Quick way to get more sales

Here’s one of the quickest, easiest ways I know to get more sales.

It won’t cost you a dime, and everything you need for the strategy to be successful you already have at your disposal.

What’s the Secret?

Start collecting compliments.

For the next month start collecting all the compliments you’re getting from your customers. Every time they tell you you’re doing a great job, or that your product/service rocks ask that customer if they mind if you use their comments as a testimonial.

Make it easy for them to give you a testimonial by having a simple page on your website devoted to getting their feedback. Or, if in person perhaps an easy to fill out form will do. However, be sure that they know you are using their statements as a testimonial, you have their express consent to use it, and run it by them before you publish their praise for the world to see.

Where to Use the Testimonials?

Once you have a nice selection of customer praise, integrate it into your marketing materials, brochures, your website, or anywhere you directly interact with your customer.

To help get the most bang for your buck here, use testimonials that are:

• Specific - “Jim’s expert advice on small business writeoff’s saved me $500 on my taxes this year alone” is a lot better than “Jim is great at taxes”
• Authentic/Genuine – These shouldn’t sound like a sales seminar, in fact quite the opposite. You want to use comments that sound genuine and authentic
• Relateable – Some customers have a way of giving you feedback that will easily translate to the masses. Use the comments that the majority of your customers will relate to.

Why Does it Work?

Simple. A testimonial is proof you don’t suck. Consumers want to know that somebody before them has used your service and loved what you do, or they have your product and can’t live without it.

Testimonials act as a kind of social proof. When consumers talk about your products they are automatically thought of as more credible than when you talk about your products. Consumer testimonials:

• Build trust
• Aide familiarity
• Reinforce your marketing message

Remember:

• 2/3 of the United States Economy is driven by word of mouth

• 10% of consumers influence the purchasing decisions of the other 90%

• 91% of consumers are “likely” to buy off of a recommendation

• 92% of consumers “prefer” a word of mouth recommendation

Final Thoughts

Many business owners don’t like to toot their own horn, that’s fine with testimonials your customers do it for you. Many times you’ll find that they enjoy giving you feedback, and will get a kick out of seeing their statements or quotes on published material of yours. If you’re good, customers want to tell the world about you.

This takes no real time, cost no money, and you’re getting the “data” anyway, so tell me where you’ll get a better deal than that?

Your Turn

If you’re not using them, take a couple weeks to collect the praise and use the feedback – then come back and let me know how it went. If you do use testimonials in your marketing let’s hear about how it’s working out for you.

great idea from Seth

Tom points us to a provocative idea for home builders. If you want to sell a new house, why not offer prospective buyers help in selling their old houses? Send your idle crews to their house to paint it or do other important cosmetic fixes. Fill the old house with the furniture you use in your models, etc.

Take it a step further. If your home building service is totally slack, why not get to work upgrading and selling older homes or even foreclosed ones?

Consider what a solo entrepreneur could do using eBay: instead of waiting for people to hold garage sales, why not distribute flyers offering to run a virtual garage sale for anyone who will open their home to you? Go in with a digital camera, catalog and photograph the top 20 most valuable items in the house and sell them on eBay... and split the money. Your proactive effort overcomes the seller's inertia and you both profit.

There are huge opportunities for this in the business to business space as well. Most companies would welcome a post-tax-day accountant who offered (on spec) to review bills or expenses in exchange for half the money saved. If they had time, they'd do it themselves, but of course they don't.

In my experience, much of marketing is a game of waiting for the other guy to go first. Well, if nothing is happening, you go first.

Advice on Equity

A friend asked me to help him think about how to split the equity in a company he was starting. His colleague is contributing office space and some key technology. My friend is responsible for where the business goes from here. I told him this:

If you apportion equity, you will certainly do it wrong.

That's because it's based on a snapshot, a moment in time.

Sure, today, your partner's share is worth 50% and yours is worth 50%. His because of what he did, yours because of what you're going to do.

But a year from now, that number can't possibly be right. You may have acquired six more pieces of software, raised millions, traveled the world, closed sales and sold the company. Wow. Or, you may have done absolutely nothing.

So, my best advice is to say, "Today, right now, your contribution is worth 5% of the company and my creation of the company is worth 5%. The other 90% is based on what each of us does over the next 18 months. Here's a list of what has to get done, and what we agree it's worth..."

And then make a list. Stuff like commenting and updating and supporting the code. Stuff like closing sales and hiring people and raising money...

Of course, you leave an out for unforeseen events and dilution based on bringing in new partners.

You may end up having small disagreements about how to interpret the list, but this sort of advance flexibility is well worth the awkward conversation it takes to get it started. Another tip: put in a clause appointing a trusted third party as an arbitrator, so small disagreements don't snowball into litigation.

Getting serious about meetings

Do you have a meeting problem? Some folks are going to eight hours of meeting a day. At Ford, they used to have meetings to prepare for meetings, just to be sure everyone had their story straight.

If you're serious about solving your meeting problem, getting things done and saving time, try this for one week. If it doesn't work, I'll be happy to give you a full refund.

1. Understand that all problems are not the same. So why are your meetings? Does every issue deserve an hour? Why is there a default length?
2. Schedule meetings in increments of five minutes. Require that the meeting organizer have a truly great reason to need more than four increments of realtime face time.
3. Require preparation. Give people things to read or do before the meeting, and if they don't, kick them out.
4. Remove all the chairs from the conference room. I'm serious.
5. If someone is more than two minutes later than the last person to the meeting, they have to pay a fine of $10 to the coffee fund.
6. Bring an egg timer to the meeting. When it goes off, you're done. Not your fault, it's the timer's.
7. The organizer of the meeting is required to send a short email summary, with action items, to every attendee within ten minutes of the end of the meeting.
8. Create a public space (either a big piece of poster board or a simple online page) that allows attendees to rate meetings and their organizers on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of usefulness. Just a simple box where everyone can write a number. Watch what happens.
9. If you're not adding value to a meeting, leave. You can always read the summary later.

This is all marketing. It's a show, one that lets your team know you're treating meetings differently now.

PR v Publicity

Most PR firms do publicity, not PR.

Publicity is the act of getting ink. Publicity is getting unpaid media to pay attention, write you up, point to you, run a picture, make a commotion. Sometimes publicity is helpful, and good publicity is always good for your ego.

But it's not PR.

PR is the strategic crafting of your story. It's the focused examination of your interactions and tactics and products and pricing that, when combined, determine what and how people talk about you.

Regis McKenna was great at PR. Yes, he got Steve Jobs and the Mac on the cover of more than 30 magazines in the year it launched. That was just publicity. The real insight was crafting the story of the Mac (and yes, the story of Steve Jobs).

If you send out a boring press release, your publicity effort will probably fail, but your PR already has.

A publicity firm will tell you stories of how they got a client ink. A PR firm will talk about storytelling and being remarkable and spreading the word. They might even suggest you don't bother getting ink or issuing press releases.

In my experience, a few people have a publicity problem, but almost everyone has a PR problem. You need to solve that one first. And you probably won't accomplish that if you hire a publicity firm and don't even give them the freedom and access they need to work with you on your story.

How to build your email list

click here

Twitter according to Randy Gage

go for it Randy - click here