*** Part 1 of an ongoing series
There’s a lot of hype and misinformation around what does and doesn’t work to increase your sales. But the fact is, there are only 6 things you need to do to substantially accelerate your sales.
Get these 6 things right and you can forget about wasting thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours chasing the next big thing. Plus, you can make a lot more sales by actually marketing less.
In this first installment of an ongoing series, I’m going to show you what all 6 of these sales accelerators are. I’ll give you a complete overview of each accelerator. Then, in the upcoming installments, we’ll drill deeper into each accelerator.
So let’s get started!
Sales Accelerator #1: Generate more traffic – and higher quality traffic
The most important goal my clients tell me they want is to generate more traffic. Nothing wrong with that, but I’m a firm believer in doing more with the traffic you’re already getting – much more. And I’ll show you how to do that in just a minute.
Now, when it comes to getting more traffic, the main error I see most businesses making is treating all traffic equally. But the difference in the quality of traffic you generate can determine whether you have a so-so month or break your monthly sales records.
To illustrate what I mean, let me ask what would you rather have – a list of 40,000 people or a list of 6,500 people? Sounds like a stupid question, right?
But the fact is, if your list of 6,500 people is made up primarily of buyers, actual customers who have bought something from you, but your list of 40,000 people consists primarily of people who opted-in to your list to get a free bait piece and did nothing more, that 6,500 person list will always run circles around the much larger list. In fact, it could easily produce 3X to 10X more sales.
Why? Because a customer who has bought from you once is as much as 10 times more likely to make another purchase as a prospect is to ever make a purchase. So right here, you can see that treating all traffic equally is a huge mistake.
More importantly, by focusing on traffic generation methods that let you use the profile of your proven buyers to drive that traffic rather than a broader, scatter-shot approach, you can actually buy much less traffic, pay a lot less for it, yet generate 3 to 5 times as many sales as you would from weaker, less qualified traffic. And I’ll be showing you exactly how to do this in an upcoming installment in this series.
Sales Accelerator #2: Capture more of the traffic you generate at no extra cost
In the first accelerator, I promised to show you how to do more with the traffic you’re already generating. And the single most effective thing you can do is capture more of that traffic.
Look, you’re already paying for each and every prospect who visits your web site. So why not make a minor tweak or two that will result in you capturing at least 30% more of that traffic? That would be like getting 30% more traffic without paying a penny to generate it.
So how do you do this? There are a number of important things you can do, all of which are reasonably easy. The first and single most important thing to do is to make sure your opt-in box is positioned in a prominent place toward the top of the right-most portion of your web page.
Since we read left to right, this is where a reader’s eyes are naturally going to land when first scanning your page. And placing your opt-in box in this position can easily increase the amount of traffic you capture by anywhere from 20% to 70%.
Easy, right? So take a minute and make sure you optimize the number of prospects whose information you capture by using this simple placement method today.
In future installments of this series, I’ll show you a number of additional changes you can make to your opt-in process that are as simple and as powerful as this one.
Sales Accelerator #3: Convert more prospects to paying customers
While generating more traffic is the number one goal my clients and subscribers tell me they want to achieve, converting more prospects to buyers ranks a close second. Fortunately, there are so many ways to do this, it’s crazy. So let’s start off here with one the easiest and best methods for converting more prospects from lookers to satisfied buyers.
The method I’m talking about is to prove in advance that your product or service undeniably delivers whatever result you’re promising. One excellent way to do this is to actually provide the product or service in its complete form before your prospect has to pay a penny for it.
For example, I recently saw a television commercial for a healthy treat delivery service that will deliver your first basket of treats absolutely fee. And there are no gimmicks or tricks. You don’t pay “a small delivery charge” or “local taxes only” and it doesn’t automatically trigger regular monthly deliveries and credit card charges. It is absolutely, 100% free.
Now, I follow a pretty strict diet in order to keep my weight at the optimal level since I had back surgery, so eating a lot of treats isn’t on my radar. But if it was, I’d jump on this offer in a minute. Why not, since you have nothing to lose?
What’s going on here is absolutely transparent. This company is confident that the quality of their healthy treats is so great, that an extremely high percentage of people will become regular, consistent buyers on a subscription basis. And by proving in advance how great the quality of their treats truly is, they are financing potentially millions in future sales for pennies on the dollar.
This is just one example of how “proof in advance” works. But this single example is universally applicable and with just a little thinking, you can easily adapt it to whatever product or service you offer.
Sales Accelerator #4: Increase the dollar amount of every purchase your customers make
One of the best and easiest ways to boost your overall profits is to increase the average dollar amount of every purchase your customers make. It’s one of the best ways because it doesn’t cost a penny to do this. And it’s easy, using a variety of techniques.
Most importantly, the key to increasing the amount of every sale is understanding this critical principle – not all customers want the same level of product when they buy from you. Some customers want higher quality… some want a better price… some want a greater level of service… and so on.
All you have to do to take advantage of this is to offer multiple packages of your product whenever it’s presented to your customers. To do this, create packages in a “standard-better-best” range.
Now, there are many different ways to do this depending on what type of product or service you offer. But all it takes is a little thinking to create your own standard-better-best variations.
When you do create these options and begin offering them to your customers or clients, something almost magical happens. What you’ll see is that after considering their options, far more people will choose the “better” package.
The number of people who choose the “standard” package will then decrease. And those who choose the “best” option will rise slightly. When you factor in all the increased purchases of the “better” option, the average amount of every purchase your customers make for this product or service will now increase by 20% to 50%. Not too bad for such a simple technique!
Sales Accelerator #5: Turn more single-sale customers into loyal, repeat customers
Just a minute ago, I mentioned that a customer who has already bought something from you is as much as 10 times more likely to buy again as a prospect is to ever buy from you. Yet few people take advantage of this proven buying characteristic. And that’s a shame, because it’s so easy to do when presented in an authentic way that adds value for your customer.
So let me start by telling you what not to do when attempting to turn more single-sales customers into loyal, repeat buyers. You should never offer one of those ridiculous, instantaneous upsells at the time of checkout.
Yes, I know you see them being used all the time, but only by the most manipulative marketers. But the message this sends is, “Wait, the product you just bought does not do everything I promised. In order to really get everything I’ve promised, you’re going to have to buy this too”.
That’s a foolish way to lose a lot of customers quickly. Because any time you come off as being shady or even the slightest bit shady, you’re losing more business than you’re gaining. The problem is you never see the amount of business you’re losing, so you usually aren’t even aware that it’s happening.
With this in mind, let’s switch gears and I’ll show you a great way to ethically sell a lot more to every customer who does business with you. And here again, while there are many great ways to do this, we’re going to start with just one method today.
This method is called, “Other customers like you also liked this”. And here’s how you implement it. Instead of making any offer at check-out time, you want to wait two to three days to make your next offer.
There are two reasons for this. We’ve already discussed the first reason – that you don’t want to create the impression that you haven’t delivered everything you promised. But the second, and possibly more important reason, is that even if you have delivered everything you promised, there’s no way for your customer to know that right at the point of purchase because they haven’t had any time to use your product or service.
However, when you wait two to three days before offering something else that “other customers like you also liked”, the landscape has changed dramatically. For products or services that are delivered electronically, your customer has already had a chance to start using it. And if your product is of high quality, your customers will be elated that they found you.
For a product or service that isn’t delivered immediately, you’ve now had a couple days to start your customer experience process. This begins with a heart-felt thank-you email that’s sent out immediately.
That’s followed by a recommendation on how to get the most out of this new product or service that’s sent out the following day. Or, for high-ticket items where it makes sense, you can absolutely knock your customers out with a live, thank-you call the following day.
The key point is that this customer experience process starts a long and very different type of relationship with your customers. A relationship where people clearly get the message that you care about them, not just about what they buy from you.
When you do this right from the minute someone makes a purchase from you, it sets the stage for selling many more products or services to them as long as those products and services provide real value for your customers.
Sales Accelerator #6: Create a steady, reliable stream of high quality referrals
Generating a steady stream of highly qualified referrals is the great mystery of marketing. Everyone wants more referrals, and with good reason. Since trust is a significant factor in making the sale of any product or service, when a prospect is referred to you by someone they trust, much of that trust transfers over to you. And that greases the wheels for making a sale far more easily than you would with cold prospects.
At the same time, it can be extremely difficult to get your satisfied customers to make referrals on a consistent basis – or to make them at all. Even when they promise to make referrals and have the best of intentions, most people never make a single referral. And it’s not because they wouldn’t like to, it’s because they’re too busy doing other things and contacting their customers to refer them to you seems like another task to add to their “to do” list.
So what’s the solution? There are a number of good ways to generate more referrals, so let me show you one of the easiest ways here. I call it a Joint Venture Referral Program. And although that sounds pretty darned official, it’s easy to put into practice.
What you’re going to do is invite one or more of your customers who have a decent sized list to swap referral emails with you. They will refer their customers to you and endorse you as a trusted source. At the same time, you will refer your customers to them and endorse them as a trusted source.
Except for the referrals that each side receives, there is no other compensation. No commissions are paid on any business that is generated. It’s just an even swap in both directions.
The power of this technique is that it gives your referral partners much more incentive to actually make the referrals. So it’s practically guaranteed that they’ll uphold their end of the deal. As a result, you both get the kind of quality referrals that are highly likely to turn into more sales.
To extend this concept one step further, if you were to do this with four partners, you could receive – and send in exchange – one referral mailing per quarter. And this would create a steady stream of highly qualified referrals coming into your business on a consistent basis.
Wrap up
I hope you’re as excited by these 6 Sales Accelerators as I am! I use them all the time with my clients and in my own business. And I can tell you that they rarely fail to produce exceptional results.
So here’s my recommendation for you: start small. Pick just one of these 6 Sales Accelerators and implement it in your business this coming week. I can promise you’ll find that it takes very little time to do and once you see the results it produces, you’ll wish you would have done this long before now.
Leave me a comment below to let me know which Accelerator you plan to use first.
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Want to work with me One-on-One? If you’d like to work directly with me to use any of the 6 Sales Accelerators in your business, just l let me know which accelerator you’d like to work on together and I’ll get you all the details. You can email me by clicking here