Building A Thriving Business (What's at the VERY CORE) Pt 9

Business is all about getting a customer to sign that deal. Without customers, there won't be any business. The question every business leader needs to ask is where is my business coming from? or where do I want my business to come from? It could be via direct selling, distribution channels, trade shows, events, cold calling or referrals. Whatever the channel your leads come from, you need to be able to convert and close them, by educating them on how your product/service will benefit them more than anyone else in the market.

How To Get A Paying Customer

This can be done in a variety of ways. One of the proven ways is by under selling, where you lure the lead in, by being an empathic adviser, rather than a sales person. This starts by listening to the challenge ailing them, which includes following up with questions regarding current solutions, if any, being used by the lead. As the seller, your pitch starts, when the opportunity arises, by tailoring your product/service self-serving benefit to the list of responses given by the lead. And, you CLOSE them, by educating them on why it's better than any other alternative in the market.

A more strategic approach is through risk reversal, where as the seller, you assume some or all of the risk in the transaction - Jay Abraham. If you're selling a digital product/service, you could offer a free trial/course on your landing page, for user registration. This gives the lead the opportunity to avail themselves with the experiential benefit your product/service offers. After the free trial/course is over, you could then CLOSE them, by offering a paid/subscription membership with more product/service features. This mostly works, if your offering is providing real value.

There's another variance of risk reversal, called, guarantee, which you can arrange pre-sale, by writing up a nominal invoice, showing the price of your service/product, but discounting to zero, or, post sale, by offering a money back guarantee.

Strategic Marketing

The power of risk reversal is in the life time value of a customer (LTVC).  LTVC is calculated by finding out the frequency and duration of a customer's repurchases, after the initial sale has been made. If it outweighs the risk taken on, by YOU, the seller, then you could decide to extend the usage of any free trial, offer or increase/supplement the content of any free course/product; making it longer or unique to the conventional standard set in your market, because you know the accrued value is still POSITIVE. That's what you call strategic marketing. 

Having An Infinite Budget

LTVC, could also work to your advantage, in providing you with an infinite marketing/advertising budget. Consider the story of Jay Abraham, CEO of Abraham Group Inc, who with his colleagues in the 70's, bought over a bankrupt factory, that produced icy hot, a balm for rheumatic ailments, selling for $3 at the time, but due to the appeals from long standing clients, decided to resume production, and forgo their original plans. They decided not to pay for advertising, but instead made deals with a 1000 outlets, like radio/tv stations, magazines, mail orders, including non-traditional means, and gave them ALL the revenue made from the sale of the balms, only if they would get the contact of each sale, so that he and his team could confirm customer satisfaction upon delivery. They had calculated a positive accrued value from the deal using LTVC, while factoring in cost of production and shipping at $0.55/balm, that for every 2 balms sold, 1 out of the 2 sales, migrated around for a year to buy 10 more balms, for a duration of 5 years. Also, for every order shipped out via mail, they added coupons stating other products they sold, which led to new orders, while still enjoying the revenue from the repurchases of the balms. In 8 months they grew the company's revenue by 5000%. And, even when sales started drying up, they paid the outlets $3.45/balm to keep selling the balms to their audience/clients at $3.00. In the subsequent years that followed, they sold the company to a big pharmaceutical company for $60M.

Conclusion

For more on CLOSING techniques and strategies, feel free to drop a request in the comment section.

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