Thoughts on Life, Liberty and Hybrid Marketing
Posts tagged upsell
How to Double Your Revenue, With Your Existing Customers
Sep 25th
This technique work online and offline, as do ALL of our Hybrid Marketing strategies. So why am I posting it in the Online category? Well, because I haven’t posted here in a while silly… 
This ties in directly with our concept of “The Ultimate Backend” and a real powerful concept is to challenge yourself, your clients, vendors and employees to constantly search for new businesses within your business.
Here we go…
First, in ANY business there are an unlimited number of offshoot businesses you can create.
You just have to be creative.
For instance, in a mail-order company, you could have an offshoot of consulting to those people that you sell to. You could then telemarket. You could then do seminars and workshops.
For car dealers, you could provide extended warranties and insurance to new car owners.
For a contractor, whether it’s heating and cooling, pools, pest control or whatever, you can provide annual service contracts.
I’ll use a pool contractor as my example, and show you how to double your annual revenue without having to increase your customer base.
A pool contractor for instance might use upselling through the offering of an annual service contract to clean and service a pool four times a year. This can dramatically improve his bottom line.
In fact, we can easily double the value of the customers by added income from adding just 40% of the clients to an annual contract.
How, you ask?
Let’s walk through the math…
For the sake of easy numbers, let’s say the service call for pool service (or pest control, or <insert service here>) is $100 and there are 100 customers per year.
There’s a gross of $10,000, which is $100 per customer.
Here’s the upsell and how to easily double your annual revenue…
The upsell strategy is an annual contract where you’re going to visit four times a year. The cost for each visit to the client is $100, so the total cost at this point is $400 (before giving them your “preferred customer” discount).
If they buy your annual contract today, let’s say you give them a discount of $150, of which now just $250 is the cost to the customer. You following me here? (This is EASY!)
If you close just 40% of these people, your new revenue is $10,000. 40% of 100 is 40 people times $250 (the cost of your annual contract) and that equals $10,000 per year.
So, the new value of these 100 customers is $20,000; $10,000 for the service call ($100 x 100 customers) and another $10,000 for the 40 people who paid $250 for the annual contract.
The value per customer is now $200.
You just DOUBLED your annual revenue!
You still have the same 100 customers, so it didn’t cost you anything extra to gain new customers.
How cool is that?
If you enjoyed this simple strategy, leave a comment – or better TRY IT and let me know how it works for your business! (And if you need help putting the offer together, request a FREE Strategy Session and we’ll help you integrate this powerfully simple technique into your business.)
- Lee Collins
How NOT to do Telephone Marketing With Your Customers!
Jun 3rd
I was originally going to call this post “The Utterly Useless and Laughably WRONG Way to Followup With a Client” – you’ll see why very shortly…
It was a week ago today when I got a phone call from a “Client Rep” of one of the notable gurus.
I won’t name names because I have a lot of respect for the guy. (I mean, I didn’t even name names when a dickweed pulled a gun on me at JVAlert… capesh?)
Good.
OK, so let’s set the stage.
You’ve probably gotten one of these calls.
Guru’s Client Rep calls up and tells you he appreciates you. That you’ve been a great customer. And because of the fact that you’re a great customer the Guru wants to offer you a special deal not available for anyone else. And you can’t tell anyone about this special deal because it would make them feel bad – this is JUST FOR YOU. And just because you’ve been an awesome and loyal customer.
I mean, you’ve got those calls – right?
Sure you have.
Many A-List Marketers (most, actually) have even hired/staffed people to make these calls for them, because these “personal reward and recognition” calls are PURE GOLD.
And even if you don’t buy anything, if you just play along there’s usually a LOT you can learn from them (if done right… and you’ll understand the difference shortly).
But I am utterly baffled by the complete ineptitude of this call.
Before we go on, let me say this…
The reason I’m not mentioning the Guru’s name is because he’s a personal friend of mine. And I really do think a lot of him both personally and professionally. Even if he wasn’t I wouldn’t name names because I believe that’s absolutely unprofessional and just an asshole thing to do.
I’m blogging this because I know it will 1) benefit YOU and 2) benefit him.
So here’s the dealio-yo…
He’s gotta do some serious work on his followup/upsell/special offer marketing campaigns. Or in picking/training the people who do the calls. Or both.
Here’s what I mean, and if you pay attention you can assure your followup marketing campaigns work better than his by following these 4 simple rules.
Let’s start with foundational requirement numero uno…
1. The guy on the phone had ZERO confidence and no conviction.
You have probably been around marketing long enough (if you’ve been in marketing for a day it’s long enough) to know that confidence and conviction are NECESSARY to close the sale.
Most people would have hung up on him, but I hung in there hoping it would get better.
It didn’t.
2. The guy gave me NO benefits for taking the offer.
The only friggin benefit he gave me is dropping <Guru’s Name> 17 times in the span of 8 minutes and 22 seconds. (Yes, I counted.)
3. The guy was completely unclear about what the offer even was.
Let’s take that a step further, not only was it unclear to ME… he didn’t even know what he was offering me for the $1500.00 that he wanted for this special personal offer from <Unnamed Guru>!
After he dinked around for a while I asked just to get to the point, “so what am I getting for $1500 bucks?”
He replied, “Uh, well you’ll get <Well-known Product>… uh, no, you said you already own that… uh…”
and that leads me to my next point…
4. The guy had NO clue about what I had purchased before.
Look, I don’t care if you have to track customer purchases on a NAPKIN… DO IT!
This is CRITICAL information to have!
Especially if you’re going to have these follow-up calls to sell them more stuff.
In all seriousness I wouldn’t use a napkin, but what I would use – if you have NOTHING ELSE – is an Excel spreadsheet. Or if you want to get fancy a simple database program. Or (when you get bigger and) if you want to get real fancy – I highly recommend Infusionsoft.
(We’ve gone through all these stages. Except the napkin stage. We only use napkins to take orders, not to track purchases. But that’s a whole ‘nother story for another day.)
Anyway…
Before he called me he should have reviewed my past orders and put together a REAL special package customized just for me.
When we work with our clients in creating profitable followup campaigns that integrate online and offline strategies (we call it “hybrid marketing”) we go so far as to even help them come up with scripts to guarantee the highest rate of success from their followup.
Because we all know the money is NOT in the list, it’s in the FOLLOWUP with the list. The real-a-tionship. The personal touches, like knowing what they’ve purchased before.
So, given all the suggestions above, would I have made a purchase from <Unnamed Guru>? Probably not, but he would have gotten a lot further in wooing me toward higher priced products in the future with just a little bit more effort from his sales team.
Whaddaya think? Has this happened to you and what is YOUR experience? I wanna know!
PS: Can you guess the guru in this story? If you guess correctly, I’ll send you a $97.00 gift. One guess per person – just enter the guru’s name with your comments below!
