January 15, 2008

In this issue: Proper expectations can take the stress and discouragement out of marketing and sales

By: Eric Albertson

Word count: 919

Time to read: 3-4 minutes

The two things to get right in business

Recently, someone faxed me a 37-point list of things that cause business failure. As usual, the inability to market and sell reliably and effectively was right at the top of the list. Plus, it carried this admonishment: “If you don’t get these two right, nothing else on this list really matters.”

If I had to pick just three things that are most responsible for success

I was discussing this list with a friend in the banking business when he asked me what I thought were the top four things that he should tell his customers to attend to about sales and marketing. I gave it some thought, and decided I would share my recommendation with you today.

Four things, plus a critical realization

As I pondered my friend’s question, I remembered a long ago realization that had changed my results and my life in marketing and sales. Here are the top three success factors in marketing and sales, in my opinion, followed by that critical realization.

1. Define a goal

2. Pick your target

3. Build your offer

4. Manage your conversion table

Define a goal

The goal simply defines the gap between the situation today, and what you want to achieve in the future. Everything that follows is relevant only to the extent that it closes the gap between your condition today and the goal. If you have no goal, it is hard to have a gap between today and where you want to be. With no goal, you probably don’t need to worry about the other three strategies.

Pick your targets

Some call this list of targets your “ideal customers.” In direct marketing, where everything is measured, we know that picking the right target and target list often accounts for up to 70 percent of the success or failure of a marketing and sales effort.

Build your offer

This is the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) from the client’s perspective. Nine of ten offers I hear are way short of what they could be. The offer accounts for up to 20 percent of the success rate. (We give you the science and art of a great offer in the Marketing Fast Track course, starting January 21st.)

Manage your conversion table

By this, I simply mean track your numbers so that you can test and improve. It also means rigorously sticking with an offer for some period of time, or number of attempts, until you have a good idea about what needs to be changed to improve performance.

The long ago realization

When I was eight years old I won my first sales contest selling newspaper subscriptions in my little town of 2,000 people in the mountains of the Oregon Coast. Initially, I was very discouraged by this until I realized that for every 10 doors I knocked on, I got one subscription.

Pure magic; I could always see the light at the end of the tunnel: I was encouraged; not even remotely discouraged.

Once that fact settled into my young brain, I practically ran from door to door, asking people to buy. The more doors I knocked on, the better my results. I won the contest by a wide margin.

The implication

Working the three things above is one of the major keys to marketing and sales success in any business, anywhere on this earth, in my opinion.

The other big realization was that each type of offer has its own hit ratio.

• Cold drinks after a 5K run on a sunny day are probably a one-for- one. Everybody will take you up on the offer.

• Life insurance, to new parents, has a hit rate very different from life insurance close rates for single, 50-year old bachelors who work the graveyard shift at convenience stores.

• Selling stocks and bonds via phone in a lower income Zip Code is quite different from working referrals from a CPA or a lawyer in a high-income Zip Code.

Knowing what to expect: seeing the light at the end of the tunnel

My real point here is for you to determine what to expect so that you can: 1) get enough targets to work through, so that you; 2) know how many no’s you’ll likely get before you get another yes.

Make more and work less via testing the market and message
Once you know roughly what the appointment and close rates will be; when you have gathered enough targets; when you are disciplined in working through the list, you are in a spot to start testing strategies to optimize your conversion table.

Optimizing simply means that you make refinements so it takes fewer calls to get the sale.

A sample conversion table