I was invited to a meeting put on by marketing genius Bill Glazer. He has 25,000 customers that pay him every month ranging from $40 – $1000 (he also has some high end clients too). Do the math – he knows what the heck he’s doing. Bill shared 7 Business Boosters That ANY Business Can Do To Survive And Thrive In This Recession. I covered #1-3 in a previous post and here is #4-7…

Booster #4 How To Find An Army of People Eager to Sell Your Stuff For You!! (this is very cool!)

Ok, who wouldn't want to have an army of people eager to sell your stuff for you? Just the thought of that has got to bring a smile to your face. Visions of grandeur. Of finally being on easy street. A situation everyone craves.

But how do you do that?

You Create a Referral Culture.

But how do you do that you ask?!!! Here are some bullets to help you:

• feature customers who refer you in your newsletters
• posts people who gave the referral on your social media sites
• thank customers who refer – my goodness is this ever horribly missed by many! I referred a client to a friend who is very skilled in his profession. He closed the deal and you know what I got – nothing! A simple "thank you" or email would have been plenty for me to refer more business. I got nothing. How many more referrals do you think I want to send him? Contrast that to a client of mine who gives any combination of thank you cards, gift certificates to upscale restaurants or a simple Starbucks gift card for a simple warm introduction.
• referral contest
• build a referral program into your business – build it into your sales presentation or in your brick and mortar store – where you give them a choice of gifts for giving you referrals on the spot
• create a referral rewards program
• take your best referrals on a night out or to a special exclusive event

To create an effective referral program, it is vital that you do three things:

1. Be very clear who are your ideal customers or clients
2. Be intentional to attract them using pull marketing
3. Create the ultimate customer experience for them

Do these and your odds of getting referrals will skyrocket!

Booster #5 – How to Tap Into The "Hidden Goldmine" in Your Business

Most miss this. Every business has one. It is the 3rd easiest way to get business (selling more to existing customers and getting referrals are #1 & 2 easiest). It is easier to get more business from here than it is to get new clients. It is approximately 7x more expensive to get a new client than to farm this one.

Create a Lost Customer Reactivation Campaign

Many businesses do this. But how they go about doing this is all wrong. They send some cheesy, flat, dull, boring 4×6 postcard saying "it's time for you to come back and see us".  zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz – that's the sound of your lost customer's sleeping while reading it.

There are much more fun and creative ways to get people to come back in. One is to send a boomerang in the mail with a letter and offer to have them come back. You throw a boomerang and it comes back, get it? Sends the message to your lost customer that they are supposed to come back. Make sure your letter is not dull and boring though. And give them a compelling reason and an irresistible offer to come back in to see you.

But how do you know when to send this? …. every business has a cycle, determine when they should come back in and send it around that time.

Booster #6 – How to Build Relationships to Get People to Keep Coming Back to You

You must stay in touch with your customers and prospects. If you are married, when you were dating your wife did you only talk to them when you wanted something? No! You built a relationship with them on a regular basis. Same thing with marketing to your prospects and customers. If you want more business, you must build a relationship. This is called Relationship Marketing.

How do you do this?

Send them a newsletter.

2 ways to do it, is to send an electronic newsletter or ezine, the other is to send a print newsletter. Every business is different and some fit better than others. Here's one thing about print newsletters – they outperform electronic newsletters. To send a 4-page print newsletter it costs a buck a name. This includes all costs including postage. And it needs to be done monthly. Look at what your customer value is and figure out if it is worth investing a buck a month or $12 bucks a year on them.

Regarding the content, most people do this all wrong. They send a newsletter that is just boring facts about their business or a glorified sales pitch. While you want to include both, you put in a lot of other stuff in there – include some of your personality, add humour, articles about other non-business related things that are of interest to your market. And yes, recognize people who referred you business and give them a great offer monthly.

Booster #7 – Add More Media!

The worst number in any business is the number 1… if you only have one client you do not have much security, if you only use one source of media you are screwed if anything happens to it. I have read stories and met people that had one major account that was giving fat commission checks until the account was bought out by another business and the product shipped overseas, a distributor that lost it's sole shipping channel, a major client that decided to discontinue a product, an advertiser that was spending 1,000,000/yr on adwords and had their account shutdown overnight, someone had some work done on their website and had all SEO & SEM traffic turned off because a simple piece of code was missed, a company that was selling to Big Box stores that gave a mandate to reduce prices and squashed all profit margin, a printed magazine that decided to delay mailing by months until it was more profitable for the magazine.

Get the point?!!

If you are only using one source of media you are setting yourself up to be screwed.

As an engineer, you just know I am big into formulas. Here is one worth memorizing

Diversity = Stability

In this economy you must be smarter and more diverse. More businesses are beginning to advertise more. Remember this story… "2 guys were walking in the woods. One had running shoes strung around his neck. His buddy asked what they were for. He said they were in case they met a bear. His buddy laughed and told him he was never going to outrun the bear. He chuckled and said "don't have to outrun the bear, just have to outrun you!" :)

Most businesses are lazy and copy what everyone else is doing. You are different. You are on my list and are here reading this. You are smarter. You are being exposed to great stuff that will let you outrun your competition every time.

Now go figure out what to implement and go do it eh!

Blessings
Chris.

P.S. Want to gain more of an "unfair advantage" over your competition? … go get the ebook "12 Biggest Marketing Mistakes Most Businesses Make And How to Avoid Each One"… it's your's free. Put your name and email address in the  box just to the right of this post and I will have it rushed to you. Go do it now!

I was at a meeting put on by marketing genius Bill Glazer. He has 25,000 customers that pay him every month ranging from $40 – $1000 (he also has some high end clients too). Do the math – he knows what the heck he’s doing. Bill shared 7 Business Boosters That ANY Business Can Do To Survive And Thrive In This Recession. Here they are…

Booster #1 – Get Out of The Commodity Business!!!

When the going gets tough, the natural inclination for many is to drop their prices. Afterall, when you drop prices you become more attractive and can compete better right? Problem is, your competition does the same and then at what point does it stop? Sure you win a job or 2 initially but then you hit a point where you are barely profitable. Your workload may stay the same but your profits drop significantly. Unable to keep margins up you have to resort to cost cutting and possibly letting go of people and getting back in the trenches yourself. Sure this may seem glamorous for a brief moment, but this gets old fast doesn’t it?

So what is the cure?

Get away from competing on price. Develop a list of why you are inarguably the BEST choice and ONLY choice. This way you completely separate yourself from your competition. One of the first things I do with my clients is to get them into a “category of one”. Where they are the ONLY choice for their prospects. The more you understand your market, the compeittion and what frustrates your propects and what their secret desires are, the easier it is to do this. In many cases you can actually increase your prices with no loss in top or bottom line.

Booster #2 – Constantly Build Your Herd

Little known fact… “Your Database is Your #1 Asset”.

I was recently talking with a friend that said he was thinking about buying an existing business. It would cost him 7 figures to buy this business. They have been around for over 20 years but have no customer list and no database. Sure they have a respected name but that’s it. No marketing system, no list, no database. He said he thought he could do much better than investing so much. I agree. For much less than that you can develop a sizable list and establish a powerful presence in the market.

So, back to your list… focus your efforts on developing and growing it. With a big list, you can make the initial sale and then come back around and sell them many other products or services later. Don’t have any you say? Put your thinking cap on and apply some creativity. It cost 7x as much to get a new prospect to buy from you vs. an existing client or customer.

And when you are looking at building your list, put an Iron Clad System in place for Customer Data Collection. Apply this to online data collection using squeeze pages. Apply this to offline data collection by training your staff to gather information on every customer. Next time you go to a restaurant, see if they collect your contact info or email address. Odds are they don’t. Do you think if they did and sent you great offers from time to time you would be more likely to come back more often? Think about how you can apply this to your business.

Booster #3 – 3 Step Survey Process

There is nothing so powerful to uncover your prospects and customers needs better than a survey. Who doesn’t like to voice their opinion about a topic they are interested in?

Here’s how you do it. It’s an easy 3 Step Process:

1. Ask 1-10 multiple choice questions. There are free online tools you can use like Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo. Offer a gift or a premium for answering the questions. Note, for an existing database, you can get a great response with no premium. If you have no list or weak response, bribe them with a premium or a gift. This works really well. Then promise to report back results.
2. Report the results – people have more confidence in what other people want instead of what they want. That is a powerful statement. Go back and read it again. People want to know what others are interested in and will change their opinion and purchasing behaviour based on what others want.
3. Sell them the thing. Sell them what the biggest unmet needs are.

Here’s a note about surveys, when analyzing the results, don’t always look for the most popular answer. Look for the answers to where the most pain and frustrations are. This is where you can create even higher profits from even more loyal clients.

That’s enough for this week. Look for Business Boosters #4-7 coming soon!

Now go put one of these into play.

Blessings
Chris

P.S. If you don’t want to miss Business Boosters #4-7, you need to subscribe to my newsletter. To do this simply fill out the form to the right of this page to get your free report today. You will get marketing secrets guaranteed to make a difference in your business. As a special bonus, you will also get a Free E-book called “The 12 Biggest Mistakes Most Businesses Make in Their Sales, Marketing and Advertising and How You Can Avoid Each One”. I wonder how many you are making?