Session 3
The Golden Rule of Small Business Growth:
“It is a LOT easier to sell to prospects who CALL YOU than it is to sell to people YOU CALL!”
Now that we are getting prospects to visit our websites, how do we get them to contact us so that we can make the Golden Rule above kick in? And once they do make contact, how do we turn them into initial customers and long-term champions of our products and services? Welcome to Session 3, Responding to Inquiries to Turn Leads into Cash.
Responding to Inquiries to Turn Leads into Cash
Tip #1: Make it Easy for Prospects to Contact You Put phone number at the very top of every webpage in a very prominent place. Invest in a toll-free number. (I know, most people use cellphones to talk today, so long distance calls are a thing of the past, but a toll-free number shows the world that you are a REAL business… Not one in your garage.) People who pick up the phone and call you are serious buyers. In addition, put a web form on pages of your website where people can fill it out to request information. Good rule-of-thumb, the more web forms that you have on your website, the more leads you will generate. Finally, put a Buy Now button on your site. Give visitors the option to buy something right now without have to talk to or email anyone.
Stop Right Now! Click on your website homepage and see how many clicks it takes you to find a way to buy something. How many pages do you have to visit? How many hoops do you have to jump through? Make it easier for them, and they will buy.
Five Big Mistakes that Will Ensure that Someone Who Contacts You will Always Buy from Someone Else and How to Eliminate Them
Make sure that you 1) Give people a way to easily contact you on every page of your website, 2) Follow Up with every lead fast (and often by phone works best), and 3) Ask prospective customers questions to get them to clarify their actual need for you. Once you do these three things, just offer the prospect a solution, and they will likely put you at the top of the list for solution providers. Try to give a sales pitch, and you will play “20 Questions” with the prospect and likely end up competing on price.
How to Take Luke Warm or Cold Leads and Turn them into Future Income
When visitors to your website call your toll-free number or fill out a form giving you their contact information, your closing ratio at turning those leads into sales should be fairly high. The closing ratio is often determined by your industry (how competitive your industry is), how well you follow up with them, and how good your product or service is. So if your not getting a fairly high closing ratio, you can either 1) make your marketing focus more specific so that you have less competition, 2) change the way that you follow up (get faster and follow up longer), or 3) improve your product offering.
What happens with all of those, possibly thousands, of people who come onto your website, but never call and never fill out a form? These are the people who may not be a good lead or a good prospect right now, but may be a good prospect in the future.
Participant Warning If you are in an industry where people contact you ONLY when they need a result RIGHT NOW, skip this entire section. For example, if you are a plumber who focuses on emergency plumbing issues, this will not work for you. However, if you work primarily as a subcontractor for general contractors, then this process can help you build rapport with potential general contractors over time. If you are a collision repair center, it won’t work, but if you are an oil change facility where you see customers every four to six months, it will.
Not everyone who views your website for the first time is going to be ready to buy right now. So the tips in this video will help you trade some of your expertise for contact information so that you can educate potential leads over time. When they are ready to buy, they will already know you and trust you.
Continuity Programs: Turning Satisfied Customers into Long-Term Repeat Business (Steady Streams of Income)
So, what the heck is a Continuity Program? A continuity Program is a service that you provide for a large group of customers over time so that each customer pays very little (and sometimes nothing) individually, but when the group gets big, this steady stream of income can help you provide more services to customers that would otherwise be unattainable. This video shows what these programs are and what a great benefit they can be for you and your company.
Don’t underestimate the power of $9.99 or $19.99 per month. If you have a million people paying you $1 per month for a valuable service, you’re still pulling in $1,000,000 every month. Continuity programs are a way that you can do the work one time to create value for your clients and create a steady stream of income forever. When continuity programs are done correctly, you will have a huge following of satisfied customers. Realize, though, that if you promise your customers grand things and don’t deliver, you will get the opposite effect. So over deliver in your continuity programs.
Review and Create a Plan of Action
- Now that you have completed the course, go back and re-watch the first video, Ten Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make. If you have started to take action from this seminar, these should already be becoming a thing of the past.
- Continue to network, but ask a lot more questions than you ask. Get to know them, and add them to your Linked-In Account. Build your network in person and online.
- Use the Google Keyword Tool to identify two or three keywords or phrases that you can monopolize on the internet.
- Optimize your website title, description, keywords, content, images, and links based on the keyword phrases that you found.
- Write eight or more articles for each of the three keyword phrases and post them to at least 25 article directories, your blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, and Linked-In account. (Post them one per week or one every couple of weeks until all eight are published.)
- Record a few two minute video tips related to your keywords (an easy way is to just record yourself speaking the content from your articles) and upload them to YouTube.com and other video websites.
- When you get leads from the internet, RESPOND FAST! Be a consultant and a problem solver. Help the person see that he/she has a problem by asking questions. Often, they will talk themselves into buying from you.
- Give away some of your expertise in order to get visitors to give up their contact information. Then educate these cold leads over time to create future business
- Create a continuity program as a service to customers and a way to generate long-term streams of permanent income.
Do these things, and you will be the go-to company in your industry!
Need Additional Help?
- The Leader’s Institute Entrepreneur Boot Camp is a three-day, in person, seminar where we take you step-by-step through how to implement these and other ways to move from small business to big business. Class meet in May and December. Click here for a schedule.
- Your articles are the key to improving your search engine results. If you need to get better at writing, we cover a whole session on this in the Boot Camp mentioned above. Another great resource is our Fearless Presentations class which helps participants write and deliver great presentations. Guess what? The same technique makes for fantastic articles as well. Classes take place in cities all over the US, Canada, and Europe. Click here for a schedule.
- If you’d like help publishing (or writing) your articles, purchase article submissions through our service.