When a survey asked the question “what comes to mind when you think about salesmen”, the most common answer was… “pushy”.
And I think it’s something we can all relate to. We’ve all seen the Carry On films and similar where someone (literally) sticks their foot in the door (and the laughter when the lady slams it on his poor toes).
But it’s a stereotype that’s come from somewhere and no one likes the thought of it being applied to them.
It’s bound to happen sometime, as sure as night follows day. You make a sale or carry out a service for client, and you think everything is fine. And then suddenly, out of the blue, comes a complaint, like an arrow suddenly slamming into your desk. You know you did a great job, you’re pretty sure the complainer is wrong, and you don’t want to feel you’re being taken advantage of. The big question is: what do you do?
One of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make time and again is to concentrate on getting more leads to the detriment of something just as, if not more, important.
They put a lot of effort into their lead-generation but then they miss out something so fundamental to marketing that, in many cases, almost all that effort goes to waste.
Here’s what I mean, and before you read this you’d better sit down, especially if you’re spending a good amount of money on lead-generation and you haven’t been making as much money as you’d like.
When we talk about sales conversions we tend to look at the whole idea of a “conversion” as being a single event.
But very often it simply isn’t that at all, and is in fact a more complex process involving at least two steps – and often many more. If you send an email for people to click on a link to visit a sales page and then click on a button to buy something, you have at least two steps – the sales letter, and then filling in the payment details on the shopping cart.
If you’ve studied online marketing for any length of time you’ll have come across the phrase “squeeze page”, which sometimes goes by the name “opt-in page”. Whatever you call it, essentially the page has a simple purpose, and that’s to gather the contact details of prospective customers so you can follow-up with them.
One of the most common and powerful pieces of advice I give to business owners is to figure out the demographics of their top 20% of clients and then spend 80% of more of their time and marketing efforts to get more people just like that. It’s very simple, very straightforward, and it’s an almost guaranteed recipe for success. This 80/20 Rule is called the Pareto principle and i will show you how you can use it to your advantage.
You’re no doubt already aware one of the key principles of marketing is measuring and testing. After all, we can’t possibly know if our marketing efforts are bearing fruit unless we can measure the results of what we’re doing.
And once we’ve measured how effective a given strategy is, then it’s only a small step to take to start testing something different and measuring again.
