26 August 2009View Comments
If you’re in business, you want to make money. When you invest time or money into something, you expect to see a return on investment (ROI). In fact, the goal is to maximize that ROI. But your potential customers aren’t always eager to spend money with you. How can you set yourself apart from the competition, make potential customers or clients love you even before spending anything, and manage to turn them into buyers?
Easy. Give them something for free.
I tell freelancers this all the time. Give your knowledge away — not all of it mind you. Some people are just too protective. They figure they should charge for everything they have to offer. That’s silly though. Here’s why:
Why Freebies Lead to More Sales
When you give something away for free, you’re attracting leads. Will everyone convert into a paying customer? No. But the conversions can be just as high (if not higher than) other lead generation tactics like advertising. It can cost far less up front too (improving your ROI even more).
Think of freebies as a base for an up-sell. This happens quite often in publishing. For example, a free excerpt of a book might be given to magazine publishers (and therefore their readers). The idea is to suck them in and entice them to the buy the book. It’s true of information products online too. Let’s look at a hypothetical example.
Credit: Christian Ferrari (via Sxc.hu)
Let’s say you run an online consulting program or course on SEO. There are a lot of people giving SEO advice, and you need to set yourself apart if you want people to actually pay. You already have a decent selling point in that you run a highly successful SEO firm that regularly wipes the floor with the competition. But you need more. Continue Reading →
06 August 2007View Comments
As a salesperson, you put in a lot of time and effort to ensure that your product or services are needed by your prospect. However, no matter how compelling the need may be, no matter how excellent your product may be, prospects will always raise objections, and demand additional information. Consequently, you should welcome objections because once answered, they give you the potential energy to close the sale.
In selling, one definition of an objection, is ‘a reason given by the prospective customer why they are not ready to buy your product or service.’ Your success as a professional salesperson will depend on your ability to anticipate and handle a prospect’s objections. No matter how perfect your presentation is, at some stage, your prospect may raise an objection …. and how you handle it will make or break the sales game.
• Anticipate Objections
Objections scare new salespersons because they are not sure they can find convincing arguments to overcome them. However, sales professionals have learned how to take the prospect’s objection and turn it around in order to close the sale.
As a sales professional, you will probably put a lot of time and effort into developing a winning presentation to ensure that your product or service is needed by the potential prospect. Yet no matter how persuasive your presentation may be, and no matter how convincingly you present your product or services, there will be objections and doubts.
An easy exercise for you to do before you make your presentation is to review it in detail. When you get to a point where you think there might be a customer objection, write it down on a separate sheet of paper. Continue doing this until you have reviewed the entire presentation. Once you have finished, give your presentation to a colleague, asking him to give you any objections that come to his mind. You might find other areas of objections to work on before giving your presentation to a prospect. When you think you have covered all possibilities where objections could originate, continue to work on the solutions. Practice your answers. You may not be able to come up with all of the answers to make your presentation ‘objection proof’, but you will surely have a command on the presentation and be ready with answers in case of an objection.. Continue Reading →
03 August 2007View Comments
Qualifying leads and prospects is an important first step for anyone’s sales process. To be effective in selling you must have a good start and become as productive as possible in identifying qualified leads. This article will lead you through a step-by-step process of where to go for leads, how to get them, what to say when you have got them, and finally, how to get them to buy.
• Introduction
Qualifying leads and prospects plays a very significant role in selling. Without a solid prospect list, it will be difficult to build a sales territory. Finding the potential prospects is one of the most critical phases of a salesperson’s work. If a salesperson is not vigilant, he will lose the potential customers to aggressive competitors. Sales prospecting has been compared to panning for gold. Just as a prospector digs for the gold, using his pick and pan, the sales prospector must also look for qualified prospects using his sales tools.
According to an authentic survey, out of every 100 prospects, there are probably ten who are qualified to purchase. Of those ten, there are probably only three who have the immediate need to buy. How do you find those three buyers? That is how the sales process starts.
Jack Staubach, in his book ‘Sell Like a Pro’ tells the story of a salesperson who worked for a business magazine in a major city. Each week the editorial staff covered a specific market segment in their Sunday edition; that is, one week they focused on insurance companies; next week they covered banks; third week they would cover the computer industry, etc. The salesperson, knowing the editorial schedule, contacted all of the computer organisations two months before the start of each editorial segment and sold the advantages of paid advertising in the computer edition of the magazine. The magazine, in a way did prospecting for him. However, it was the salesperson who went out to qualify those leads and found out who in the computer market was interested to advertise in the magazine. Continue Reading →
