Volume #13

Double your profits in 2011 without working twice as hard

“It always seems impossible, until it’s done.”

Nelson Mandala

I’m a firm believer in the concept of a small effort producing a big result.

So in this edition of Easy Business Success I am going to show you how you can double and even triple your sales and profits in 2011 without a huge amount of effort.

(Because this is such an important topic I’ve decided to make this newsletter quite a bit longer than normal. So you may wish to print it out for easy reading.)

Is it really possible to double and triple your sales
in 2011 without working twice as hard?

The answer is ‘yes’ you can.

However you need to a good plan on how you are going to do this.

Let me give you an interesting example you can learn from:

Now here’s why Franks story is important to you:

If you want to double or triple your sales in 2011 you first of all need a good plan with well thought out strategies on how you are going to do this. Secondly you are going to have to take action and use a number of the strategies in your plan.

So let’s look at how you can put together an effective plan to double and triple your sales and profits in 2011.

In most cases your plan to double or triple your sales and profits will have between four and nine strategies in it. There are dozens of different strategies you could potentially use so here are ten to get you started.

Double Your Sales Strategy One:

Use magnetic marketing to attract ideal new clients and customers

Magnetic marketing is where you provide useful information that positions you as an expert in your field. and helps potential clients to achieve important goals or solve big problems.

In Frank’s case I got him to use a magnetic marketing strategy called tip sheets to get potential new clients to pick up the phone and call him. A tip sheet is just a two page article with helpful tips on one side and great testimonials on the other. Frank wrote a tip sheet called ‘7 Secrets to a great looking body.’ He photocopied this tip sheet using a friend’s photocopier and hand delivered them to around 1,000 homes in expensive neighbourhoods close to where he worked.

This tip sheet had some simple tips to get in shape fast and tip #7 was to use a personal trainer like Frank. The call to action in the tip sheet was a free 15 minute personal consultation.

Within a few days of delivering his tips sheets to homes in expensive neighbourhoods Frank was getting dozens of calls from people wanting to book a free 15 minute personal consultation.

They all said the same thing. “I read your 7 Secrets article and thought it was time I got in shape. When can we meet?”

The great thing about doing magnetic marketing is that it positions you as an expert in your field and makes it much more likely that people will then contact you.

There are dozens of simple ways to use magnetic marketing in any business.

You can use special reports, article, group talks, and many more.

(In fact I’m using magnetic marketing right now by providing helpful marketing tips in this ezine. This positions me as an expert on sales and marketing and makes it easy for potential clients to make contact with me.)

Just one magnetic marketing strategy by itself can have a very positive impact on your sales. Here’s a good example...

Action Exercise One:

Double Your Sales Strategy Two:

Improve your sales presentation

After personally training several thousand sales and business people in over 37 different industries I know that all of us can improve our sales presentations.

In most cases we can do this by asking 3-5 good questions and listening carefully to the answers. Then explain in a low key how our product or service can help a person to reach their goals faster or solve some pressing problems they might have.

(Have a look at Easy Business Success Volume Nine for some helpful ideas on how to ask what I call “Expensive Questions”.)

With Frank I gave him some very simple questions to ask in his free consultation.
What have you done in the past to get in better shape? How did that work?
What results are you looking for? Why are these results important to you?
What are the ideal outcomes you want to get working with a personal trainer?

Frank then talked about these answers and how he could help people achieve the results they wanted. He showed people some amazing testimonials from a few of his existing clients and told a couple of relevant stories about the great results they had achieved. He then suggested they try a 30 day programme to get started. A huge number of people began to use Frank’s services and once they did they got excellent results and continued using him.

There are actually over 147 different things you can do to make each sales presentation more effective. And it’s also one of the easiest ways to increase your sales with no additional effort.

Action Exercise Two:

Double Your Sales Strategy Three:

Offer additional products and services to your existing clients

This is critical if you are serious about increasing your sales and profits and don’t want to work a lot harder. It’s ten times easier to make additional sales of products
and services to existing clients compared to getting a brand new client for the first time. So make sure you give your existing clients regular opportunities to spend more money with you Show them other products and services that will help them to achieve their goals or solve important problems that they have.

With Frank, I asked him what vitamins and nutritional supplements would help a lot of his clients to improve their results and improve any health problems they might have.

It turned out that Frank was incredibly well educated about all the latest research on nutritional supplements and the effects they had. He was a walking encyclopaedia of helpful information on what worked, what didn’t work and what combinations of nutritional supplements would be best for different people.

I showed Frank how to explain these products to his clients in a way that was easy to understand how they would benefit by using them. A lot of his clients tried these products, liked the benefits they received so his sales and profits jumped nicely.

In the past Frank wasn’t offering any additional products and services so he was missing out on these great opportunities to increase his profits with very little effort.

In your business you need to look for new products and services that will benefit your clients in some way. Then encourage your clients to try some of these.

In some cases you just need to communicate more often with your clients and every so often you make them an attractive offer to spend more money with you. (A key factor to success with add on sales like this is to use ‘reason why’ advertising. In other words you explain carefully why you are making this offer and why it is of great benefit to your clients to take advantage of this offer.)

Best of all these products and services don’t even have to ones you actually provide yourself. They could be supplied by other businesses and you could receive income from any sales that are made to your clients.

However they must be products and services that will really benefit your clients before you decide to recommend them.

Action Exercise Three:

Double Your Sales Strategy Four:

Put up your prices

This is one of the fastest ways to increase your sales and profits with almost no effort. Yet it’s something most people resist like crazy.

With Frank we increased his personal session prices by around 300% over a 12 month period. And because of the value he offered, Franks clients were happy to pay this money.

Here are some quick thoughts on increasing prices.

(I’ll cover this whole topic of increasing prices in more detail another time.)

The freight company that increased prices by 10%:

A friend of mine took over as CEO of a large national freight company that was barely breaking even each month. This was despite an excellent reputation and a multimillion dollar turnover. My friend decided that the best way to turn around the freight company was to increase the prices on all freight services by 10% overnight.

The entire management team and sales staff in the freight company told him this would have a disastrous impact on customers and many would leave. The reality was that only three freight customers out of nearly 3,000 complained about the increase in freight prices. And only one of these customers took their business to a competitor.

Yet after this 10% price increase the freight company now started to make a very healthy profit of well over a million dollars a year.

Action Exercise Four:

Double Your Sales Strategy Five:

Change ‘what’ you sell

One of my favourite books on selling is “How champions sell” by Michael Baber.

This book is now out of print however you can still get second hand copies by going to http://www.amazon.com/

What interesting about this book is that it’s about the top 1% of sales people in a wide range of industries and the specific strategies they use to do so well.

Now the top 1% of salespeople in many fields often earn a seven figure income.

(That’s a million dollars a year or more.) And one thing many of these sales superstars have in common is they often change ‘what’ they sell.

Here’s a good example:

One of the people in this book is a superstar salesperson called Joe Gandolpho.

At a time when a good insurance agent would sell three or four million dollars of insurance in a year, Joe Gandolfo would regularly sell over seven hundred million dollars of insurance in a year!

The reason Joe did this, was because he changed ‘what’ he was selling.

The average life insurance agent will sell insurance. The "good" insurance agent will usually sell security and peace of mind. (They sell insurance of course but they emphasize these two important benefits of life insurance.)

Joe Gandolfo initially became a "good" insurance agent by selling security and peace of mind. But then Joe changed ‘what’ he sold. He decided to sell "Tax Shelters" to higher income clients.

He packaged insurance as a component in these tax shelters but the main emphasis of what he talked about was how to legally reduce your income tax with tax shelters.

This was a totally product or service from what most insurance sales people were offering and was responsible for him selling over seven hundred million dollars of life insurance a year for seven years in a row. In one year Joe personally sold over a billion dollars of life insurance by this method of changing ‘what’ he was offering and selling a great idea that appealed to his target market.

Action Exercise Five:

Double Your Sales Strategy Six:

Change the customers you sell to

Many people don’t give a lot of thought to choosing which customers they sell to. However this one choice can have a huge impact on your results.

Changing who you will sell to can be as simple as asking yourself the following question: “Who are my best customers and what do they have in common”?

Action Exercise Six:

Double Your Sales Strategy Seven:

Make it more convenient or easier for a customer to do business with you

Look at every part of your business and see if there is any part of what you do that you could make easier to use from the customers view point.

The convenient shoe repair shop:

One of my clients told me about their local shoe repair shop. They make it very easy to do business with them.

They will, at no charge, collect from your home at a time to suit you any shoes you have for repair. (A pick up in the evening is fine)

They will drop them back home for you again at a time to suit. They will also have any keys you want cut duplicated at the same time.

Wow, talk about making things easy!

I wish my local shoe repair firm would do the same.

I have several pair of shoes I would like to have repaired and several keys that I would like to get extra copies made. Guess when I intend to get them done? That's right! When I have free time. Which never seems to happen!

Using convenience can be a simple as redesigning a form or process so it's easier for a customer to use. It could even be the hours you are open for business.

Action Exercise Seven:

Double Your Sales Strategy Eight:

Improve your follow up with clients and customers.

The good news (for your business) is that very few businesses have a great follow-up system for their clients or customers.

They are not in touch that often with an added value communication. Many times they never stay in touch.

(Trades people for example are usually terrible at staying in touch with their clients.)

The reason this is good news, is that because good follow-up is so rare, you will often gain an unfair advantage by doing it.

You could use this idea of a great follow-up system by putting into place a great follow up system in just one part of your business to start with.

Example:

I deal with a number of accountants and will occasionally recommend a new client to some of them. One of the accountants I deal with called Peter has put a great follow up system in place.

Whenever I give him a new client, Peter sends me a lovely thank you card thanking me for the new client I have introduced to him. Inside the thank you card is a $50 Westfield gift voucher as a free gift from Peter. Every time I send Peter a new client, I get this lovely thank you card and a nice gift voucher.

So what Peter has done here is put in place a very simple yet effective follow up system to say thank you to people who refer new clients.

Action Exercise Eight:

Double Your Sales Strategy Nine:

Use ‘proven’ sales improvement systems

You have two choices if you want to massively improve your sales results.

You can try and learn how to do it by trial and error yourself. This will probably take you a lot of time and be very frustrating.

Or you can learn from other people who are already using proven methods to improve their sales. Some of these ways to increase sales might have taken other people years to discover, yet you can often learn them in a fraction of this time.

Life is too short to try and learn everything by trial and error. Learn from other people experiences and wisdom and you will be delighted at how fast your sales can improve.

Action Exercise Nine:

What are some possible sources that you could use to learn proven methods to increase your sales results?

Books (What titles?)

Courses (Which ones?)

Other successful salespeople or businesspeople. (Who are their names?)

CD’s and DVD’s. (Which ones and where can you get them?)

Other sources: (List them)

Which of these sources are you going to use in the next week?

Double Your Sales Strategy Ten:

Eliminate risk with ‘Social Proof’.

Every single person has had a bad experience at some point in their life with spending money on a product or service.

They might have bought something and it didn’t work as well as they expected.

Or perhaps they bought something and found they could have got something just as good a lot cheaper from someone else.

Or maybe they bought something and were then criticised by someone for their purchase. They might have been told they’d made a stupid or dumb mistake.

You and I have also had at least one experience like this at some point in our lives.

So this means that we are all a little bit cautious about spending money on products and services because we might make a mistake and then feel bad.

I believe that one of our responsibilities in all selling is to reduce the risk (in our customer’s minds) of buying our products or services.

Because the lower the risk (in the mind of your customer) the greater the chances that they will buy what you have.

One of the most effective strategies to reduce risk is to use Social Proof.

Social Proof means we often make buying decisions based on what other people similar to us have done. That way we reduce the risk of making a wrong decision.

The key words in using Social Proof are “People similar to us.”

So if you are a medical professional; you will be strongly influenced by what other medical professionals think about a product or service that is of interest to you.

If you are a teacher; you will be very interested in what other teachers have to say about a product or service you are interested in etc.

Social Proof can be summed up in the question many of your potential clients will have. The question is this...

“Who else has purchased this product or service and what happened when they did?

When you can show these people proof that other people similar to them have purchased your product or service and enjoyed some wonderful benefits you will increase your chances of making a sale.

Here are two ways to use Social Proof to reduce risk and increase your sales

Testimonial Comments and letters

These are a wonderful way to reduce risk. What a customer says about your product or service is far more believable than what a salesperson says about it. After all, a salesperson is expected to say it’s a good product or service, where a customer can say what they truly think. These comments and letters can instantly reduce perceived risk.

Example:

Many years ago I called on a real estate office in a small town. On the wall of the office as I walked in were several hundred cards and letters from delighted customers of this real estate company. I read a few of them and thought to myself ‘Boy this company must be good, look at all their happy clients’.

Use relevant names of other happy clients

Action Exercise 10:

How can you use Social Proof in your business to reduce risk in the mind of your customers?

Summary:

In this message I have challenged you to think about an exciting goal.

How can you double and even triple your sales in 2011 without working twice as hard?

The starting point to do this is a good plan that has between four and seven key strategies that you will implement to help you achieve this goal.

In my experience, it’s the combination of strategies that works well rather than just one strategy by itself.

There are actually dozens of potential strategies you could use to help you achieve this exciting goal and I’ve touched briefly on ten of these strategies today.

So create your own plan on how you are going to double or triple your sales and profits in 2011. And then take action on your plan. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve with a good plan on an exciting goal like this.

One final comment:

It’s far easier to find reasons NOT to try a new idea than it is to break out and take a risk on something new.

But thinking “Yes, I CAN make this idea work for me,” instead of “It’s impossible. That would never work for me,” is the key to breakthrough success in your business.

Eliminate small thinking in your business:

These are the thoughts that keep you thinking “small” or stop you from trying something big, something bold, something risky...

These are the thoughts that will make you hapless, helpless, and hopeless...

So the challenge for all of us is to stop our minds whenever we hear that little whisper,
“Impossible. That can’t be done. It won’t work. Not for me.”

Stop and figure out a way the idea CAN work for you.

All the best for remarkable results in 2011.

I’ll be in touch again soon with the next volume of Easy Business Success.

Copyright © 2010 by Graham McGregor All Rights Reserved

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