Archives - Increase Conversion of New Prospects

5 Tips To Double Your Sales
If you want to know how to double your sales in 6 months and send your sales sky-rocketing you must do the 5 things in this article.

6 Simple Rules for Creating Direct Mail That Gets Your Phone to Ring
It almost doesn't matter what business you are in, direct mail properly executed works. Sometimes it may not be very economical if you sell a low priced item, but a well crafted letter can get a prospect to take action.

10 Role Playing Tips to Increase Sa1es Success
Guest article by Nicki Weiss, build your confidence and become a more successful sales person using these 10 role playing tips.

10 Steps to Gaining Credibility in Your Field
Bob Blye gives 10 short tips to help you become a "Most Trusted Advisor" to your clients and prospects.

11 Profoundly Fast Ways To Fix A Website
The following article was written by John Forde. He publishes the COPYWRITER'S ROUNDTABLE. This is a great newsletter with many very practical tips and always a great read. The simple techniques that follow are ones that especially apply to websites that feature a sales promo.

11 Quick Steps to Gaining Credibility in Your Field
Here are 11 quick steps that you can take to ensure that you are the recognized expert in your industry and thus resulting in converting more prospects into clients.

A Website That Works
I am participating in a conference for successful entrepreneurs. My job is to deliver a presentation and then to work one on one with of the 20 business owners to help them develop a strategy to grow their businesses and become more successful. As part of my preparation, I spent time reviewing each company’s web site.

Although Some Things Change Rapidly In Business, Other Things Never Change.
The frequency that people view advertisements produces certain results. Thomas Smith of London wrote this quite some time ago, see how relevant it still is today.

Are You a Giver Company or a Taker Company
As a StreetSmart Marketer, you know there are giver companies and there are taker companies, just like there are people who are givers and there are people who are takers. We are attracted to people and to companies who are givers, so it is a good idea to build this into the way you market.

Are You Revealing Your Price Too Soon?
A common mistake made by copywriters and advertisers is to start by making a big promise in your headline or at the beginning of your copy, and then follow with "for only $499.95!" Bringing up price is wrong at this point.

Become A Recognized Expert In Your Industry
StreetSmart Marketers know that one of the best lead generators is the free publicity generated when you are perceived to be a recognized expert in your industry. It doesn’t matter what field of business you are in. It can be in carpet cleaning, auto repair, gardening or quantum physics. If your clients and the media perceive you to be an expert, they will seek you out for advice...

Better Questions to Better Serve Customers
Creative business builders are always looking for better ways to serve customers. To constantly improveeetsmart owners ask themselves the following 2 questions.

Customers are Not as Gullible as They Once Were
Consumer confidence in media has declined dramatically. So what can the average business owner do to combat this? Here are 6 streetsmart ways to use marketing that will show your prospects that you are not just full of hype.

Contact Campaigns: Part One: The Antidote To Low Response Rates
If you are tired of sending out too many direct marketing pieces and getting too few responses, read what our guest author, Stu Heinecke has to say about converting over 80% of your responses.

Contact Campaigns: Part Two: Contact Campaign Basics
Now that you have learned the fundamentals of direct marketing, Stu Heinecke, our guest author will teach you the critical elements to get your marketing piece ready to send.

Contact Campaigns: Part Three: Contact Campaign Gallery
Now that you have learned the fundamentals of direct marketing, Stu Heinecke, our guest author shows you some examples of award winning and simply terrific campaigns.

Did Anyone Get That Customer's E-Mail Address?
What is an e-mail address worth? How about a tenfold increase in lifetime customer value!

Do You Blame Your Prospects When Your Products Or Services Are Not Selling As Well As You Would Like?
Many firms get it backwards. They fall in love with their products instead of their customers. It's not your customers' responsibility to understand what you sell and how it could help them, it's yours. This is one of the most fundamental principles of marketing.

Do You Remember The Great Vision You Had When You Started Your Business?
At this time of the year, when we are making New Year’s resolutions and setting goals, it is useful to look back at that great vision and reflect. Not from a glass half-empty perspective, that serves no one. But from a perspective that says “Whatever I can conceive, I can achieve!”

Do You Want To Improve The Effectiveness Of Your Web Site?
When it comes to websites, most business owners make the mistake of confusing glitz with effectiveness. If your primary objective is to sell, then the single most important issue is text. Not graphics and definitely not fancy flash technology.

Ensure That Prospects Buy From You and Not Your Competition
At anytime there are a small percentage of potential customers ready to do business with you, and a bigger percentage of customers who are interested in buying what you sell but are not yet committed to any particular vendor. Treat these potential customers like a ripening peach, nurturing them along until they are ready to buy.

Fresh Hot Pizza Delivered To Your Door In Under 30 Minutes Or Its Free! Guaranteed.
Don’t limit yourself or your business with a fear of lawsuits. Build and grow your business with integrity and ethics, make sure that your value system leaves your clients and prospects in better shape than when you found them.

Get Unsolicited Referrals by "Wowing" Your Customers
There is no question that businesses that "wow" their customers grow quicker than firms that do not. But how do you wow your customers consistently? This is a question that should be top of mind for every business owner.

Getting Paid to Prospects
"If your phones aren't ringing in, then you'd better be ringing out!" So, ...if you don't like cold calling for any reason, here's a simple way to get people to call you. If you do it right, you can even get paid to attract new prospects who will call you for help.

How Often Should You Repeat a Mailing?
Here are some specific results that illustrate the impact of multiple impressions of the same advertisement to a single list.

How to Avoid B.S. From Your Marketing Consultant
Don't just take the advice of an expert, use your own intuition and you can save money and achieve greater results in your business. Look for someone who is willing to be paid on results and is not looking for a quick fix solution for your business.

How To Double Or Triple The Response From Your Promotions
Clayton Makepeace, America's highest paid copywriter has a list of questions that you should ask yourself while writing your headline for an advertisement, direct mail, an email or web page

How To Generate More Leads From Your Advertising
I received a call the other day from a consultant, whose specialty is improving the performance of corporate web sites. He told me he had been advertising his services in two magazines and that the results had been disappointing to say the least. He wanted to know how to generate more leads from his advertising.

How To Get Great Testimonials
As customers become more cautious and more skeptical, so does the need for great testimonials become more critical. Most of us have a few testimonials, but almost no one has a process for systematically going after them as a strategic priority. Social proof is one of the most powerful selling tools available and StreetSmart Marketers make it a priority to obtain it and provide it to prospects.

How To Get More Out Of Your Networking
Networking is the marketing tool of choice for many business owners, but many are only mildly effective at it, resulting in a huge wasted opportunity. StreetSmart Marketers constantly find ways to optimize every marketing dollar and every marketing activity. Here's how you can optimize your networking.

How To Recession Proof Your Business NEW
With the USA in an economic recession, Canadians will feel the squeeze as well. You will need to market harder and wiser in order to stay on top.

Insider Secrets on Big Ticket Selling
Subscribe to Graham MacGregor’s “The Big Ticket Selling Report” and receive strategies and techniques that produce remarkable big ticket sales ideas to rapidly increase your big ticket sales.

Marketing Clutter Is Making Every Business Owner's Life Much Tougher
According to marketing authority Chet Holmes, decision makers are now exposed to 30,000 commercial messages daily, as compared to only 3,000 ten years ago. Similarly, the cost of selling has almost tripled over the past decade.

Monkey Trap Marketing
As a kid growing up in the bush in what’s now Zimbabwe, I was always fascinated by how the local tribesmen lived off the land. I learned early on that monkeys are considered food, but of course are both hard to catch or kill with traditional weapons. When you are hungry, your mind works overtime and so they developed a simple but ingenious way to catch monkeys.

Never Cold Call Again, Ensure That All Your Sales Calls Are Inbound Sales Calls, pt 1
Stop struggling as a business owner by making endless amounts of outbound calls when you can learn the marketing process that will guarantee to make your phone ring with prospect's calls

Never Cold Call Again, Getting Publicity for Your Bait Piece, pt 2
Use your written article or press release as a "bait piece" to draw in more prosepective clients. Once you have made contact learn how to nurture these prospects so that they understand that you are an expert in your field.

People Buy What They Want And Not What They Need! NEW
To attrack new prospects and clients you need to be more than just a business. See the 5 steps Louisa Nedkov took to become an indespensable expert in her business.

Personalized Cartoons As Response Engines
Guest article by Stu Heinecke. Want to wow your prospects? Here is a new and fascinating way to use personalized cartoons in direct response mailings that is sure to generate winning campaigns. It is fun too.

Putting Your Guarantee Where Your Money Is
The following article appeared in the Globe and Mail on 17/03/05. It covers a topic we have addressed before, but it remains valid and powerful if you act on it. Timothy Eaton had it right 120 years ago. His slogan - “Goods satisfactory of money refunded” revolutionized Canadian business.

Reduce Risk And Increase Sales
From time to time I meet people whose work impresses me as being valuable, practical and worth sharing with my readers. This guest essay is one of those. I recently met Graham McGregor at a conference in San Diego. What he says is worth reading. "The problem with what I was selling was that even though it looked good (and was certainly far cheaper), it was perceived as being risky by the buying committee..."

Risk Reversal
Bringing in new customers is expensive and often difficult. Here is one effective but frequently overlooked way to reduce the difficulty. The difference in attitude is subtle, but will have a huge impact on your customers' readiness to do business with you.

Romance Your Customer By Making The Easy Sale First
When dealing with your customers, are you trying to close a sale that is hard to make? If you are advertising or selling to people who have never heard of you and you start off asking for a relatively big commitment, the answer is almost certainly yes.

Simple Strategy For Getting Past Voice Mail When Cold Calling
Many people are frustrated with voice mail. It seems like an impenetrable wall between you and your prospects. It often seems the harder you try, the more voice mail you get to. Leaving a meaningful message when you hit voicemail, for my money is the preferred strategy. We all have to learn to deal with voice mail. It is a fact of life.

Successfully Recruiting Top Sales People
The difference in knowing how to grow your business and actually aquiring new customers can be as simple as finding the right sales people to help you sell your product. It does not require huge sums of money or marketing.

The "7" Musts Of Marketing
Marketing works if you do it consistently. It takes effort to do this but it's definitely not a one time thing. There are 7 things that need to be in place for marketing to really produce results.

The Critical Skill
The ability, the desire, and the patience to listen are necessary if you want to achieve greatness in sales. Unfortunately, most sales people tend to talk more than they listen. Here are three strategies that can help you improve your listening skills in both face-to-face meetings and when speaking to people on the telephone.

The Difference Between Networking and Selling
Having a good network is a vital resource for any business person. For many people networking is their primary source of business. Yet most people get very little benefit from their efforts.

The Power of Personal Branding
According to a UCLA study, 85% of all decisions are made with our eyes. This holds true when we meet people for the first time. We make an impression in three ways: Visual, Verbal and Vocal. What's most interesting is that the visual component is the most important by far.

The Secret That Makes Millionaires
What is the difference between you and a millionaire, not much more than a few simple skills that are easy to put into action.

The Secret To Achieving Success In Any Business
I meet many people during the course of my work who go into business for themselves, simply because they are good at what they do. Take Susan, a physiotherapist who loves what she does. She worked in a multi-disciplinary clinic for some years before branching out on her own. Because she was good and she was in demand at the clinic, she believed the same would be true if she went out on her own.

The Value Of Great Ideas
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."
- George Bernard Shaw
I believe there is an old Chinese proverb that asks; "When is the best time to plant a tree?" The answer is "Twenty Years ago!" The truth is that if you only plant a tree when you need it, you never get what you need, until it is too late.

There Are Only 3 Reasons a Prospect Won’t Buy From You! NEW
There are 3 reasons your prospects won't buy from you but 10 actions you can take to establish credibility with them. Learn how to build a lasting and sustainable relationship with your ideal prospect.

Use Service To Open Doors To New Prospects
Kim Armstrong has a successful screen printing business. She focuses on large national firms that buy screen printing in big volumes. Her business has slowed considerably over the last 3 years and her biggest challenge has been getting targeted new prospects to see her.

Very Few Business Problems Cannot Be Solved By Adding A Few More Profitable Sales
If you have more business than you can handle, you're lucky. But don't let that stop you from always marketing your business. It is easier to handle more clients than you need than too few.

What Do These Companies Have In Common?
The stronger and more outrageous your guarantee the better, but make sure you can deliver what you promise. The top companies all used this technique.

What Makes An Ideal Prospect
The Ideal Prospect has established a need and demonstrated a willingness to spend money to solve their problem. Contrast this with people who may have a need but have no interest in solving the problem.

What To Do When a Customer Says No
Most entrepreneurs I know hate rejection and sometimes even take a customer turn down personally. There is a way of creating a positive outcome from these situations.

What To Do When Your Competitors Cut Prices
When asked do you feel threatened by price competition and eroding margins. With only a brief hesitation you can respond; "Whenever my competitors cut their prices, my team and I look at our business and ask; 'How can we add more value?'"

What's The Difference Between Traditional Marketing and StreetSmart Marketing
Almost everyone in marketing dreams of a never-ending flow of qualified leads streaming into their business. This has been a lifelong quest for me. It has been a strange and exhilarating journey. Along the way, I have built four businesses and learned many valuable lessons; many of them the hard way, bumping my head as I went.

Why Falling In Love With Your Product Can Be Dangerous To Your Wealth!
"I have a great idea, no one is even thinking of it, there are no competitors. I just know I can make a lot of money if I can get it to market! Will you help me market it?" Twice in the last week I have had requests like this from budding entrepreneurs who are starting businesses with this view in mind

You Can Network Anywhere, Anytime, On Any Occasion ~ Even At A Funeral ~
For a master networker, networking is a lifestyle, and it's something that can be incorporated into everything one does. But you must always follow the #1 rule...

You Marketing Versus Me Marketing
During the course of a week I usually meet several people who hope to sell me something. What astonishes me is how few of these people ask questions to find out what I am interested in or worried about. Most usually start with a pitch that is aimed at impressing me with their success. I hear about all the amazing customers they have, many of whom have no bearing on what I am doing and even less on what I am interested in.