"Replace Sales Drudgery With Systematic, Inexpensive Marketing That Generates A Constant Stream Of New Clients For Your Business." The key ingredient to success in YOUR business is Getting A Steady, Predictable And Reliable Stream Of New Clients. This newsletter is all about how to do that. The people who know how to do this will make plenty of money. The people who don't know How To Get A Steady, Predictable And Reliable Stream Of New Clients will always struggle, wondering why the world doesn't appreciate what they have to offer.
And it doesn't matter what exact business you're in. Whether you're in corporate sales, network marketing, consulting, web based marketing, financial services, or whatever, you MUST become a shrewd marketer to succeed.
If you're busy prospecting all day long, making cold calls, hanging out at chamber of commerce meetings, etc. etc. or any other type of "brute force" promoting in order to get your message out, I'm here to tell you that there are better ways to accomplish your goals!
Furthermore, how well you market up front has a very strong influence on whether your prospect becomes a customer at all!
The Smart Marketing Home & E-Business Ideas Newsletter is designed to address these problems to help your business grow. This newsletter is all about working smarter, not harder; re-packaging your business in new ways by identifying resources you didn't realize were valuable; using smart, low-cost advertising and publicity mechanisms; replacing prospecting with positioning; identifying certain kinds of knowledge which you already have, and learning how to leverage and sell that knowledge for maximum profit.
Click here to subscribe to The Smart Marketing Home & E-Business Ideas Newsletter. There is no charge. If you have specific topics or questions you'd like the newsletter to address, add your comments to the message.
Note: We will not sell your e-mail address to any other entity or company; You can unsubscribe at any time; and we promise to respect your time by only sending out valuable, timely information, not thinly disguised advertising fluff etc.
Thanks, and I look forward to helping you grow your business, and helping you free up more of your time and resources by helping you work smarter, not harder!
Sincerely,
Perry S. Marshall, Editor
http://www.perrymarshall.com
Previous Issues
Sample Issue #2
The Home & E-Business Smart Marketing Newsletter
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The Creative Use of Outgoing VoiceMail Messages
How To Use Voice Mail To Save Time and Hassle
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I'd like to tell you about two times that I've used outgoing voice mail to make some very ordinary jobs much less time consuming: Selling a car, and renting an apartment.
Then I'd like to extend it to whatever YOU are trying to sell, and some resourceful ideas that will make your efforts more effective.
If you've ever tried to sell a used car through classified ads in the newspaper etc., then you know why lots of people just prefer to sell it to a dealer on trade-in for (often) much less than it's worth. No matter how much information you try to compress into that 20-30 word ad, people always call with lots of questions--even questions that the ad itself already answered.
Does this sound familiar: You run an ad for 1 week in the local newspaper. You get 2-5 calls every day. Everyone who calls has the same questions: How many miles? How much rust? Do you have repair records? Does the AC work? Any body damage? Does it need any major repairs? And so on.
They leave messages on your answering machine. You call them back. You have to refresh them on which car you're selling, etc etc.
Maybe one in five wants to come and see it. And only half of them show up. In my case, my wife's home and I'm not, and she really doesn't like dealing with all of those phone calls.
Then, if the car sells, the calls still keep coming in, sometimes for a couple of weeks!
We devised a much simpler solution: The number in my ad rang to a voice mailbox. A 2 minute message explained EVERYTHING about the car. The good, the bad, and the ugly; what's right about it and what repairs it's likely to need in the near future. I gave the asking price, and what part of town we're in. I told callers that if they were interested in seeing and driving the car they could call me and gave our home phone number.
The results: Two phone calls to our home number. Two appointments.
Appointment #2 bought the car on the spot. The whole scenario took 3 days from start to finish, with no aggrivation for my wife.
THEN we simply changed the voice mail message to say "Thanks for calling, the car is sold." End of phone calls. How much time did we save by using a voice mailbox?
SITUATION NUMBER TWO: Renting an Apartment via Voice Mail
I own rental property. An apartment in the building we share opened up and I decided to use the same strategy to find a tenant. The outgoing message described the apartment in considerable detail, and described the potential tenant as a NEIGHBOR and described the kind of neighbor we expect in a tenant: respectful, pays on time, friendly, takes good care of the property, and doesn't throw wild, all night parties.
I took 5-6 phone calls, made 2 appointments, and the second one took the apartment. She's been a great tenant, too. She's a good neighbor, and she pays on time.
Summary observation: Both cars and apartments have broad appeal, but the stampede of mildly interested buyers who are happy to call you at all hours of the day or night, waste your time and then not show up, needs to be further screened. Outgoing voice mail is a fantastic way to do this.
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The Business Application For Voice Mail
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If a small, inexpensive ad for your business has enough broad appeal to make the phone ring, but you need to pre-qualify buyers before speaking with them, you can do exactly what I did to sell the car and the apartment. For most people, a modified version of the above scenario is best.
Specifically, many potential customers are afraid to call because they don't want to talk to a salesperson. They just want to gather information before they talk to anybody. Now in the high tech world, a website is plenty good enough for this purpose, because most high tech customers have web access. But for general consumers, an ad that says "Call xxx-xxxx for a 24 hour recorded message about <information on a topic your customers are trying to understand>" will cause many people to pick up the phone who otherwise wouldn't have. And when they listen to your message, they immediately have more trust for you than for anyone that they didn't call.
Who should use this? Anyone who sells something that's personal or private should strongly consider it. A service for people in financial difficulty, or companies that deal with sensitive health issues (ie a gynecologist) or psychological issues (ie alcoholism) should always have a completely safe, non-threatening way of communicating with potential customers. A wildly successful bankruptcy attorney in Chicago uses recorded outgoing voicemail messages. The messages are carefully, masterfully prepared, and their purpose is to reassure callers that it's really OK to declare bankrupcy and get out from under their mountain of debt, and that it's really easy to do so.
If you sell business opportunities, you probably use voice mail to communicate with other people in your organization. But you can also use it to find prospects for your business. Put a HEADLINE on your business card that says, "How To Form Your Own Company And Operate Profitably From Home In 1 Week or Less - Call 24-Hour Recorded Message 1-987-654-3210"
Our marketing book for Network Marketers, Prospecting Sucks, goes into considerable detail on how to leverage this type of advertising in conjunction with newspaper ads and direct mail. See http://www.usedtapes.com/prospecting.html
There are many voice mail services available, often for only about $5.00 per month. Check your local yellow pages for a listing.
Are there other topics you'd like this e-zine to explore? Reply with your questions and I'll try to tackle them.
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(C) 2000 Fulcrum and Usedtapes.com
Sample Issue #1
Premier Issue: The Home & E-Biz Smart Marketing Newsletter!
An extraordinary tale of superhuman persistence – and the not-so-obvious lesson behind it!
In the world of inspirational stories and speeches, there are a few that you hear time and time again.
For example, there are the 5,000 light bulb filaments Thomas Edison tried before finally discovering that tungsten would work, or the multitudes of rejections Walt Disney overcame before he finally funded his Disneyland dream.
Another popular one on the persistence list: The 1000+ restaurant owners who turned down Colonel Sanders' Fried Chicken franchise proposal, and the Colonel's eventual victory over rejection.
You don't often hear about the Colonel's real "moment of truth", and just exactly how that elusive "eleventh spice" led to his success. Read on to find out more...
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The story goes something like this: The Colonel had a restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky, which had been doing very well. A new interstate highway was planned to bypass the town of Corbin. Seeing that his business was about to dry up, the Colonel auctioned off his operations. After paying his bills, he had nothing to live on except his $105 Social Security checks.
In 1952, confident of his chicken recipe, he began crisscrossing the country in his car, making an offer to restaurant owners: He would walk into a restaurant, announce to the owner, "I bet my chicken recipe is better than yours" and propose a cook-off.
(The chicken provided by the restaurants he visited, using his recipe, was part of his plan for feeding himself during those lean days.)
If the owner was favorable, he would "franchise" his chicken recipe to them at 5 cents per chicken.
In all, just over 1000 restaurants turned him down, without one successful deal.
Then one day he was having his daily cooking duel with a bar owner, who said to him, "Sir, I'm trying to sell beer, not chicken. This stuff needs to be a whole lot saltier so customers will get thirsty and buy beer!"
So he grabbed the salt shaker, poured some salt on, and took another bite. "Now THIS is GREAT," he said. "If you'll add salt to this recipe, I'm a taker!"
The Colonel took a bite and spit it out—it was terrible!
But Colonel Sanders had been on a NO SALT DIET for 30 years, so his tastes were obviously different than everyone else's.
The Colonel wasn't stupid. He might not like the salt, but it was better than poverty. Thus began the Colonel's enormously successful Kentucky Fried Chicken legacy.
Here's the kicker: Last time I bought a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, I looked at it closely and here's what it said on the side: "When Colonel Sanders added the 11th spice, he knew it was the best chicken he'd ever had."
(They didn't bother to mention that the 11th spice was ordinary table salt.)
This is so instructive! Let me tell you about a few things I see in this story:
First of all, Colonel Sanders could have made 1000 MORE presentations, driven his car until the transmission fell out, spent every dime of those $105 Social Security checks, prayed for success and recited positive affirmations every morning in front of the mirror. But he still would have come up empty handed, had he not been willing to change his recipe!
Secondly, although the recipe he so passionately believed in was the best recipe for HIS taste buds, it was not the recipe that his customers really wanted. Without a recipe that the customers wanted, no amount of effort or persistence would make it work. With the right recipe, he was unstoppable.
Third, the recipe he had before he added salt was ALMOST right. It was VERY, VERY CLOSE to what it needed to be. Adding salt to a lousy recipe wouldn't have helped much. So all the effort he expended developing the original recipe was worthwhile.
Fourth: Persistence DID pay off, but not the way we might expect it to. Sometimes we're looking for the magical day when our persistence, and the sheer number of people we talk to, leads us to the RIGHT person who will say "Yes!" and open wide the doors to success.
But for Colonel Sanders, playing the "Numbers Game" was not the key. The real key was bumping into someone with the audacity to suggest something different, and for the Colonel to be eager enough for a breakthrough to change his recipe.
Fifth, the magical ingredient was ordinary table salt. Salt, all by itself, is worthless as a food item. Chicken, all by itself, is pretty bland, and may not even do the trick with 10 other perfectly good spices. Put them together, though, and you've got a real winner!
Never overlook the possibility of combining very ordinary things to create something "entirely new."
[Outstanding recent, powerful example: The "Free Computer With 3 Year Internet Service Contract" that you now see at almost every computer store. Absolutely brilliant – combines two very ordinary things into a single, irresistible offer. Gets all those people sitting on a fence, waiting to buy a computer someday, to go out and finally bring one home. I don't know who thought of that, but it's the top marketing idea of 1999, in my book! What can you combine to create a powerful new offer?]
Finally, I think this story illustrates that motivation and hard work alone are rarely (if ever) enough to accomplish a challenging goal. Innovation, flexibility, careful listening, endless experimentation, and the setting aside of egos and old paradigms are all equally important.
In my own case, I worked for several years in both corporate and direct selling. I had essentially two priorities in mind: motivation and people skills. I was enamored with these two virtues, and spent the majority of my working time pounding the phone, making cold calls, working very hard to get in front of anyone who could fog a mirror, and all that other drudgery that entry-level salespeople normally deal with.
Despite all of the effort, the motivational tapes and the people skills books, there were still too many days of heroic effort and no reward. My wallet was still, inexplicably, full of hungry moths.
But about two years ago, things started to dramatically turn around. It was the result of two things: 1) I started to learn how to use marketing, low cost advertising and the web to assist my sales efforts; 2) I found some people who were more able and willing to support my efforts from a "customer service" point of view, than the group I was working for previously.
Smart marketing was my 11th spice. Odds are, it will be yours, too.
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This e-newsletter is intended for small business owners, salespeople, and anyone who is looking for "breakthroughs" in their dealings with people and clients. Specifically, we focus on low cost marketing and publicity ideas that put a little "salt" on your almost-but-not-quite-perfect plans.
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In future installments, we're going to cover a variety of important topics, like…
-The difference between sales, marketing, and advertising, and when you should use one to assist the others
-Examples of both effective and ineffective advertising and how to immediately recognize good marketing when you see it
-A candid discussion about ad agencies, the games they play, and why corporate "image" marketing rarely applies to your small business (and why it often doesn't pay off for those big companies, either)
-How to define your "perfect client" and then, inexpensively, target people who fit your exact description
Please reply with suggestions on other topics you'd like to have covered in this newsletter! I am also open to articles written by you folks.
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www.UsedTapes.com is an exchange/trading post for information-hungry people. Coming soon at Usedtapes.com: Free, automated ad submission. Visit us early and often.
Currently, UsedTapes.com features the book "Prospecting Sucks" by Dan Kennedy, an arsenal of marketing & advertising ideas for Network Marketers. See http://www.usedtapes.com/prospecting.html
Books and materials for other businesses and industries are also available. Please email me with your specific request.
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Please forward this to a friend!
Feel free to send your comments.
I look forward to hearing from you!
Best Regards,
Perry S. Marshall
Editor
The Home & E-Biz Smart Marketing Newsletter
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© Copyright 2000 Usedtapes.com and Fulcrum. All rights reserved. This newsletter may be reproduced and transmitted only in its entirety.