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Small Business Taxes Gone Wild In California

I estimate that 99% of Californians do not understand the implications of the new small business tax that Governor Jerry Brown signed into law yesterday. This law would mandates online sellers like Amazon.com and Overstock.com to start collecting sales taxes on items shipped to California if they have some sort of relationship with an affiliate. [...]

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You Got the Opt-in, Now What? Here Are Some Top Email Strategies

The first part of email marketing is to get your visitor to opt-in your email list. Once they opt-in, the visitor becomes a prospect. The second part of email marketing is to move the prospect along your marketing funnel towards them becoming a customer. An important element of that is relationship marketing done via trust. [...]

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Linkedin Company Page Follows the Leaders Facebook and Yelp

There was a time when Linkedin was cool. Well, maybe “cool” is too strong of a word for this early social networking site. Let’s just say that Linkedin was *the* place to network as a business professional. You sign up for Linkedin, you make connections with people you work with, you ask for a recommendation, [...]

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A Way to Promote Your Business with Facebook Events

Let’s assume you’ve already set up your own Facebook profile and a separate Facebook Page for your business. Maybe you’ve also created a Facebook Group that relates to a type of product or service that your business provides. What are some ways that you can promote the special events your business sponsors? One way is [...]

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How to Remove Antispyware Soft

Marketing online is fraught with risks. One category is business risk. The other category is technical risk. Business risk is when you try to execute a digital marketing strategy and it fails. Technical risk includes the risk of not implementing your websites and/or scripts correctly. But technical risk also includes the risk from cyber-attacks. One of the most common form is viruses pretending to be a friendly program ... like a trojan horse. This blog is about how to remove Antispyware Soft. … Read More...

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Marketing Sales Process That Your Business Can Copy

October 2, 2008 By Alex Tran 1 Comment

Marketing and sales is a process whereby you lead an interested prospect from step A to step B to step C to closure. Note that closure could be that the prospect becomes a customer or they simply don’t buy because there was a mismatch somewhere along the process. The prospect decides based on the offer that you have made to them whether they wish to continue down the process.

As a good vendor, your job is to present your prospect with the right offers at the right time. The prospect’s responsibility is to decide whether or not to take up the offer(s). Ultimately, it is the prospect who decides whether or not to buy … despite however slick the sales process is.

So what is a vendor to do to increase sales? Good question. But I think the better question is how should the vendor present his offer to the prospect so that the prospect is in the right frame of mind to fairly evaluate the offer. After all, people buy on emotions and justify it later with logic.

There are one million and one pages of sales and marketing material devoted to how to increase sales. I won’t regurgitate them here on my blog. Rather, I’m going to show you an example of a company that does an excellent job of presenting offers to prospects at the right time during the sales process.

Before I show you the example, let me highlight the key elements of a good online marketing and sales process:

* Lead with free or low cost. Vendors have done this for years by offering “lost leaders.” Grocery stores advertise products below costs in order to lure customers into the store. Once they have the customers in the store, they know that the customers will usually buy more than just the sale item.

* Upsell with relevant options. Car dealers do this when they direct their customers to the finance office. It’s the finance manager’s job to sell the customer on paint protection and extended warranties.

* Give them different delivery options. Shipping and handling can be a profit center for online businesses. Amazon offers free shipping, but that usually takes many days for the item to arrive. Some people just can’t wait so they upgrade to various levels of expedited shipping.

* Ask them to add an extra item for no additional charge. Once the customer has paid for shipping, they would want to add to their order to bundle their costs.

* Offer them related offers from your business partners. Magazines do this when they would offer you a discount to subscribe to one of their sister publications. Some people call this partner marketing. It works because you already have a buyer. And a buyer is many times more likely to buy another product than a prospect.

* Give them an opportunity to join your frequent savings club. More and more companies offer discounts if you would join their club. Supermarkets do this. Costco does this. Office Depot does this. You name it. The best membership type club for the vendor is one where their members have to pay a regular due.

* Finally, offer them a discount if they would refer a friend. This is viral marketing. When done right, it brings in warm leads at no additional costs.

Now that I’ve shown you the key elements of a good process. Let me introduce you to a company that does this process exceptionally well. You’ll have to go through it to see for yourself. The good news is, you’ll get a usable product for your business if you do decide to buy. It’s your choice, as it should be. They’re just presenting you with the right offer at the right time. Remember to copy this process for your business because it works. >>>

http://alextran.com/bookmarks/marketingfunnel

 

Filed Under: Sales Psychology

Are You An Expert or Are You A Peddler?

May 3, 2008 By Alex Tran 1 Comment

xWZdBPFTHOQWhen most folks think of sales and marketing, their minds envision someone who runs around peddling goods and services. You’ve seen the stereotype on TV, like the door-to-door salesman trying to convince housewives to buy his “Vacuum Deluxo-Rama.” This sales model works. I read a report that companies made $28B last year in door-to-door marketing. There is nothing as effective as selling a product face-to-face. . . Or is there?

The benefit of selling door-to-door is that the salesman can adjust his marketing message according to the cues that his prospect gives him. I don’t have exact numbers but I suspect that the response rate is about 10%-15% for a trained salesman. I based this number on my personal experience having sold door-to-door when I was a teenager. For the sake of simplicity, I’m using the word “him” to signify both he and she sellers. The reality is that most door-to-door marketers today are females selling MLM types of products.

If you compare the response rate of selling this way versus selling by email blasts (0%-0.3%) or direct mail (0-0.7%) or radio or TV (1%-10%), the peddler method wins hands down. But there are three major downsides — selling door-to-door or peddling has limited reach. A salesman can only knock on so many doors per day. The other downside is that this is an expensive marketing channel for the product owner. They have to pay a hefty commission to the salesman for each sale. Some product owners also cover the salesman’s expenses as part of the cost-of-sales. The third major downside is “cold-call burnout.” This is when the salesman cannot take another rejection. They simply cannot get out of bed in the morning anymore to knock on another door of a total stranger. Cold-call burnout also afflicts telemarketers. Imagine being mandated to make at least 50 cold-calls a day, only to be rejected by 49+ people. When this happens, the product owner needs to hire and train a new salesman.

Alas, there is a better way. Instead of peddling, where you are constantly chasing a prospect, you might want to consider have the prospect come to you. Yes, it is easier said than done. But consider this: How much did that last referral cost you in marketing dollars? How hard was it to close on that prospect? Not very hard at all, was it?

How do you get more prospects to call you? Besides building a network of referrals because you become know as the provider of quality products in your niche, you might consider how you established that reputation in the first place. Let’s get to the point: You built yourself up as the expert in your niche. Nowadays with the Internet, it is easier than ever to build yourself as the expert. When you get recognized as the expert, prospects will come to you. Even better, they will refer other prospects to you. Now isn’t that easier than being a peddler and chasing all the time? I thought so.

Instead of going door-to-door trying to sell the “Vacuum Deluxo-Rama”, seek to become the recognized expert in high-end vacuums, the ones used in fine hotels like Ramada. Seek to become the Oreck of the high-end vacuum niche. When you want an Oreck, you’ll have to call or go to his web site.

Filed Under: Sales Psychology Tagged With: ,

Master The Principal of Comparison In Marketing Or Perish As A Commodity Pusher

April 14, 2008 By Alex Tran Leave a Comment

As a business owner, the last thing you want your customers to do is to compare apples with apples. As soon as they compare apples with apples or oranges with oranges, you enter a marketing state called “commodity” pricing. This is a dreaded word in business because selling commodities means selling on price. The vendor with the lowest price wins the business. Unless you like to employ slave labor and make little to negative profits, don’t go there.

Human brains are wired to compare things. We instinctively want to pick the best between two or more choices. If we see two oranges, we want to pick the prettier one. If the two oranges are identical, we tend to pick the cheaper one. As the seller of oranges, we’d be wise to sell orange juice if there are too many orange vendors. The smart marketer wants to steer clear of the masses with their product. Some people call this differentiation. I call it the principal of comparison.

The principal of comparison is simple enough to understand. Yet businesses screw this up on a regular basis. Let’s look at a recent example. We all know that hybrid cars are hot right now. The marketing machines created a demand for green products so it’s cool to be green. It started about three years ago when Toyota got a few movie stars to drive their Prius Hybrid car. Celebrities tend to make things cool; even a car as homely as the Toyota Prius. But that wasn’t the main reason why the Prius took off and left their competitors like Honda in the dust.
Wanting a piece of the action, Toyota’s arch-rival, Honda decided to get into the hybrid car market by creating the Honda Accord Hybrid. What, you’ve never heard of the Honda Accord Hybrid? Of course you haven’t. Honda introduced the car and had to scrap it shortly after because it didn’t sell.

The Accord Hybrid didn’t sell because it looked like the regular gasoline powered Accord. The only difference was price. The hybrid car cost about $8K more than the regular car. Even with gasoline prices at $4/gallon, it would take about 10 years to get your $8K investment back in gasoline cost savings. And this was exactly what potential customers did — they used the principal of comparison to compare the two models of Accord. This was an easy exercise for them. The two Accords looked alike. Remember how our brains are wired.

The Toyota Prius, on the other hand, didn’t look like anything else in the Toyota product line. It wasn’t a Corolla nor was it a Camry. The Prius was a unique car. Consumers had nothing to compare it with so they accepted the hybrid car along with the premium price. Viola, Toyota created a hit with shrewd marketing.

What about the Honda Civic Hybrid? The answer is that Toyota outsells that car too. I’ll let you figure that orange comparison out for yourself, now that you understand the principal of comparison.

Filed Under: Marketing, Sales Psychology
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