Selling High-Ticket Stuff
Over the Phone?
Part 2
In this issue:
- How to publicize your information magnet …
- Nurturing your warm market …
- The “ugly” work almost nobody is willing to do that will make you the alpha seller in your space …
- Capitalizing on your psychologically dominant position …
- And more!
Dear Business Builder,
In part one of this article, we talked about a fundamental paradigm shift that’s taking place in the world of personal selling, and the importance of getting the customer to come to you in this new reality.
We also looked at how to use problem solving information as bait, and how to entice your prospects to take it through passive advertising.
I want to use this second section to give you a feel for the best ways to use free publicity to gain even more wonderful exposure for your business.
Action Item # 4:
Publicize Your Information Magnet
Publicity is your most powerful form of advertising, and by definition, it won’t cost you a penny. Think about the virtual “watering holes” where your prospects hang out to get smart.
Regardless of your industry, there are usually three specific styles of trade publications that fit this bill.
1) Captive Editorial
These publications have a paid staff of editors who write the entire editorial for the publication. With this type of a publication, you can gain exposure by approaching them with an interesting case study of how one of your customers solved a particular problem with your product or service. They in turn will interview you or your customer, and write the story.
2) Contributor Editorial
This kind of publication looks to vendors and advertisers to provide some of the editorial content. Here you simply write an article addressing a common problem that the publication’s readership must deal with, and offer some helpful tips that point to a solution.
3) Advertorial
There are believe it or not, actually publications out there that are entirely composed of vendor contributed articles and case studies. Each month they are just jammed packed with material that is biased. As with the more common contributed editorial however, the trick to getting published, is to keep your story as seemingly objective as possible, and by including real “how to” information that is genuinely useful to the intended audience.
Regardless of where you seek to get published, you’ll get what’s known as a byline at the bottom of the piece. It’s a few lines where you have a chance to tell something about yourself, your business, and offer a means of getting in contact with you.
Key Point – In all three cases above, the main point of going to the trouble of getting published, is to direct your prospect to an enticement for your Information Magnet. Very few marketers understand the significance of what I just said. Most waste their efforts by simply providing a URL to their home page or telephone number in their byline. Don’t do it.
Instead, provide a URL to a web page or recorded message whose only mission is to collect your prospect’s contact information in exchange for your Information Magnet as outlined in Action Item 2.
Another great way to generate traffic to your enticement is with a press release, announcing the availability of your whitepaper, executive briefing or whatever you’ve chosen to call it. Here’s a link to a great TOTAL PACKAGE interview with publicity maven Paul Hartunian that goes into that in depth.
In this last section I am going to show you what to do with those prospects that don’t contact you for a quote or personal consultation on the first pass, and how to perfect each phase of your sales cycle to reap ongoing improvements in response.
Action Item # 5:
Nurture Your Warm Market
If you’ve done a good job of writing your information magnet and enticements, and targeted your advertising and your PR properly, a fair percentage of the people that requested your information magnet will contact you for a quote or consultation immediately after reading it.
The majority of them however, will not. This does NOT mean that they are not interested!
To capitalize on your efforts thus far, you need a systematic follow-up process that ensures that these warm prospects never forget you. This is where you begin your sales process in earnest.
The key here is to use your information magnet as a springboard. Now you begin developing a “relationship” with your prospects with a series of linked sales letters, delivered by e-mail. The intervals between messages should reflect the sales cycle associated with what you’re selling, but in my experience should not exceed 2 weeks.
Your goals are threefold over the next 30 to 60 days.
- Continue educating them on the most effective ways to solve their problem (with your product or service), while also offering advice on how to best accommodate the peripheral details associated with your solution. This is also the time to begin using testimonials.
- Remind your prospect of the perils of inaction, and the unique benefits of dispatching your solution.
- Make a time or quantity limited special offer, combined with a bold guarantee.
Do these three things well, and you will see a torrent of additional response.
The nature of the goods or services you are selling should dictate the timing and the format of these linked messages. All three of the above elements should be present in each message to some degree. With each succeeding message you can begin weighting your message more toward the latter steps. Be prepared to extend this targeted sequence out as much as 8 weeks.
Then deliver a periodic newsletter to those that have still not bought or actively engaged you at the end of this period. Never let them forget you!
Action Item #6:
Beat Your Controls
(The “ugly” work almost nobody is willing to do
that will make you the alpha seller in your space…)
To maximize your results, for every printed media item that you put out into the marketplace, use two different versions simultaneously. Give both equal exposure, and measure the response that you get from each. When you have a clear winner, this is your control. Replace the loser with a message that is exactly like the control, except for one change that you anticipate might make it the control.
Make changes to the headline, the opening, the call to action, the guarantee, the offer, and the benefit statements. Be sure to make only one change at a time and retest, otherwise you will not know which change has impacted your results.
Repeat.
Test on the Internet, where costs are low, before moving on to other mediums. It’s fascinating to see how just small and seemingly subtle changes can make big differences in results. I was recently working with a client who sells exercise programs, and we were able to improve results by over 20% just by replacing the words “exercise plan”, with the words “fitness plan” in the headings. Amazing.
I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t it a lot of effort tracking and testing everything, just to see what works best? Sure it is, but believe me, testing is what sets the men apart from the boys. It’s the only way to ensure high levels of profitability.
If you’re even thinking about skipping the testing part, like many do, STOP.
Action Item # 7:
Capitalizing on Your
Psychologically Dominant Position
Sun Tzu said, “The War is Won, Before the Battle has Begun”.
A masterful guerrilla marketing strategy establishes your position in the locus of power. When a prospect responds he is making the first move, and thus putting you in the command position. Before you set foot in his office, or speak to him on the phone, you have positioned yourself as an expert, and the prospect in a position of need.
Now here’s the kicker.
Almost nobody in your industry achieves this kind of psychological dominance.
Why?
Without effective automation, obtained through print and online persuasion, it is mentally impossible to attain this positioning.
You can take all of the sales training you want, but if you’re manually chasing customers, you will never have the necessary mindset, and your prospect won’t either.
But with an automated response generating system, and the psychology of abundance coursing through your veins, your prospect will feel a natural and sub-conscious compulsion to do business with you.
So think of these strategies as much more than a way to spend more time with qualified prospects. An automated lead generation system literally magnifies your ability to close sales by a factor of no less than 2 to 1!
It’s all about who’s chasing whom.
Until next time, Good Selling!
Daniel Levis
Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor
THE TOTAL PACKAGE
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Daniel Levis is a top marketing consultant & direct response copywriter based in Toronto, Canada and publisher of the world famous copywriting anthology Masters of Copywriting featuring the selling wisdom of 44 of the "Top Money" marketing minds of all time, including Clayton Makepeace, Dan Kennedy, Joe Sugarman, John Carlton, Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Richard Armstrong and dozens more! For a FREE excerpt visit Sellingtohumannature.com
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