7 Ways To Get More Clients To Attend Your Events
March 11, 2010
One of of my clients who lives overseas is in the midst of marketing his year-long high level Mastermind group. We’ve been through setting up the sales copy for his website, and he’s pulled together some introductory workshops to give his potential clients a taste of what he does and how he works. Still, he wants to do all he can to maximize enrollment, so he asked if I had more suggestions for him. Sure do! Here are 7 ways to fill your events:
- Be clear about how many people you want. What size does the group need to be to function well, let connections and bonding take place, but still remain manageable? Share this number with your potential members, and spend a little time actually envisioning the group in your meeting place. See the faces as you look around the room. Clarity and visualization are two ways to manifest what you want.
- Leave yourself enough lead time to schedule more than one “preview” workshop for something that is as big as a year-long higher priced offering. Choose a different location. It’s rare to attract all the people you have potential with for just the one single day you have planned.
- Schedule at least one teleseminar, and preferably 3. Use these hour-long open and free calls to provide valuable, useful content to your listeners. Have them sign up to gain access to your call through your website, so that you gain their name and e-mail address in return for sharing a sneak preview of your content. Talk about the what, but not so much the how. Take a break before the end of your call to spend a full 5 minutes making your offer for the big event. Talk about the benefits, not what you plan to do. Talk about the pain points you feel your listeners have and what can happen when these pain points are eliminated from a person’s life or work.
- Review the stories of the people who have already signed up for the big event, and ask yourself why they opened their wallets for you. These early adopters can tell you a lot about what other people are feeling, too. Change your sales talk and copy slightly if you need to, in order to cover and emphasis these benefits since you already know that they are strong selling points for you.
- Consider offering a half-price ticket to the spouse or business partner or assistant of someone who has already paid full ticket price for a seat. This can be a very effective way to fill your seats. Essentially, you are upselling the already-registered client. It’s a great benefit to them to bring someone along, and a great benefit to you to have another person at the event. (Be sure, however, that you are covering your costs with this 50% person.)
- Be wise in the use of experiential work in your one-day workshop previews. People buy on emotion, not logic. So bring the emotion up at these workshops and when it is high, make your offer.
- Make sure that your offer is time limited. You can offer the half-price “second person” ticket for a limited time. You can offer an early-bird discount for a very brief time. You can offer a bonus but only if the person registers for your big event within the next 24 hours.
Filling the seats at your events and longer-term programs takes persistence and the use of multiple marketing strategies. Using these can help you gain visibility and build excitement for your big event. Let me know how it goes!
(c) Sue Painter
Entrepreneurial Passion, Problems, & Desires
March 8, 2010
Here’s a really short video I did for you today, just before starting 3 1/2 days with Ali Brown, James Roche, and my fellow Millionaire Protegee Club members in Marina Del Ray. Think about this for YOUR biz!
Do You Have The Courage Of An Entrepreneur?
March 4, 2010
Years ago, I heard the statement “the fastest way to personal growth is to open your own business.” Thirteen years after opening my first business, I can promise that statement is true. Like many people who are self-employed, I came out of the corporate world, where I was used to having support staff, creative people around me to bounce ideas off of, and the big bosses over me to handle the heat. I also had janitorial staff to clean the office and technical support staff to handle an errant computer. When I left all that to open my own business, I soon discovered that my support staff, creative people, big bosses, janitorial staff and technical staff was the person I saw when I stared into my mirror.
My business was brand new and very small, one room in an office building. I had to handle everything, whether I was “trained” to handle it or not. I had to discover what I did well, what I enjoyed the most, what I hated to do, when I could afford to hire help, and what help I needed to hire first. I had to stretch and grow quickly. Fortunately, because I had solid experience in growing a business, the Touch Therapy Center (a massage clinic I own to this day) built itself quickly. Within the year, I could hire help for cleaning and laundry service. Next came a bookkeeper. Now, 13 years later, I manage the business while other staff do most of the therapeutic massage, I’m in a medical office building with multiple treatment rooms, and I have a practice manager to handle the front desk, errands, and most adminstrative tasks.
What I want to point out is the rocky path of personal growth it takes to get from year one to year thirteen, turning a profit the whole way. Here are some of the things I had to learn or consider:
- Watch my operating costs and bottom line – I had to remain profitable even if I was spending more money on getting help with cleaning, laundry service, and so forth. Watching my weekly financial statements was critical, or I could have worked myself crazy and not made a dime.
- Know myself well enough to figure out what I liked to do and was good at versus what I am not so good at and am not fond of doing. One of these in the massage business is laundry. I didn’t enjoy dragging home loads of sheets and spending my evenings sorting, washing, drying, and folding them. And I wasn’t particularly great at it, either. On the other hand, I’m very practiced and skillful at attracting clients. I didn’t need or want to pay anyone to handle marketing for me, other than getting help with a design for my business card. It was easy for me and saved me money to develop my own brochures and press releases.
- I had to find out about my willingness to take risk and how to handle the good and bad that came from that risk. Should I move into larger office space and increase my rent? If so, how much more business would I need to generate to remain at my same level of profit? Could I get larger space, spend more money, and at the same time make even more money? Could I negotiate new lease terms that were favorable to me?
Before long, I had a very busy practice and was ready to hire other staff. Now, I could draw on my past experience as an Executive Director and use my past hiring skills. This time, if I made a bad decision, it was mind and mine alone to deal with, for better or for worse.
And, after about 8 years, I had to make a decision about opening my second business, The Confident Marketer. Other entrepreneurs had been asking me for serveral years how I’d built my business, how I knew what to do when, how I got profitable. I found that I absolutely loved helping other self-employed people be successful. So, about 5 years ago, The Confident Marketer was born. And with it, a whole new level of personal growth and challenge was necessary. It’s one reason I keep myself always working with top coaches who can help me face up to the personal growth and new business skills I need to keep my business successful and innovative.
The point to my story is that it takes courage to be an entrepreneur. You have to be willing to find out what you don’t know, get help with those things you don’t do well, and become expert at a few things that are yours and yours alone. You have to be willing to step up to intimately knowing and watching your financials (something I find many new entrepreneurs don’t want to do). You have to make decisions using both the facts and figures AND your gut feelings — your intuitive skills. And when there is a problem, you have to be willing to meet it and work it through, taking time to consider whether and how much it affects your customer service and your bottom line.
All this takes a great deal of courage and a willingness to grow both personally and professionally. A great business takes three things – a solid biz plan, a creative and well-thought-out marketing plan, and a willingness to do engage in personal growth. And behind those three vital things is courage. Step right up, and see how quickly your business becomes unstoppable!
(c) Sue Painter
Matching Your Target Market – A Lesson From Mexican Entrepreneurs
February 16, 2010
How to reach your peeps is just about always on my mind – it comes with the territory of being a marketing therapist. So here I was, two days ago, lounging around on the public beach in Puerto Vallarta. And I ended up, no big surprise, watching the vendors who sell up and down the beach. It is a great case study of how to figure out what to sell to a specific target market.
In the space of two hours we were visited by quite a number of beach vendors. Here’s a list of the items we were offered:
Cooked skewered shrimp, topped off by one of the limes hooked onto a separate skewer.
Heavy blankets in various colors that could be used on the beach or as a rug at home.
Brightly colored large pitchers that looked like ceramic but were actually wood.
Toys and gum from a basket.
Tuba-tuba, which is a chilled coconut drink served into a cup from a huge hollowed out double gourd.
Lace shawls.
All sorts of jewelry – silver, shells, beaded.
Elaborately carved cold fresh fruit, your choice, from a head-balanced platter.
Music from a 3-group band, complete with voice and instruments (including a bass fiddle)
Music from a two-person steel band percussion group, a 4-foot long instrument that unfolded and sat on a table, complete with sound system (battery operated).
Sunglasses
Bracelets hand-woven with your name on it
Straw hats
Large silver and mother of pearl fish which are jointed throughout the body so that the fish “swim” when wiggled.
I’m not quite sure this is everything, but the list covers most of the vendors we saw drifting by.
OK, let’s say that your job is to be a beach vendor on a warm Mexican beach. Some of your potential customers will be sitting in chairs under palapas, some will be already sitting in restaurants along the beach. Your job is to sell as much as you can from what you are offering. Can you name the top two things to sell? Can you name the bottom two things to sell? Remember that your target market is beach goers, some of whom are foreign, some of whom are locals, all of whom are on the beach, and some of whom are eating or drinking in restaurants. What are your picks for the two best things to sell to this market, and the two worst things?
Keep in mind, too, that you have to carry what you sell, walking in the sand, up and down the beach for miles and hours a day.
My two picks for the worst? The brightly colored large pitchers, which look like ceramic but are made of wood. They are awkward to carry, the vendor can’t actually carry more than about 4 at a time, and who on the beach wants one of these pitchers right then? Even if a potential customer was not on the beach, the pitchers are too large to easily carry home if you are a foreigner, and more than likely the locals don’t even use them as they don’t hold liquid. I think the guy who chose to sell the pitchers needs a few marketing lessons!
My second choice for the worst to sell, although a close race, is the steel band percussion. The instrument was huge to carry (requiring both persons) up and down the sand, hard to set up, and had to be hauled along with a fold-out table and the battery-operated sound system. That’s a lot to set up and take down for just one song, even if you had good luck selling the music to a lot of people. Plus, many people besides the one person who paid for the music can hear it, so you aren’t exactly going to sell music to the next person, are you? And frankly, most beach goers are busy sleeping, reading, riding the waves, or walking up and down the beach…..they don’t really have hearing live music on their minds.
My two choices for the best things to sell? Straw hats, because lots of beachgoers get to the beach thinking they won’t need a hat. But when they get there, they realize they do! The hats are relatively light to carry (I saw one vendor with a stack of about 50 straw hats on his head). As I watched him sell to someone on the sand, I realized he also had an upsell! He took leather braided bands out of his pocket and offered to add one to the hat for just a few more pesos. Smart guy – beach goers need hats, and they didn’t wear him out to carry.
My second choice for the best thing to sell is the cold, fresh fruit. It both gives a beach person something to eat and quenches thirst. It’s colorful and appetizing, and very noticable since most of the fresh fruit vendors carry the trays on their heads. It’s not expensive, it’s healthy, and even the kids seemed to like it. It’s probably one of the easiest things to carry on the beach, and the tray actually gives the vendor a little shade as he walks.
The point to this is that there are many things to consider when you are deciding what and how to sell to your target market. You do have to consider the pound of flesh it takes out of you, the costs you have in obtaining the product, and, of course, what you believe your market will want.
This doesn’t apply to the beach vendors as much as it does to you, but one way to quit guessing what your market wants is to ask them! Use a brief survey, talk to a subset of your prospects now and then, keep your ear to the ground. You’ll be more apt to design something that is wanted and needed than if you just put something on your back and start walking.
(c) Sue Painter
Can You Really Describe Your Ultimate Target Market?
February 7, 2010
One of the real “rookie” mistakes made by new entrepreneurs is to completely fail to know her target market. This is something that is very easy to spot. A few of the signs are:
- Her business is not thriving, meaning she needs more customers and she is not financially successful.
- When asked who she works with, she replies “Oh, I work with just about anyone.”
- If asked to thoroughly and completely describe her target market, she is flustered and can’t give more than a sentence.
The “Oh, I work with just about anyone” response is one I’ve heard from both new and not-so-new entrepreneurs many times. So many times, in fact, that it now drives me a little nuts. When someone says that, they are setting no boundaries for who they work with, which is a deadly thing. Let me ask the “just about anyone” entrepreneurs these questions:
1. Does it matter to you if a customer stiffs you?
2. Are you open 24/7?
3. If you were, for instance, a seller of curtains and blinds, would you drive 400 miles to sell a set of blinds to someone?
Of course, the answer to each of these is almost always NO! And that’s a good, thing, because that entrepreneur has just started on a path of better describing her target market. Her target market are people who have the money to pay for her products or services, she works with those who contact her during specific days and hours of business, and she has a limited geographical area in which to sell her blinds. This isn’t a complete description of her target market, but it is a start.
You can picture the creation of your target market as setting fences and gates around a specific group of people with whom you really want to work. You might not be as blatantly obvious about it as the gatekeepers are at hot night clubs, where one must stand outside on the sidewalk and get personally picked to go inside, but that is one very good example of a business who is very picky about who they want to serve.
I’ve learned about finding your niche and describing your target market from 3 or 4 of my coaches and mentors, but the one who made me work the hardest to describe my market, hands down, was Suzanne Falter-Barnes. She has a very long list of questions that one must answer to get through one of her platform building classes. The first time I saw that fat list of questions I just about fainted. In fact, the document she proposed I fill out to describe my market was 17 pages long! Still, Suzanne knows her stuff and I was there to learn, so I plowed into the questions. At the end, I felt like I’d invented something akin to a kid’s secret playmate. I started getting actual pictures of how my target market person looked, how she dressed, what she spent her money on, and more. I got so familiar with her in that 17 pages of ruthless questioning that I decided I knew her well enough to name her, for Pete’s sake! And that is what I strongly suggest you do, too.
My suggestion is to sit down with your computer or a piece of paper and describe a “sample” person from your target market as if she (or he) is a character in a book you are writing, and it’s up to you to fill your reader’s head with a detailed, specific, colorful image of the character you are writing about. Describe age, education, the kind of work she does, where she lives, her likes and dislikes – anything you can think of that will add to the picture in your head. This may lead you to dig around on the web for demographic or other information.
Spend quality time here, for it pays off in the end. Ask yourself (with pen and paper or keyboard nearby) “who is the most perfect customer for me?” If you have a hard time doing that, prime the pump by listing the characteristics of your most favorite or best customer so far. From there, dream on. Who would be delightful to work with? Who would you dread working with? What characteristics drive you crazy? Who have you worked with who bugs you so much you hope she never calls you again? You get the picture – and that’s whole point. For here is a secret about financially successful entrepreneurs:
Those who describe and visualize their target market well have started the process of manifesting exactly that type of customer for themselves. You now have a vision of who you want to attract, in detail. Put that right on your business vision board and keep it in your mind’s eye, for who you focus on tends to come your way.
Having this vision and description on hand also makes it easier to walk away from business that isn’t right for you, doesn’t truly interest you, and has a downside to it. (The downside being that while you are spending time with uninteresting client A, you cannot very well be also working with or running into very interesting and exciting client B. This is called “opportunity cost.”) Realize that it actually COSTS YOU to work with the wrong customer, for you are giving up the opportunity to work with who is just right for you.
Taking the time to dream up your ideal target market person makes finding that type of person much easier. You now know where to focus your efforts. If you are spending a lot of time and money networking in a group of direct marketers, and these are not your target market, it’s time to make a change. Pull your time and money from the wrong group, and go find the right group. You’ll find more and better business in the new group and waste less of your precious time.
When you are creating marketing plans, writing sales copy, or pulling together a presentation you’ll be able to keep your secret target market person right with you, writing to them. There will be less agony over creating these things.
And finally, when you have the opportunity to build a relationship with a potential customer, you will be much more at ease because, after all, you will pretty much feel as if you know that person in a way. You’ll be confident that you’ve spent time with someone who has a much higher chance of needing what you offer. This will shorten your sales cycle and make you more money faster. I don’t know of any entrepreneur who doesn’t want that!
So, get that blank paper or computer screen and get going. Breath some life into your target market, and you’ll breath new life into your business, as well. It’s a win-win for every entrepreneur.
(c) Sue Painter
Who Is In Your Entrepreneurial Community?
February 6, 2010
For the past few years now I’ve experimented with just about every method of coaching and mentoring that is available to solo professional and entrepreneurs. All of them have their pros and cons. But one thing that I’ve come to know for sure is that if you are in your own business, you need a great community of like-minded entrepreneurs around you. Why?
- Running your own business is a solitary endeavor. Decisions are up to you and you alone. You need the perspective of other business owners to round out your own thoughts. The perspective of your employees (if you have any) isn’t the same thing.
- Your own energy waxes and wanes. I’m not talking about the moon or hormones, either. The best business owners know that their own energy has to attract others to them – good staff, great customers, good deals for rents or whatever else. And it is very hard to keep your own energy up where it needs to be without sometimes drawing from the good energy of others.
- Time inevitably puts you in the box. What do I mean by this? When you created your business you did it to put forward a new, not previously done type of business. You felt what you had to offer was unique and special. In other words, you were out of the box. But as time rocks on, your own thinking gets boxed in by the very dailiness of what you do, by your own fatigue, and by the fact that others will emulate you. To keep on re-creating a business that continually pleases and serves your customers, you need to keep yourself out of the box.
- Your ideas, although they are great, can be sharpened and improved by your entrepreneurial community. Simply put, multiple heads are better than one. Here’s a quick example of this. In one of my own communities, a woman had a deal with a book publisher for her very first book. But she was balking about what the publisher wanted to title the book, taking issue with both the main title and the tagline. She brought it up in our next get together, only to find that her adamant opinion was not shared by a single one of us! We all though the title was good and that, furthermore, the publisher knew what would sell much more than the author did. As I pointed out, the author is the subject matter expert but her publisher is the marketing and sales expert for her book. All but one of the entire community basically told her to suck it up. And after she listened to us, she did! She ended up coming all the way back around to what the publisher had suggested, with only a very minor one-word change. Which leads me to my next point about the benefit of being in an entrepreneurial community….
- It helps you get your own ego out of the way, and think about what you offer from your customer’s point of view. Believe you me, you will ONLY be successful if you offer what your customers want and need, not what you in all your wisdom think they need.
I could probably come up with a few more good reasons, but I think you, smart as you are, get the point. It may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a community to foster a solo business. I cannot even begin to list for you all that I have learned from constantly participating in my own communities. I’ve gotten both wonderful, gentle, loving support and a sharp kick in the pants….and both have been beneficial to me. It will be the same for you.
I’m excited to tell you that I’m forming a new community for solo business owners that will offer these benefits ( and more) in just about a month. I’m calling it Private Matters because I’m creating a group to which you can bring your most private thoughts and worries. These deeply affect your business, they matter. So….in a nutshell….Private Matters. It will be small, full of sharp thinkers and dedicated solo business owners, and it will change you and your business in ways that you can only dream of. If you feel you are a good match for Private Matters, you can e-mail me and I’ll make sure you get the application and information.
Meanwhile, keep your business focused on who you serve, what those people need, and how you can best offer products and services that meet those needs. And remember to reach out for community regularly. Both you and your customers will benefit.
(c) Sue Painter
Add Fun To Your Entrepreneurial Endeavors
January 24, 2010
Lately I’ve run across more than one budding entrepreneur who makes building a business out to be nothing but serious and a lot of 
hard work. I’ve been pondering this a lot. Our energy follows our thoughts. When we hold only serious energy toward anything, it BECOMES hard to us. We fulfill our own expectations. We start believing that there is too much to do, too much to learn, and that we are overwhelmed. Here are just a few examples I’ve run across in the past months:
- It’s no fun to pay attention to weekly income and expenses.
- It’s no fun to carve out the time needed to work on my business, not in it.
The truth is, your business will flourish the more you weave fun into it. When we look forward to learning something new rather than thinking it will be overwhelmingly difficult, we create energy toward our own success. When we hold our work lightly, it feels much less burdensome and hard. We end up with a more positive energy toward the things we have to do. We all know this, but when it comes to our work we sometimes tend to forget it. We think we have to labor at our work, or keep it separate from our fun.
Dread has no place in your life as an entrepreneur. You didn’t set yourself up to be the boss of you just to feel dread toward your work, did you? 
One way to handle feeling too burdened or overwhelmed is to make sure you inject some fun and things you truly enjoy into your business. Tiny pleasures or large ones, they all help you succeed in your work.
Here’s just a small example. I’ve always loved the color turquoise, so to inject a little bit of fun into the work of updating one of my websites, I used it and asked Facebook friends what color to pair it with. I ended up with a dynamic combo of my fav turquoise paired with peach. I love it, and I had fun I had pulling it together. (You can check out the result at suepainter.com.) How fun it was to read the other day that turquoise has been named “color of the year.”
Often I encourage my clients to plan personal retreats to work out their stuck places and to work on their business planning. These are fun despite being productive. Go where you’ve been wanting to go, or return to a place you enjoy. Not only does the prospect of a trip create a welcoming energy, you are so easily able to work on your business rather than in it, getting away from the day-to-day routine. Go by yourself, or pair up with another entrepreneur who also wants to hammer out some work. You can weave breaks into your day, walk on the beach, get a nice dinner, shop. But for the most part, you are giving yourself uninterrupted time to invest in your business. Don’t sabotage yourself by making this a family vacation, either. It’s not – it’s for YOU.
You can also form a small Mastermind group with people you truly enjoy, and meet by phone or in person to help each other with business issues. Make it fun – meet over a good bottle of wine, take a walk, whatever you enjoy. For a while last year, I did this with another entrepreneur by meeting her to water walk and swim together. We’d do that, then get into the warm therapy pool and stretch both our bodies and our views of our businesses.
Do you have staff or employees in your business? In nice weather, try meeting outdoors with a picnic lunch. Just think about ways to bring joy and pleasure into your endeavor. You’ll benefit both in your spirit and your bottom line. Think easy-peasy, not hard. Think mastery, not failure. Think simple steps, not big overwhelming project. You didn’t put yourself in business to feel fearful, down or out. You put yourself in business to serve others and create a world of work that meets your income and lifestyle wishes. Fun will help you get there, even in small doses!
(c) Sue Painter
Could Your Business Withstand A Disaster?
January 18, 2010
The plight of the Haitian people and their country is on everyone’s mind. The images we see on the news are horrific, pulling at my heart. Literally, Haiti will have to rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. Even with massive aid from many countries, getting the country set up and the people well will take much time.
Disaster visits without warning and quickly. On a personal level, it could be unexpected illness or the death of someone dear. For your business, it might be flood, fire, or an employee who causes harm. Think about the small business owners in Haiti right now. If their business is in rubble they have no way to make money even if they could offer what their customers need most. If their business was left standing there is no security to protect it. Already, many shops have been looted for their goods. Some shop owners have simply opened their doors and emptied out their shop, giving away everything they have.
Your business will withstand disaster only to the extent that you have systems in place that you can lean on when something goes wrong without warning. While this isn’t a comprehensive list, here are your main concerns.
- Are your business’s assets insured? What would happen if a disaster caused you to lose your office or the equipment you need to carry out your business? You can either buy insurance or self insure, meaning that you have set aside money that could immediately be used to replace your lost equipment and get your doors open again.
- Do you have back-up systems in place, and do you use them regularly? Could you recreate your financial records easily? Are your customer records secure and backed up either physically or electronically?
- Have you thought about how to handle the sudden loss of a key employee? Do you have a comprehensive list of what that person does and how she does it? Do you have a way to get additional help quickly if you lose someone to illness or accident? The more you have your work systems documented in an operations manual, the quicker you can get up and running, back to making income.
- Have you planned how to handle your business if you become unable to work for a while? Is there someone who knows enough about what you do to step up and fill in until you can work again?
If you are a business owner who truly depends on the money you make, it is vital to have answers to these questions. What I see for many solo business owners is that even the slightest disaster shuts them down completely. These owners ARE their business. When they can’t work, there is no income at all. Even an illness like the flu effectively shuts them down. They’ve never thought about alternatives. Often, the loss of momentum creates a negative spiral that the solo business owner never recovers from. Their business just slowly winnows away.
One of my own businesses suffered a mini-disaster over the past few months, in fact. In early December I had major surgery that I knew would keep me away from the massage clinic I own. Plans were fully in place for my staff to take over my own work with clients. My practice manager was prepped and ready to take care of management and administrative work that I normally handle. My start date to come back to the clinic was set. My clients were all informed and taken care of. Well, while I was still in the hospital, the practice manager’s father was found to be terminally ill. She left town and even now has not returned to work. Four weeks after my surgery, I unexpectedly had to have a second surgery due to complications from the first, making it impossible for me to meet my return to work date. One staff member left unexpectedly. Suddenly, I was down to one hard-working staff member and what I could administratively handle by phone. The systems I’ve put in place for that business saved my bacon, and allowed us to continue to serve clients, make money, and handle at least the bare minimum of administrative work. While I used to chaff over the time it took to put operations manuals and back up plans in place, now I am very grateful that I had them.
Disaster don’t have to be as large as the Haitian earthquake to effectively shut your business down. If you want to recover quickly and continue to make money, get your plans and systems in place and review them at least once a year. Your bank account will show the results and your business will suffer far less than those with no planning at all.
(c) Sue Painter
Ten Basics of Consumer Behavior That Will Help You Make Money, Part Two
December 28, 2009
In Part One of this article, we covered five of the basic tenets of consumer behavior. Understanding how and why people buy helps business owners craft their sales offers in more successful ways. Part Two talks about the second set of five tenets.
Tenet Six: Buyers are loss adverse. They want to shield themselves against loss as much as possible. So, you want to make offers that take into account the buyer’s fear that they will lose. It’s a fact of how humans think that we fear loss more than we are happy by gain. You can offer money-back guarantees as one way to make buyers feel safe against loss. The fact is, few buyers will actually ask for their money back, but buyers like to know they can if they really want to. They like the reassurance even if they rarely act on it.
Another way to combat fear of loss is to offer a small trail period. Cable companies often do this by offering a few free months of a premium channel. The strategy works because when the trail months are over, a buyer will continue the channels because – guess what? – she doesn’t want to experience the loss of the channel! Maximizing potential gains and minimizing potential losses will always help you to sell more, because buyers constantly worry about this.
If you are going to give something away for free, be sure to value it by listing it as a part of the purchase agreement and stating its worth. Otherwise, you are giving it away and gaining no perceived value with your buyer.
Tenet Seven: In your sales copy, write to the product or service’s benefits , not the features. This is so basic, yet I see people miss the mark on this all the time. Tell a buyer what problem will be solved if she uses your service, not how the service works. What will a buyer have or get rid of after they purchase from you?
Tenet Eight: The frame you use to make your offer has a big role in success. By frame, I mean how you say something. If I say to you, “You can make more money by coaching with me” it doesn’t paint a very succinct picture. The phrase “more money” is relative, isn’t it? But if I say “You can take your business past the six figure mark this year” the frame is specific and much more powerful. Research shows that if a bank says “you’ll make 5% on your savings” the reaction is favorable. If a bank says “you’ll make 5% on your account” the reaction is much less favorable. “Account” is less tangible and less emotion-laden than the word “savings.”
A subset of framing is something called priming. Priming is a fancy way to say that the environment you make your offer in will affect the results of the offer. Here are some examples:
- Back of the room sales at a big event are primed by the upbeat, motivational conversation and the excitement generated by the speakers.
- A wine shop will sell more French wine if it plays French music in the store, or more German wine by playing German music.
- At a live event, making an offer for a high-level coaching program that costs five figures will go better if it’s made in a Ritz-Carlton than in a Motel Six.
- Brokers and insurance agents usually have very nice offices, their environment helps to reassure you that they are successful and their products are successful, too.
Tenet Nine: Know your connectors. Connectors are people who have a great deal of social influence. You can get a great education about connectors and how important they are to businesses in Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Connectors are influential not just because they know a lot of people, but they also naturally link people together. They connect people, ideas, and things across broad lines.
A sub-tenet of knowing your connectors is understanding peer pressure and how it influences buying decisions. Buyers will conform to what others purchase so as not to stand out. We also believe that if we purchase what others buy we are reducing our risk. If your product or service becomes the “in” thing, your sales will come to you more easily over time. If buyers see several people rush to your booth to purchase a product, chances are they will also come by to have a look. Have you ever peered into the door of a restaurant that is new to you, to see how many people are in there eating? If it’s not reasonably crowded, you probably walked away. This is an example of peer pressure buying.
Tenet Ten: Social exchange breeds more loyalty and a stronger bond than economic exchange. How does this translate into your business? Offering a service to buyers without regard to getting paid for it will help to build a bond, which in turn will eventually lead to sales. For instance, you might offer to make an introduction to someone. You might offer a morning coffee meeting for 3 or 4 business owners who are potential buyers and would benefit from knowing each other, too. You might offer to come by and water the plants for someone who is on vacation.
Companies use social exchange to build loyalty. Saturn had big reunions for all Saturn owners back in time. Hyundai’s Assurance program will pay your car payment for six months if you lose your income. These social exchanges built strong bonds to both brands. Years ago, McDonald’s would fill your coffee cup for free if you bought one of their special ceramic McDonald’s cups. At the time, I worked in an office next door to a McDonald’s. We all walked over there twice a day for coffee for years, never thinking to go anywhere else. And, of course, we bought other food to go along with the coffee more often than not.
Tracking consumer behavior is fascinating, but more to the point it helps you know how to make your offers and become more profitable in your business. Sit down with all the products and services you offer in a list, and see how many of these ten tenets you can put to use to sharpen your offers. It will impact your bottom line in a good way!
(c) Sue Painter
Ten Basics of Consumer Behavior That Will Help You Make Money, Part One
December 28, 2009
A good way to start the business year is to remind ourselves of how unpredictable consumer behavior is. The more we understand about why people purchase what they do, the better we can design our marketing messages. There are 10 basics of buying behavior that can help you make money, in today’s post I’ll cover five of them, and in Part Two I’ll talk about the second set of five.
Understanding why people purchase when they do is no easy task, however. The field of behavioral economics indulges in marketing research and can give us some insight. Here are ten things we know about consumer behavior, and how you can put them to use as a small biz owner.
Tenet One: The need to express one’s individuality is a critical factor influencing the choice of brand that someone will buy. What does this mean? Well, if you’ve got this type of consumer on your hands, you want to offer a product or service that seems unique and very individualized to the person. If you are selling braided leather bracelets, for instance, this person is going to want a leather bracelet that isn’t braided, or a colored leather, or a braided bracelet with a customized charm at the end. If you are selling your cleaning services, offering a menu of tasks you do and asking this person to personalize it to their own home will make them feel they are getting a unique “brand.”
Tenet Two: Keep it simple. Too many choices confuse a buyer, and as I’ve preached for years now, a confused mind does not buy. If you offer 17 different products and services, simplify it down to no more than three. Group your products and services by broad category and let the buyer choose what she most needs. A few weeks ago, I met a concierge service owner and asked about her business. To my horror, she enthusiastically told me “we can do anything you need.” That doesn’t help most buyers, who will quickly glaze over and not be able to think about what they need at that particular moment in time. A better answer would be, “We handle shopping for gifts, office organization, and party planning.” The buyer’s mind will then sort and land on something she recently needed that falls into one of these large categories. Give a buyer a place to land and you’ll do a better job of selling.
Tenet Three: Use decoys when you package your options. Let’s say you are offering three different options for house cleaning. Make the middle option the package that you really most want to sell. Most people will select the middle option, not wanting to go with the absolute lowest cost option but then not being willing to spring for the very highest, either. So make the middle option the one you really want to sell, the one that is the most profitable for you. The others are, in essence, decoys.
Another way to use a decoy is to actually use a competitor’s product or service up against your own. Point out the added value or benefit that you have, and that your competitor doesn’t have. For instance, you may sell a face care product not that different from another product – but yours may offer 20% more product for the money. Or, it may have an added benefit that the “decoy” competition doesn’t have.
Tenet Four: You set the anchor for your price. In retail operations, the suggested retail price is the anchor, the price at which you want a buyer to compare your goods with others they may buy. In nonprofit organizations, you set an anchor by suggesting levels of giving in a campaign. It’s also possible to re-anchor prices and change a buyer’s expectation. One of the most familiar and successful examples of re-anchoring is when Starbucks began. Starbucks re-anchored the price of a cup of coffee much higher than it was in any other coffee establishment by convincing buyers that the coffee and the experience was of much higher value than in a McDonald’s or a Dunkin’ Donuts.
Tenet Five: How you package what you offer makes a big difference. In marketing research, this phenomena is called sensation transference. It means that buyers will transfer the sensations they have about the packaging of a product or service to the actual item itself. For instance, people will report that the food served on a paper plate doesn’t taste as good as the very same food served on a china plate. The “packaging” of the china plate transfers a better sensation. Brandy and perfume manufacturers heavily depend on sensation transference. You’ve probably heard before that the design of a bottle of perfume is often more expensive than the actual design of the perfume itself. The packaging makes all the difference in the success or failure of that particular scent.
There are many ways you can use packaging to help your sales. If you are a residential developer, packaging may include a fancy entrance to your neighborhood. If you are a coach, packaging might mean the extra little bonuses you offer people to work with you – things like a personalized planner, a private forum, a special event offered at no charge as part of the “package” of the coaching offer.
Think about how you can put these basic tenets to work for you, and in Part Two you’ll discover the last five tenets.
(c) Sue Painter