PetesWeekly

When is Marketing a Waste of Money?

March 21st, 2012 | by | entrepreneurial life, marketing

Mar
21

I am ashamed to admit that I think most small businesses deserve to close.  (I think it, but I sure don’t wish it.)

The key to success is finding enough prospects and turning them into clients. It doesn’t matter what you sell, and it doesn’t matter how good you are at making it. Success depends on closing enough clients.

Over the past year, we have generated more than 120,000 web prospects for more than 400 clients.  These clients sell in every market from ADHD to Water. The one thing that shrieks out at us is that about 80% of our clients cannot sell a life jacket to a drowning man.  Frankly, it’s scary.

As individuals we would not normally notice this.  Each of us has had some awful buying sagas, but we see them as an one-off, rather than the norm.  Not so.  It turns out that most of us in business are really bad at the coalface.

And that means that it doesn’t matter how good our marketing is or how good the flow of incoming prospects is. If we cannot turn those prospects into clients, we’re wasting our money, which we might as well blow on a weekly staff lunch at the Spur.

Here is a hint: If it’s worth investing money to attract prospects, then it’s worth putting a little effort into the way we respond when we ‘catch’ one.

If we have an e-commerce site, then that is a fine first response.  If we don’t, we must phone quickly.  Some research from the United States shows that 90% of all sales are made if the call is made within 30 min.  After that there is a huge drop off in client closure, and if we respond later than 20 hours, we can expect to be sworn at.

But it’s not just this first response that is crucial.  All of our marketing effort, and all of our sales effort, ends in a single document: The quotation.

Frankly, after looking at thousands of these over the past year, I know just one thing – most are worse than rubbish.  Most are hostile.  It’s almost as if the gentle Kahlil Gibran side of us, the person writing the sales copy and doing the talking, becomes Stephen King/Charles Dickens, writing evil stuff in archaic language.

Somehow we have forgotten that the quotation is a sales document.  It is almost as though, after months of wooing the person of our dreams, we get down on our knees to propose, and over the next hour detail what WE want, and what WE will not accept in our marriage. Hint: This a great way to enjoy a lifetime of bachelorhood. (And it is a great way to have no client support issues as well.)

I am mortified that after more than a year of begging our clients to improve their response processes, and sales closing processes, and quotation processes, we haven’t made much progress.  And a lot of people have gone out of business.

There is, however, some dark consolation in having somebody announce, as if he has just found the Holy Grail, that he tested our process last week, after having been too busy for the last 51 weeks, and he can confirm, by gum, that it works better than sliced bread!

The tragedy in all of this is that the South African service bar is so low that even if we are barely average, we stand out like shining lights, because everybody else is so bad.

If you can sell enough, you own your banking relationship, and your bank doesn’t own your business.  Much as I would love to share best practices with you, it’s much more important that you simply, tonight, re-look at your entire process for converting strangers into clients.  There is an 80% chance that it needs life support.

And if you’d like to join me on a 12 month journey working through these issues in depth, and sharing what we have learned over the past decade about Web best practices, please join us for a gratis event on Tuesday next week.

If you want to know more, please join me here at 8pm SA Time, Tuesday evening, March 27.  In order to work through this program with me you will need reasonable speed internet (better than 300K), either Windows or Mac, and the ability to chuckle a lot.

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Why are products easier to sell than services?

March 19th, 2012 | by | marketing, selling

Mar
19

Why are products easier to sell than services? And how does this relate to finding prospects on the Internet?

Your typical product is easy to recognise. You can touch it, feel it, or take a picture of it.  It is very easy for somebody a long way away to understand each aspect of what you’re selling. And, when they are searching, it’s very easy for them to describe  what they want, like a “Ford 5610 clutch cable”. There are not too many different ways to describe it. (Hint: That’s because, as a product, it describes itself. It has a colour, size, brand, model number, and so on.)

Some services are just as easy to sell. I think of them as “impersonal” services. These would include things like having your car serviced, having your lawn maintained, having your roof waterproofed, or having a blocked toilet cleaned. (Having raised a bunch of children, I became so familiar with this last service that I am godfather to the children of three local plumbers.)

The reason this impersonal kind of service is easy to sell is that the problem tells us about itself. It is a light on the dashboard, or losing a daughter in the bush covering your acre, sleeping in a cold shower, or finding that nuclear submarine navigating the depths.

The problem defines itself, and most sentient beings know what group of people to call for help in each case. We can also easily  describe the problem. And we all “know” what the end result should be. This work doesn’t have a high emotional content, and we don’t often care who does it for us, as long as the car doesn’t stop 40 km from Riviersonderend over the Easter weekend.

“Personal” services, on the other hand, are much harder to sell. These are services like consulting, training, mentoring and the like. Most of us do not know we need them. Just as we do not call a GP until that small sniffle becomes the Yellow River, or call a lawyer until that minor business setback becomes a stack of summonses.

Firstly, in its early stages most of us don’t even know that we have a problem. Even if we did, we don’t easily articulate how our business is struggling, or why we feel happier with tinfoil covering our heads. We want to use the web to research this issue, but we struggle to find useful information. We find no shortage of unconvincing people telling us that they can fix it, and if their solution doesn’t work on the tinfoil, it sure will do a great job cleaning the car.

For these kinds of personal services, we – the buyers – need to know that our supplier (consultant) clearly understands our problem, and is competent to help.

This cannot be done in a four line Google advert. Nor can it be done on a website. “Personal”, in this context, means “face-to-face”. People at this level need much more relationship than John Farmer buying a clutch cable for his Ford 5610 tractor.

But how you build that relationship online? Like a better-looking Dr Phil.

You start talking about the problem online – ideally in a space where people can see you or hear you. (Think relationship.) You give away the problem gratis. You discuss the problem from every angle, every which-way, and in doing so you show that you know the subject backwards and people get to know your style. As long as you are sharing the problem with lots of people, you will have no shortage of them having “AHA” moments. This is where, for a moment, they resonate with you. It doesn’t take too many of these before they “know” you.

Basically, you have to make your personal service as tangible as a product. In the absence of anything else, you are that product. This is a good thing, because you are unique, unlike a Ford 5610.

And once people are at ease with you, they are far more likely to pay for your services.

On the Internet, this is a two-stage sale. Rather than advertising your solution, you advertise the problem. Maybe inviting them to a gratis webinar, or offering your free PDF on the subject. Then using that intro to explain your take on their problems in as much depth as they need.

You will talk to many more people than will buy. But the key is that you’re going to talk to more people than you are talking to right now. These new people are your future clients.

To do all of this, at least online, you need a wide toolbox of skills. How to present webinars, how to create PDFs, how to deliver all of it automatically, how to save your material for reuse, how to automate follow-up e-mails, and a bunch more.

We will be doing all of this in the mentorship project starting March 27. It’s not just for those folk wanting to live online. It’s for folk with off-line businesses wanting to use “online” to get more clients.

Please grab your gratis ‘seat’ here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/484183129 (Yes, we will be recording it.)

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The End of Teaching as we know it?

February 16th, 2012 | by | applied tech, marketing, selling

Feb
16

When I was a kid I wanted to be a teacher. Early on in high school I realised that there wasn’t enough money in it to keep me in the style I wanted to become accustomed to. I think it must have been in Mrs FitzPatricks class, after she whacked me yet again for not paying attention. Wonderful teacher, with an inspiring ruler. I spent a lot of my early maths career dreaming rather than doing.

And so I got lost in the computer world, before life jolted me back into consulting in 1992, and soon after  my teaching life took over. I am embarrassed to admit that I have just one qualification. It is not in the teaching arena. So it has been a long, mistake-strewn path I have followed.

But, and here is the point I am aiming for, I have been teaching via webinars for almost four years. More than 1000 hours worth. And every teacher I meet assures me that it won’t work.

This strong opinion comes usually without ever having seen one. It has something to do with not being able to see the kids. I was shy and withdrawn at school, and didn’t much want to be seen, let alone to raise my hand and offer a wrong answer so that my peers could roll on the floor in mirth. This webinar approach allows us introverts to blossom.

Although, I still recall Mr Nel inhaling a fly and showing us some strenuous dance moves as he tried to cough it out. Sadly, that kind of experience is rare in real life, and almost impossible in webinar life.

But teachers are looking at it from a very narrow perspective, an all-or-nothing one. Integrating a webinar approach early would add immense value, increasing the reach of great teachers, while easing the impact of bad teachers.

Each time a new idea arrives that is obvious to the rest of us, the incumbents ignore it. They seem so fixed in their views that they cannot see it. Kodak was one of the most memorable, going into chapter 11 bankruptcy a few weeks ago.

I actually consulted with a couple back in 1998 who wanted to spend R2million on a Kodak franchise. I told them how untimely an idea it was. They went ahead anyway. And two years later I consulted with them about saving their home from the fallout.

A webinar is just such an obvious idea for adult trainers. Let me tell you why I love the concept.

Prepping for a live event is arduous and costly. The event must have ‘heft’ – be long enough for you to want to spend an evening in my company – even if the idea I want to share is just one hour long. Then there is the cost of the venue, hotel stay, printed notes, air ticket, car hire, food, and loss. (Each time I travel I return home without something that I really liked. Items include my passport, credit cards, laptop, insulin, power supply, and the like.)

Then there is the opportunity cost, time missed with my family. And the risk that Eskom won’t play ball on the day. And, of course, the risk that I won’t sell enough seats to pay for all of the above. In other words, for a speaker, the risks are daunting.

Contrast that with a webinar. Zero risk. The service costs about R500 per month, which allows me to run as  many ‘classes’ as I want to, 24/7. No notes are needed, because the service lets me record and share a video of each session a few hours later. (That lets me build a library of content that I can share or sell.) There is no risk or cost to delegates. The recording takes care of broken connections and family emergencies.

I don’t have to make an event longer than it needs to be. It can now stretch from 30 minutes to three hours (or all day) – as long as the material needs it to be.

No travel, and my cost per ’seat’ is down to less than R1, from R400 (in JHB). Maybe I am too stupid to see why it won’t work, but in the meantime I love my ignorance.

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Google and Underwear

January 25th, 2012 | by | marketing, selling, webinar videos

Jan
25

There are two groups of small business owners: those of us who have tried selling stuff using Google, and those of us who have not.

Today I would like to talk to those of us who have tried.

When I started using Google I was seduced by the apparent simplicity: Something along the lines of that first Wright brothers aircraft. Some canvas and string and a motor just strong enough to power a unicycle with a child on it. Point it due North and press this button, and your products would go as fast as corn during a locust plague.

But climbing into the Google cockpit is a lot like climbing into the pilots seat of a new Airbus 320. (That’s the smaller one without the cracks in the wings.) You are surrounded by a dizzying array of switches, toggles, dials, screens. It is so complex you need two drivers. And then, before you are allowed to take off, you need to get a general pilots licence, and then ‘invest’ a few hundred hours in a simulatorgetting qualified for this specific aircraft.

All of this costs time and money, both currencies that we smaller players don’t have enough of. That means that our first Google experience is more like a fiery accident than a fiesta in Ibiza.

The problem is that Google seems want more and more detail when you advertise. So do the folk searching for stuff.

I discovered this while in the UK. My wife was, frankly, grumpy after the birth of the new Carruthers. Her superstructure no longer fitted her bras. We agreed that buying a few new bras was much cheaper than going to gym, at least for a while. I suggested that my new best friend, Google, might be able to help.

“It’s not going to work,” she said. “Search Google for bras and you are buried in drivel.”"Why not search for 34E?” I suggested. (Hint for men: That is a model number, equivalent to a Porsche ‘Boxster‘, or – if you are a nerd like me – an ‘iPad2 3G’.)

She rolled her eyes at me. Grumpy wives exist to inspire men to go angling.

A few minutes later she popped her head into the study. “Got them on the first click.” she said. I was stunned, and not just because she followed my advice. So I tried to buy a few myself, not that I need them, of course. At least, not any more.

In the UK, which is very active on Google with 20 million odd people active on the web at any time, you have to search deeper than in SA. (I tried the same test in SA, and found an online store in SA that was, wait for it, “closed for the holidays”.)

That started Peter Bowen and me on the quest to build some tools to make using Google easier for the rest of us. It has been a fascinating journey.

Most folk trying to market via Google seem to be mixing their knowledge of traditional mass market advertising with their Google efforts. This works as well as cheese and onion ice cream.

Google interest-based marketing truly is unlike anything that has ever existed before. No sane marketer wants us to know that because we would all abandon media marketing as fast as real people abandoned the Encyclopedia Britannica when Wikipedia arrived.

So, next week, at 8PM SA Time on Tuesday, we will host a gratisonline seminar to look at why Google works so well compared to any other form of marketing, including Facebook. We won’t be pushing our products, but we will be showing you how some folk are getting up to7.5 enquiries for every 100 impressions/searches. Nope, that was not a typo. That’s not 7.5% Click-Through-Rate (CTR). That’s 30% CTR and 25% page conversion rates.

Book your seat here. And hold on to your underwear.

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Gratis Marketing Seminar Online

January 11th, 2012 | by | marketing

Jan
11

In 1992, just 20 years ago, I had to close my firm. As you might already know, I lost everything, as well as a lot of money I hadn’t yet earned. After a few months of trying to find another job I realised that there were none left. (This was during that uncertain period as SA made the transition from apartheid regime to rainbow nation.)

I was faced with starting up again. I won’t bore you with the details. But, marketing back then was a mere shadow of what it is now, and much, much slower. Sadly, most of the books I read still reflect the thinking back then. The single exception is “anything to do with the Internet“. And, frankly, the amount of hype about the web is beyond belief.

I have driven down almost every marketing road, and for a small business owner most of these are cul-de-sacs. I was thinking about this as I meandered through the south of Spain over Christmas. This was not as exciting as you might think. We were, after all, staying at the home of Mrs Carruthers’s mother. You get my drift.

Anyway, a bunch of shops were vacant, on every road, in every shopping centre, in every town. Like me in 1992, they’d run out of clients. And it got me to thinking about how starting a business is almost the same as finding a job. In both cases, all you have to do is find that first client. (Employee is formal-speak for a business owner who sells all of his 160 hours/month to a single, hopefully long term client.)

In essence, about the only difference between starting a business and finding a job is that the aspirant entrepreneur just keeps repeating the process, while trying to produce the actual goods, while trying to employ the staff, while trying to keep the govt happy, and so on. The employee, he with the one client, focuses on doing whatever makes his employer happy.

I browsed around Spain with my trusty wordprocessor – the pencil and notepad version I first learned to use in Mrs Kettley’s kindergarten class in 1963 – and I realised that, for all my focus on writing efficiently last year,  I hadn’t actually written any of those words down in a form that might add any lasting value. (I had dreamt of writing a book on startups and jobs, but hadn’t quite gotten the first page out.)

So, this year, one of my goals is to help you find more clients, even if it’s only one client you were looking for. I am not going to try writing it all down, else it will be Groundhog Year, all over again. So, next week on Tuesday evening at 8:00 p.m. – South African time – I’m going to present a gratis one-hour seminar online – a webinar – on Marketing – the 1992 version versus what you can do in 2012, and how to effectively find one or more clients.

Whether you are looking for a job, looking to startup a business, or really grumpy about the number of new clients arriving at your current business each week – you are welcome to join me. It’s gratis.

When you book your “seat” I will ask just one extra question – whether you are looking for a job, whether you are a start-up looking for your first client, or whether you are an existing business looking for more clients. Just so that I can better tailor the evening. It does not matter what age you are. My clients these past 20 years have mostly been between 18 and 81, however.

You will need to be in front of your PC at about 7:40 p.m. This will allow enough time to download the snippet of software you will need which will automagically convey my screen and voice to you. Your PC will need to be connected to the Internet via a connection that is at least 300KB. The event will use approximately 60 MB over the hour. You will need to be running Windows or Mac OSX. We can’t see you, so you may sit in your pyjamas. Heck, bring your girlfriend along as well. (That was not a sexist comment because I am not presuming that you are male. Just so that we can clear the air.)

I think that it is challenging times like these which bring out the best in us. We are inspired to find other, usually better ways of doing things. I’d like to help. You can help too, by sharing this invite with anyone you know who fits the spec outlined above. They will thank you. So will I.

Please book your seat here.

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How to tell someone his website sucks?

November 24th, 2011 | by | marketing

Nov
24

How do you tell somebody that his website sucks? One of my partners asked me this question this week.

It is a question salespeople face each time they talk to a prospect about buying a new service or product. There is the belief that they must deep-six the status quo to get action.

The simple answer is that you don’t.  The key is to get some context: Find out what the reasoning was behind that first effort.

Nobody offers their worst efforts on purpose. But often the results don’t turn out quite the way we expected.

Which reminds me. My email last week prompted a stream of emails asking if my wife really had left me. I think it was making mention of my office being left on the porch. Mrs Carruthers has asked me to assure you that I am still welcome in her bed, but that Steve, Linus, and Bill cannot join us any longer.

As for that website we were talking about earlier? Every website has parents. These are the designers who built it and the owners who commissioned it. And they did the best they could with the resources they had. At worst we can suggest that it might have been built as a corporate brochure rather than a tuned sales instrument.

At Sales Motor we put your products and services on the front pages of search engines so that you get streams of great prospects. I think we are the only agency in SA that guarantees enquiries, and we even train clients to convert those enquiries into sales. Most firms don’t think beyond the clicks.

That means my partner does not have to say anything about the present site. We won’t be using it anyway. All he has to do is ask how many enquiries came from that site last week, and how many of those prospects turned into clients. And then, of course, tell a few true stories.

Like how one of our clients asked us to do a campaign three weeks ago selling meat based food products. And how they sold 25 tons of it to Angola from just one of the first responses. And how they cleared the shelves of the factory outlet by the second weekend. For less than the cost of a single small ad in Farmers Weekly.

Or how a client selling office space made R100,000 in countrywide commissions in the first ten days of starting with us. For less than the price of a single ad in a single newspaper for a single day.

Or how a plastics factory has taken 123 enquiries worth more than R60 million in the past three weeks. (Over 150,000 units x R400 each). For somewhat less than they pay the top half of one of their drivers.

As a salesperson, telling somebody that what they did in the past sucks is a really bad way to inspire them. We have each done a bunch of things in our past that we would rather forget. Mapping out a future with great prospects is a much better way to share ideas.

Finally, if you are advertising already, the 40 partners at Sales Motor would love to talk to you about getting a hell of a lot more bang for your buck. Please go to Sales Motor and tell us what you sell, where you’re advertising right now, and where you are based. One of us in your area will get back to you fast. (Having partners countrywide also means that we can accept payment in almost any form.)

Or check out the activity at some of our clients sites here. (The lines highlighted in green identify enquirors, rather than just searchers (clicks)).

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Word-of-Mouth

October 12th, 2011 | by | marketing

Oct
12

Whenever I talk to some intrepid entrepreneur about finding clients, often a few months before I talk to them about closing their business, they assure me that they don’t need to do any marketing because all of their clients arrive by word-of-mouth.

This is a prime example of a problem known as confirmation bias.  Of course all of their clients arrive by word-of-mouth.  That’s because they’re not doing any other marketing, so there is no other way for clients to arrive.

Just in case this isn’t obvious, it is very unlikely that a person will call in response to the wireless ad that my intrepid friend did not arrange, or the magazine advert that he didn’t place, or the flyer at the traffic light that he did not hand out,  or the website that he doesn’t have.

That’s not the way he sees it.  Rather, he interprets the results to mean that he is so darn good that his past clients are referring him.  It is easy to make this mistake.  After all, 100% of his new clients are indeed the result of word-of-mouth, even if there are not enough of them to cover the watery soup and gruel he has come to enjoy.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not the kind of guy who, at the dinner table, waxes lyrical about the service I have received from a plumber, ISP, car salesmen, or   bespoke PHP coder, unlike, it seems, women using OMO. That’s often because their service is nothing to write home about.

Facebook has added a new high-speed layer to the concept of word-of-mouth, not that any of my interviewees is using it.  But, frankly, I must admit to having a few problems with Facebook at the moment.   It was once a superb place to stay in touch with my family.  Now I am bombarded by word-of-mouth messages that have been engineered by Filipino copywriters for every man and his poodle, including Coca-Cola and Weetabix.

I am not sure that I want my clients and partners to know that my granddaughter is expecting triplets sired by a passing swagman, especially if they hear about it before I do. Facebook is very good at that.

No matter where I look I am prompted to “like” something, which apparently gives the “likee” the right to assail me with yet more Filipino writing.  And, Lord forbid that my finger innocently slips onto an advert for a dating site which Facebook has put on my front page. Within seconds, all of my friends see that same advert with a picture of a good-looking young man, and a note at the bottom assuring them that Peter Carruthers likes it.  I might do.  But not him. I just do not want quite that level of word-of-mouth sharing.

Relying on word-of-mouth is, I think, a dreadful way to sell your services and products.  Especially at a time when the world economy is tightening, and the competitors are getting a lot hungrier.  I think this is the universe telling us to bring our First Team to the market.

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Gravel in the Gold Pan

September 28th, 2011 | by | marketing

Sep
28

Old time prospectors were used to working really hard.

There was the long trip to South Africa, stowed away in the hold of a grimy steamer, followed by the buying of all the kit needed to walk to Johannesburg from the coast, barefoot, and then stealing the spades and pans needed to dig and wash for gold, and all of that was before fighting to find some tiny spot of dirt that nobody else had claimed.

About the only good part of all of this is that they got to leave the wife and kids back home to work in the coal mines.

And then the hard work really started. Digging up a few tons of gravel, then sifting it through a pan, in the vaguest hope that a tiny nugget of gold might remain to pay for tonights gruel.

Contrast this with my new hero, who arrives in our system three weeks ago to do some prospecting through Google. Sitting in his armchair at home he loads up a complete website and advertising campaign, which reaches the front page of Google within a few hours. He has no concept that it took me more than 6 months to begin to understand the complexity of the dashboard that Google offers. Or that the mistakes I made cost me the equivalent of a years worth of Malema’s annual salary (the one from the trust, not the one that he tells SARS about).

And then, a few hours later, prospects start falling into the pan. (They would be the gravel that now needs some sifting.)

Sadly, our hero has staked his claim somewhat out of the territory we would normally find gold. He finds some nuggets of a new metal that nobody yet has a use for. (In his case, he finds leads that are exactly what his new site is looking for, but not what he wants.)

In true modern style he gives up within a few days, demands his money back, and goes back to whatever he was doing before, knowing with all his heart that prospecting via search engines does not work.

Isn’t life wonderful?

Bottom line: If you’re prospecting for gold, remember that you gotta shovel a little shyte before you see the gold. If this was too easy, everyone would be doing it and there would be no space for you and me. Be happy that it needs some effort. That’s why fortunes are made in them thar hills.

It’s also why we have closed our gold mine for a while as we restructure to focus on the winners, and deal with all this talk of nationalising the mines, of course.

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Body (Business) Mass Index?

September 15th, 2011 | by | life, marketing

Sep
15

I discovered a few days ago that I was, to put it technically, ‘overweight’. I have a new application on my iPad to control my Type 1 diabetes. The first time I entered my weight it creaked and started playing Jewel’s Fragile Flame (also known as Fat Boy). That’s the delight of high tech. It insults you with style.

But the software gave me an exact number to work with. My Body Mass Index was 28.7. The ‘normal’ range is between 18.5 and 25.

There are 3 methods to resolve this issue. The simplest is to grow 5 cm taller, and then you are back in range.  In my case, that’s quite difficult to do, especially at the age of 53.  Almost as difficult is to lose 15 kg (get my current weight from 95 kg to 80 kg, which seems the appropriate  weight for my height.) So I chose the 3rd method: Do nothing.

There is a business point to this story, if you will bear with me a little longer.

Since I bought this product to get better control, I started measuring the numbers that are crucial to a person with diabetes. There is just one: Blood Glucose. It took a few days to see that what I was eating was not conducive for blood glucose control. So I began to change my habits.

Within a week I had lost 5 kg. (And my glucose numbers now look fresh and smell of lemon.)

Now, before you yell at me because we are all experts on nutrition, having spent so much time fighting with these issues, and you feel I might be losing weight little too fast, and that if I chose the Foster-Alan Synchronised Amino-Apothecary Baltic Sea regime instead, I could do much better, remember that this story is about business, not my personal quest to go to heaven via airmail instead of road freight in a large box.

The simple act of measuring the numbers led me to start thinking about what they meant, and how to improve them. And thinking about them made it easy for me to change what I was doing. This was science, rather than opinion. The fact that these numbers ‘happen’ every few hours remains a constant nudge.

That’s the thing about business that I find so fascinating. Most of us are too busy to measure the numbers vital to our own efforts. There is an apocryphal story about a department store owner in the United States about 100 years ago who famously proclaimed “half of my advertising money is goes to waste, but I don’t know which half”.

Most of us still do our advertising and marketing with that same level of measurement. In the Internet marketing world we have it much easier because we can actually measure results. And we do, ad nauseam. At some point in the next few months somebody is going to call you and tell you that they can get 100 clicks to your website for the paltry sum of R2000 (unless you take today’s discount of R1000)  provided you sign a 12 month contract. (I am being a little cynical, but you get the point.)

A “click” is what happens when somebody is searching for what you sell, sees your advert, and clicks on it, finally ending up on your site. The concept is wonderful. In practice, 100 clicks won’t usually give you better than one enquiry. In fact, most of the time it will give you no enquiries. That’s because your website wasn’t designed to ask for enquiries. Most of our websites are designed to tell people about ourselves and our businesses.

In fact, most websites are about as effective at getting enquiries as my blood glucose software is for controlling bees in the basement.

I am a salesman, not a techie. Clicks are meaningless. Enquiries are a much better measure of how effective your Internet marketing is. But the true measure, the platinum standard, is the number of those enquiries that turn into sales.

Because a sale is not just a one night stand. It is the beginning of a lifetime relationship. And for most of us, the lifetime value of a client is almost immeasurable. It’s not just the money they give us when they buy what we sell. It’s that they continue to buy. And they talk to their friends about us. And if they like us enough they will tell us what we are doing wrong rather than leave and buy elsewhere.

I found this out over the past two weeks when we launched a new venture. We expected to take on 10 partners. We ended up interviewing more than 60, and taking on 42. 41 of these were existing clients, or previous clients, and many dated back to the mid-nineties. Your clients are the only real asset your business has.

Bottom line: If you want something to change in your life, start measuring the right things.

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Life, Chocolates, & Minestrone

June 20th, 2011 | by | marketing, sovereign individual

Jun
20

I have always believed that the easiest way to survive commerce, and have some fun en route, is to make sure that you are adding more value than you are costing. Mostly, that works. Now and then the cost of adding that value exceeds the income you are getting, but as long as you are adding enough value, it all seems to come right in the end, even if you have to share a few drinks with your local sheriff along the way

On the way there will always be a few fine folk who want to pay you far more than the value you think you are adding. That’s a lot of the fun. And there will always be a few folk who don’t want to pay you at all. That’s where much of the learning comes in.

While it’s tempting to think that the folk who get really rich are doing something sly, I think that they have just worked out how to add a lot more value to a lot more people with a lot less effort at a lot less cost. Of course, because they are so “lucky”, it makes sense to demand that they pay more tax than the rest of us. (I fear I might have been watching too much BBC and Labour.)

The Internet makes all of this so much easier. For instance, for the cost of just one live seminar tour (three events hosting about 250 people in total) the Web allows me to host 1000 people in 12 events each day for the next 20 years.

I will be in South Africa from next week, for six weeks, for a superb break and three live seminars. And a bunch of impromptu gatherings wherever a good bottle of red rears its head. PetesWeekly on Twitter makes that very easy to arrange. And if you want a little more formality, PetesWeekly on Facebook allows us to plan ahead – by at least a few hours.

Last week was quiet, what with SA on holiday, again. A good time to relook at what we are doing. We have just re-opened Marketing Motor which uses the same tools we do at Sales Motor to get your business onto the front page of Google, but instead of using our time, uses yours. One of our key reasons for doing this was to help those folk in business arenas without enough traffic to justify a full service (and the costs thereof).

When I started teaching the Crashproof ideas back in 1995 I always said that if I was able to share this knowledge gratis, I would. And webinars cost pretty close to nothing to host.

When I return to Norway, we will launch a gratis daily business training channel – a live Q&A webinar each day about issues of business, ownership, survival, and success. Of course, the recordings can be downloaded if you can’t make the live show. The first month will be a beta run to see if we can make it a better run.

I’m not sure that I’m the right person to do it, but since I have spent more than 27 years gainfully unemployed, dealing with the daily challenges we all face, it makes sense to share a little of that. As Forrest Gump’s mother said, life’s a box of chocolates. I doubt she was a sugar-challenged. I am, so life is better seen as a canteen of minestrone. And like all things edible, it is a lot more fun when shared.

We still have Early Bird seats at the live seminars next month. Use the codes: CPTEARLYBIRD, DBNEARLYBIRD, or JHBEARLYBIRD. Just click here if you’d like to join me on the night.

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