They try to impress people with their ability to write funny or inventive advertising copy, rather than simply getting the message across.

We’ve all been exposed to years of advertising copy in magazines, newspapers, television commercials and radio campaigns that were too smart or clever for their own good.

See, all around the world advertising agencies spend thousands of dollars trying to produce award winning advertisements, not generate leads.

These “clever” advertisements are not designed to make bring in customers for their clients but rather impress judges presiding over major awards. The judges themselves have no interest in how successful a campaign has been. They simply look for the best play on words, the biggest, the brightest or the funniest advertisements.

They miss the real point of advertising, making sales.

The problem with “clever” advertising is that it doesn't make people buy.

Consider how many ads you read, see or hear during an average day. If you consider the number of billboards, in-store displays, window signs, taxi-backs and outdoor signage you go past, you may not be surprised to hear that most people are exposed to over 1,500 advertisements each day.

How many can you actually recall seeing?

In many cases people would be lucky to remember 10, a very small number out of more than 1,500. It's hardly surprising we can recall so few. After all, if we were to stop and pay attention to every ad we were saw or heard, we'd spend our entire day reading advertisements.

So the problem with “clever” advertisements is that people simply don't have the time to stop and think about what the ads trying to say. If your ad doesn't get the sales message across fast, it will fail to achieve its true purpose, bringing customers to your business.

You can use open-ended questions to build rapport, to find a need, to discover a customer problem and find the right solution. In journalism there are six key questions used in the interviewing process which is as equally useful in sales - who, what, where, when, why and how.

By using these simple words as a template, you can begin to write scripts which will help you to build rapport and qualify your leads.

Here are a few examples of open-ended questions which are very useful:

Who are you buying the product/service for?

How often would you use the product/service?

What features were you looking for in this product/service?

This type of questioning yields information from your customer and helps you determine which product/service is uniquely suited to them, making their experience with your business better.

While open-ended questions are typically more productive, closed-ended questions can be useful in the right situations.

While closed-ended questions tend to get one word answers "yes" or "no", they can be used to gather information quickly, like when filling out a check-list. Using closed questions can also confirm a particular buying detail or even confirm a sale.

Just remember that asking questions is an important way to make your customers feel you care about their needs and in this way you encourage the customer to communicate, building rapport, establishing their needs, directing the conversation, diffusing tension and inviting discussion.

Learning the art of questioning and listening is the key to increasing your conversion rate and an important milestone on the way toward developing great relationships with your customers, so start putting questions into your scripts and see how much your business benefits.

Yes, saving a wage is killing your business.  And, I mean that literally …

I know. I see the accountants saying, you have to run lean to get a decent profit, right?

That’s partly true. It’s also true you need to grow to make profit. You can’t cost cut your way to a fortune.

In business, it seems there are always two sides. For example, if you’re an owner of a retail business, you need to get product on the shelf and also get product off the shelf.

In a service business, you need to deliver the service, and you also need to manage your customer base from the sales and marketing side to build a demand for the service.

So, as an owner, faced with dealing with both sides, which of those areas should you focus on?

If you want your business to be big, you need to focus on getting the business, rather than managing it once it is brought in.

That means you have to get out of doing anything in your business that doesn’t contribute directly to both top-line and bottom-line revenue.

It also means you have to start hiring people to do the things you may be already doing – things that may be more comfortable for you than selling.

And don’t think you can’t afford to start paying those wages. Truth is, you can’t afford not to.

See, many owners hide behind the “managing” side of things, preferring that process to the sales side. They spend hours doing the books or creating spreadsheets or even answering phones in the misguided belief that “busy” equals “business.”

The reality, of course, is that sales equals business, and nothing in business happens until a sale is made. Many owners also have no idea how much their time is actually worth – causing them to engage in tasks or activities that do little or nothing to grow the business.

The way forward is to start delegating routine tasks to wage earners so you can start focusing on the top-line activities that will drive revenues. You need a plan to start, however, because delegation without a system is abdication. And for most owners, there’s simply too much abdication in their companies for anyone’s good.

How do you start? By following these five steps to make sure you are fully engaged on the “bringing in” business side of things at all times in your own company.

1. Know what your time is worth. First, you need to define your value in your business over time. What’s it worth? Twenty, $50, $200 an hour? What do you currently charge for your time in your business? What should you charge? These are key questions to defining the types of tasks you should be doing to leverage your own time and value in your company.Once you know your value, you can easily see how certain tasks can be outsourced to leverage your time.Say you’ve determined your time is worth at least $100 an hour. Will you still mow the lawn, iron clothes or clean the pool at home? Not if you can get those tasks completed for less than that rate – and you will soon discover you can.For your business, you can benchmark this rate against the “Lifetime Value” of your average customer. Say you have a customer who will spend on average of $5000 a year with you and will be a customer for 5 years.

   That customer’s Lifetime Value is $25,000. Now, at your rate of $100 an hour, will you continue to answer phones or work up your monthly financials?

   I’d hope not. Especially when your time is better spent finding more “average” customers.

2. Figure out where you spend your time. Keep careful track of how you spend your time in your business for a week or two, and you’ll have a better handle on how you can adjust your tasks and activities in more profitable ways. Most owners will find very little time goes into actually getting sales, while most of it is spent on delivering the product or service, administrative or managerial tasks and functions. Remember the 80/20 rule:  80% of all results come from 20% of effort. And if 80% of your efforts are managerial in nature, you can immediately see where your sales results are at.
3. Delegate routine, administrative or basic tasks. Once you have a handle on how you spend your time, start to find ways to systemize your most routine functions and delegate them to wage earners. Start from the bottom up, and make sure you have a system in place before you place an untrained person in a position.
4. Get more training – for yourself. Take an honest assessment of your sales and marketing abilities, and if you need help – go get it. You, of all people in your company, might be the biggest beneficiary of additional sales or marketing training. You can’t get additional learning and education if you are tied to the office doing books or answering phones. Again, pay the wage to someone who can do it better and for less money than your time is worth, and brush up on the skills you need to boost your business.
5. Just do it. Get off your backside and actually start to engage with your customers. Strike up a conversation. Call and ask how they are doing. After a while, they’ll be impressed enough to start referring your business to others – which is by far the best way to leverage your “sales” time in any business.

Then, once you get enough referrals coming through your sales pipeline, you can once again become a manager – this time of a fortune.

This article is reprinted courtesy of My Business magazine, one of the leading business publications in Australia.

Last month, we looked at the “Five Ways” and showed you how easy it was to get a 61 per cent increase in your bottom line … If you missed it, call for a back issue, because it truly is a great “secret” of business.

This month, we’re going to see how you can use those numbers to achieve an UNLIMITED marketing budget for your business.

That’s right – unlimited. Most companies aren’t good when it comes to figuring marketing budgets, and use a variety of figures, whether it’s a set amount per month, a set percentage of sales or just a number they decide on when a salesperson calls to sell advertising …

So if you could have an unlimited budget, how big could you grow your business? Let me show you how this works before I get into specifics.

Imagine you went to the bank and gave them $100. Then, 30 days later they gave you back $200.  How many $100 bills would you go to the bank with every day?

Now what if you could use that information to create an unlimited number of new leads and customers in your business?

Well, you can – if you focus on your “Acquisition Cost” and the “Lifetime Value” of your customers, topics we’ve looked at before but that now take on new meaning in light of the “Five Ways.”

Acquisition Cost is simply the cost of “buying” your current customer. If you’ve put $1000 into advertising and had 100 phone calls, you’re paying $10 for each of your leads. If only 10 of those leads “convert”, or make a purchase, you’re paying $100 to capture each sale.

Now, what’s this customer really worth?

Typically not much on a first purchase. But, even if it was just $200, you are putting in $100 and pulling out $200.  That said, in most retail businesses, a “bought” customer doesn’t begin to provide break-even or profitable revenues until the second, third or even fourth purchase.

However, the value of every purchase after those initial buys are just like gold for your business.

This is where the idea of the “Lifetime Value” of your customers is so important. Simply put, “Lifetime Value” is the amount of money your average customer will spend with you over a buying lifetime.

I’ve used the example before from my old dog food business. In that business, I knew my average customer would spend $800 a year on their dogs, and the average dog lived about 10 years. I presumed a customer would stay with me half that time, meaning the “Lifetime Value” of my dog food customer would be $4000.

What if I knew I could spend up to $38 to acquire each customer to get $800 a year per customer through my door?

Well, for my first month, I’d do better than break even. By my second month, my customer would be fully profitable, and at the end of the year, my marketing efforts would generate a better than twenty times return on my initial marketing “investment.”

So how often would you spend $38 to get $800?

It’s really just simple “marketing math.” Determine how much each new customer spends with you, figure your gross profit and “presto!” – you have your new marketing budget.

Let me explain …

In my dog food business, my customer’s first purchase averaged 6 weeks for delivery, totaled $108 and had a gross profit of $38.  Thus, my marketing allowance for “buying” each new customer – up to a total of $38 – was simply that.

Do your numbers and know that as long as you can cashflow the timing between when you pay for the advertising and when you get your customers’ money, your marketing results will be the same as if you were using the bank.

The idea of the unlimited marketing budget is to get you thinking in terms of your marketing efforts as investments rather than expenses. And with any investment, you are always looking for a return.

It also forces you to look at your advertising and marketing efforts in a whole new way. Why  toss thousands of dollars out your door looking to build a brand image when you could spend those dollars more tactically to actually increase your bottom-line – and build a brand as you’re doing it by buying customers?

Once you’ve bought your prospects and turned them into customers, know you’ll need to get them buying more, spending more and staying longer with your business. Why?

Because profits really come from repeat business, and your Return on Investment (ROI) is really determined by how long you keep customers.

Now you can see how these two factors – Acquisition Cost and Lifetime Value – add a powerful dimension to the “Five Ways” formula. Again, it works for any business in any industry or category.

In the next few months, we’ll get into more details about how to lower your Acquisition Costs and increase your Lifetime Value. We’ll also look at specific strategies to boost each one of the “Five Ways” factors in your business.

I would also be interested to hear what kind of results you get from these useful tools, now that you’ve realized their real secret is in the incredible value you can gain from getting the best information possible for your business.

A free resource

Our interactive “Five Ways” calculator remains active at the following link:

actioncoach.com/free-business-calculator-profit.php

It’s simple, it’s free, and it’s designed to give you an idea of how powerful the “Five Ways” can be for your business.

This article is reprinted courtesy of My Business magazine, one of the leading business publications in Australia.

Well, here's how ...

Let's use Leverage, divide to multiply that is ...

Break the task down, you need more leads and you need better conversion rates.

First the Leads ... if you read my first ever book Instant Cashflow you'll see more than 70 ways to generate leads.  I'll go over several of them oer the next few blog posts.

Today we are going to look at your conversion rates.  No use getting more leads when you are not converting enough of the ones you;re already getting.

Here's the top 6 ways to boost your conversion rates this week ...

1.  Measure it ... that's right work out what it is, exactly, not just a gut feel.  In fact, if you want to get serious you can measure the results every step of the sales process, measure it by every sales person, and my every marketing medium ... measuring it gives real growth ...

2.  Work out what you're spending ... when you know what it costs you to buy your leads (ie. $1000 advert that got 20 leads cost you $50 a lead) you'll get very serious very quickly at turning them into real sales.

3.  Follow Up ... if you think of every lead as money already spent, money already invested in buying the leads, then you will work out ways to continue to follow up with your leads, reasons to either call, write, email and ask for the sale again and again.

4. Make Offers and Ask for the Sale ...having trained literally tens of thousands in sales the biggest thing I see is sales people who don't ever really ask for the sale.  how many ways can and do you ask for the sale, remember, never ask a yes/no question, use a detail question like 'what day do you want it delivered?' as your close.

5.  Use more questions ... stop chatting, and selling and start asking questions.  Questions let your prospect talk, it let's them show you why they feel they want to buy ... less sell more questions that will sell for you ...

6.  Training, training and more training ... every profession and sales is one of them, needs professional development.  Doctors, lawyers, accountants all have to train for a set number of hours each year to stay relevant, sales is the same.  Find and attend the best courses, read the best books, watch the best video's and so on.

So, get to work, measure it, and then make the changes to boost your conversion rate and thus your bottom line ...

All the Best ... Brad Sugars