Here’s the secret to making more sales with less effort...

I am convinced that in any business there is both a ‘hard’ and an ‘easy’ way to higher sales and profits.

The hard way is to invest huge amounts of time, money and effort to produce very modest increases in sales results. So you try a lot of things, spend a lot of money and the results are frankly disappointing. (We’ve all done this in our businesses.)

The easy way is to look for simple things you can do that will produce extraordinary sales results with virtually no effort.

The key words here are ‘look for’.

In other words you have to make an effort to see the world in a new way.

In this new way you are looking for simple action steps you can take that will produce amazing increases in your sales and profits with hardly any effort.

1: A simple explanation increases sales by over 500%

In the book “Yes-50 secrets from the science of persuasion” there is an interesting example of a new sales approach taken by a home improvement firm that sold expensive hot tubs. These hot tubs sold for around £7,000 so were a big ticket purchase for most people.

This firm did two very simple things differently and this increased their hot tub sales by over 500%.

First of all they began telling prospective customers, honestly, that many buyers of their top of the range hot tub model reported that owning it was like adding an extra room to their house.

Secondly, they began asking these prospective customers what it would cost to build an extra room on the side of their house.

When you compared the cost of a £7,000 hot tub with the much greater expense of building a new room on your home, the hot tub seems far less expensive in comparison. This made it a lot easier for clients to justify purchasing it.

2: The book publisher that ignored book shops...

A lady called Cindy Cashman saw an interesting idea a few years ago that took her fancy. The idea was for a book with the title “Everything men know about women.”

The book was over 100 pages long and inside there was nothing but blank pages.

Cindy liked the fun nature of the book but she didn’t like the idea of having to work really hard to try and make a few sales.

So she began looking for ways to sell huge amounts of her book with very little effort.

The outcome was interesting.

Cindy ignored completely traditional book shops as she realised her book would be competing with tens of thousands of other books for sale.

Instead Cindy approached businesses like women’s clothing shops and got them to display her book next to the cash register. Women shopping at these stores would pick up the book because of the catchy title, laugh when they saw it was totally blank inside and would then buy a whole bunch to give as gifts to people they knew.

Cindy kept the price very affordable and sold over a million copies of her book within the next few years.

Cindy went on to become one of the most successful self publishers in the world.

3: The franchise company that focussed on an unusual market:

A large franchise company began looking at the characteristics of their most successful franchisees, and discovered (to their surprise), that a large number of them had short haircuts.

Now that was pretty unusual; so they decided to dig a little bit deeper.

Further research revealed that the majority of these franchises (with short hair cuts) came from an armed services background like the air force or army.

The reason these franchisees were so successful was because they were used to following orders from their armed services background.

So they tended to do everything they were told to do in their franchise manual and got excellent results when they did this.

The franchise company began to focus more on getting people from the armed services into their franchise business and their sales went through the roof.

4: The personal trainer who surprised even me:

Many years ago I used a personal trainer to get myself in better shape. His methods produced great results in a matter of weeks, yet this personal trainer wasn’t making many sales. I discovered that in the previous year he had only made around $19,000 income working full time as a personal trainer.

He was keen to improve these results so I gave him 4 simple things to do. I got him to write a one page article called 7 secrets to a great looking body. He delivered these articles to around a thousand homes in expensive neighbourhoods close to where he worked.

This article had details of 7 ways to get in shape fast and one of these ways was to use a personal trainer like him. He offered a free consultation in his article and on the back of the article we included some glowing testimonials from happy clients.

The phone began ringing with people reading his article and wanting to book a free consultation. I then showed my personal trainer client how to use a simple sales presentation to convert many people who took his free consultation and turn them into happy paying clients. I finally showed him how to offer these clients other products like vitamins, protein powders and other things that would help them get good fitness results. In other words he offered his clients more things they could buy from him. What we call ‘add on’ sales.

The results of doing these four simple things surprised even me. Within 18 months this personal trainer was regularly earning over $190,000 income a year and still working as a one man band trainer. Not bad for doing four simple things.

5: The home relocation firm that had dozens of people keen to talk with them:

One of my clients is a home relocation firm that physically moves a complete home to a new location. They will take it to pieces, put it on a couple of trucks, move it and then put it back together again. I suggested they try a simple lead generation magnet to attract potential new clients to talk to. So on my advice this client wrote a short special report called ’11 secrets to successfully relocating a home’. Dozens of people each month ordered this report which had some useful tips on how to relocate a home. The end result was over $8 million dollars of new sales with virtually no effort.

Helpful Resource:

For most businesses a simple combination of 3-5 marketing strategies is all they need to explode their sales. The trick is to pick the right marketing strategies to use..

If you are serious about making 2010 an exceptionally good year in business I suggest we have a short chat on the phone and explore what marketing strategies would work best for you.

There is no charge for this and I think you will be pleasantly surprised what we come up with.

If this sounds of interest let me know.

Just email me with words ‘Explode my sales’ in the headline and I’ll make a time to chat on the phone and show you the exact combination of marketing strategies that will help you to make more sales with less effort.

You can email me on graham@twomac.co.nz