Generating Business Part Three:

Ten more questions you should ask yourself if you want to generate more sales enquiries and turn them enquiries into profit.

1. The best way to sell is to ask questions, are you and your sales staff aware of this fact?
   
2. You should always include a PS in your letters, are you aware of why this is important?
   
3. You should be using up to ten ways to market your business, are you doing this?
   
4. If you follow up a mail shot with a phone call you can increase response rates and increase your profits, do you do this after every mail shot?
   
5. Your existing customers are really important, you should take the best care of them are you and your staff aware of this?
   
6. Your clients all have Birthdays; do you know when these are? Do you send them a card?
   
7. You should be in contact of your existing customers all the time by these methods, Mail, Email and Telephone, this is how they will get to know about your offers, are you keeping in touch?
   
8. Most of your competitors probably don’t do what I have stated above, Can you imagine  how much  better than them you would be if you chose two of these marketing methods and put them to use?
   
9. Would you enjoy life more if your business was doing better?
   
10. Did you know for things to change in your business, you have to change what you do with your marketing?

If you have answered NO to any of the above, implement the changes today and begin to earn those missing profits that your company needs.

Dave Edwards

How To Get NEW Customers On A Tight Budget – And Get People To Do Business With YOU Rather Than Your Competitors!

Try Before You Buy Offer

Using the social aspect of sales:

Sometimes the social aspect of a TRY before you BUY offer can be used to help people make the right decision, making the sales process faster and less stressful.

Quite often your potential customers have already decided to purchase your products/services and your try before you buy offer simply helps them to make a decision.

Don’t let your potential customers make the mistake of taking their business elsewhere, sometimes people want to buy your product/service but they need to remove the risk of buying from you.

Use a ‘Try before you Buy’ Offer,

Find a way to offer your potential customer an opportunity to try your products, let them test it or see if it works, don’t be fooled into thinking your product/service is to valuable to let potential customers try it for free.

Test it out!! it will pay dividends.

BMW or Mercedes will quite happily let you test drive one of their cars, WHY because they know that it works, many customers buy cars from one these two companies this is the same principle as a try before you buy offer.

Here’s what to do NOW:

Firstly: find a way to get potential New Customers to try your product and feel the value it will offer to them, make sure this trial is FREE.

Secondly: ask these potential New customers what they thought about your product or service after using it.

If they tell you they love it, ask them what is it, that they loved

The answer to this question should be the foundation of your sales pitch, remember questions hold the answers let your potential customers sell your product for you. Believe me when I say they will sell your product or service to themselves.

This would be a good time for you to say, I’m really glad you found our product or service useful, then you can use an assumptive close to sell your product/service.

If you ask this question in the right manner and say nothing your potential customer will be motivated into taking some action, this won’t work every time but it will massively increase the number of sales that you make, try it and see.

It makes little or no sense what so ever, that any business even small businesses would not have a try before you buy offer.

Another approach is to let your potential customers take all the risk, putting their faith in you and your product/service ask yourself what you would do in this buying situation?

If you wouldn’t buy your product neither will they.

Generating Business Part Two:

The Next 10 Questions You Should Ask Yourself:

Today I want to share with you the next 10 great ways to highlight some instant ways for you to generate more enquiries, boost your profit and grow your business.

The following 10 questions will help you to understand where your business is succeeding and where it isn’t so that you can take the necessary action to produce rapid results. Effort will be required on your part if you wish to take advantage of those extra profits you could be missing out on.

Did you know it takes 99% of effort to launch a rocket but only 10% to keep it flying?

1 How much time each year do your sales team spend learning leading edge sales skills?

2 You should have an excellent lead generation in place, Do you have this in place ?

3 Do you have an ongoing communication with qualified leads consisting of letters and emails and phone calls?

4 Do your customers ever send you testimonials and do you use them?

5 Do you have an effective referrals system in your work place?

6 There are lots of ways of obtaining referrals, can you name three?

7 You should offer something of value to your website visitors in exchange for their contact details; do you make this offer to them?

8 You should know how to write a press release as this will grab the attention of the person reading it; do you know how to do this?

9 You should personalise all emails newsletters and letters, is this something you are doing?

10 You should send regular email communications to your customers and prospective customers do you do this?

If you have answered NO to any of the above, implement the changes today and begin to earn those missing profits that your company needs.

WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT TEN GREAT WAY TO BOOST YOUR PROFIT AND GROW YOUR BUSINESS.

Dave Edwards www.harlequinsalesandmarketing.com
How To Get NEW Customers On A Tight Budget – And Get People To Do Business With YOU Rather Than Your Competitors!

Generating Business Part One:

Ask Yourself These 10 Questions:

Today I am going to share with you 10 great ways to highlight some instant ways for you to generate more enquiries, boost your profit and grow your business.

The following 10 questions will help you to understand where your business is succeeding and where it isn’t so that you can take the necessary action to produce rapid results.

These questions are what you should ask yourself, give them plenty of time and thought and you will be surprised at the results you can achieve. This would be a good time for me to point out that should you answer NO to any of these questions, these are areas of your business where you are losing out on those all important PROFITS.

All is not lost, don’t bury your head in the sand or crawl under a stone this exercise should motivate you into taking action with your marketing.

1 You should be able to name three things that set you apart from your competition (Can you?)

2 You should demonstrate the benefits your products will have for your customers in all your promotional literature (do you?)

3 You should use telemarketing to attract new potential customers (do you?)

4 You should use Direct Mail to attract new potential customers (do you?)

5 You should have a good relationship with a media so that you can acquire some good PR to build name awareness (do you have this relationship?)

6 You should use Direct Response adverts that will make your potential customers jump to action (do you use this type of advert?)

7 You should not advertise in the media just because your competitors advertise there, you should try something different (do you?)

8 You should always converse with your customers in ways they can understand (do you?)

9 You should test search engine advertising (have you?)

10 You should test Internet Advertising (Have you?)

If you have answered NO to any of the above, implement the changes today and begin to earn those missing profits that your company needs.

WATCH OUT FOR THE NEXT TEN GREAT WAY TO BOOST YOUR PROFIT AND GROW YOUR BUSINESS.

Dave Edwards www.harlequinsalesandmarketing.com
How To Get NEW Customers On A Tight Budget – And Get People To Do Business With YOU Rather Than Your Competitors!

Marketing Letters “GET THEM OPENED”

Get YOUR marketing letters opened:

Today I would like to share with you a few facts about how to get your Marketing Letters (mail shots) opened.

These simple facts will ensure that your Marketing Letters provide an increase in future response rates, which in turn will generate more enquiries and More Sales.

All companies that send out mail shots are looking to generate more business or at least more enquiries but in order for this to happen your Marketing Letters need to be read, you could have the best offer your customers have ever seen but if your letter doesn’t get opened your prospective client will never know just how good your offer really is. There are lots of marketing gurus out there that will give you good advice about what to write in your Marketing Letters, but surprisingly not all of them know how to get your letters opened.

Read Mail vs. Junk Mail:

Have you ever picked up your post in the morning and separated it into two piles, usually one pile consists of flyers, post card offers and anything that looks like junk which ends up in the BIN!! the other pile consists of bills (easily identified) and letters that look you want to read them. Today I was talking with my Brother in Law He’s a Postman and I said to him I wish I had a job like yours where I could finish at lunch time. His reply was I would be home a lot earlier if it wasn’t for all the junk mail I had to deliver.

Junk Mail is easy to SPOT:

This morning I had a letter that nearly ended up in the bin, but at a second glance I realised that it was a Marketing Letter that was selling something I was interested in buying, I won’t bore you with what the product was but I will share with you the reason why it nearly went straight out with the trash, you see when I looked at the letter my name and address was spelt wrong and it was printed on a white self stick label, most mail shot companies use this method because the computer will print labels out more quickly than you hand writing the name and address on an envelope, any letter that uses this type of label looks like junk and usually end up in the bin.

Companies sending out mail shots like this will suffer in the fact that thousands of their Marketing Letters never get opened infact their letters meet with huge amounts of unnecessary resistance from potential customers, Just because their letters look like junk mail.

Make sure that YOUR marketing letters are opened:

Follow these few simple steps and I guarantee your Marketing Letters will be opened.

Be sure to correctly address the letter you are sending.

Do some research and make sure you have a name on the envelope (Don’t write your letter to the Director or any other title) and make sure your envelope is spelt correctly and displayed clearly.

Don’t use ‘window envelopes’ with the name and address of the recipient printed onto the enclosed letter.

Refrain from having any offers or message on your envelope it could result in as much as 100% of your letters remaining unopened.

Don’t use CAPITAL LETTERS and always send your letters with a stamp not a franking system.

My best advice is do some research, for the next week scrutinise all the mail you have delivered to your address, Which would you open? and which of your mail goes straight to the bin? Learn from this and make sure that in future you give some thought to your Marketing Letters. Remember the bottom is that you need to make sure that your future customers are reading your mail shots, and when they do make sure there is a COMPELLING OFFER inside that makes them TAKE ACTION!!

If you find this information useful please forward it to anyone you think might also find it interesting, or tell them visit my website www.harlequinsalesandmarketing.com and subscribe to my newsletter and I will also send them a FREE copy of my short e-book;
“10 ways to Success in business”

U.K. Advertising “Make It Pay”

Advertising seems to be every one’s favourite way of wasting money:

So let’s take a look at how you can get Better Results from your advertising budget.

In my experience there are better and more cost effective ways of marketing than advertising. This said, most businesses I know depend heavily on advertising and therefore give little thought to finding more cost effective ways to market their business. Advertising is the most expensive of all marketing options so business owners should look at getting their advertising right before spending their marketing budget. If  however you are advertising already, or plan to in the future, here are my thoughts on what works and what doesn’t.

Don’t Advertise if it Isn’t Working.

If this sounds silly or obvious you would be amazed at how many businesses advertise because that’s what they have always done or even worse because the competition does it, most don’t even know if their advertising works or if it doesn’t.

Measure the results of all your advertising its really important. Many businesses just allocate a certain amount of money to an advertising budget, they spend this budget every year…and only have a vague idea if the adverts are working or if there not, this is absolutely barmy. If your advertising works then use it on a larger scale if it doesn’t work STOP it immediately and use the money on one of dozens of other marketing strategies that can bring you a better return on your investment.

Use Direct Response Advertising, other forms of advertising are institutional (or brand) advertising and are designed to build brand awareness, If you’re a small or medium sized business, brand advertising is almost certainly a waste of your advertising budget.

For small or medium size businesses your advertising needs to produce a profitable response, so stick to Direct Response Advertising and watch your profits grow
RATE CARDS:
Now there’s a laugh! I often chuckle to myself when newspaper sales executives talk about rate cards, most rate cards are far too high always negotiate a better rate is my advice. 20 to 30% less for your advertising isn’t unreasonable and can make your advertising campaign profitable rather than unprofitable and I bet your sales executive is soon back looking for more business.

Just as with direct mail the HEADLINE should be given lots of thought it will if written properly increase response greatly, don’t be tempted to use your company name as the headline think of something that will grab your customers attention, remember also that the copy of your advert needs to communicate with the person reading it.

Here are some other advertising tips:
If possible place your advert on an early right hand page. This has been tested again and again. When you read a newspaper or magazine your eyes are drawn to the right hand page as you flick through, so statistically more people will see your ad if it’s on the right hand page, use Bold or Underline text in your advert especially on any offers

like I said in my experience many businesses are wasting money on ineffective advertising compared to other cost effective means like (Direct Mail, Telephone Marketing, Direct Sales, Email, Internet, Referrals, Strategic Alliances etc) But done properly advertising can be highly profitable and a good mix with other marketing forms.

Hope you found this interesting if you did pass it on or leave your comments:

Feel free to forward this information on to anyone who will find it useful. If they want to receive my emails, they need to go to harlequinsalesandmarketing.com/newsletter.

Taking care of what we’ve already worked for.

The success of any business is the source of wealth it gets from Existing or new customers.

Don’t neglect your source of wealth. Don’t neglect your customers.

One of the best profit areas for any business is its existing customer base, how often do you communicate with your existing customers and do you realise how important they are?

Nearly every business owner I know, concentrate their efforts on looking for new customers and forget how much it cost them in the first place to acquire their biggest asset (their existing customer data base) once you have sold to them they should not become a number, remember they are still a customer.

Most businesses are sitting on a fortune,

it’s not hidden, just forgotten.

You can get access to this fortune by answering these questions.

Do you have something to offer your existing customers that would make them want to contact you?

Is there something that you are not offering existing customers that you could be offering them?

When was the last time you sent your customers a letter, an email or contacted them by telephone?

This might be interesting, what would happen if you made twice as much contact with your existing customers this year as you made last year, just be sure if you do communicate with them with whatever you decide to offer, make sure that you monitor the response you get.

I have helped many businesses to generate thousands without spending on anything more than a first class stamp, a little bit of time and an A4 piece of paper this is not unusual, sometimes all you need is to step outside the box and look back in to see where your next customer will come from.

Here are some useful things to consider when you’re looking for your next best customer.

What results could you get by using direct mail?

Do you spend time every day thinking of an offer you could make to your existing customers?

Do you always thank your customers for their business?

Do you always measure the response you get?

There are tons of marketing ideas on how to get new customers, but remember you are sitting on a fortune if you already have an existing customer data base.