Business Mastery 2011 with Chris Cardell. Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials

Transcription

1 Business Mastery 2011 with Chris Cardell Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials

2 Chris Cardell s Business Mastery 2011 Complete Event Schedule Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials immediately boost your turnover and profits (Duration: 90 Minutes)... Wed 23 March 11am Session 2: Online Mastery getting visitors to your website and converting them to buyers (Duration: 90 Minutes)...Wed 30 March 4pm Session 3: Pricing and Positioning Mastery - the key to getting your customers and clients to pay the prices you ask is mastering the art of positioning (Duration: 90 Minutes)...Wed 6 April 4pm Session 4: Advertising Mastery we ll dig deep into what makes an ad work, how you can make your ads MUCH more profitable and measure the results you re getting (Duration: 90 Minutes)... Wed 13 April 4pm Session 5: Pay per Click Mastery - I ll show you how to succeed; and if you re already doing well, I ll show you how to massively improve your results. (Duration: 90 Minutes)... Wed 20 April 4pm Session 6: Sales Mastery Advanced Influencing skills for Maximum Sales (Duration: 90 Minutes)... Wed 27 April 4pm Session 7: Marketing Mastery Direct Mail, Telemarketing, Advertising and more - we re going to examine in detail how you can benefit from Direct Mail, Telemarketing, traditional Advertising and much, much more besides. (Duration: 90 Minutes)... Wed 4 May 4pm Session 8: Advanced Online Mastery SEO, Remarketing and Social Media - this Session builds on what you mastered in Sessions 2 and 5 and plunges you deep into the immensely profitable world of Advanced Internet Marketing (Duration: 90 Minutes)...Wed 11 May 4pm Session 9: Advanced Marketing Mastery XXX Advanced Marketing strategies guaranteed to boost your sales and profits beyond anything you believed possible. (Duration: 90 Minutes)...Wed 18 May 4pm Session 10: The Psychology of Wealth The Advanced Thinking Secrets of the Entrepreneurial Millionaires (Duration: 90 Minutes)...Wed 25 May 4pm BONUS SESSION: How to Hire and Manage Staff with the World s Leading Authority on Recruitment and Management.... Tue 29 March 8pm Champions Breakfast: Tentative schedule will be Sunday morning, 26 June in London. Details to be announced. Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 1

3 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials First, let me welcome you to Business Mastery! It s a very smart decision you ve made and a big commitment to your own success. And by the end of our ten weeks together, I promise, you ll have all the tools, strategies, resources and know how you need to put your business firmly in the top 1%. In this first Session of Business Mastery we re going to cover the essentials to get you off to a flying start. You may have heard of the 80/20 Rule, where 80% of your results come from just 20% of the things you do. It s a counterintuitive phenomenon but it s real, it s powerful and it s immensely profitable. And that s what we re going to be focusing on in this Session: the vital few things you can do immediately and see results (quite literally) overnight. And more than that, these essentials are fundamental to your ultimate success as an Entrepreneur. In other words, unless and until you have these fundamentals taken care of, nothing else you do is going to be of much use to you. By the end of this Session you ll understand and be and be able to implement seven Essential Marketing and Internet Marketing strategies at very little or zero cost and see an immediate boost in your profits. If you put the simple strategies in just this one Session to work for you, you will be streets ahead of your competitors. Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 2

4 1. Three Ways to Grow Your Business Despite all the dozens of marketing strategies and tactics out there, and the dozens of business models in thousands of industries and niches, the simple truth is... there are just three ways to grow any business. They are: 1. Sell to more customers and clients. This is the obvious way to do it the more customers and clients you have, the more sales you make, and the more profits you get as a result. Some simple and easy ways to get new customers and clients are: i. Advertising. ii. iii. iv. Pay Per Click. Direct mail. Article marketing. v. Search Engine Optimisation. vi. Telemarketing. vii. FREE PR. viii. Referrals. ix. Joint Ventures with other businesses. 2. Sell your products and services at a higher price. This is the easiest, quickest and most profound way to increase your profits and can be as simple as changing a price tag. Without going into the maths, a 10% price increase on a 35% margin increases profits by appoximately 37% and this is for exactly the same amount of work. Ways to increase prices without losing sales are: i. Just increase your prices (almost no one will notice, and if they do, they won t care). ii. iii. Bundle your products and services into offers that cannot be compared like-with-like to what your competitors offer. Upsells. The easiest time to sell to your customers and clients is when they ve just bought from you... and the extra profit is free and takes no extra work. Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 3

5 iv. Offer payment plans. v. Offer a Deluxe version (and even a super Deluxe version). vi. Offer an outstanding guarantee. vii. Offer a bespoke or design your own service. viii. Offer exclusive access to those prepared to pay a premium. 3. Sell more often. And finally, you can sell more frequently. Here are a few ideas for selling more frequently: i. more often! ii. iii. iv. Have regular offers coinciding with special dates on the calendar, celebrations, and even current-events. Have a proper marketing system in place (this is just one of the many things you ll have by the end of Business Mastery). Offer some form of continuity product or service (e.g. If you can have a book club, why not a haircut club, car wash club or any other kind of business club? And on the following page, we can see an example of how powerful understanding these three concepts can be (and proof of how easy it is to double your profits). Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 4

6 OPTION A: If you... Increase the number of Customers by 10% Increase the average spend by 10% Increase the number of times people purchase by 10% Your Turnover will increase by 33.1% OPTION B: If you... Increase the number of Customers by 30% Increase the average spend by 20% Increase the number of times people purchase by 30% Your Turnover will increase by: 100% + Notes Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 5

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8 2. Multiple Marketing Approaches One of the big mistakes business owners make is having too-few marketing approaches. They perhaps have one, maybe two things that work for them... and they sit back on their laurels and leave it at that. Not only is this a very dangerous way to run a business, because if circumstances change, you can find yourself with no marketing at all (e.g. fax marketing in the US, your local paper going bust or no longer accepting the ad that s been working for you, or your Adwords campaign getting the infamous Google slap ), but it also means you re leaving potentially massive profits unclaimed (simply because people who would be willing and eager to buy from you can t... because they never get to see your marketing). One way to think of it is like the Parthenon, in Athens. In the same way that the Parthenon s roof couldn t have been supported by just one or two pillars, your business cannot be supported by just one or two marketing streams. Here is a partial list of the many, many different approaches to marketing you can and should test (put a tick in the boxes by the ones you re using now and I bet you ll be surprised at how many you re leaving untried). Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 7

9 1. Direct Mail Telephone Marketing Capture Autoresponders Direct Sales Joint Ventures PR Print Advertising Radio / TV Advertising Shows and Exhibitions Pay per Click Free Events Conference Calls Mailing List Rental Referrals Internet Advertising (Banner ads etc) Search Engine Optimisation... By the end of Business Mastery you ll have all the knowledge and tools you need to be able to test all of these in your business and discover which ones work the best and so take advantage of the untapped profits in your business. Notes Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 8

11 3. Long Term Customer Value and Cost Per Customer Two little-understood facts about your business, once you truly embrace them, will make a huge difference to the way you view and run your business. What s more, long term, they ll make a massive difference to your profits, too. First, the true value of your customers and clients is in the profits you make from them over the time they are your customer. Most business owners get this completely wrong and instead focus on the profit they can make on the first sale. And the second point follows from the first: if we re focusing on the long term value, then it stands to reason we are in the business of buying customers. Why do I say this? Because however you bring in customers or clients has a cost attached to it, whether it s a direct cost (e.g. Paying for an advert, or a click on a PPC ad), or an indirect cost (e.g. the time and effort needed to put an effective referral system in place). This is sometimes called the cost of sale. And the long-term value of a customer is: ltv = (sale price - cost of sale) x number of purchases Most business owners do not understand the last part of this equation! And if you don t know these numbers yet, an easy way to work it out for the last year is: ltv = annual revenue / number of customers We now have the advantage because we now realise we can afford to spend substantially more than our competitors do so we can gain a new customer. Here s a concrete example: Your annual customer value is 1,000 and your lifetime customer value is 2,000 pounds. Therefore, you may decide it very worthwhile to invest up to 500 to get a new customer, because you know on average each one will be worth 500 Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 10

12 profit to you in the first year, and 1,500 profit to you over the course of their relationship with you. Exercise My annual revenue is: This is how many customers or clients I have: Each customer or client is worth each year: (A) (B) (A/B) Over the next three years each customer or client is worth: (A/B) x 3 I would consider spending up to an average of to obtain a new customer or client. My current average cost per customer is: Notes Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 11

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14 4. Testing Outrageously successful marketing systems are always the product of concentrated and scientific testing and analysis. And testing is what makes direct response marketing so incredibly powerful. If you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing system by just 6% every month then by the end of the year you will have imroved your sales figures by over 100% more than double. And increases of this size are much easier to achieve than you think because there are literally dozens of different variables you can test. Here are some ideas: 1. All the marketing approaches listed on Page The font in your ads, letters and web pages. 3. Your headlines. 4. Your first paragraph. 5. The colour of your envelopes and paper. 6. Real stamps versus franks. 7. Video, audio and copy on web pages (and all combinations of them). 8. Auto-play audio and video. 9. The colour of your copy. 10. Drop caps and the first line of each paragraph indented. 11. Dashed boxes around you calls to action. 12. The wording of your guarantees and calls to action. 13. Subject lines in your s (personalised versus not-personalised, for example). 14. Text versus simple HTML s. 15. Sending DVDs or CDs as direct mail instead of letters. 16. Long copy against short copy (especially on landing pages). 17. Your prices. Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 13

15 18. All aspects of brochure, letter, postcard and web-page design. 19. Sizes of postcards and envelopes. 20. Teaser copy on the outside of envelopes. 21. The days and times you send s and direct mail. 22. Telephone scripts. There is practically NO limit to how many things you can test, and the combinations are to all intents and purposes infinite. And when you do test, you will be AMAZED at the difference even small changes can make. Here are some real results: White envelopes in one test got a 40% better response Underline versus bold got double the responses in an online sales letter. Simple HTML got a 35% better click-through than a plain-text one. Long-copy landing page got a 12.5% better response than a short one. Video caused a landing page to bomb The lesson to take away is you can NOT afford to assume AND what worked best in one instance may not work best in another. So... test, test, and then test again! Never, ever stop testing because you ll never ever stop improving! Notes Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 14

17 5. Pricing Increasing your prices is the fastest, easiest and surest way to increase your profits. We ll cover this in a lot more detail in Session 3, but in the meantime here are some critical points to get you started: 1. Price makes a statement about quality. You won t lose customers or clients, and the few you might lose are the ones you don t want to be dealing with anyway. 2. It s easier to sell one 1,000 widget than a thousand 1 widgets. What s more you ll be dealing with nicer people and endure far less stress. 3. Only 14% of people are truly price-buyers. Most people in most circumstances most of the time are more interested in value than they are in price. And they ll focus on price and become price-buyers only when you have NOT given them any other reason to measure the value of your products or services. 4. In many cases an increase in price means an increase in sales because people want the best. True story: a franchise was not selling at all when it was priced at 5,000. But when the price jumped to over 50,000, they were innundated with applicants. 5. High price implies exclusivity. People want what not everyone else can have. Notes Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 16

19 6. Lead Generation In previous sections we saw how your real value is not in the first sale, but is in the long-term customer value. We now take that concept further and look at lead generation marketing and why long-term it helps us realise the full potential of your marketing. Your prospects have an unspoken question in their mind: Why should I do business with you and not your competitors? And because we want their business, we will do better if we demonstrate our value to them first before we ask them to spend money with us. We do this by offering something of value to them in exchange for their contact details (e.g. name, address) and permission to send them marketing messages. How effective is this? One case study, and this is by no means untypical, showed a 1,134% increase in sales when comparing sales from a website sales-letter presented to cold visitors, and the sales resulting from an autoresponder sequence. In other words... just by changing the focus and beginning the relationship by giving, sales increased more than a factor of 11! Remember: we are now marketing to get long-term customers and clients not sales! On the following pages are some examples of lead-generation marketing, from both online and offline sources. In each case they are giving something away for free. Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 18

25 7. The Purpose of Your Business You will be more successful as an Entrepreneur, make more money and make it faster and more easily if you remember one important fact at all times: you are in the business of adding value to people s lives. If you position your business and yourself so people see you as the solution to their problems, not only will your Entrepreneurial life be transformed, but you ll be able to command income at will. Or as one great salesman put it, if you help people get what they want, they ll give you everything you want. Notes Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 24

27 8. Your Business Mastery Implementation Assignment We ve covered a lot of ground and it WILL need time to sink in. However, the key is... IMPLEMENTATION. Nothing happens until you take action. So for this week your assignment is to go back over this handout, listen to the recording of the call, make LOTS of notes and then pick THREE things to take action on and... then... TAKE ACTION on them. Remember: there is NO failure. Only results. This Week I am Going to Take Action on... Action 1 Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 26

28 Action 2 Action 3 Business Mastery 2011 Session 1: Business Mastery Essentials 27