Archive for the ‘Closing The Sale’ Category

Consider your role as a consumer. When you're shopping, do you look at the products first, or the price tag first?

If you looked at the price tag first,
retailers would pick up on that and simply offer a collection of price stickers inside the front door. You would choose what you could afford, and then the actual product would be a surprise – possibly an unpleasant one.

You don't shop that way, and neither do the people that you have identified as your perfect clients.

Prospects want to know your prices, but unless your prices are preceded by the benefits that you're offering, consumers will have nothing to gauge those prices against.

Follow these four steps to eliminate your fears in revealing your price. Gain the confidence you need to make the most out of your requests for cash:

1. Present what you're offering. Answer the timeless questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Keep it simple. If you make it too complicated, those raised hands might start to return to laps.

2. Summarize the benefits. Because you're offering specific solutions to specific problems, this step should turn on light bulbs in your prospects' minds. This is the step in which you convince them that you are their answer.

3. Introduce the price. By now, your listeners or readers are absorbed in what you're offering. The benefits are foremost in their minds, as is the question of price. Reveal your pricing while the question is still in their minds; and before it reaches their lips. Perfect placement of price revelation makes it comfortable for you and acceptable to your audience.

4. Map out a direct route for the money. Make it crystal clear how easy it will be to sign up, jump on, or join in on your program. Prospects should leave your teleseminar, your sales page, or your conference without any questions about how to participate. Or, better yet, they should leave already having signed on. Make it possible for them to sign up immediately. Make it easy for them to do so.

When your appeal is placed correctly, while all of the most fantastic points of your product or service are fresh in the minds of your audience, you will not only feel more confident in asking for money, but your prospects will have more confidence in their spending.

After you identify your sea of raised hands (those people whose problems you can solve, and whose interests you have piqued), you'll need to devise an effective method for telling them how much cash they will need to jump onboard.

The steps I've outlined here make up an excellent plan for starting to ask for money. As you proceed, you will learn to tweak your own presentation to meet the needs of the people in your particular niche. You will learn to identify the exact moment in time when they are most receptive to pricing, and when your presentation best complements that revelation.

When considering how to properly sandwich your asking for money in your presentation, consider your own shopping habits. You see the product. You consider how it could benefit your life. You look at the price tag. You proceed to the check-out. You leave the store with the satisfaction of knowing that you fashioned your own shopping experience.

Give your prospects that luxury. Take the time to learn about what price placement gets the most lucrative results for your business. You'll soon discover that timing is everything – especially when it equates to money on your pocket.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com

The process of justifying your price has two components: giving your prospects a reason to pay your price, and overcoming their objections to your price. If your price is in the high end range, I recommend offering   payment plans –   break up the payment into monthly payments or another payment installment plan. This enables you to overcome client objections about price, and increase your conversion by capturing more of your prospects.

When you're offering a high-end product, some of you prospects may have a mental barrier to your price point based on their income, their cash-on-hand, or a variety of other factors that are beyond your control or your ability to predict. In many cases, this mental barrier can be overcome if you use monthly payments to justify your price. For example, if you're offering a $1,000 workshop, someone looking at your materials might think $1,000 is more money than they have at the moment, or more money than they can afford to pay for a workshop.

On the other hand, if you offer them four easy payments of $250, that mental barrier of seeing the $1,000 number goes way down. It's the same paying $1,000, but people don't tend to think of it as $1,000 – they think of it as $250. This simple technique can go a long way toward overcoming the initial mental barrier about a price, and reducing your barrier of entry for potential clients, thus increasing your conversion rate.

In addition to using payment plans to overcome the mental barrier that prospects might have to buying your product, you can also use payment plans to increase registrations at your next event.     Use your payment plan options to encourage early registration. For example, if your event costs $600, you could give people the option of paying four easy payments of $150, or three payments of $200 or two payments of $300 getting closer to the event. While this all ultimately adds up to $600, many people, when given the option of paying $150 or $300, will choose to pay $150. This means you can get people registered earlier, as well as getting income from your registrations earlier, which can help you pay many of your event fees and costs before the event itself.

Recently one of my clients posted a query on my Mastermind Forum about payment plans.     They were concerned that a lot of people may register but fail to make all the payments. In my experience, very few people register, make one or two payments and then drop out. It's very rare for this to happen.       Most people who register and make a payment,   stick with the plan and pay it all, or contact you to work out any difficulties. Using a payment plan isn't administratively a lot more difficult than taking one payment up-front.

When you're pricing your product or event, consider offering your prospects a payment plan. A payment plan can go a long way toward overcoming the mental barrier against your price, and can help you increase your conversion rate and get more people registered for your event!

Bernadette Doyle is a marketing specialist who helps entrepreneurs become client magnets and attract a steady stream of their ideal clients. She publishes a free, weekly newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you’d like to receive invaluable tips and advice on how to attract clients with ease, register at http://www.clientmagnets.com

When it comes to marketing, every single thing that you do to generate leads should have a purpose. Without a purpose, you can end up with an advertising blitz campaign that saturates the market but doesn't have any real direction.

And where does something without direction end up going? Nowhere.

We call this "spray-and-pray" marketing – advertising your business anywhere and everywhere, hoping that people will notice you, praying your hard work pays off.

You'll do a ton of things because you think you need to be doing them. You'll get on Facebook. You'll start to Twitter. You might host a teleseminar or write some articles. Don't get me wrong. These can all be very good leads for your business, but if you don't know why you're doing them, they are just busy, random activities. Unless they are consciously linked to your end point, they will simply exhaust you and your physical resources, like your energy and time. Some of them will exhaust your money as well because they cost money to apply.

Be more intentional with your marketing techniques to avoid becoming frustrated by the amount of time you're spending on lead generation. Instead, your time will be well spent because your marketing is on purpose. What you really want is to be engaging with your clients in your specialty, and that is where intentional marketing will lead you.

But, if do you reach a point of being overwhelmed or disillusioned, where you're putting out a lot of energy but aren't getting the returns, don't be discouraged.

Do not give up. That would be a tremendous waste of your talent.

Part of my own purpose is to support and encourage you to pursue your own path. I know it's easy to get discouraged if things haven't been working out the way you'd imagined. Don't blame yourself, and don't assume that what you are offering has no value because you haven't been able to get people to buy it. That would be a critical mistake.

What you are offering to clients absolutely does have value. You may just be missing one or two of pieces on how to promote it. It's time to tweak your approach and get focused. A tweak or two could be all you need to make your approach more intentional, to turn things around and help you start attracting the clients you want.

You will probably find that you don't need a major overhaul in your business, and that some of the approaches you are using do work quite well. It's not about giving up on what you're doing, throwing it all out, and saying that it was all a terrible waste of time. It's not about throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It's about evaluating where you are and looking closely at where you want to be.

There are almost certainly pieces of what you're doing that are working. But, that spray-and-pray part of marketing is just not smart marketing. And if you have been doing that, at least you've been taking action. If you look on the positive side, you've been doing something. It may not have been the most effective thing, but you are working, trying and doing the best you can.

Now you know that you need to be more deliberate, more purposeful. And you now know it's time for you to address your business and your marketing with intent.

Bernadette Doyle specializes in helping entrepreneurs attract a steady stream of ideal clients. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, sign up for her free weekly e-zine at http://www.clientmagnets.com