Maximize Profits By Optimizing Your Customers Turning One-Shot Sales Into A Continuous Stream of Income

Danica Productions utilizes the tools taught to us from Y2Marketing. Below is there theory and principles taught to us to "Monopolize your Marketplace!"

3 Critical Elements To Growing Your Business

For many business owners and marketers, marketing only means getting new customers. True, getting new customers is important for every business but it is only one part of the OPTIMIZATION equation.

In order for a business to achieve exponential growth, it must do the following three things:

Marketing must address all three of these areas to optimize a business. For some reason though, 95% of marketing dollars are spent on gaining new customers. But by failing to increase your current customers' frequency and amount of purchase, there's a good chance that you're wasting valuable resources.

3 Steps To Avoid Perpetual One-Shot Selling

Restaurants are a good example of perpetual one-shot selling. It's not that people don't come back necessarily, just that the restaurant makes no pro-active effort to get them back. That's why I'm going to use a restaurant to illustrate a simple 3-step formula that will keep customers coming back over and over again. This formula can and should be applied to every business.

Sounds simple enough and it is. But I can assure you that any business that is struggling isn't doing it and 90% of businesses that aren't struggling could double their profitability-if they would execute this formula.

By execute, I mean contacting the customers either individually or by a letter that is computer addressed and laser printed and sent to them. I don't mean sending a coupon in the mail on the back of a lost child postcard (although those are good for finding customers in some cases).

The Myth Of Passing Out Coupons

What about a method that most small-time restaurants use: coupons. I'll submit to you that most people using your half-off coupon are looking for a deal more than they're looking for a good restaurant to frequent.

Think about the message the coupon sends to customers: Our place is so bad that we've got to give it to you at half price to make it worth your while. Plus you don't make any profit on the transaction.

You must pro-actively seek to work the back-end. Most businesses let their customers dictate what their buying habits will be how often they'll come back, how much they'll spend when they do buy, etc. Most businesses are reactive when it comes to re-selling their customers. If you already have sunk the cost of generating and nurturing a customer once, why not solidify the relationship and profit from him forever?

Start immediately to do everything in your power to gain repeat sales from your current customers. It may be something as simple as writing them a letter or giving them a telephone call. But one thing is certain if you don't ask for the business, your competitors will.

Joint Ventures: How to Gain $3.4 Million of Good Will in 30 Days

One of the best ways I know to leverage your time and marketing dollars is to enter into joint ventures with other businesses. The first place you need to consider when looking to maximize profits is reselling to your own customers.

If you agree that your customers are your business' most valuable asset, then you should see the potential profits available if another business will make its customers available to you. Available, that is, in the form of consignment of goods, an endorsement or a more integrated joint venture.Joint ventures can work in one of two basic ways. First, you let other companies play off your customer base and then take a percentage of each resulting sale. Or second, work a deal with other companies to make their customers available to you and then pay them a portion of each sale.

The underlying principle of why this works is simple. A business will spend some finite amount of time, money, resources, and sweat developing a relationship with its customers. The customers will have some level of confidence in that company which translates into their willingness to respond to offers made by the company.

For instance, a company might spend $50,000 a year in advertising, $80,000 a year on commissioned salespeople, and $5,000 a month for prime retail space. These three expenditures alone not to mention dozens of others account for almost $200,000 spent a year to develop customer relationships. Now, if you work a joint venture with the owner of that store, you can access all of that money spent for the cost of a letter.

Joint Venture Marketing Offers Your Business The Ultimate Financial Leverage

There are thousands of ways to construct joint venture deals. You have to be willing to actively pursue and put together deals. When you present another business owner with a proposition, your approach is all-important.

Just like all good marketing efforts, you want to preach benefits to him immediately. Don't just go up to him and say, "Will you endorse my product to your customers?" You have to paint the picture first. You have to help him understand how it works. Not everyone understands the dynamics and leverage like you do.

The marketing function of a business can offer tremendous leverage. These concepts can be applied to almost any kind of business successfully as long as you keep an open mind and continue to think outside the box.

The Landscape of Business Has Changed

In order to explain the "Monopolize Your Marketplace" system, we have to start by defining the importance of marketing. A special yearly issue of Success Magazine called "The Selling Issue" quoted Scott DeGarmo, "The big money goes to those companies with superior marketing operations. Entrepreneurial companies of today must evolve from being sales oriented to being marketing oriented in order to now win the consumer."

Let me explain why it's important to focus on marketing instead of selling. There was a time known as "the days of simple selling." The days of simple selling are generally considered the days before 1980 or, in some industries, before 1990. In this period of selling, it was a lot easier for a salesperson to go in and sell to a buyer. The reason was simply because the marketplace was a lot less crowded.

For example, in 1980, if you wanted to buy a Ford pick-up truck, where did you go? You went to the dealership. This was the only way to see your choices and ask your questions. You couldn't go online or to Barnes & Noble and read fifteen magazines that compared and contrasted new trucks and cars because these sources of information didn't exist. The dealership was the only source of up-to-date information. In the days of simple selling, there was less competition, fewer choices, and it was easier to make a buying decision. Let's wrap this up by saying, "in the days of simple selling, the seller had the power because the buyer had very few options."

The Days Of Simple Selling Are Over!

Now we've got a new situation; buyers no longer have to rely on limited sources of information about a product or service. The landscape of business now involves increased competition, information, choices, and more resistance. It has made buying cycles longer. There is now price competition that didn't exist before. Products are becoming commodities and a lot of the marketing messages are identical. Because of all of this, a wedge has been created between the seller and the buyer. This wedge is called "The Confidence Gap."

"The Confidence Gap" is the consumer's inability to determine whether any of the products or any of the services are any better or worse or any different than any of the others. This creates a big problem. What you need to understand is that people, who will be buying from you, have all these different choices. It's very difficult for them to determine whether you are any better or any different from anyone else. So your marketing goal needs to be to narrow the Confidence Gap and restore the consumer's trust and confidence.

How Do I Fix This Problem?

The questions you may be asking yourself are "How do I figure this out?" and "How do I fix this problem?" Go to the business section of any bookstore and you'll find all kinds of books on this topic. You'll find things like "Better Customer Service." The theory is if you have better customer service, you'll have more customers. The problem with this philosophy is you must have a customer in order to give them service. You can't just say, "I've got great customer service." It doesn't work that way; you must have a system that will drive the customer to you! One of the things you might hear business gurus say is, "If you have more sales training and if you are better at sales, then you'll be able to get more customers." The problem with that is, again, you've got to have prospects in order to use your sales skills. If you look at all the sales training books and all the sales training seminars, they are all short on advice in this particular area, which is: "How do I find someone to sell to in the first place?"

There is another way that business books and business gurus tell you how to overcome this thing we call the Confidence Gap. "Use advertising tricks and techniques." "You can trick people through misleading advertisements to call you or come in." For example, I saw a car ad that said, "Pay no tax on all new vehicles." Do you think that sounds like a pretty good deal? If I weren't paying any tax, then I'd probably save a couple grand. The problem is when you looked at the fine print, it said, "Customers responsible for all sales taxes, state, and local. The dealer will pay for the inventory tax." This is a sales trick. It does nothing to build trust and confidence. Instead it builds contempt, hatred, and suspicion. The result is a widening of the Confidence Gap when the goal of the advertisement should have been to narrow it.These examples reveal a problem. We used to have the days of simple selling, now we have The Confidence Gap. You, as a business owner, need to overcome this in order to be successful. You need to find a solution to the problem.

How Do I Get The Customers To Actually Want To Do Business With Me?

I don't know if you are familiar with Napoleon Hill; he wrote the book, Think and Grow Rich. He had a saying that went like this: "It is as useless to try to sell a man something until you have first made him want to listen as it would be to command the earth to stop rotating." Do you believe that? Think about it; if they don't want to listen, trust me, they are not going to want to buy what you are selling. They are going to view you as a pest. That's where the difference between sales and marketing come into play.

In sales, what you are doing is trying to make people want to listen to you in a sales situation. What we're presenting is a marketing program that does the job of making people want to listen. It prepares the buyers so they will come to you and you will have an opportunity to sell. Sales skills are still very important, but your time is used more productively in closing sales rather that chasing them down.

Marketing Is The Tool You Must Use To Bridge The Confidence Gap

Marketing needs to be concise, well articulated, and powerfully stated. It is low or no pressure. Marketing is one-way communication. It's not afraid of rejection. It's not obtrusive. People can review marketing at their own pace, when it's convenient for them. And, if they aren't interested, they can ignore it altogether. No commitment. That is why we need to talk about a marketing program.

In the Monopolize Your Marketplace system, we teach and implement a Marketing Program that helps businesses overcome the Confidence Gap. It accomplishes this by addressing two points-the Inside Reality and the Outside Perception.

The inside reality is everything your business does that makes you valuable to your customers. It is what gives you a competitive edge in the marketplace. It is all of your skills, your passion, your systems, the way you conduct your business. The outside perception is how customers and prospects perceive your business. It is the ideas and impressions consumers gain from your direct and indirect communication with them.

The Outside Perception Of Your Business Should Match The Inside Reality

To be successful in business and to continue that success, your inside reality and outside perception should match. If you spend all your resources developing the inside reality and neglect the outside perception, you will be frustrated wondering why you are having minimal results with your superior product or service. On the flip side, if you focus solely on the outside perception and neglect the inside reality, prospects will soon find there is little value in the product or service and you will get little, if any, return business.

To conclude this introduction to the MYM system, I would like to reemphasize the point just made. I paraphrase Jim Rohn, a great business philosopher, in a lecture about personal communications he said: "First, have something good to say. Second, say it well and third, say it often."

The Monopolize Your Marketplace system incorporates all three of these communication elements thoroughly. About 25% deals with having something good to say or the inside reality, the remaining 75% deals with saying it well and saying it often or the "outside perception."