Is there a “secret sauce” for increasing your sales?

Too many crazy promises are being pushed these days for the next “magic bullet of the week” that’s supposed to boost your sales. Unfortunately, what you really get is a flash-in-the-pan technique that relies on a questionable loophole, works only for a short time, and then dies off quickly.

But is there truly a “secret sauce” that you can consistently rely on to increase your sales?

There actually is. But it isn’t a mystery, it isn’t some new marketing gimmick, and it isn’t the latest, greatest technology.

What it really is, is a sound, fundamental marketing principle. You see, if you want to consistently increase your sales and build continual growth into your business, the “secret sauce” I’m talking about is the ability to… create better offers.

Decades of independent studies have proven that without changing anything else, one offer can outperform another by anywhere from 15% to 400% – and sometimes even more.

So rather than wasting your time with some new way to game the search engines, let’s take a look at a simple way to create better offers – and start getting the boost in sales you really want.

Improving your offer by discovering the “hidden benefit”

Most businesses sell their products or services based on what they think the best features or benefits are of the product. This isn’t a bad place to start, but if you stop there, you’re leaving a lot of sales on the table.

You see, in every market, there are hidden benefits that you usually can’t see because you’re just too close to your product. But if you take the time to survey your market, both with survey forms and by informally talking with prospects and customers, you can quickly discover these hidden benefits.

For example, one of my clients was selling a workshop for realtors on how to  get more listings and make more sales. The training was top notch and included a period of mentoring to make certain the participants got great results.

The offer focused on all the skills a realtor would learn at the workshop and the additional sales this would bring them. Now, that’s not a bad place to start, but my client quickly hit their limit.

You see, because of the mentoring involved, they could only handle a limited number of participants. Beyond that, it wasn’t possible to provide the quality of attention that was necessary.

So the only way to increase the profits of this workshop was to raise the price. But the client felt that was dicey since their price was already at the top end in their market.

So I suggested that they interview their past students to see if there were hidden benefits that the offer could be built on in order to raise the price of the workshop.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long to discover a common thread among their participants. A huge percentage of the participants told them that while the content of the workshop was excellent, what really helped them the most was the ongoing mentoring which answered any questions they had and provided additional motivation to actually implement what they learned.

Armed with the knowledge of this “hidden benefit”, my client then restructured their offer to focus entirely on the mentoring aspect of the program as the main benefit. The training topics were given far less emphasis and now became the secondary benefit. By flipping the order and the importance of these components in their offer, they were able to increase the price of the workshop by 67%. Here’s the comment I received from my client:

“Your offer advice was a godsend. I used it to increase a workshop price from             $1495 to $2495 by “flipping” the copy to sell the mentoring rather than the workshop. The $1000 price increase has not hampered  sales in the least. That’s a profit increase of at least $75,000 every time we present this workshop.” – J.P. Vaughan

Not too bad for a little bit of research and restructuring of their offer copy!

 Takeaways to apply to your own marketing

There are a number of important lessons here that you can apply right away to your own marketing.

Takeaway #1: Increases like this are pure profit. While my client couldn’t expand the enrollment of this workshop beyond its fixed size, the gains they made were pure profit, since the fixed costs were already covered. Any time you can restructure your offer to generate an increase in sales, if part or all of your fixed costs are already covered, then the majority of your new gains are pure profit.

Takeaway #2: Your customers know more about what’s important to them than you do. Ignore this at your peril. If you rely on your own instincts exclusively, as you’ve just seen, you could easily miss out on a feature or benefit of your product that will cause customers to buy more quickly, buy multiple times, or pay higher prices. It just doesn’t make any sense to overlook this when doing the research is quite easy.

Takeaway #3: Stop chasing every “magic bullet” that comes along. We all want to be able to sell more of our products or services faster and easier. But nearly every new gimmick you see is just that – a gimmick. And gimmicks rarely produce the immediate results they promise or contribute much to your long term success. A solid product, strong marketing fundamentals, and excellent service are the real path to a continually growing business, not the next gimmick, buzz word or technology.

Am I nuts? Am I right on target?

Feel free to let me know – or share your own experience with this topic – by leaving your comment below.

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A brief commercial – let me help you create a superior offer

In this article, I covered one way to create a much stronger offer that will quickly increase your sales. But there are also many more ways to create powerful offers that get exceptional results.

One of the services I offer is 1-to-1 coaching for creating a powerful offer that’s guaranteed to increase your sales substantially – by at least 3 times the cost of this service.

In addition to the guarantee, you’ll love the pricing too, because all it takes to get started is $497. Here’s how this works. The full program fee is $3,488. But with your deposit of just $497, you’ll get the entire 1-to-1 coaching program, conducted by me personally. Nothing is left out.

I’ll coach you through a number of ways to create a powerful offer and work with you to craft a new offer that’s guaranteed to run circles around your current offer. Then, plug this new offer into your marketing materials and watch it increase your sales immediately.

BEFORE the next payment is due, you must produce at least 3 times the total cost of the program in new profits – and you’ll probably do much better than that. If not, you’ll receive a full refund of your deposit.

And when you do get these results, the remainder of the fee is paid out of the additional profits I’ve already generated for you – billed to your credit card in 3 monthly installments of $997 each. Plus, during these 3 months and for years to come you’ll be adding more and more sales you wouldn’t see without this.

So the bottom line is simple – I shoulder all the risk and you’re fully protected.

If you’d like to talk with me further about this unique 1-to-1 coaching opportunity, just send me an email at: offers@ProfitAlchemy.com

In your email, be sure to include:

> Your name and address

> Your web site url

> What product or service you sell

> The price your product sells for

> Your income so far for this year

> Your income for the previous year

> How soon you’d like to get started

Once I receive your email, I’ll personally review this information and get back to you within 48 hours to schedule a short call to talk about improving your offer.

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