Tips and Strategies
3 Critical Elements To Growing Your Business

For many business owners and marketers, marketing only means getting new customers. True, getting new customers is important for every business but it is only one part of the OPTIMIZATION equation.

In order for a business to achieve exponential growth, it must do the following three things:

1. Increase its customer base.
2. Increase each customer's frequency of purchase.
3. Increase each customer's average amount of purchase.

Marketing must address all three of these areas to optimize a business. For some reason though, 95% of marketing dollars are spent on gaining new customers. But by failing to increase your current customers' frequency and amount of purchase, there's a good chance that you're wasting valuable resources.

3 Steps To Avoid Perpetual One-Shot Selling
Restaurants are a good example of perpetual one-shot selling. It's not that people don't come back necessarily, just that the restaurant makes no pro-active effort to get them back. That's why I'm going to use a restaurant to illustrate a simple 3-step formula that will keep customers coming back over and over again. This formula can and should be applied to every business.

Step One: Capture the names and addresses of all of your customers.
Step Two: Systematically contact all of your customers and ask them for more business.
Step Three: Offer a reward when you ask for more business.

Sounds simple enough and it is. But I can assure you that any business that is struggling isn't doing it and 90% of businesses that aren't struggling could double their profitability-if they would execute this formula.

By execute, I mean contacting the customers either individually or by a letter that is computer addressed and laser printed and sent to them. I don't mean sending a coupon in the mail on the back of a lost child postcard (although those are good for finding customers in some cases).

The Myth Of Passing Out Coupons
What about a method that most small-time restaurants use: coupons. I'll submit to you that most people using your half-off coupon are looking for a deal more than they're looking for a good restaurant to frequent.
 

Think about the message the coupon sends to customers: Our place is so bad that we've got to give it to you at half price to make it worth your while. Plus you don't make any profit on the transaction.

You must pro-actively seek to work the back-end. Most businesses let their customers dictate what their buying habits will be how often they'll come back, how much they'll spend when they do buy, etc. Most businesses are reactive when it comes to re-selling their customers. If you already have sunk the cost of generating and nurturing a customer once, why not solidify the relationship and profit from him forever?

Start immediately to do everything in your power to gain repeat sales from your current customers. It may be something as simple as writing them a letter or giving them a telephone call. But one thing is certain if you don't ask for the business, your competitors will.
 

Joint Ventures
How to Gain $3.4 Million of Good Will in 30 Days
One of the best ways I know to leverage your time and marketing dollars is to enter into joint ventures with other businesses. The first place you need to consider when looking to maximize profits is reselling to your own customers.

If you agree that your customers are your business' most valuable asset, then you should see the potential profits available if another business will make its customers available to you. Available, that is, in the form of consignment of goods, an endorsement or a more integrated joint venture.

Joint ventures can work in one of two basic ways. First, you let other companies play off your customer base and then take a percentage of each resulting sale. Or second, work a deal with other companies to make their customers available to you and then pay them a portion of each sale.

The underlying principle of why this works is simple. A business will spend some finite amount of time, money, resources, and sweat developing a relationship with its customers. The customers will have some level of confidence in that company which translates into their willingness to respond to offers made by the company.

For instance, a company might spend $50,000 a year in advertising, $80,000 a year on commissioned salespeople, and $5,000 a month for prime retail space. These three expenditures alone not to mention dozens of others account for almost $200,000 spent a year to develop customer relationships. Now, if you work a joint venture with the owner of that store, you can access all of that money spent for the cost of a letter.

 
Joint Venture Marketing Offers Your Business
The Ultimate Financial Leverage
There are thousands of ways to construct joint venture deals. You have to be willing to actively pursue and put together deals. When you present another business owner with a proposition, your approach is all-important.

Just like all good marketing efforts, you want to preach benefits to him immediately. Don't just go up to him and say, "Will you endorse my product to your customers?" You have to paint the picture first. You have to help him understand how it works. Not everyone understands the dynamics and leverage like you do.

The marketing function of a business can offer tremendous leverage. These concepts can be applied to almost any kind of business successfully as long as you keep an open mind and continue to think outside the box.
 

Dominate Your Marketplace
Train Your Targeted Prospects To Buy From You
The Success Marketing Systems igive you the systematic approach to making prospects want to listen to what your company has to offer by presenting a compelling case for your product or service and systematically and consistently communicating it in a way that's instantly embraceable.

We have found that most companies don't have much of a problem selling their services or products - once they get an audience. If a salesman gets an appointment, as long as he can fill the prospect's basic needs, then he's got a good shot at making the sale. In retail, if the customer just comes in the door, it's likely that they'll buy again, provided that their needs can be met at a fair price. Professionals can usually sell new clients if they can just get the initial consultation to demonstrate how good they are. If a manufacturer can just get his products into the hands of distribution, there's a good chance they'll make sales and so on. The problem is generally NOT selling.


The Problem Is Getting An Opportunity To Sell
Utilizing Truth to Trust principles is the only way to consistently contact your target market with compelling marketing pieces. In this way you train your prospects to buy from you and loathe the competition. You do this through the creation and implementation of a Hopper System.

The whole point of the Hopper System is to allow you to manage huge quantities of leads without all the additional time, hassle, and expense of trying to personally contact each one of them with the intent of developing a one-on-one relationship. Most business owners and salespeople spend 80% of their time trying to frantically manage prospects (with little success), instead of spending 80% of their time closing business and building their residual income.

To help you more clearly understand how the Hopper System works, consider the analogy of a plum tree. It's simplistic, but it's also true to form. Let's say you have a plum tree in your backyard. Each year that tree will grow hundreds of green plums that are up on the branches just waiting to turn red. If you wait long enough, you'll discover that some of the green plums ripen, turn red, and become ready to eat.

Plums on a tree are like your prospects. At first, some of your prospects will be ready to buy just like the ripe plums that are ready to eat at the beginning of the season. But the fact remains, that for various reasons, many of your prospects WILL NOT be ready to buy when you first contact them. They still need some nurturing some time to "ripen," so to speak.
Harvesting "ripe" prospects is easy. These are the ones you call on and they have an immediate need and since you called at a good time, you get the sale. This, incidentally, is not your greatest opportunity to gain new customers. Your REAL potential wealth lies in the "green" prospects-ones who need more time and more nurturing from you before they'll finally be ready to buy.

The average business owner or salesperson will pick all the red plums off the tree, throw them in his little bucket (he doesn't need a very big one!), and run off to the next tree looking for more red plums. Maybe his next tree is a trade show, a networking group, a mail campaign, a fax blast, or a telemarketing list. But wait a second-don't you think some of those green ones, the ones who weren't ready right away might pan out in the future?

Well, even the average business owner or salesperson figures that his green plums might turn red someday, too. So he sets up a great system for cultivating them called the tickler file. Every so often, he calls the people on his list from a given tree and becomes what's known as "the annoying little voice on the other end of the phone."

See if this sounds familiar; maybe you've even been guilty of doing it. You call an unconverted prospect and say "Hello, may I please speak with Tom. Tom? Hey, this is Joe over at XYZ Cash Flow Solutions. Remember I met you at the chamber of commerce lunch a couple of months ago? You don't. Well, did you get that brochure I sent you with my business card? Oh, don't worry about it. Anyway, I was just calling to see if you guys over there need any of our services yet? You don't? That's okay. I'll give you a call in a couple of months to see if you need some then. Bye!"

See how silly that sounds? There is no reason from the prospect's perspective for you to call him and waste his time in the first place. So instead of building trust and confidence and brand equity, you're building a gulf of contempt and hatred! This routine gets old (for them) very, very fast.

In business, realize that there's a process that a prospect must go through before he'll be ready to buy from you. He may need to learn more about this industry in general or he may want to know about you and why your offer is any better than anyone else's he's considering. Or maybe, he just doesn't need what you have...right now.

Your challenge is to educate and nurture each prospect along. But that's hard to do if you've got more than 10 prospects. Lots of business books and trainers talk about what's known as "relationship marketing" or the process of building a personal relationship with a prospect so he'll think you're his friend. After all, given a choice, we'd all like to buy things from our friends. But with 250 prospects, that's a tough row to hoe.

Let's go back to the orchard to find the solution. In the orchard, you cultivate plum trees by watering, fertilizing, de-pesting, etc., and you also let nature take care of some things (sun, rain, and so forth). But remember, prospects are like plums, not entire trees. Building a relationship with every prospect is a lot like paying a lot of attention to every plum on the tree. Imagine inspecting all the plums for bugs every day. Or somehow adding a small but precise amount of water to each plum each day. This is a silly example, but it does make the point. You have to address the entire tree at once not plum by plum.

In the orchard you can set up an irrigation system that would automatically come on every day to water the trees. You can hire an airplane to drop pesticide on your trees once a week. You can send in a crew to prune the branches. In other words, you can treat the entire orchard at once. All the plums will ripen when the time comes. Then your job is to go in and HARVEST!

In sales, your nurturing consists of two things: Communication and Consistent Contact. You have to continuously communicate with your prospects why they would want to do business with you…and you have to say it in a way that makes them believe it and take action. If you will do this consistently, you will win the lion's share of the business. Here's why:

1. None of your competitors are doing it, so you win by default.
2. If you do this properly, you will be building your case and as soon as the prospect has a need, you will already be the OBVIOUS CHOICE to do business with.

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