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Building Long Term Relationships With Your Vendors

It’s extremely important to build relationships with your vendors.  By doing so, you can bring in new customers and clients and increase awareness of your company branding.

The people you work directly with on your products and services are really the ones with the most to gain when you find success. By taking the time to get to know them, you’ll find many opportunities you didn’t realize were there.

Look for great ways to offer your vendors rewards for helping grow your business and everyone wins. One of ways you can do this is by offering performance based incentives that are much larger than their normal charges.

Here’s a step-by-step process so you can put together a partnership with a vendor:

First, approach all the vendors you work with and offer an incentive based on performance.  Next, put together a generous incentive plan together from their perspective.  You may even take suggestions from them on what would motivate them.  Now, develop a clear, concise and easy to track incentive plan.  By doing so this will increase competition between vendors and also produce higher performance levels.  Who doesn’t like a little friendly competition?

Don’t forget to encourage subsequent sales, too, instead of focusing only on the initial sale. By doing this you can give away more of the profit from the initial sale to your vendors and make higher profits off the back end products. So be sure to encourage future sales, upsells on more profitable products or services,  and cross-selling over to additional products.

When you create an incentive plan that’s irresistible to your vendors by offering generous, exclusive compensation you both win!

Just think of all the vendors you work with and the creative ways you can put together an incentive plan that will entice them to be part of your business. Use their talents, capabilities and connections and you’ll both be winners.

Putting together an incentive plan doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Use our FREE test drive to come up with some great ideas and put your incentive plan together for maximum results.  For more information and your free test drive, go to www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com

13 Tips On How You Can Control Buyers Remorse

Today I’d like to talk about how to turn prospects into customers and how to keep them! While your marketing is bringing more prospects to you, you need to be working on turning those prospects into customers. There are a few key ways to draw them in and seal the deal. You need to be Inviting, Informative, and Enjoyable!

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded buyer’s remorse. You know the feeling: you just bought a large purchase, you get it home and then you think, what have I done???!!! As a business owner, you want to avoid this at all costs and as long as you provide a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims you’ve made, you should be fine.

However, buyers remorse CAN still occur. There are two ways to deal with this:

1. You can offer to refund money with a “no questions asked” policy.

2. You can offer a bonus they can keep, even if they return the product.

These offers alone will also help control buyer’s remorse because the customer will trust you more, just for offering these things.

Some other ways to turn a prospect into a customer are to offer a special price as an opportunity for you to test the market. Offer a lower price with a reason why you are offering the special rate. For example, to push inventory to pay a tax bill, for your kid’s’ braces, or another tangible reason. Customers love this because it makes you feel so much more human.

You could also offer a referral incentive. Or, how about offering a smaller, more inexpensive product first to build trust? Another option to control buyers remorse is to offer package deals. Or you can also offer to charge less for their first purchase if they become a repeat customer. What about offering extra incentives, like longer warranties or free bonuses if ordered by a set date?

You can offer financing options, if applicable, or offer a bonus if they pay in full. You can offer special packaging or delivery. You could even consider offering a “name your own price” incentive! Some other offers could be comparative data or other comparison tools, offering a trade-up or upgrade to something they already have or additional, educational information to help them make their decision.

The options really are as limitless as you make it. You can use these or other ideas to find what works the best for your business, products or service and target market.

Jay Abraham says (and he’s so right), “By making it inviting, easy, informative, non-threatening, educational, inspiring and fun to do business with you, you’ll loft your company above the competition.”

Do you need help figuring out the best strategy for converting your prospects into customers? Our FREE test drive gives you exclusive access to a mountain of resources and tools and information. For more information and your free test drive, go to www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com!

The Three Essential Start Up Marketing Tools to Keep Your Customers For Life

Let’s talk about the three most important start up marketing tools you need to get and keep new customers, and how to implement them.

The three most important tools you can use are:

1. Go meet your customers in person! It’s essential for you to meet with your customers or clients in person whenever possible. This shows you respect them and that you will take the time to work with your clients to give personal attention to each of them.
2. After your meeting, always take a moment to send a follow up letter about what you talked about, new agreements or partnerships made and to thank them for taking the time to meet with you. Likewise, you should always send thank you letters or small gifts to partners you find success with.
3. Use a phone call to follow up with your customer to talk further about the matters you covered in your meeting and offer any assistance you can to help their business run smoothly and more successfully.

In our high tech society where everyone emails and texts, it’s these personal touches that will begin to make you stand out from your competition.

And remember…none of these will work if you don’t have a quality product or service to back you up!

Here are the five key steps for putting together your start-up marketing tools:

1. Research potential customers, buyers, competitors and their preferred methods of distribution.
2. Talk to potential customers. Take a hard look at your product from a customer’s perspective and see what it needs to be successful.
3. Follow up with your 3-step process from above.
4. Develop systems for contact follow through, quality control standards and customer service.
5. Lastly, develop a post-sale follow up system to keep the lines of communication open to customers and build on your current relationship which will increase future purchases.

Peter Drucker, a management consultant says, “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs” – and it is so, so true.

Here’s another one I love from an icon:

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.” That’s a quote from Henry Ford, Founder of Ford Motor Company.

I hope you take this lesson and assemble the tools you need to put together a start-up marketing plan that can be used over and over again to help your customer base and business grow in a manageable way.

The tools offered in our FREE test drive offer these very same things. For more information and your free test drive, go to www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com!  Let us show you how to put together the resources and tools you need to keep your customers coming back for life!

Your Lifetime Value of a Customer

Today you’re going to learn how to find a target market of potential customers so you aren’t wasting precious resources on “blitz marketing,” or marketing that is all over the place and not focused. So, the two questions you have to ask yourself are:

What do people really want to buy from me? And what related products are they already buying?

Once you figure this out, you will know who is most likely to purchase your products or services. Then, you can find other businesses with the same customer base (that are not in direct competition with you), who you can share your customers with. Then, think of a way to come up with an incentive or arrangement to encourage both of your customer bases to shop at both of your stores.

The basic concept is this:

You want to find an existing business who has the same customer that you are looking for to market your products or services to.

You then develop a relationship with those business owners to work out an incentive for customers to purchase from both businesses.

As a result, you have an audience to market to and the partner business generates added value from their current base.

So, how do you figure this out? The following is a great formula from Jay Abraham you can follow with great success.

LV = (P x F) x N – MC

Here’s what it all means:
• LV is the life time value of a customer
• P is the average profit margin from each sale
• F is the number of times a customer buys each year
• N is the number of years customers stay with you
• MC is the marketing cost per customer (total costs divided by the number of customers)

Once you know how much you need to spend to attract a new customer, you will know how much of an incentive you can offer to a business to help attract new customers.

So, here’s your step-by-step process:

1. Find companies who already have the customer base you are looking for.
2. Negotiate an incentive for them to share that customer base with you.
3. Focus your marketing resources to this group of predisposed customers.

If you need help working through this process, check out our FREE test drive for the most comprehensive system of marketing tools and resources. Visit us at www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com today!

Keep Your Customers For Life

Keep your customers for life? It sounds like a great dream…but how? Well, consider this: most businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but you must spend time retaining current and former customers. These are people who have already bought from you!

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and spend less time trying to sell old products to new customers. When you do, you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality and branding position.

Here are a couple of keys to retaining your current customers.

Stay in contact: You can do this by phone, email, e-newsletter, in person…or how about this?  Send a handwritten thank you note!  When was the last time you got a handwritten thank you note from a business or salesperson that you did business with?

You need to follow up with your customers. Your customer needs to feel like they are being supported after their purchase. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt like you were completely abandoned? This happens to me all the time – especially when I buy software!  You think the software will solve some big problem and then you get home and remember,  “Oh yeah, I have to actually LEARN how to use the software first!”  Something as simple as a thank you email to your customer introducing your customer service center can go a long way in retaining a great customer.

Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business!  One of my biggest pet peeves is when businesses offer specials to entice new customers to come in but do little or nothing in the way of discounts or deals to KEEP me as a customer – it really drives me nuts when I’ve been a long standing customer and get no ‘reward’ or discount to show me they appreciate me!  They are so busy trying to get new customers that they don’t spend enough time or money on keeping their current customers. Don’t let this happen to you and your business. One of the best ways to thank your current customers is to start a loyalty club specifically to reward longtime customers. Another option for this would be to offer preferred pricing to loyal customers.

Lastly, have some integrity!  Implementing good business practices and simply having integrity, dignity and honesty goes a long way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of deceit and deception out there and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they’ll trust you – and that makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business.  The first is to offer a quality product or service. The next is to offer useful products or services that solve a problem for, or enhance the life of, a customer. And lastly, offer subjects that your customer finds interesting.

By using the approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight, you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new getting prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside!

As Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and divert some of your resources into reselling, upselling, & cross-selling to those same customers. Stay in touch with those customers every way possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers –  and get them used to buying from you.”

So, there it is! Remember, our FREE test drive can help you put together the resources and tools to do exactly that. We can help you create customers for life and when you do, you can watch your profits multiply! Visit us at www.profitcatapultbusinessschool.com today!