6 Simple Ways to Turn More Leads Into Customers
By Scott Hallman on June 12, 2013

You’ve invested in one or more lead generation approaches to fill your sales pipeline and turn those leads into customers. Have you considered what you can do better to obtain more customers without spending additional money? Even a small percent improvement can yield significant returns lowering your overall cost of customer acquisition.

Here are some tips for getting more customers from the same number of leads:

1. Measure Lead Success – Do you know what percent of leads turn into customers? Without knowing your lead to customer conversion ratio, you’ll never know what lead strategies are most successful and when there is a problem that needs attention.

2. Compare Lead Strategies – Once you’ve implemented a way to measure leads, track the success of each method and invest more time, effort and money in the methods that are producing the most customers.

3. Be the First to Respond – Customers often do business with the first company that engages them. Examine all points of potential prospect contact and make sure everyone knows, and a system is in place, for immediate response.

4. Consistently and Persistently Follow Up – Prospects are barraged with thousands of promotional messages each day. One follow up to a potential customer isn’t enough. By following up more than once you are more likely to convert prospects into customers. In following up, use more than one strategy because different prospects will respond to different approaches.

5. Recontact Old Leads – If your consistent follow up does not result in a conversion to a customer, don’t discard unconverted leads. Conditions change and, although a prospect may choose not to do business with you now, he may in the future. For example, if a prospect picks a competitor and is dissatisfied with that competitor, he may seek another provider to do business with.

6. Leverage Your Lead Generation Success – Periodically review what lead conversion strategies are most successful and test other ways to improve on what you are already doing. For example, if you are using print advertising or online pay per click advertising, test different headlines for these promotional messages on an ongoing basis to improve results.

Marketing Success Secret
By Scott Hallman on June 4, 2013

What I am about to reveal to you is something many businesses don’t employ. I call it “Leveraging Your Success™”. Leveraging Your Success™ is all about identifying what you do well, making sure it is done consistently and improving upon it for even greater success.

If you have a sales force, think about your top sales person. Have you carefully reviewed why he or she is successful? Have you in turn shared his knowledge and approaches with other sales people so that they can one-up their sales performance?

What about a successful headline you have used through one advertising vehicle, such an offline print advertising? Have you used that headline in other places to gain added success and more profits for your business?

Here are some key steps to Leverage Your Success™:

• Take a success inventory of everything you do well in your company such as marketing campaigns, sales processes, lead generation techniques, up sells, referrals, collections and more.
  

• Document the success (best practices) so that you make sure it becomes an integral part of your business year after year after year. This requires breaking down the process involved for each task and determining who is doing it best, and evaluating whether this “best practice” procedure is being followed consistently.
  

• Turbo Charge and “One Up” Your Successful Processes by evaluating them and determining how you can make small incremental changes for significant profit impact. Just imagine a 2% increase in 10 areas. The result is a success improvement of 20%.
  

• Cement in each best practice, not only documenting them, but monitoring them to make sure expected results are continually achieved or exceeded. For example, if a best practice for up selling a product is successful 30% of the time, any deviation from that can alert you of a potential problem. One problem could be that one or more of your sales people may not be using the documented wording during the up sell process.

What are your top three successful marketing practices? Have you documented these practices? Have you evaluated these practices and determined how you can improve them? Is the best practice monitored for consistent results?

Get started today and identify one successful practice you are employing with the action steps I have recommended. More profits can be yours from this simple tip.

Compelling Advantage Convenience
By Scott Hallman on May 24, 2013

Just imagine what it would mean to your business if your prospects refused to do business with anyone else. It’s entirely possible if you develop a powerful set of Compelling Competitive Advantages™ that differentiates you from the competition.

One powerful differentiator is SERVICE LEVEL. Differentiating yourself with service is especially powerful today when service (often substandard) has been outsourced to overseas agents and when many businesses reduce expenses in the service area.

One simple but powerful service level strategy you should consider employing is making it easier and more convenient for customers to do business with you. To improve customer convenience:

• Add more locations. If appropriate for your business, open more physical locations.

• Add more purchase options such as employing mobile services for ordering.

• Make ordering easier. For example, although many restaurants allow for takeout ordering, the ordering process can be annoying such as having to wait in line. Savvy restaurant marketers are now providing a way to order on the web before order pickup at the restaurant location. No waiting time is required by customers when they arrive at the restaurant.

• Become more available. Consider allowing customers to order from you 24/7. The success of around the clock convenience stores has proven that this approach works.

• Add value added services. Reduce the stress of shopping for customers. Shopping can be a stressful process at times. But if you are shopping with kids, it is pretty much a guaranteed frustrating experience. If your business requires evaluation in the purchase decision, i.e. computer or furniture or clothing, or requires a lengthy visit, i.e. dentist or doctor or health club, then having a kid’s play area is a huge point of differentiation.

Whatever business you are in – even if your business is considered a commodity by your prospects – you can gain a powerful Compelling Competitive Advantage™. Rethinking how to make your business more convenient is a great start! How can you make doing business with you more convenient?

3 Easy Ways To Get More Leads
By Scott Hallman on May 14, 2013

When it comes to improving marketing results, one of the first areas many businesses focus on is lead flow – getting more leads in their sales funnel. More leads means turning more suspects into prospects and more prospects into customers.

One easy way to get more leads is to simply increase your “Market Reach”. Market Reach is the estimated number of prospects that can potentially be reached with your marketing. To increase your market reach you can:

• Increase Your Geographic Coverage – Expand the area you are serving. For example, if you are advertising in your town’s local newspaper and you decide to advertise in a nearby town, you are exposing your message to prospects who may not have heard of you before.

• Expand Your Target Prospects – Consider revisiting and redefining who your target prospects are. For example, if you are car wash advertising to general car owners in your area, consider marketing to auto dealers as well encouraging them to offer a free car wash to all new car purchasers. By simply expanding your targeted prospects, you’ll get another source of fresh leads by just rethinking who your prospects are. Ask your team, “Who are our prospects now? Who could they be?”

• Increase the Number of Marketing Tactics You Deploy – Simply add one or more marketing tactics to what you are currently doing and you will get more leads. One reason why this is effective is that different prospects are motivated by different media and touch point approaches. Use more approaches and you will increase response.

Expand your Market Reach and you will increase your lead flow and resulting sales and profits. Why not get started today?

Downsell for Profits
By Scott Hallman on May 1, 2013

How To Instantly Increase Your Sales Conversion Rate and Add $25,000-100,000+ To Your Profits by Changing One Tiny (no cost) Step in Your Sales Process

What is “Downselling”?

Many of you now utilize the point of purchase maximization technique of upselling (and I trust optimizing the results). To make sure we are on the same page, upselling involved offering an additional item to the primary purchase to increase the overall price of the transaction.

In contrast, downselling is where you offer an alternative to the primary purchase to decrease the overall transaction price. Why would you ever do that? Well we teach several applications of this strategy but for this brief tip I am going to focus on the application of “Increasing Sales Conversion”. If you are losing out on potential clients because they cannot afford (or chose not to) your product or service, even though they want what you provide, downselling provides a simple way to “give them what they want” and convert them into profits instantly.

This strategy applies to most businesses and can be profound for many. When I taught Chet Holmes this concept, he said it was one of the most impactful things he ever implemented in his company.

Essentially, downselling is where you offer the prospect a lower cost alternative. This may be a smaller quantity package or a lower quality item, or even a first time buyer “special purchase” opportunity. The goal is to win the customer so you gain the opportunity to do business with them in the future as well.

Downselling Leverages What You Already Provide

Downselling can be amazingly simple if you simply utilize the exact products and services you already offer to create the lower priced item. If you are a health club and trying to sell a prospect on a Gold Membership that includes a one year membership, an obvious downsell is a 90 day “trial” Membership. You win a customer and a chance to convert them to a regular member. Taking this a step further, you could have a second downsell to a 30 day membership…and finally to a one week membership.

Real World Example #1*
An Instant Increase in Sales Conversion of over 125%

At my company, Business Growth Dynamics, we implemented a new downsell program in our coaching division. So we simply created a series of lower cost ways they could benefit from our coaching services and training. Our sales conversion rate increased by 125% in the first month. These are clients that would have never purchased coaching services at our standard one-on-one rates. But, and this is critical, they wanted and needed the service!!

Real World Example #2*
Marketing Systems Training Company adds $10,000 a month in Profit

I recently spoke with the CEO of an international Marketing System Training company that said he heard my interview with my friend Eben Pagan and was intrigued at the concept of upselling… So I gave him some distinctions and helped him immediately create a downsell strategy – two training programs priced below their current lowest priced one.

We quickly determined it was at least a $10,000 per month profit stream (based on past lost prospects that would have purchased) … and the CEO said that he expects it to grow to over $50,000 a month in profit!

The great thing is that it includes the exact same services that they already provide, just stripped down versions. So it required little effort to put it into practice.

Real World Example #3*
$96,000 a year in profit while helping people – How cool is that?

A healthcare provider immediately added $2,000 a week to their profits when they learned the detailed implementation systems we teach in our 30 minute “Downsell Workshop”. The strategy is totally proprietary so I am not allowed to reveal the details, except to say that there are 200 patients a year getting the help they need due to this creative downsell solution. And 50% of those that were offered the lower priced alternative are accepting the offer.

Profit Action Steps

Ok, let’s get you ringing the cash register. Select any product or service you offer and create a simple downsell that you can offer to prospects that do not purchase your standard product or service. Remember, it can be a lower quantity, quality, include fewer bells and whistles or even be a one time deal.

As with every strategy I share with you, Downselling for Profits costs virtually zero to create and test. So go for it and ProfitNOW™.