Press Release:
Here in the northern hemisphere summer is upon us. The sun is shining, the kids are on holidays and most of the business world slows down to enjoy the warmer weather. If youve been struggling to find new customers in your business, now is the perfect time to change all that.
The greatest need among all small to medium sized businesses is finding new customers on a consistent basis. Unfortunately, far too many of us are still relying on old-school selling tactics such as cold-calling and business networking to prospect for business. Not only are these methods time-consuming and ineffective, they are also demoralizing and depressing. This is 2007 - there are much better ways to find new customers.
Get Prospects to Contact You When Theyre Ready to Buy
The simple solution is to implement an automated lead-generation system for your business. With this system, you position yourself as the expert in your industry and the first person people will want to call when they require your products or services.
Ill overview the entire system first and then go back to expand upon each of the steps.
1. You begin by created something of value to give your prospective customers for free in exchange for the opportunity to begin a relationship with them. This is called your ?offer?.
2. You then use cheap and effective direct marketing tactics to promote your offer and entice people to join your list.
3. Once people are on your list, you continue to provide them with valuable information and enhancing your position as the leader in your field.
4. As people become more familiar and comfortable with you, they will begin to contact you when they are ready to buy.
5. Finally, you leverage your customer and prospects lists through partnerships to increase the value of each customer.
Your Offer
Your offer is something that youre going to give away for free in exchange for prospective customers contact information as well as their permission to begin a relationship with you. It could be a short report, an interview or even an email course. How you set it up is up to you.
Ideally, your offer must cost you very little or nothing, be distributed automatically and most importantly, have a high perceived value by prospects in your target market.
If youre stuck for ideas, think about your customers biggest problems. What keeps them up at night? Can you solve these problems? Good! Solve them with your offer. Your offer shouldnt blatantly promote your product or service. It should, however, solve a problem related to whatever it is that you offer. Remember, you want to be perceived as the expert - not just another salesman.
Make your offer available online through your website or via email. Depending on your budget you may even want to have it printed and mailed out to people interested in receiving it.
Spreading the Word
Once you have your offer in hand youre going to turn on the marketing. But here is the twist. You want to promote your offer and not your business offering. This is where youll distinguish yourself from your competitors. While the rest of the world tries to flog their wares through selling, youll be offering information (your offer) through marketing. Rather than being perceived as yet another salesman youll be perceived as a problem solver.
How you market your offer is again, up to you. I recommend cheap, guerilla direct marketing tactics - email, postcards, classifieds, etc. You dont want to spend a fortune but you do want to be able to measure the ROI you get on every marketing dollar you spend.
Making Contact
People hear about your offer and decide it is something they just have to have. They visit your site, join your email list and receive their offer. Their name and email is added to an autoresponder series for automated follow-up.
Building the Relationship
Now that you have people joining your list, you continue to provide them with valuable, pertinent information. This information solves their problems, not yours. In other words, you dont blatantly pitch your products or services. Your prospects appreciate your help (remember, it hasnt cost them anything yet) and they begin to trust you and your advice.
They Call You to Buy
As time goes on one of two things will happen. Either people will get bored and unsubscribe from your list or they will contact you to buy what you have to sell. At this point, you dont have to sell them anything. They are familiar with you and what you do and they are comfortable enough to contact you. You may have to answer a couple of questions but the real qualifying has been taken care of by your marketing system. As your list grows youll find that youll spend more and more of your time as an order-taker, while your poor competitors continue to cold-call and pop alka seltzer to curb their stress induced ulcers.
Expanding the Relationship
You now have a list of people that like and trust you. However, you only have so many hours in the day or you may be limited as to how much you can sell. Not to worry, a couple of great partnerships will allow you to maximize the value of every prospect on your list.
Every business can use more sales leads. Now that you have a lead-generation system in place you can leverage this tool. What problems do your prospects have that you cant solve? Find a partner that can solve these problems and recommend his or her services to your list in exchange for a commission of some sort.
Make sure that the partner is both competent and trust-worthy and never recommend a solution that you wouldnt use yourself. The last thing you want to do is alienate your list.
There you have it - a simple, automated method of building business relationships. This is not hard to do. You can have everything set up in a month even if you know nothing about computers or the Internet.
And come September, when your system is in full-swing your competitors will have no idea how you managed to take so many of their competitors from them. Werent you taking holidays like everyone else?
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