Six Simple Tips for Increasing Sales and Peace of Mind

Have you ever found a lead on a scrap of paper after the prospect purchased from your competition? Are you spending time recreating proposals because you can't find a similar one you wrote a few months ago? Do you run out of the door for an appointment at the last minute because you couldn't find the samples you really wanted to take? Are you feeling overwhelmed?

If so, here are six simple steps to creating the office environment you deserve, and one that will help you increase sales and decrease stress

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13 Fastest and Best Ways to Get Business

Mail to your house list. Names and addresses of people who have bought from you, shopped at your store, sent for your merchandise through the mail or given you business in some way are all members of an elite group: your house file of customers. These people are your most likely prospects for doing business with you again, if only you'd entice them with a nice offer.

Especially great prospects are those that have purchased from you two or more times. They like your products or services; they've proven that by coming back. You don't have to sell them on anything -- they already know where your store is, and the quality of your merchandise or workmanship. Why don't you drop them a nice note?

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Take Care of Your Customers -- and They'll Take Care of You

Your company can have great products, wonderful services, and terrific prices, but if you don't take care of your customers, you will have nothing. If your business is to succeed, you must differentiate yourself from your competition by providing superior customer service.

That means treating your customers with respect. It means listening to the customer when he or she has a problem. It means doing whatever it takes to solve that problem.

Customer care begins with communication. Whether it be a smile when the customer enters your business or a 15-minute explanation of the various features of a product, it is important that your communication be timely, specific, and sincere. While that might sound simple, often it isn't.

Take this situation, for example: A customer comes in with a complaint. Before that customer can explain the situation to the employee, the telephone rings and she answers it, leaving the customer to stand and wait while she finishes that conversation. When the customer finally
gets the employee's attention and explains the problem, the employee appears to be bored with the whole situation.

The result? The customer is frustrated and feeling neglected. The employee then says she can't solve the problem, tells the customer to wait, and calls for a manager. She then begins to ring up other customers' sales while the customer with the problem again waits to be helped.

In another scenario, the customer is irate and immediately begins to berate the employee because the DVD player she purchased isn't working properly. The employee in turn becomes defensive, which only escalates the situation into a shouting match. The customer demands to
see the manager. The employee sulks. And both feel frustrated and angry.

Each of these situations is more common than most of us would like to admit. The good news is that each is easier to handle than most of us realize. In the first scenario, the employee should have told the caller on the telephone that she was helping another customer and to either hang on or call back in five minutes. Then she should have listened intently to the customer's complaint, repeated the complaint back to the customer to make sure she understood it correctly, apologized for the problem, and then immediately done whatever it took to solve the problem.

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What is Marketing?

It includes diverse disciplines like sales, public relations, pricing, packaging, and distribution. In order to distinguish marketing from other related professional services, S.H. Simmons, author and humorist, relates this anecdote.
If a young man tells his date she's intelligent, looks lovely, and is a great conversationalist, he's saying the right things to the right person and that's marketing. If the young man tells his date how handsome, smart and successful he is -- that's advertising. If someone else tells the young woman how handsome, smart and successful her date is -- that's public relations."

You might think of marketing this way. If business is all about people and money and the art of persuading one to part from the other, then marketing is all about finding the right people to persuade.

Marketing is your strategy for allocating resources (time and money) in order to achieve your objectives (a fair profit for supplying a good product or service).

Yet the most brilliant strategy won't help you earn a profit or achieve your wildest dreams if it isn't built around your potential customers. A strategy that isn't based on customers is rather like a man who knows a thousand ways to make love to a woman, but doesn't know any women. Great in theory but unrewarding in practice.

If you fit the classic definition of an entrepreneur (someone with a great idea who's under-capitalized), you may think marketing is something you do later -- after the product is developed, manufactured, or ready to sell.

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How to Win by Thinking Like a Listener: Presentations That Persuade

The ability to gain an audience's attention, hold it for a period of time, persuade the listeners to your viewpoint and then move them to action is a skill that can be learned by just about anyone who is willing to develop it.

Speaking, like writing, is valuable in business because it reflects an ability to think, analyze ideas, make judgments, develop arguments that command attention and organize information in a way that moves people to action. Just as good writers are in demand in business, the ability to speak can open doors of opportunity.

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Market Positioning

Positioning is a perceptual location. It's where your product or service fits into the marketplace. Effective positioning puts you first in line in the minds of potential customers.

As individuals, we continually position ourselves. The responsible older sibling, the class clown, a number cruncher, a super genius are all examples of positioning. These identifiers help us define ourselves and distinguish our abilities as unique and different from other people. 

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In Today's World, Value is the Word To Live By

How do you increase your company's market share? In these days of great economic anxiety, it's a question that looms large. If you're like many business leaders desperate to capture a higher share of the market, your first impulse is to drop your prices. After all, that's what customers want, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong! All that does is position you as a commodity, which is a recipe for failure in our new economy. What customers really want is value -- and not what you think value means to them, but what they think it means.

The past few years have brought corporate scandal, overvalued tech stocks and a wildly fluctuating stock market. In the wake of this economic carnage, we're seeing a real back to basics movement. First, money is tighter than ever. Second, customers are tired of "smoke and mirrors" business practices and are demanding value in what they buy-and corporations are realizing they'd better make products and services that deliver the V-word. This is not a trend of the week -- it's a whole new paradigm.

And here's the really important part. Anyone who thinks value is synonymous with customer satisfaction needs to think again. Customer satisfaction is the old paradigm, and it's quickly being jettisoned by forward-thinking corporations. Customer value is the new paradigm, and it drives every other decision a company makes. Basically, it's up to you to figure out what value looks like to your current and potential customers -- and then to give it to them.

Think about it. For years you've heard the "satisfaction guaranteed" tagline so many times that it's lost all meaning. You may have gone so far as to hire a company to conduct "customer satisfaction" research, only to find yourself stuck with a mountain of data that you don't know how to use.

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How to Write a 'Trash-Proof' News Release

After sending out over a million faxed news releases on behalf of more than 2,000 clients, I've developed some "secrets" for writing news releases that get published. You can make them work for you as well:

Tell me a story. Give me a local news angle, touch my heart -- make me laugh or cry -- hit me in my pocketbook, make my stomach turn over or grab my gonads. Do this as many times as possible in a one page news release in 30 seconds or less and you will succeed in getting publicity.

A few years ago I spoke at the National Public Relations Society meetings in Omaha. I found out that the most publicists at most big PR firms don't have a real clue about how to write a news release to get news coverage. They write corporate fluff.

All too often, publicists at big public realtions firms write corporate fluff. Rarely do they create something that makes an editor drop what he or she is doing and pick up the phone and call. And yet, this is what you want an editor to do.

Few people who write a news release really think about what they want the editor to do after they receive and read a news release. I've been sending out news releases for people for almost 22 years, and most of the people who come to me initially write detailed book reviews or commercial news and Web site announcements, not short ideas for articles intended to attract editors attention and get a dialog going that results in a feature story published.

Often, I have to tell them to start over or shift gears. Of course, a lot has to do with the content and quality of the book, product service or Web site, but let's just assume that you've written the end all of all whatever you have its in your field. This is the ultimate sensation. The only thing anyone will ever need or want. You're all charged up and rearing to go. Now what?

A Publicity Plan!

First, establish your goals for the release. Write them down. Memorize them. Sleep on it. Wake up and think about them some more.

Remember you have to integrate your marketing with public relations and keep it all within your budget. So, identify how much you have available and write down how much you want to spend, on what and when and with whom.

Let's assume your goal is getting the word out about your product. It could be an initial announcement. It could be part of a year-long monthly campaign to a well targeted media list (again and again to get name recognition).

The task at hand may be to get an article published in as many places as possible, to feed sales, acquire name recognition, drive Web traffic or all the above. Now, it's time to get more specific. Narrow your options and tighten the true alternatives you wish to seriously consider. Think strategically. Narrow the goals and keep it as simple as can be.

What ever your specific publicity goals, you need to be mindful of the types of news releases that can be written, including print releases for feature stories, opinion-editorial pieces, "tips" articles, event announcements, product or service releases, query letters, Internet and/or e-mail news releases.

All these can produce publicity success. But writing each type of release entails arraying different information into a different format and style of presentation. Each release has a different purpose and asks the editor or producer to take a different action. And, doing any of these well in order to succeed is a daunting challenge.

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How can you expect them to buy your products or services when they don't know you're there?

Silly question; you can't. But if your advertising budget doesn't come close to the national debt, you may think there's nothing you can do except sit back and wait for the media to stumble onto your great company and write a terrific story that will get the attention of customers near and far.

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