Folks, I have met lots of nice, honest people who are very, very good at what they do. Yet time and time again, before I’ve had a chance to realize it and intervene or help, they’ve gone out of business for lack of clients. Why the heck does this happen?
For the average business start-up they spend 60% of their time doing admin work, 30% of their time making good on their business promise and only 10% on marketing. This is upside-down. Most businesses and business owners should spend over 50% of their time rainmaking and have delegation and management systems to download to.
It starts with marketing. I don’t know what it is, but I suspect not knowing how to pull it all together or what to do next has something to do with it.
Do you consider marketing your business’ weak point? Do you say to yourself “I am not a marketer”? I will tell you right now, this is hogwash and you should stop telling yourself that immediately, before you start to believe it. Small business marketing isn’t voodoo. It is a LEARNABLE skill that, like any other, you can teach yourself, practice and develop. The only constraint is time and effort to gain the knowledge in an efficient and effective manner.
This is where everyone gets tripped up. It takes a lot of work for the average small business owner to to sift through he
NUMEROUS sources of marketing information, make sense of it all and apply it to their businesses.
So, I’ve been hard at work making this super simple for you. I want to help you become a small business marketing master and I am willing to show you how.
In just 12 sessions with my new LIVE training program “The Marketing for Real Results Fundamentals Bootcamp”, you will LEARN the marketing skill in the most efficient and effective way possible. I’ll show you how to confidently market your business so that you can always feel in control. When you are done, never again will you think “marketing” and feel that lump in your throat.
Here are some of the things we will learn:
- How to create a powerful marketing message that makes people WANT do business with you
- How to identify and focus on your natural market – those who REALLY want what you’ve got
- How to communicate what makes you awesome, so your clients only want to do business with YOU
- What you MUST know about your competition to make intelligent strategic marketing decisions
- How to use positioning and branding to increase customer confidence
- What NOT to say in an elevator speech, and what to INCLUDE so that it brings in MORE leads
- What you MUST include for your marketing for your customers to BUY
- How to track results so your can SPEND LESS and GET MORE out of your marketing dollar
- Which are The RIGHT technology tools to make life easier
- How to use Direct Marketing to DRAMATICALLY increase your business
- How to Educate your Leads and Turn them into Clients with less EFFORT
- How to Advertise like a PRO
- How to create a simple, don’t-bog-me-down, Marketing Plan, so you ALWAYS know what to do next
Best of all, when you sign up, you get my Special “Recover your Money” Bonus: ‘Business Generator Email/Letter Template’ (a $99.95 value). for FREE.Why? Because I want you to recover your tuition quickly, I will give all participants my surefire, business generation email/letter template in the very FIRST session. This template is something I use with small business owners to create QUICK results with LITTLE effort. This template has brought in $830, $1670, $2140 and in some cases over $4000 worth of business within a few days. This will be yours, FREE, when you attend your first session.
The workshops start on November 4th and there are limited seats to ensure you all get the attention you need.
Get all the details here >>>
http://m4rr.com/fundamentals
P.S. Hurry, because seats are limited to 15, no more!
Based on the book “Jumpstart your Business Brain” by Doug Hall, a business growth expert, this seminar explains the Three Laws of Marketing Physics. When applied correctly, these three Laws can make your sales, marketing and
business development measurably more effective. What makes these Laws unique is that the methods detailed are grounded in statistical analysis and backed up with hard data. Applying these Laws, you can measurably increase
effectiveness in today’s super-competitive, saturated marketplace.
Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Time: 7:00am
Where: Restaurant Les Pyramides d’Or, 1375 TransCanada, 1st floor.
Driving from Montreal: Take the 40 westbound service road just past the
Henri-Bourassa overpass Look for gold, pyramid shaped office towers.
NOTE: If you are planning to attend, you are encouraged to drop Pat Snow
(patsnow@gmail.com) a note.
Learn more here:
http://www.networkingplus.ca/
When an overly enthusiastic real estate agent gets trapped by answering a question, the Real Results Guy can’t help but give feedback.
Last Sunday afternoon my wife and I were looking at open houses. We are looking to move soon and decided it would be a good idea if we started scoping out the neighbourhoods we want to live in to get a feel for what’s expensive, what’s a deal, etc.
One home was being shown by a *very* nice real estate agent. She was polite, friendly and helpful. Her only flaw — she talked too much. While not a deadly sin, talking too much if you are in the sales role is NOT helpful. In my training session I call it the sign of the inexperienced sales person.
The exchange below illustrated how you can get caught by talking too much:
My wife: “Are we far from the highway?”
Real estate agent: “Oh don’t worry, you are not that close.”
My wife: “Erm.. okay… But I *need* to be close, I work downtown. How many minutes away are we?”
Real estate agent (backpedalling): “Oh! It’s super fast, I could show you shortcuts!”
You see how making an assumption trapped the agent into a corner? How she was forced to backpedal and recover? She was so anxious to promote the house, she was in full-on “deal-with-objections” mode. This happens when you are under pressure to make the sale.
Instead, she should have spent more time clarifying the objection to get to the real desire, in this case, that we have easy access to a highway.
Here is how the exchange could have gone:
My wife: “Are we far from the highway?”
Real estate agent: “Interesting question. Why do you ask?”
My wife: “Well, I work downtown and need access to a highway”
Real estate agent: “I understand. Actually, you are only 8 minutes away.”
Once the real problem has been identified, dealing with it is child’s play.
Sales lesson: Get to the bottom of the objection before rushing to deal with it.
Question:
“I am a financial advisor. When I introduce myself using my elevator speech, I mention that I will help them achieve their financial goals, but sometimes that may not be possible. Their situation may be complicated or they may have a lot of debt, or they just are not saving enough to make their goals a reality. I almost feel like I should qualify my promise in my elevator speech because I feel guilty. Is this false advertising? Am I misleading people?”
Peter Answers:
Before I respond, let me remind you that the purpose of your elevator speech is NOT to make a sale. It is to ask them to take the next step with you.
Given this, the only job of your elevator speech is to attract interest. They’ll only be interested if you are selling something they want, usually some happy result, or “end-state”. If you are a personal trainer, your end-state might be a healthy body. If you sell parts for a manufacturing process, it may be a headache-free supply chain. In your case, as a financial advisor, that may be peace of mind that loved will be taken care of, should something bad happen. Either way, your elevator speech is meant encourage the right people to take the next step with you.
So, the elevator speech is NOT the time to qualify anything. You can take as much time as you need to qualify your
client in the next step of the sales process. This is usually your first meeting. If unusual situations exist that prevent the typical results from occurring, it is at this meeting when you would identify and discuss them. You are NOT misleading anyone if you don’t bring up every contingency within your first 30 seconds or meeting them.
In fact, you are shooting yourself in the marketing foot, if you do.
When a personal trainer promises she’ll whip you into shape, she doesn’t need to qualify that it won’t work as effectively for the lazy, the injured, or those with bad backs, in her elevator speech (unless, of course, her speciality is working with the lazy, the injured, or people with bad backs). She is simply reporting the typical results of her service.
After all, she can provide the process, the know-how, the gentle (or not-so-gentle) motivation — in short, all the ingredients for success — but she can’t foresee every unusual situation because you control the most important ingredient of all. You and your choices. You still have to choose to eat right and get yourself out of bed and go train.
If you don’t and wonder why you are not getting results, it ain’t her process, skippy. It’s you. Similarly, if people don’t save or are spending themselves into debt, no amount of financial advising pixie dust is going to help them. But don’t feel like you have to warn them of this, you don’t.
Agreed, there are sometimes unusual circumstances. But these are exceptions and once again, you are not responsible for listing all contingencies in your elevator speech. For example, if a financial advising client is trying to come out of a financial hole and there is simply no way to reach their their goals before they retire, it’s okay
to tell them once you’ve assessed their situation and figure out what *is* possible. As long as you haven’t strung them along with promises that won’t become reality just to make the sale, you are not acting inappropriately.
To recap, there is no need to qualify in your elevator speech that people with unusual circumstances may not see all the intended results. You must however, be honest and truthful early in your sales process if you don’t think you can help them as much as they hope.
Now, there is another dimension to your question that the coach in me found intriguing. You mentioned “I feel guilty”. Please ask yourself why? Is your message truthful? If so, then you have nothing to feel guilty about.
If you still do, then this is worth exploring with a good coach.
Wishing you all the success,
Peter Vogopoulos
Have a marketing question? Ask me at http://www.AskPeterNow.com
For many small businesses, it may seem futile to try and compete against heavy-hitting corporations with seemingly bottomless marketing budgets. So how do you resonate with your target market without shelling out big bucks? Guerrilla marketers know that instead of money, we can invest time, energy and creativity and beat out the big boys and their budgets.
Here is a 5-step easy, economical way to get the word out that won’t break your small business marketing budget:
• Go grassroots. Hitting the pavement and making personal connections can go a long way toward establishing a name for yourself and getting word-of-mouth flowing. The key here is to identify who you will be spending your time on. Who is an influencer of what you sell? Who recommends or nixes its purchase? A wedding cake business better be spending its time on brides-to-be because they are usually the key decision-maker of this purchase. An innovative baby-carrier should be speaking straight to new moms.
• Go where your market is, front and center. If you’re trying to drum up clients for your wedding cake business, visit the shops of the local bridal district, distributing fliers to sellers of formal wear, stationery, flowers, and more. Heralding the benefits of an innovative new baby carrier? Approach moms at the mall who appear frazzled by the squirming infant in their arms.
• Fine-tune your message. For effective marketing collateral, content is key. Take the time to craft an attention-getting, value-adding message that will resonate with your target audience. A tepid or passive message is uninspiring and won’t be remembered and your results will reflect this. Create a marketing piece that delivers all the right messages and get it into the hands of the right people.
• Let them experience it. If you’ve got something good, giving it away can lead to a huge boon for your business. When a wedding cake business took out a table at the mall on Saturday, it brought in its biggest, most beautiful cake with a big clock that said the cake will be cut and served at precisely 1:30pm. Hordes of people stuck around or came back to eat some cake and take away a brochure (which naturally included the picture of the cake). The baby carrier company let women try their product for an hour while shopping. Many cam back after an hour to buy it. Both companies earned back their investment that day. A strategic giveaway can often cost less than an expensive marketing campaign and yield just as positive results.
• Follow-up. People don’t necessary act on their own. You have to remind them you exist. The tables surrounding the cake had lots of “return slips” and pencils. To get a marketing kit, you had to fill out a paper. If you did, you are probably more interested that just getting a free piece of cake. The company assiduously followed up on these prospects and found them to be very qualified and closed a lot of business.
What is your best tip for competing with the big boys? Let me know below!
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I’m Peter Vogopoulos, The Real Results Guy™, Founder of Marketing for Real Results. I help you attract more clients, make bigger profits and succeed with your small business. 
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