Jay Abraham - Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got
Part 1: How to Maximize What You Have
Chapter 1: Your Flight Plan
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There are only three ways to increase your business:
- Increase the number of clients.
- Increase the average size of the sale per client.
- Increate the number of times clients return and buy again.
- Geometric growth formula: Number of Clients * Transaction Value per Client * Number of Transactions per Year = Total Income
- Example solution to increase the number of clients: Instead of giving the salespeople 10 percent of the profit on a sale to a new, first-time client, give them 100 percent of the profit on the first sale.
- Example solution to increase the average size of the sale per client: Sell extra related items.
- Example solution to increase the number of times clients return and buy again: Hold private "by invitation only" sales events for preferred clients.
- See yourself as a product and/or service. You sell yourself and your services to the people above you. Give the people above you what they want most - solutions to problems. These people 'kill' for problem solvers.
- Avoid the costly learning curve and borrow success practices from other industries and apply them to yours.
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Replace the word customer by the word client.
- Customer: A person who purchases a commodity or service.
- Client: A person who is under the protection of another.
- Think of your clients as dear, valued friends.
- Develop a unique selling proposition (USP) to strengthen the benefits of doing business with you. Identify what advantage or result your clients want the most, and clearly integrate that advantage in all your communication.
- Eliminate as much, if not all, of the risk in the transaction for your client.
- With add-ons (up selling) you graduate the client to a larger or superior alternative product or package of goods or services. Cross selling is introducing to the client an additional product or service that will add or increase the result of their transaction with you or your company.
- Test everything.
- Set up host-beneficiary relationships.
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Put a formal referral system in place:
- Set the stage.
- Diplomatically ask for client referrals.
- Extend a totally risk-free, obligation-free offer.
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Clients stop buying from you for three basic reasons:
- They stop buying temporarily and just never get around to dealing with you again.
- They became dissatisfied.
- The client's situation has changed to the point where they no longer can benefit from your product or service.
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A sales letter lays the groundwork for you by delivering the intended recipient the complete message:
- Every question is answered.
- Every issue is addressed.
- Every problem is solved.
- Every reservation is overcome.
- Every application is made.
- Every call to action is expressed.
Chapter 2: Great Expectations
Your greatest success and prosperity in business and life will come from your ability to create your own breakthroughs.
- The secret is doing things smarter, not harder.
- Think in terms of skipping levels and making quantum leaps. Move rapidly, easily, instantly, directly and suprisingly safely in virtually every aspect of your business or career activities.
- A business strategy that may be as common as dirt in one industry can have the effect of an atom bomb in an industry or business application where it's never been used before.
- Breakthroughs are unconventionally fresh, superior, more exciting ways of doing something. Practice a continual breakthrough business performance-maximizing philosophy to dissolve many of your previous business and money problems. Adopt a possibility-based mind-set that looks for new, different, and better ways to attain a goal or solution or address a situation.
- Major breakthroughs come from the correct mind-set - they are merely fresh new ways to do something. Most breakthroughs are a result of looking at things with a commonsense, "superlogical" degree of open-mindedness.
- Be constantly on the lookout for new and better ways to dramatically improve your overall business performance by capitalizing on what everyone else sees as a limitation.
- Examine ideas, people, procedures, and philosophies from as far outside your normal sphere of business and life as you can possibly reach. Develop a genuine interest, fascination, and curiosity for how other things outside your limited business world work and the principles they're based upon.
- Think: highest and best use of your time, money, and effort. Highest and best. Always highest and best!
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Fundamental objectives:
- Discover hidden opportunities in every situation.
- Uncover a cash windfall every three months.
- Engineer maximum success into every decision.
- Build upon multiple streams of idea generation.
- Make things more special, unique, and more advantageous.
- Create more value for others for greater power.
- Maximize personal or organizational leverage.
- Look outside your industry.
- Think growth.
- Take away risk or resistance.
- Adopt or adapt external philosophies and methods.
Think about breaking out of the conventional approach you've been taking in as many different areas of your business or career as possible. Break your activities into as many subactivities as you can. Each one can be targeted for one or more breakthroughs. Imagine what it will be like when your mind is thinking about overlooked opportunities as fresh possibilities in each activity you do. Make a list of outside sources of information about other industries' business practices you could plug into.
Identify both your biggest and easiest existing breakthrough opportunities. Try to come up with thirty breakthrough ideas in thirty minutes for thirty different areas of your business or career. Next, try to identify twenty overlooked opportunities that your business or job is sitting on. Come up with ten possibilities you could test that, if successful, would result in a major breakthrough. Make a list (and keep adding to it) of as many breakthroughs as you can identify that other industries have produced. Finally, start applying the mind-set you're now developing to the subject matter of each chapter you are about to read.
Chapter 3: How Can You Go Forward If You Don't Know Which Way You're Facing?
The first step in navigating any journey through treacherous business waters is to know exactly what your strengths and weaknesses are. And how they relate to your competition. Yet almost no one in business does this strategic analysis. Even fewer people working for corporations operate their careers strategically. Until you know your business positives and negatives it's impossible to get the ultimate rewards and payoffs you're after. So the first thing you need to do is get a handle on where you are, so you can then determine what you need to focus on to get where you want to be.
- Evaluate your business strengths and weaknesses in order to identify the basis of your current success or lack of success.
You can't make the best decisions, pursue the best strategy, or focus on a big goal until you first recognize and evaluate all the options, opportunities, and business intelligence you have available to you. So, identify what you're doing right and what you're doing wrong. What you could be doing better, differently, more effectively, and more profitably. And what you know, but don't act upon.
You can't know what area of your career or business to focus on and improve until you know the realities of these areas.
Chapter 4: Your Business Soul - the Strategy of Preeminence
The Strategy of Preeminence is a powerful yet simple strategy that almost single-handedly can transform your business or career. It makes people enthusiastic to do business with you instead of your competitors. It will give you an uncanny insight into what people want, and why they act and react in various ways. It will turn clients into, literally, friends for life. And it will strengthen your passion and connection to everyone with whom you associate.
- The Strategy of Preeminence is quite simply the ability to put your client's needs alway ahead of your own.
- Think of your customers as clients.
- Understand and appreciate exactly what your clients need when they do business with you. Once you know the final outcome they need, you lead them to that outcome. Give value and advice.
- Take responsibility for the well-being of your clients. Put their best interests ahead of your own.
- Recognize the impact you have on people's lives in the business you are conducting. Pitch in when a client's in trouble. See him or her as a valued business partner, someone whose well-being and success is directly tied to your own.
- Clients look for a trusted friend. Understand and acknowledge the reality of human nature in your clients. Understand what you can do to help solve the problems of others, help maximize the options, and find ways to do it.
- What you are really selling is solutions to problems.
Think about the different people you deal with, sell your products or services to, buy from, and work with. Think about them one at a time. Then focus on what that person's real need in dealing with you is. What results are they truly after? What's the impact your action, product, service, or function has on their career, job, future, well-being, etc.? How have you impacted their quality of life in the past? What has it meant in terms of their business or personal success? How much more could you do to improve your impact on that result? Think about their hopes, dreams, fears, interests, families, goals, and dependency or trust in you.
Realize these people are all your friends. Trusted and trusting friends. You've built a deep connection with them. Find something about them you can get even more enthusiastic and excited about. Then try a little test. Let your renewed passion and purpose work for you and them. Connect (in person, by letter, E-mail, or fax) more compassionately, respectfully, and loyally to that person. Then see what a dramatic difference it makes in the way they respond to you.
Chapter 5: Break Even Today, Break the Bank Tomorrow
Most business and people make it far too hard for clients and employers to start a relationship with them. They make it too difficult to get prospects to start using their products or services to the maximum advantage. If you lower or totally eliminate the hurdle in starting a relationship, far more people will begin one with you.
If you deliver great value, service, and tangible results, these people will keep coming back and dealing with you. And the fact that you were the only one with enough faith in yourself, your product, or your service to take the risk instead of putting the risk on their shoulders will long be remembered favorably by these clients. The faster you get a buying or advisory relationship started, the faster someone will convert from prospect to lifeling client.
- Know the lifetime value of your clients (or your clients' marginal net worth).
- Knowing how much a client will spend with you over a period of years tells you how much you can spend on the process of acquiring a client.
- The goal is to make that first purchase so much more appealing that people find it harder to say no than yes... please!
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Invest the profits of your clients' first purchase to extend the lifetime value of your client:
- As selling incentives to your salespeople.
- To buy more of your product or service.
- To buy other complementary products or services (at wholesale) to package and add to your product or service.
- Invest in advertising, sales letters, additional salespeople, free seminars, or any other marketing and selling program.
Make a list of every product or service you or your company sells. Then figure out how you can lower the resistance barrier to a prospective client, employer, or prospect by lowering the entrance fee you ask. Remember, focus attention on the fact that where you begin has nothing to do with where you end up. A new client first coming in for a lower-priced starter offer will turn into a client who buys over and over at full margin. Likewise, an employer who promotes you to a higher position (or a new employer who hires you) but will pay you only your previous salary for the first thirty or sixty or ninety days is the same employer who will probably agree to pay you 30 or 50 or 100 percent more in the long term. But before you get that 30 or 50 or 100 percent salary increase, you have to get in the door.
Try it out in a small, safe test approach first. You might offer to do a project for your current employer or work in a new position for three months with no raise. You'll be pleasantly surprised by how many people take you up on your proposition. If you use the logical strategy of lowering the barrier of entry to get started in a relationship, it will produce significant business and career results.
Chapter 6: Vive la Différence
In business and in a career, standing out more favorably, advantageously, and appealingly in the prospect's or client's eyes is a big reason why clients and employers will choose you over your competitor. The more clearly you telegraph what makes you the better choice (offering more benefits, advantages, and bottom-line payoff), the more often they'll choose you over your competition. You need to create maximum real and perceived advantage in your clients' and employers' eyes and minds at all times.
- Your unique selling proposition (USP) is that distinct, appealing idea that sets your business apart from every other "me too" competitor.
- Adopt a USP that dynamically addresses an obvious void in the marketplace that you can fill. Focus on the one niche, need, or gap that is most sorely lacking - provided you can keep the promise you make. Remember the axiom: You will not appeal to everybody.
- Develop a USP through preemptive marketing.
- Boil down your USP to its bare essence. Clearly and powerfully express your USP in sixty seconds (the oral equivalent of a written paragraph).
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Positioning your USP:
- Price-Discount USP
- Service Oriented USP
- Quality or Snob-Appeal USP
- The more measurable, comparable, demonstrable, or quantifiable your advantage, the more powerful it is, too!
- Good marketing requires that you give clients rational reasons for their emotional buying decision.
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Principles when extending a special offer:
- The client should always see the offer as a logical extension of your basic USP.
- Make it very clear that this special offer is only available to current clients.
- Don't cut corners by not providing a better price or higher-quality product, longer guarantee, or added services.
Make a list of the real benefits or advantages that you already offer a client or employer. Then list the benefits and advantages your competition offers them that you don't. Now list the ways you could improve upon your competitors' unique advantages. List any niche advantages you already possess. For instance, the ease of application of your product or service. Or your location.
Now make a list of your most important or favorite suppliers, vendors, retailers, and businesses in your professional life. Focus on the one biggest reason why you like or prefer dealing with each of these entities over their competition. Reduce the main reason or benefit down to one sentence or less. Then see if you can adopt the same benefit or advantage to your business or career.
Think about the biggest successes you know or see in any field. What's their biggest single benefit (their USP) to their client market? Is there a direct application here for you? When you understand and start focusing on and promoting the unique advantages or benefits you can offer your clients or employer, you'll see results.
Chapter 7: Make 'Em an Offer They Can't Refuse
The biggest secret to success in business or a career is to always maintain the edge in everything you do. Logical-sounding, yes, but infrequently understood. Even less frequently practiced. One of the biggest "competitive-edge" advantages you'll ever gain is to always make it easier for the client to say yes than it is for them to say no. You do it by taking away the financial, psychological, or emotional risk factors that are always attached (stated or unstated) to virtually any decision-making proposition you ever ask a client to make. When you remove the risk for anyone deciding to do business with you, it results in a powerful advantage in your business and financial success.
- Assume the risk in every transaction you have with your clients.
- You totally and completely guarantee the purchase for your client. Make a completely risk-free performance guarantee to compel them to purchase from you instead of your competitor and to purchase now.
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Use a better-than-risk-free guarantee (BTRF):
- Offer the client something else in addition (a bonus) when they agree to purchase.
- Offer financial compensation if they ask for a refund.
- Denominate a very specific result or minimum result or personal performance level the client should expect within a defined time period.
- Offer a strong and specific money-back, risk reversed performance guarantee.
- Risk reversal helps people decide to act and act now, today, immediately, without fear or concern.
- Your guarantee must be sincere and without loopholes.
- The longer the guarantee and the more specific the performance expectations you make, the more people will buy.
Look at your business, products, services, or employment skills and talents. Make a complete list of every obstacle to your clients or employers that might prevent them from purchasing, dealing with, or choosing you over your competition.
Break them into the following categories:
Financial reasons: the initial cost or expense of choosing you. And the potential financial loss if the transaction doesn't work out.
Emotional reasons: how bad the client or employer would look or feel if his purchase or commitment to you fails to perform.
Measurability reasons: Can it be measured and evaluated to show the tangible impact you or your offering could or should have on the client's life, business, or career?
Ask yourself what the real downside is in offering the client that product or service or your own employment services on a risk-free basis. Or even a better-than-risk-free basis.
Look at your product, service, or personal performance history to see how many people have been dissatisfied, asked for a refund, cancelled, or complained. If the number is low or nonexistent, that means a high risk reversal would do wonders for you. If you have a high incidence of problems or dissatisfaction, it means either you promised too much or your product or services are inferior and need quality attention.
If you provide and deliver true quality and value that can be appreciated, perceived, and understood, don't be afraid to offer risk reversal. Try it out with a few prospects or clients. Or ask one salesperson to try it for a day or week or in one market to see how much better clients respond before you incorporate it continually or systemwide.
Chapter 8: Would You Like the Left Shoe, Too?
When you close a sale, it's the perfect time to make an additional sale - particularly if there's a very good reason and benefit for the client to buy your package deal. Sixty percent of all clients will increase if you do it right and offer true value.
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Three simple technique to deliver greater benefits to your current clients:
- Adding products and services.
- Adding volume or time options.
- Adding combinations.
- Take the client forward into the future. Emphasize the end result that clients desire.
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Ways to come up with a valuable add-on:
- Observe what your clients do before they buy your goods or services.
- Watch what people themselves do with your service or product after they buy it, and offer to do it for them for a fee.
- See what people buy to go with your product or service in the pursuit of their end result.
- Ask yourself how you would make a client's end result even more complete.
- Give clients the option or incentive to buy more volume and more frequent.
- Always focus on the increased profit - not lost profit - that an add-on transaction brings you.
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Getting down to your business:
- Consider offering three times the average volume being purchased now for two and a half times the price.
- Package your product or service for a period of time.
- And finally, offer your product or service 'Til Further Notice with periodic, automatic billings.
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Engage the client in a discussion designed to indentify two things:
- What the client's primary needs, wants, and desires are.
- Educate that client as to what's available and possible.
- Up-sells are different grades, different fabrics, different colors, different styles of blinds or curtains. Cross-sells are other decorations that go along with them.
- Use point-of-sale promotions.
- Offer package deals in a more price-advantageous manner.
- Take any or all of the products and services you sell and reposition them to be more upmarket.
List all the products and services you sell that produce a greater result for the client when used together or in logical progression. Try offering various combinations, packages, and up-sell with these.
Then list what I call the cycles of product or service life - all the products or services other people sell that precede, parallel, complement, or follow the use of your product or service. Find the companies who sell all these products or services and see what kind of distribution, outright purchase, or host-beneficiary deals you can make with each in order to add their items onto your client's sale.
Think of any logical services your client could benefit from after purchasing your product or service - like tech support, extended warranty, annual or semiannual maintenance, pickup and delivery, etc. Could you provide any of these services to increase the value of your transaction?
Finally: If you have nothing else you can add, consider offering a larger or more deluxe version of your product or service at a greater price.
One or more of these experiments will result in a windfall profit and achievement opportunity for your business or career. How does it boost your career? When you get one job or project, suggest that your employer or boss give you responsibility for all or part of another job or project that's complementary. And ask for a lesser amount of compensation for the added responsibility than your employers currently pay for someone who does it full-time or to an outside service.
Chapter 9: How to Never Fall off a Cliff
You can't maximize your performance or make the most money unless you know how to make the best use of your time, opportunities, efforts, and investments. You can't get the best results until you comprehensively evaluate all the different approaches you have available in all your business activities. One approach will often outproduce another approach many times over. The odds are great that you are currently underperforming and not reaching your real potential because you're depending on the wrong actions or approaches for your success. You can right that wrong and never make those mistakes again.
- A marketing genius is someone who is both logical and prudent.
- Test different directives. Test positioning on the page. Test where and when to run your ads. Test different recommended opening statements. Keep on testing additional factors.
- Analyze the number of responses, traffic, prospects, and resulting sales for each specific ad. Compute the cost per prospect, the cost per sale, the average sale per prospect, the average conversion per prospect, and the average profit per sale against your control.
- The purpose of testing is do demand maximum performance from every marketing effort.
- Design your test to give you specific results keyed to each approach (e.g. use coupons, department numbers, questions, mailing label code, telephone numbers, different packages, specific persons).
- Never test big if you can test small.
- A/B splits: allows you to test two approaches with one ad run. "Nth name" A/B test: an Nth-name sample is a theoretically perfect cross section of the quality of the list you are testing.
- Pretest by telephone to get early feedback.
- Avanced testing: Consider quality of response instead of mere quantity. Furthermore, keep tabs on all of your data.
- Test prices! Whatever you think is your best-selling price probably isn't.
Make a list of all the major elements or variables in your business or career activities that produce measurable results. Include all regular situations where persuasion or influence are important to your success. For example, sales presentations, board presentations, setting phone agreements, advertising, catalogs, sales letters, E-mail, faxes, the conduct and attitude of your order department, client services, technical support, accounts receivable, etc.
Next, identify the key transitional elements in each of those activities (i.e. headlines, presentation openings, sales, closes, USPs, etc.).
Then come up with at least two alternative ways or approaches to those activities. Create at least two different ways to say or communicate your "message": different pricing strategies, different positionings, different presentations, etc.
The conservatively and modestly test these different approaches against your current control approach.
You'll be surprised at how many of your new tests outperform your old standards.
Find every process in your business or career that could be improved and focus on making small incremental or large exponential improvements in each process. If you do that, the combined effect will be dramatic and geometric.
Part 2: How to Multiply Your Maximum
Chapter 10: With a Little Help from My Friends
Why spend all your time, effort, expense, and credibility-building activity to attract new clients from the outside market when there is a much easier and less expensive way to do it? You can get other people, companies, publications, and organizations to get new clients for your. And they can do it faster, more efficiently, and for a fraction of the cost you'd spend doing it yourself.
- You are in the client-and-prospect-generating business. That's the basic goal of all marketing.
- Host-beneficiary relationship: Company A (the host) agrees to let Company B (the beneficiary) deliver a sales message to people who are Company A's clients.
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How to set up a host-beneficiary relationship:
- Ask yourself, "Who already has a strong relationship with people to whom I might be able to sell a noncompetitive but related product or service?"
- Once you've got names on paper, contact those noncompeting business and ask them to introduce your product or service to their audience. Supply them with plenty of information on what you sell, and some testimonials attesting to its high quality.
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Ask the potential host company's president if he would like to make thousands of euros or more instantly for absolutely no effort, no risk, and no investment.
Then point out the following facts:
- Your product or service is absolutely noncompetitive to his.
- No reduction but augmention in income or profits for the host.
- Requires no work and no investments.
- You create all the marketing material totally to his approval.
- Indemnify and hold the host harmless and unconditionally guarantee every item or service sold.
- Optional order and service routing through the host for verification.
- Pure bonus income if the host is far removed or totally tangential to your business.
- The host gets the most of the benefit from the proposition.
- Virtually eliminate the exorbitant costs of "prospecting" and only spend your time and money on people who are ready to buy.
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Benefits to the host:
- The host makes money he otherwise wouldn't have made.
- The host generates outside streams of cash flow without any cost of sales or overhead.
- The host is able to recoup the investment he has already made in his clients and prospects and all the other assets he has built up in his company over the years.
- The two-way-valve effect: Bring all sorts of things to your business and take your business to all sorts of other people.
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Possible questions from the host:
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Q: "How do I know it's not going to take away my clients?"
A: "Well do a test to see if it works." -
Q: "I want control. I don't like you having control of my clients."
A: "We can do whatever you want." -
Q: "How do I know I'll get paid?"
A: "You control the money and I'll collect from you."
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Q: "How do I know it's not going to take away my clients?"
- Try to get an "automatic renewal and exclusivity" agreement. But when you are the host, you don't want to get involved in a perpetual or exclusive relationship.
- Get endorsements.
- One of the most powerful assets your company has is your client base.
Start by making a list of products and services that complement, precede, or follow your product or service.
Then make a list of business that sell those products or services.
If you are employed in a career, your list should be of people or organizations that are, or have access to, the key decision makers in your life.
Next, contact those individuals or businesses and propose setting up a host-beneficiary relationship.
Don't expect anyone to say yes immediately. Think of this as a process. Don't try to slam-dunk a deal in just one communication, be it in person or by phone. A letter should precede and prepare a potential host-beneficiary partner for your call or visit.
After your initial letter, follow up with a call, then, if possible, a visit. Set up a logical, systematic progression of letter, call, visit, letter, call, visit, etc.
Compile numbers, facts, and logical reasoning, and present the irresistible factors that make saying yes to your proposal the only ultimate decision your potential partner can make.
Start out with the sincere belief that it's only a matter of time before those you're contacting become your strategic partners and start contributing to your wealth and success. Don't wait until an agreement is signed to start contributing value to this relationship. Share ideas and give advice and recommendations each time you communicate.
While two to four relationships may not seem like a lot, even a small number of host-beneficiary relationships can produce impressive results. If you choose your partners wisely, you could actually improve business by 50 to 100 percent.
Chapter 11: Someone You Should Meet
If you show you care about your clients and how your product or service makes a difference in their lives, businesses, or careers, they will eagerly refer a constant flow of quality clients to you. All you have to do is show your clients what to do.
- Focus on your contribution to your client's lives or business and the ultimate impact that results.
- You must intercede. You must encourage and develop referrals as often as possible.
- Referrals are self-perpetuating.
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How to do it:
- Every time clients deal with you in person, through your sales staff, or by letter, E-mail, or on the phone, diplomatically ask them for client referrals. But first you must set the stage.
- Willingly offer to confer with, review, advice, or at least talk or meet with anyone important to that client. Offer to consult their referral or let them sample or get a demonstration of your product or service in action without expectation of purchase, so your client sees you as a valuable expert with whom they can put their friends or colleagues in touch.
- The law of consistency is such that if clients recommend you to someone else, they have commited themselves also.
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You want a formal referral system so that you consistently get referrals no matter what else is going on because it is a formulized, sequential process.
Here's a guide:
- What are the demographics of your ideal prospects?
- Who can refer these prospects to you?
- Set the stage for getting referrals.
- Help your clients locate the referrals for you (people they normally interface with and people they think about because of an event).
Start looing at your clients as dear and valued friends. Think about how many other friends, family, coworkers, clients, and colleagues they associate with that they can refer to you. Review the template. Make a list of all the factors that you know apply to your clients. Then pick out one or two example referral processes from this chapter that you can use directly or with slight variation. Pick the best prospects for referrals from your client list based on your relationship with them, their level of past purchases, or their degree of satisfaction. See how many referrals you receive within the next five, fifteen, thirty and forty-five days. Adjust and perfect your system so you're comfortable with it. Then once it proves out, incorporate it throughout your operation - and continually use it. Then start experimenting and implementing more systems. You'll be introduced to dozens, hundreds, even thousands, of new clients you can serve, protect, and contribute value to for years to come. Referral-generated clients buy more often, buy more each time, stay with you longer, negotiate less, appreciate you more, and refer their own contacts with a high degree of frequency. All you need to do is start working a regular referral system and process, and the clients will start flowing in.
Chapter 12: The Prodigal Client
If you lose 20 percent of your clients a year, you have to add 30 percent more clients just to get a 10 percent increase in sales. Every business or profession has clients who leave them or stop buying. But you can sharply reduce or even eliminate most of this lost business from happening. Follow these easy lost client preventative-maintenance steps, and your business will soar even if you never increase your new-client-generation activities. Once you stop the leakage, the natural flow of new business and referrals from existing activities will build because you're no longer forced to make up for lost ground just to break even. This same philosophy applies to quality people you have lost as an employer or manager. Plug the hole and the bucket will fill up fast.
- Attrition is the number of clients who stop doing business with you or your enterprise. The opposite of attrition is client retention.
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Most people stop buying for three reasons:
- Something totally unrelated to you happened in their life or business that caused them to temporarily stop dealing with you.
- They had a problem or unsatisfying last purchase experience with you that they probably didn't even tell you about.
- Their situation has changed to the point where they no longer can benefit from whatever product or service you sell.
- You have the wonderful and noble opportunity of assisting your past clients to restart their buying relationship with you again.
- The best way to address attrition is to never lose a client in the first place by embracing and living the concept of the Strategy of Preeminence.
- To reinstate your lost clients, contact them sincerely and humbly - and tell them the truth. The added bonus benefit you get by contacting your clients is feedback.
Start a policy of cummunicating regularly and intimately with as many active clients as possible (if not all of them). This will help avoid the misunderstandings, unintentional interruptions in business, and lack of attention that open the door to competition.
Make a plan to contact as many inactive clients as possible. Preferably call upon them yourself in person or by phone. If impractical, get your assistant, staff, or management team to help you. If it's a job too big or timeconsuming for you or them, send heartfelt, empathetic, and totally respectful letters, faxes, or E-mails. Then follow up with everyone. If you have to choose, start with the most recent inactivities. How do you decide they're no longer active buyers or clients? There'll be an average buying pattern of time periods, dollar purchases, or product mixes. Anyone who used to follow such a pattern but no longer does has become (or is fast becoming) inactive. Your job (and financial opportunity) is to turn that situation around.
When you talk to or get contacts from the inactive clients, you'll need to do one of three things:
Many will start quickly buying and referring again because they never purposely intended to stop. So reward them for you lack of initiative in the past - do something special and preferential for them as a "welcome back" reward or gesture of appreciation.
For those inactive clients who express dissatisfaction with a past experience with your company, do the right thing - whatever that may be. Do something special at no charge or little charge. Express respect and sensitivity for their position. Give them a great deal on a subsequent purchase or do something distinctive that has nothing whatsoever to do with your product or service. You could send them a certificate for dinner, or tickets to the theater or ball game, or a book that's subject-appropriate or... use your imagination.
A great approach is to remember when dealing with any inactive, dissatisfied client is: "... even if you only take advantage of our make-good offer but never do business with us again, it's important to us that your last transaction with our company be a positive and satisfying experience. So please give us this chance to see that that happens for you."
Do this and almost no one can continue to hold a grudge. And even the few who still do will have to "grudgingly" tell their friends about the gracious gesture your company extended to make up for the problem. Ironically, this approach will often generate referrals from the very people who left you and never intended on returning.
Finally, when you make contact with past clients who are inactive because they have no further need or use for your product or service, don't write them off. Instead, thank them for all their past loyalty and patronage. Then diplomatically look to them for quality referrals. They'll be only too happy to accommodate you if you really communicate appreciation from the heart.
Chapter 13: Your Ten-Thousand-Person Sales Department
The effective use of direct mail can develop and penetrate new markets, niches, and opportunities. More so than any other form of influence or persuasion-based communication you currently use, direct mail offers overlooked, undervalued, and little-known applications that can easily boost your success in business as well as your career. You can make a more powerful case, reach people you'd never get on the phone, make a perfect presentation every time, command attention and respect, and stimulate interest prior to every meeting with a client or prospect.
- Sales letters are the most powerful prelude to telephone marketing efforts. They are nothing more than a conversation between two friends.
- Direct mail is one of the least expensive and most effective ways for you to tell your full sales story to your clients and prospects.
- Identify the most probable audience for the most appealing and attractive single product or service you offer. Then construct your offer.
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The components of a sales letter:
- It must get the reader's attention with a powerful headline.
- The letter must show clear and distinct advantages in the body copy.
- The letter has to prove or validate your claim of benefits or advantages through factual examples - comparisons, analysis, testimonials, or credentials.
- The letter must persuade to reach out and seize the advantage you promise.
- The letter must motivate the reader to act, respond, order, write, come in, or send back the coupon.
- Headlines communicate what the big benefit or advantage is to the client.
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The body of the letter shows people the advantages of your product:
- Write the entire letter from the client's side.
- You must then validate your claim.
- View your product as if seeing it for the very first time.
- When you present the facts, begin with a statement of basic truth, known and accepted by the reader. Always use specifics instead of generalizations when citing facts.
- Now get your reader to act. Amplify the appeal of the request for action with risk transferal.
- Make your letter long enough to tell a complete, informative, and interesting story.
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Use a brochure in the mail with an accompanying sales letter to amplify and dimensionalize it.
- Your sales letter should be warm, human, sincere, honest, personal, and one-on-one.
- Your brochure or your company product or service report should be technical.
- On the back of your brochure, place a summary and a composite of statements from other people who've already done what you're now asking this new respondent to do. Then put together a simple but declarative response device (a coupon).
Make a complete list of every business contact you make - in person; by phone; when people call you, your order department, or your client-service or technical people; accounts payable and receivable; etc. Each is a perfect opportunity to add one or a series of direct-mail letters to the sales process you currently use.
Then list every critical situation or opportunity in your business where a preceding or follow-up direct-mail or direct-response letter could result in a more positive outcome.
Next, remember that continuous contact and communication with the client has been proven to have a significant positive impact on order size, frequency of purchase, loyalty of clients, referrals generated, etc.
Now rank your various lists on a priority and frequency-of-occurrence basis. Once you've done that, start writing some powerful, purposeful, and profitable letters. If you don't have the time or talent, find a salesperson in your organization who can write. Or sit down with someone you respect and just naturally talk out what you'd like to say to someone - a spontaneous flow of thoughts from your heart. Record this conversation and then transcribe the session. You'll be surprised at what a good letter you've created once it's edited.
Once you're focused, and some letters are written, try them out in small test-run quantities or applications and see what a difference it makes.
Also, the same applies in career situations when you need to impact someone in another department, in upper management, or a board member. It applies to civic activities and community work as well.
Chapter 14: Fish Where the Big Fish Are
Why use a shotgun if you can use a rifle with absolute precision? Focus your efforts and attention on the markets, prospects, and activities that offer you the highest probability of a payoff and you'll always do better. But most people don't stop and question whether there's a better way, an accessible and qualified decision maker or source they can reach easier and more effectively. When you do realize there are ways to focus on prospects who are more likely to be interested in your product or service, you will experience greater results with less effort, time, and money expended.
- Send out letters that refer to some product, service or process the recipient of that letter can take advantage of and would have a very strong interest in acquiring.
- Personalize every letter by name, address, and solutation.
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Your mailing list is the most important factor.
There are two types of mailing lists:
- A compiled list is a categorical list of people who have similar things in common.
- Direct-response lists, on the other hand, include people or businesses who've actually responded to previous solicitation.
- Compile your own client/inquire list. Start asking for your client's name, address, city, state, zip code - and phone number. As a reward, put them on the preferred-client mailing and announcement list.
- Separately collect and retain a mailing list of prospects, leads, and inquirers.
- Your goal is identify all your active and inactive clients, to know who and where they are, and then to communicate with them and frequently reward them - attracting them to gain greater benefit when they fulfill their needs and desires through your enterprise.
- The right list will connect you with your starving crowd.
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There are five different categories of list people:
- List owner
- List broker
- List user
- List manager
- List compiler
- Use your time and your efforts more effectively and efficiently. I.e. when you pick somebody's mind, turn it into an article.
Sit down with your client files and salespeople (if you have them) and make certain you have a complete, comprehensive list of all your clients.
Separate your clients by their various buying patterns or interests. Determine which clients buy what category of products or services and which ones buy larger units of sale and buy more frequently. Identify people or businesses that purchase more of specific categories of products and services or far more specialized applications.
Note if there are similarities among various buying groups that point to opportunity trends. For example, if you discover that your biggest buyers are all doctors, or chemical manufacturers, you'd be able to target more of these groups as primary prospects.
See if there are geographical trends, demographic indications, or general age, family, business type and/or size factors that correlate to specific buying patterns.
When you recognize what these patterns are, you can use that knowledge to fashion propositions geared more to that segment.
It only makes sense that you'd want to deal differently and spend more time or communicate more extensively with clients who buy more and buy more often than ones who don't. Yet few businesses do this. The only way you can start is by finding them, then acting on the information you're sitting on.
Once you start analyzing and interpreting your data, it will lead you to significant opportunities. Because now you can start targeting precise lists of the highest probability and viability prospects - people or businesses who most mirror the patterns and characteristics of the clients you already serve. Don't forget to include the Internet and E-mail in any strategy and action plan you develop.
Chapter 15: Watson, Come Here, I Need You
Telemarketing is probably one of the most undertilized maximizing tools available to you or your team. It has many powerful ways to add sales, profits, impact, reach, connection, or penetration to your business activities.
- Prequalify your prospects by mail.
- Closely review the script that's used by telemarketeers. Monitor some of their calls.
- When selling by phone, you have approximately 30 seconds to convince the prospect to listen to you.
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Ask questions in telephone selling:
- Develop a plan
- Prepare a list of topics to cover
- Ask permission
- Time questions properly
- Begin with broad questions
- Build upon previous answers
- Balance the number and type of questions
- Don't ask manipulative questions
- Be relaxed and conversational
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Bedrock lessons for a sample script:
- Prime your prospects with a mailing (or a couponed ad)
- Project respect, warmth, and believability
- Emphasize that you call to your client's benefit
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When the prospect calls you:
- Be an interested and knowledgeable person.
- Communicate that you understand their needs and problems.
- Let them know you have solutions for them.
- Create a mutually convenient appointment time.
- Produce ideas, information, education, and expert perspectives they can learn from and respect.
- Advise them.
- Guide them professionally.
- Ethically lead your prospective client to action.
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Tips for following up on leads:
- Follow up on leads promptly.
- Help the prospect get what they need.
- Help find a solution.
- Use telemarketing to find out why people don't buy from you and to convert them.
Today no one approach or strategy can do it all for you. It takes a combined, integrated, systematic approach. Telemarketing is powerful. It's rapidly approaching direct mail as the biggest single direct-response marketing method in use. But with the advent of voice mail and the Internet and so many home-based knowledge workers being almost inaccessible, you have to respect telemarketing for what it is and accept it for what it cannot do.
Not everyone will take your call. Nor will everyone who does talk to you enthusiastically embrace what you're calling about. But properly employed telemarketing is still your most valuable and effective tool for getting more people to respond to your letters and catalogs. And to be receptive to your live visits and presentations.
So make a list. Start with every situation where a telemarketing call ahead or after a specific selling or communication process would be effective. Try out your theory by calling five or ten or fifty people and see what their response is. Don't get concerned if you've never tried it before. If your interest is honorable, your motives good, and your message and information holds true value for the recipient, it'd be shameful not to call with the information.
Give it a try. You'll be pleasantly surprised by how many people enthusiastically take your call and positively respond to your proposition.
For those people who aren't in or who don't take your call, don't get frustrated, disappointed, or mad. Know that people are very busy. They are prevailed upon more in a day than they used to be in a week. Their time and attention is precious.
Remember that, as with every other form of persuasion-based communication you use, the focus must always be on them, not you. Always find the key benefit, opportunity, or advantage that's in it for them. Make that the prime reasons for talking to them. Use that guidepost when stating your reason for calling anyone who screens calls for the person you're trying to contact. If you can't talk to them for whatever reason, leave a compelling message that holds value, appeal, and desire for them.
Don't be afraid to follow up within a reasonable time. It's not offensive if you have something important to talk about. Just make sure you're respectful and mindful of people's attention span (short), time limits (many), and access (limited).
Chapter 16: Big Profits.com
You've heard the stories about the riches to be made on the Internet. The stories are true... some of them.
The Internet offers massive profit potential. But it is an area of business that is still finding its legs. Speed-of-light change is the norm on the Internet.
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There are only three things you must do to successfully sell your products or services on the Internet:
- Offer very high-quality products and/or services that your visitors want.
- Create a great Web site that sells effectively.
- Generate high-quality, qualified traffic to your site cost-effectively.
- Remember, it's not the technology that counts. It's the strategy.
- Test powerful headlines.
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How to create a virtual community:
- Let your visitors contribute to your Web site.
- Create an editorial page, and invite visitors to contribute their viewpoints.
- Create a bulletin board where visitors can ask questions.
- Ask your visitors for suggestions about how your web site should grow - and implement the best ideas.
- Create a regular poll or survey.
- Sponsor interesting contest.
- Allow visitors to share their success stories about how your products or service benefits them.
- Solicit experts in your field to come to your Web site and provide an article, set of tips, interview, etc.
- Publish your own e-zine.
- Target your market precisely by creating three special Web sites.
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Devote your time to gaining great placement with the top eight search engines.
Here are a few tips:
- Come up with the important keywords and phrases people would use to find your product or services.
- Always use the plural of words.
- Include your most important keywords in your page title and in the first few paragraphs of your Web pages.
- Keep it simple.
- Look to other businesses and industries.
- Translate your Web site into the language of the countries where you have the highest number of visitors. Later you can expand that list.
I suggest just two action steps.
First, research the Internet world deeply before you invest your money, time, or reputation on a Web site. Learn the culture. Get comfortable with it and in it.
Second, review all the strategies I've presented in this book and focus on how each one will produce greater results when applied to doing business on the Internet.
Then get ready for the ride of your life.
Chapter 17: Manhattan for $29 Worth of Beads
Trading your products or services for things your business needs or wants is called business barter. Barter gives you the amazing ability to vastly increase your purchasing power - sometimes by as much as five to ten times over. Done right, barter also gives you the effect of having almost unlimited capital. It's like having a blank check to fill in. It allows you to acquire products and services now, but pay for them much later. And the longer you take to pay, the less it ends up costing you. You can make barter a major factor in your business-growth strategy.
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By engaging in barter activities to acquire goods and services, you can:
- Enjoy up to 80 percent cash savings on all your purchases.
- Acquire needed items with money you've already spent.
- Finance major purchases interest-free for years, and get the purchaser to carry the paper at a discount.
- One-to-one barter: Start by going to the most direct and logical prospects first, and then propose a direct exchange of your goods or services for theirs.
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Ground rules you should always follow:
- Insist on assignability for any item or service you ever receive a credit for.
- Never try to trade your goods or services at anything less than retail value. Remember, the higher the valuation you place on the goods or services you trade, the greater the buying advantage.
- Triangulation is the use of three separate transactions (or more) to achieve your ultimate barter objective.
- Always identify the real personal profit hot button of the person who controls the goods or services you want, and then satisfy those needs that push the right hot button.
- To leverage infinitely with barter, the trick is to use other people's money. In essence, you learn to control other people's goods or services without ever having to own or invest in anything.
Start by making a list of all the products and services your business makes, sells, or markets. Make special note of excess or surplus goods, materials, equipment, inventory, capacity, space, technology, access, etc., your business no longer needs or doesn't fully use.
That list is on the left-hand side of the page. On the right-hand side, make a list of all key vendors you regularly buy goods or services from to see if any might be interested in directly trading with you for their products or services. Or for a portion of the cost you pay for them. Also add the names of your current suppliers' competitors, who might be even more eager to initially trade with you for product and service as a means to start a business relationship with your company.
Below that list, make a third list of companies with whom you might be able to triangulate for goods or services. See if there's any company to whom you'd like to start selling your products or services who would also trade whatever they make or sell in order to start a relationship. Then write down whom you could either sell or trade those items to for things you or your business needs or wants.
Now, go wild with the possibilities. Try putting a few small, easy trades together at first to get comfortable with it. Then, with time, keep expanding your level of trading. I've seen companies make or save millions using barter. At the very least, it'll add an additional level of profit, revenue, or expanded impact to your business activities.
Chapter 18: Leave a Message After the Beep
The more contact and communication you have with a person, the stronger and richer the relationship becomes. In business the secret to keeping and growing clients, as well as growing a career, is to keep continual and meaningful communication with everyone important to you. This is a simple but very powerful method for getting the very most out of your client or key contacts.
- Open a dialogue with anyone and everyone who could help you reach your goals.
- Reassure clients about their wise decisions, and show how the same USP that served them this time will be there to serve them in the future.
- Teach the clients why that USP and risk-reversal advantage is so much more important than the benefits offered by your competitors.
First, make a list of these categories:
Active clients
Inactive clients
Special-buying-category clients
Frequent-purchasing clients
Larger-average-purchase clients
Special-industry-based clients
Independent sales and distributors
Professionals
Industry trade contacts
Key suppliers
Noncompetitive businesses in your field (not competing directly with you)
Businesses that sell key products or services that complement, parallel, amplify, follow, or combine with the product or services you sell
Key executives above or under you
Key influential people you know
Add more as you think of appropriate categories
Under each listing, determine how best you or a member of your team can contact the people in each category. For example, call, visit, send a Christmas card to, take to lunch twice a year, etc. Obviously, the level and frequency of contact will depend upon how much time, people, and capital you feel should be devoted to each category. But remember, doing anything regularly is far better than merely intermittent contact or communication.
Then make a list of what has to be created, set up, and managed to make certain the objectives on your list are implemented, then sustained.
Prioritize them by importance and ease of initiation (making quarterly calls, for example, is much easier to do than a complex call-letter-visit system).
Then start doing it regularly, enthusiastically, and systematically. This strategy works for business owners and employees with equal effectiveness.
Chapter 19: Somewhere over the Rainbow
Having a reachable goal is more important to your success and financial prosperity than almost anything else you do. Once the goal is established, you need to work backward to reverse-engineer the exact steps, accomplishments, benchmarks, timelines, and methods you need to follow and set. And include appropriate, hedge, or contingency plans.
- Incorporating multiple success approaches together vastly multiplies your achievements, minimizes your shortfalls, and comprises your timeline to achieving any goal.
Most people live in mortal fear that they aren't worthy of the limited and abstract goals they set for themselves. More of us set limited goals that simply aren't worthy of our true ability, potential, and mental capacity.
Set higher sights for yourself. But make them clear, specific, decisive, and accountable goals. Then reach those goals and keep raising the bar for yourself.
Sit down with your notepad. Clearly state each major business, financial, professional, personal, or family goal you have set.
Then, under each goal, write down the exact steps, numbers, events, processes and actions you have to accomplish to reach those goals.
Finally, do a reality check. How well are you really progressing on each goal? Are you regularly evaluating and adjusting your performances and methods to reach the goal? If you're past your original goal, have you established new, higher goals? If you're behind your timeline or haven't diligently developed a daily, weekly, transaction-by-transaction plan, do it now. Break it down to simple non-threatening steps.
Without a clear destination and a precise road map for getting where you want to be, you'll never maximize your potential income or success.
But follow a good clear map with complete detailed travel instructions and your journey will be highly rewarding.
Chapter 20: Your Never-Ending Success
You now have the knowledge to embark on a wonderful adventure. Don't limit your trip. Don't stop when you make your business or life successful. That's only the first leg of the trip. Focus on bigger successes, greater possibilities, and constant, never-ending personal and business improvement.
- "Far more is accomplished through movement than was ever achieved through meditation."
- Uncover and identify what powerful marketing and selling approaches other industries have discovered that you don't know about, and then find an easy way to apply those methods to your business.
- "How might I adapt all or part of that process to what I do?"
- The only limit to your income is how much you believe is enough.
Chapter 21: You Are Richter than You Think
The strategies I have shared with you throughout this book will change your life. I guarantee that when you apply them with diligence and persistence you will enjoy success beyond anything you can imagine. The question you need to ask yourself is "What is my definition of success?" Most people have a tendency to define success in terms of their companies and/or careers. But the ultimate benefits you will derive from my strategies are the successes you'll enjoy in your life.
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Four questions that can change your life:
- Have I identified and valued my true expertise and inventoried my negotiable personal assets?
- What performance skills have I demonstrated in the past that have not only abstract, but intrinsic, value and importance to a business - or a specific type of business?
- What have I accomplished that people would not only respect, but also desire to learn and utilize to gain the same benefits for their companies?
- Who would give their right arm to acquire the valuable expertise I now recognize that I possess?
- One of the key ideas in what Jay Abraham calls the Secret Wealth Mind-set (where you evolve to creating your own rules and using Jay Abraham's concepts in your own original combinations and interpretations) is to always remember that you make the rules.
- What you know, do, or have successfully done is probably worth considerable money and value to other noncompetitors in your business or line of endeavor - or outside it.
- Write down and create a permanent file of who all your past business contacts and relationships are and the business area and connection they control, and what would bring them the greatest profit and advantage.
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The optimum personal, business, and career strategy:
- Refuse to get less out of an effort, less out of an opportunity, less out of a day, less out of a dollar, less out of a relationship, than the maximum that activity or action has the capacity to give you.
- Don't do things just to be doing them.
- Insist on playing life to the fullest.
- Playing it based on your sense of value.
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Ask yourself these questions:
- Who am I?
- What do I want?
- What makes me happy?
- What doesn't?
- Where is my strength, where is my weakness?
- Where can I make the greatest contribution in my life, in my job, in my business, in my relationships?
- Your first priority is to identify what you want and then make sure you take the path that's going to give you that.
Posted on 10th November 2007 by Quintus Hegie
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