-click basis with a free special report, and then giving them a free subscription to the e-zine with its back-end selling.

What we found - over and over again - is that those who had purchased our informational reports were worth considerably more over the long-term than those who had responded to our free report offers.

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Posted by: Troy White
November 21, 2008
Issue #551

Frank talk about Selling Lobsters
By The Boatload

Fellow Business-Builders,

You are going to love this success story!

I know I do … I’ve probably shared it with a thousand people by now.

Why?

Because it is packed with useful tips on how a relatively average, commodity-type business turned things around and now charges > 12,000% more than his competition.

The next best thing about this: Brendan Ready did this without buying 400 e-books, $1,500 home study programs, or attending thirty different $2,500 per person workshops. 

Here is a guy who is well on track for a $1.5 million dollar a year business in his first year.  I can see it tripling in size every year, if they can handle it.

Now, I am one for training through books, home study programs, and seminars. I invest $20,000+ per year in this … not to mention what I pay my coach and mastermind groups (more than my education investment).  I would highly recommend you invest in your education too. 

Even with Brendan’s success, he had never even heard of some of the strategies I shared with him.  One of which is an easy extra million a year for him if he wants. 

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Posted by: Clayton Makepeace
November 10, 2008
Issue #542

Time to Turn Lemons into Lemonade!

Dear Business-Builder,

So let me tell you a true story …

The year was 1976 and life was NOT good in America — and it wasn’t just because Disco was king and we suddenly found ourselves sporting silly-looking Leisure Suits.

America’s name was being dragged through the dirt world-wide.  In the preceding 24 months, Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace and Saigon had fallen to the Vietcong.

Our new president, Gerald Ford — the only man in history to serve both as vice president and president of the United States without winning a single election — was proving himself to be an affable dunce. 

Our nation was still reeling from the effects of a vicious two-year recession.  Unemployment was actually worse than it is today:  Nearly 8% of our workforce was out of work. 

As if to add insult to injury, inflation rates — our cost of living — had soared more than 17% in the preceding 24 months.  Our money had lost nearly one-fifth of its buying power in just two years — and our president’s only solution was the idiotic proposal that we all wear lapel pins proclaiming “WIN” (“Whip Inflation Now”).

Then, just when most investors thought things couldn’t get worse … you guessed it:  Things got worse.

Unsurprisingly, given the laundry list of woes just cited, millions of Americans were eager for “change.”  So in November of 1976, they elected Jimmy Carter as the 39th president of the United States.  And just to make sure the new president would have no problem getting his economic programs passed into law, they also preserved his party’s majority in both houses of Congress.

Now, you’d expect any fiscally conservative entrepreneur to be deeply worried … even depressed about the future at a time like that.  But four men — Howard Ruff, Tom Phillips, Bob Kephart and Jim Blanchard — were not depressed.

Instead, they rolled up their sleeves and laid the groundwork for what would soon be massive personal fortunes.

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Posted by: Troy White
October 31, 2008
Issue #536

Has effective marketing
gone to the dogs?

Fellow Business-Builders,

Casino the Crusader … and a damn fine puppy

After two years of pestering and some on-paper commitments from them, we just got a new puppy for the girls 8th birthday.  They have wanted a dog for soooo long (me too) … and I made sure we were all in agreement with how they would help, and the type of dog they would get.

(Note: this contains non-puppy content too … and some great marketing ideas learned in the process.)

Rather than opting for a purebred dog, we decided to rescue one.

And I was shocked at how many rescue companies there are in Calgary!

We have been watching all the rescue websites for the right time and the right dog. The night of October 1st, I decided to check out the Misty Creek Rescue Web page (http://www.mistycreekdogrescue.com). 

When I read Casino’s story … I knew he was the right one for us. 

From his blog (yes, they had a blog up for him!) …

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