Two Steps to Improving Your Marketing SuccessWritten by Joel Sussman
Since human brain seems to be able to focus on only one thought at a time, it's difficult to evaluate an advertising idea from perspective of both a marketer and a customer. That's why it's necessary to use a two-step process when developing highly effective ads, sales letters, web pages, and e-mails. The first step involves creating a rough draft of your marketing message, while emphasizing strong points and best attributes of your product or service. Your message, especially your headline, should strive to capture your prospects' attention, focus on many benefits they'll experience, and outline important features and selling points. The first draft should include a call to action, as well as whatever contact information is necessary to get prospect to follow through. Navigate Through Expected Sales Objections Possibly most daunting obstacle to generating inquiries and making sales is human inertia, which is basically tendancy to postpone, deliberate, and procrastinate. The best way to overcome that is to create a sense of urgency by imposing a deadline for taking action. Whether your supplies are limited -- or prices are about to go up -- or prospect must act now "before it's too late", there needs to be a feeling of urgency conveyed if you are to be successful in overcoming powerful forces of inaction and indecisiveness. Other obstacles in sales process that you need to overcome early on include skepticism, mistrust, and pessimism. The ideal marketing message would remove any doubt in customer's mind about quality, competitive prices, ongoing customer support, and customer's ability to get a refund if they're dissatisfied. One common mindset that many prospects have is, "It sounds like a good product/service, but it probably won't work for me." A strategy you can use for overcoming that negative attitude is to include testimonials of satisfied customers -- just like them -- in your marketing materials.
| | Get Coached!Written by Marcie Hanhart
Get Coached! By Marcie HanhartCoaching is a hot trend at a growing number of companies, from IBM and Dow Chemical to entrepreneurial start ups. According to a recent survey by The Hay Group, an international human resources consultancy, between 25 percent and 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies use executive coaches. A coach is defined as being “part advisory, part sounding board, part cheerleader, part manager and part strategist (Business Journal).” Coaching can occur in one-on-one face-to-face meetings between coach and business person, over telephone, in small groups, and even in group conference calls. Recently, a client of mine, who owns an acoustical tile cleaning franchise, was so pleased with results of our coaching sessions, that she organized group telephone coaching sessions for her and other franchise owners. The benefits are enormous. Not only do franchise owners save time and money conferring in a group telephone session, they all receive same information at same time, there are networking and sharing opportunities, and a spirit of teamwork has evolved. Coaching does not only occur in one hour session each week. I give my clients reading assignments and “homework” to do in between sessions. One exercise that I use frequently with clients is to have them look at their entire business and pick two things that would impact their business most. Then, we determine one or two things in each area that would give them biggest bang for their buck. After doing this exercise, one client picked getting back in touch with old clients and telling them all of services her company offers. In one week, she had three new proposals to bid on.
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