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Who’s Your MVP?

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Michael D. Goodman

In the last post, we talked about making first contact with your prospective big fish and how to make a positive first impression. Today we’re going to talk about feeling out the personality of your prospective big fish to match the right salesperson to the fish.

You need to do this in two steps:

Profile your salespeople’s personalities.
Match the right salesperson to your target fish.

There are essentially three different selling personalities:

Sage
Pal
Pit Bull

The Sage

This salesperson offers knowledge, experience, comfort, and trust. They can make a concerned customer feel at ease. In order to be successful, they need plenty of information, a demo of the product/service, references and case studies, if possible.

The Pal

Much like it sounds this is a salesperson that shines at building relationships. They can instantly relate to the prospective client and make them seem like old friends in no time. They work best with clients who are looking for friendship, information and in a similar peer group as the salesperson. This can include anything from age and culture to hobbies and nightlife. While, sharing experiences can be beneficial to creating a new relationship, your salesperson must always keep it professional and dignified. The resource’s this personality type needs is help pairing with the right client, entertainment (or schmoozing) budget and the right information to meet the client’s needs.

The Pit Bull

Obviously, this personality type is a little more aggressive than the others. They are all about business and the bottom line. While this may seem harsh to a lot of people, there is a set of business people out there that want the same thing and respect someone who can get down to business and the benefits of a partnership. This salesperson will need to be trusted with a little authority as they will likely be closing deals on the spot. They’ll need plenty of resources and access to products and services. They are best placed in environments where they can work independently, exercise their authoritative discretion and seal deals quickly.

These can all be successful when each is used in the right selling environment. You can easily see how matching the right salesperson for the client can secure more big fish and for a longer period of time.

If you need help figuring out which of your salespeople fit into these three areas, try our FREE test drive and work with one of our amazing coaches to get your big fish plan in action.

The Perfect Bait

Posted on May 18, 2022May 18, 2022 by Michael D. Goodman

In the last post, we talked about how to learn about your big fish and prepare for the first contact you’ll make with them. This first contact is essential to your success. You need to instill confidence in them. They need to know you can fulfill exactly what you are offering on time, at a good price, and at the quality, you promise.

Today we’ll actually go through the big approach and how to make that perfect first impression. Before you put together your approach plan, you need to choose which big fish you’re going after. Take a look at your notes and the research you’ve done about prospective fish. Then decide which one will be the easiest approach to start out with.

There are a series of things to go through in choosing which fish to start with. They are:

Position Your Business
Compile Your Hit List
Select the Best Target

Position Your Business

You need to position your business to make the first move by listing your revenue streams, your operational procedures, where your fish is initially positioned, your big-customer research, and putting it all together.

Compile Your Hit List

Start with a list of all the companies you’ve been considering. Then narrow it down to the ones who know could use your products or services. Don’t overlook obvious choices, whether they are big or small. Even small companies could be big fish in the future.

Select the Best Target

Once you’ve got your list narrowed down, you need to decide which one is the best fish to start with. You need to consider a couple of things:

Which have the most purchasing resources to spend?
Does their company vision complement yours?
What are their employee incentive programs as they relate to your products/services?
What’s the company’s real need for you?
Will the partnership lead you off-course?

Now you should have a target in mind to start with. It’s time to plan your approach and execute that plan.

Here’s the step-by-step plan to help you make a good first impression:

Build and analyze your database. Divide your leads into three different categories: hot leads, great fits, and secondary leads.
Send out introductory mailings to your target to introduce yourself, your company, services, products, and vision. They need to be short, clean, and concise.
Follow up with your first phone call 2-3 days after they would have received the mailings. During the phone call find out whom you need to be speaking with in the future and try to set up a meeting with the right person.
Follow up your phone call with another mailing that thanks them for taking the time to speak with you and offer more details about your products/services. Use this letter as an opportunity to set up a meeting to do a presentation.
Follow up the letter with another phone call a couple of days after they would have received the letter. This phone call is to help you further develop your relationship with the prospective client. You should also be able to set up a presentation meeting with them.
Call again a week later if they haven’t agreed to a meeting or presentation. Ask if they received your creative letter (the second one) and if they have a minute when you can stop by and introduce yourself in person.

Now, don’t be upset if you don’t seal the deal right away. Some people simply take a little longer to woo. This can all be a little intimidating at first, but when you know you are offering a quality product/service, you can’t go wrong.

Once you’ve gone through this process and made first contact (and hopefully a good first impression) it’s time to put your best face forward, which means sending the right salesperson to seal the deal.

If you need help putting together your approach and making a good first impression, try our FREE test drive to work with a coach and have access to a wealth of great resources and tools.

Deliver + 1

Posted on April 13, 2022 by Michael D. Goodman

In the last post, we talked about how to figure out what your customers want out of a positive shopping experience. Today we’ll talk about the concept of Deliver +1 and how this concept can take your customer service to the next level. I’ve decided to split up this post so the next one will cover the 1% Rule.

Consistency is the key to any great customer service experience. If you want to take your satisfied customers to Raving Fan status, you have to go above and beyond the average customer service experience.

There are three ways to develop consistency:

Avoid offering too many customer service options.

We sometimes get so caught up in giving customers what they want that we get away from our original vision. Instead, stay true to your vision and offer one or two solid customer service techniques that will set you apart from the competition.

You need to fine-tune the current systems you are using before you can add anything to the mix. There’s nothing worse than launching a new program when you haven’t even worked out the kinks of an old system.

Put solid systems into place.

Once you know what you’re going to offer, you need to have a system in place to execute it flawlessly every time. This system needs to involve the right people in the right roles and responsibilities and technology that guarantees a positive experience every time. Emphasis needs to be placed on the results, which ultimately is the satisfaction of the customer.

Good training is the key.

Once you have your system in place you need to train people to use it properly and efficiently. This helps your people deliver the results your customers are looking for. While training is essential for the system to work and for all your people to perform together cohesively, appreciation will go a long way.

I hope this has given you a look into what you need to do in order to have a quality customer service system in place. If you need help, try our FREE test drive and gain access to a wealth of resources, tools, and coaching.

You Turn Me Right ‘Round Baby, Right ‘Round

Posted on March 1, 2022 by Michael D. Goodman

The biggest area of turn-key businesses is franchises. There is a franchise for every industry in the world and they are fairly easy to acquire and come with a pre-packaged, easy-to-assemble system. McDonald’s is a prime example. In fact, a 12-figure, 38,000 franchises example.

There are a few things we are going to talk about:

Business Format Franchise
The Franchise Prototype
Franchise Prototype Standards

Business Format Franchise

The business format franchise came from an earlier model called the “trade name” franchise. The big change was in the rights. During the “trade name” days the franchise owner only had marketing rights; now franchise owners have ownership rights to the entire business including systems. This has allowed for a shift in focus to go from the quality and name recognition of the products carrying the business to sales techniques that carry the business.

The Franchise Prototype

It was really the franchise prototypes that allowed for the changes to be made that help today’s franchises really shine with the techniques developed by the owners instead of the corporation. This can make a significant difference in the success of the franchise as the owner can custom tailor their marketing and promotions to the direct needs of their local target customers.

Franchise Prototype Standards

Now, the above being said, no one in their right mind would purchase a franchise if the parent company didn’t have a solid plan of action set up to ensure the prospective success of the business. So, there are a few standards that are put into place that help jump-start the process of opening a successful franchise.

Build a model of prospective customers/clients, suppliers, creditors, and employees who will consistently offer high-quality work.

Build a user-friendly model that can be used by individuals of any skill set.
Build a defect-free model.
Build a model with Operations Manuals.
Build a model that will provide guaranteed, consistent results.
Build a model that encompasses the same branding in color, dress, and facilities codes.

These are all ways the parent corporation makes sure their brand stays the same and in the front of the minds of customers. When you are purchasing a widely-known brand, you will attract customers just for being you.

If you are considering purchasing a franchise, talk with one of our experienced business coaches during our FREE test drive.

Expand the Life of Your Business

Posted on February 22, 2022 by Michael D. Goodman

Today I’m going to talk about the life cycle of a business and how to get the most out of each cycle while also extending the lifespan of your business.

The four different stages of a business life cycle are:

Infancy
Adolescence
Growing Pains
Maturity

We’ll talk a little about what each of these cycles means and how they can each help expand your business’ lifespan.

Infancy

This is generally considered the technician’s phase, which is the owner. At this point, the relationship between the business and the owner is that of a parent and a new baby. There is an impenetrable bond that is necessary to determine the path your business will follow. Never drop your baby.

The key is to know your business must grow in order to flourish. You cannot stay in this stage forever.

Adolescence

In this stage, you need to start bringing your support staff together to delegate to and allow growth to happen. The first line of defense is your technical person as they need to bring a certain level of technical experience. This cycle really belongs to the manager though. The planning stage needs to start, and a relationship should be built with the entrepreneur to plan for the future.

Growing Pains

There’s a point in every business when business explodes and becomes chaotic. This is referred to as growing pains. It’s a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. You are often faced with a number of choices:

Avoid growth and stay small
Go broke
Push forward into the next cycle

Maturity

The last cycle is maturity, though this doesn’t mean the end of your business. Your passion for growth must continue in order for your business to succeed. You need to keep an entrepreneurial perspective in order to push your business forward.

You see how all four of these cycles are connected and depend on a strong foundation for each one of them for your business to be and continue to be successful. All three of your key roles (the technician, manager, and entrepreneur that I mentioned in my previous post) must also work together to work through these cycles.

If you’re having trouble putting together your business life cycles and figuring out which of the key roles you fit into, try our FREE test drive, Click Here.

Put Them in a Trance

Posted on February 1, 2022 by Michael D. Goodman

We’re going to go through the 5 essential keys to a successful and reusable marketing campaign launch. Once you have these basics down, you can use them over and over again.

The 5 essential keys are:

Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Put an effective sales offer to work
Avoid the marketing pitfalls
Use a world-class marketing perspective
Get results!

We’ll go through each one of these, so you can see exactly how to use them and how they all affect the overall outcome of your marketing campaign.

Define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Take the time to ask yourself some questions from the perspective of the customers/clients. What would it take to get your attention? What needs do you have that need to be met? What are the promises you want to be fulfilled?

Once you know the answers to these questions you can start putting together a plan to meet these needs. Then take a look at what USP your competitors are using to help you develop your own USP. Your USP is what you are “promising” your customers/clients. This is what’s going to set you apart from your competition.

Put an effective sales offer to work

To develop an effective sales plan, you need to:

Put together a headline that gets immediate attention.
Share benefits of your products/services speaking from the customers’ perspective.
Identify the specific needs met by your products/services.
Make it easy to do business with you by offering guarantees.
Share your specific sales proposition.
Walk your customers/clients through how they should respond and act.
Motivate with a call to action.

What this all means is, you need to put together what makes your products/services special and compel customers to buy. If they don’t feel like they NEED your product, they won’t buy it. You need to answer a question, solve a problem or feed an obsession.

You need to provide them with all the information they need to make an informed and confident decision. Buyer’s remorse is one of the worst things that can happen.

Avoid the marketing pitfalls

There are 5 major marketing pitfalls many businesses fall into and you should avoid:

Ignore market testing and push on with an inaccurate plan.
Offer an incomplete case, or reasons, throughout their marketing plan.
Fail to notice the needs of their prospective customers/clients.
Fail to diversify their marketing options.
Fail to get market opinions on their offers.

These are all areas to avoid. If you’ve been working through these lessons, avoiding these pitfalls should be easy and natural.

Use a world-class marketing perspective

A world-Class marketing perspective is important, especially if you want to attract customers/clients from all over the world. You can do this with a number of different techniques and activities:

Keep a marketing journal and scribble down anything innovative you see.
Keep encouraging your marketing department, or yourself, to try new things and dump the ones that aren’t working.
Order from your own company under a different name and analyze the process of ordering, shipping, online store, customer service, and the product itself. This will show you where the areas for improvement in the customer experience.
Read every quality ad you can find and keep a file for future ideas to consider.
When out in public, watch how consumers behave in different situations and how they consider their purchases.
Step down a notch or two and work on the front lines with your sales and customer service staff.
Continuously acknowledge your staff, vendors, and customers. Everyone works and shops better when they feel appreciated.
Always listen to feedback from employees and customers.
Continuously test markets, ads, and marketing techniques. This is the only way to stay successful and know what’s working and, more importantly, what’s not.
Offer more information in your marketing than anyone else. The more information you offer, the more products/services you’ll sell.
A great marketing plan can only get better. Continue to fine-tune and refine your marketing plan based on testing results and feedback.
Be classy in your marketing. Make sure your marketing and advertising fit your company image, products/service, and quality.
Improve your best marketing areas and drop those that aren’t working.
Focus on what you say, not how you say it. The best marketing ideas turn into the best marketing naturally.
Develop all your ads, campaigns, and sales materials with attention to compelling and factual information.

By using these techniques you can put your name out there to the world and become one of the top brands in your industry.

Get results!

The last area we are going to talk about is the best-satisfied customers. If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted all your marketing resources and all chance of positive word-of-mouth advertising. You can satisfy your customers by:

Providing quality products/services
Providing high-quality customer service
Providing a low-pressure, highly informative sales experience
Taking all the risk away with a great guarantee

To generate more business there are a couple of simple techniques that work every time:

Build your database with a contest.
Do regular mailings with sales, discounts, or other incentives.
Find other creative ways to keep your current customers coming back for more.

“As long as the reward is directly related to your product or service, you can’t lose. Why not get started today? It’s so simple, it’s so seldom done, and it’s so profitable. And that’s the bottom line.” Jay Abraham

It is so simple! So, why aren’t you starting today? We can help you put together a great marketing plan that will get you results. Try our FREE test drive and find the tools and resources you need to be built by some of the biggest names in the marketing world.

PR Equals Free Publicity

Posted on January 18, 2022 by Michael D. Goodman

There are three key areas of public relations you can use to boost your advertising results ten-fold over your paid advertising.

The key to public relations lies in:

Public relation or publicity
Merchandising
Promotions

With a solid plan in place that encompasses all these areas, you’ll have a great approach to using public relations in the best way possible.

Public relations include all that is the media. Don’t limit yourself. The attention of newspapers, television, radio, magazines, bloggers, ezines, and more are all equally powerful. Online marketing is just as, if not more, important as conventional media.

Here are the steps to get noticed by the media:

Put together a press release for your company. The press release should be relevant to your target market and address consumer interest, not just announce your business.
Compact your press release to include one hook and one angle. Choose the most attention-getting to make sure the media person you are sending it to is interested in reading it.
Put your press release in professional formatting. With press releases, you need a dateline, the most important information at the top, facts, figures and wrap it up with contact details including who and how. Print the press release on your letterhead.
Send your press release to all television and radio stations, local and metro newspapers, national newspapers, industry magazines, and any other form of media that reaches your target market. Don’t forget to include relevant blogs, ezines, press release submission sites, and industry professionals.

More importantly than a perfect press release is to make sure you have addressed the needs of your target market in the products/services you offer and made that clear in the press release. If you are providing people a solution to a problem, a way to avoid a problem, and an opportunity to enhance their life the media and public will be interested.

If you have a connection (or the ability to get a connection) with a celebrity, this can practically guarantee you’ll get attention. Make sure you are offered newsworthy information and then follow up with media outlets to make sure they are publicizing that information.

“One of the most powerful techniques every business should use is free publicity. As the name implies, there is no cost, just the time and effort required to attract attention to your business.” Jay Abraham

Our FREE test drive can show you how to put together press releases that work! Check out how the pros do it and craft the perfect press releases for your business.

Make it Pop!

Posted on December 21, 2021 by Michael D. Goodman

There are 5 major components to good advertising copy (The order of these is essential to success):
• Command Attention
• Showcase Benefits of Products/Services
• Prove the Benefits
• Persuade People to Embrace the Benefits
• Call to Action

Advertising is sales in print. So, you need to think about the unique benefits your products/services offer and showcase that in a persuasive way. You need to emphasize results, not features.
Let’s take a minute to talk about each of these components:
1. Command Attention: This is usually accomplished with the headline. You need an attention-getter that makes people want to know more about your products/services. The best headlines give a vivid portrayal of the benefits or show how a problem can be avoided with your products/services. The headline is the advertisement for the advertisement.
2. Showcase Benefits: You have to showcase the benefits of your products and services and, more importantly, show how they will solve or prevent a problem. They need to know what’s in it for them. Include useful, factual, and clear information to show precisely what the benefits are and how they are going to help the customer.
3. Offer Proof: This is where you prove what the advertisement is offering. You need to establish you have a method to deliver. Consider the information that establishes credibility and past performance.
4. Persuade: You need to add compelling reasons for your potential customers to purchase your products/services. Use a hard sell approach and create scarcity. This will enact your potential customers to feel like they have to act now. Which leads into the last component.
5. Call to Action: You need to compel your potential customers to DO something. They need to check out your site, sign up for your newsletter, purchase your products, contact you about services…something. Offer a freebie, booklet, sample, product, bonus, demo, consult, limited-time price…the list goes on. There are lots of ways to get potential customers excited about ordering and help them feel like they are getting an amazing deal.
Good advertisements include all of these components and are not complete without any of them. You can sit down and think through any one of these components, then figure out how to best place them together for the most effectiveness. We can help you with this too. Try our FREE test drive to learn how to put together great advertisements from some of the best in the business.