1. They could go out and generate more leads and, simply because sales is “a numbers game”, they would convert more prospects into customers. This is a good strategy but time consuming (usually because prospecting is a resource-intensive effort).

2. They could generate more revenue dollars per existing customer by developing add-ons like upsells and ancillary sales. This is a good way to do less work and earn more money from each customer.

But there are other ways to sell more. Two more I’d like to cover today are related: Generating more revenue without doing more prospecting. One way is through repeat sales and the other way is from referral sales.

Repeat sales

Repeat sales is when your customers buys from you once… then buys from you again. This makes your profit much higher because you didn’t have to spend a lot of money to market to that customer to convince them to buy. If you’ve ever bought more than once from any company, you have improved their bottom line dramatically.

Referral sales

Referral sales is when your customers love you so much that they refer their friends and family to you. A word-of-mouth referral from a trusted friend or family member is the most valuable form of marketing there is. Consumers can be cynical of sales pitches because we live in a world that overwhelms people with marketing messages. But a referral cuts through those messages and encourages people to buy. And, these can be higher profit customers for you because you didn’t need to market to them either. If you’ve ever bought anything because a friend gave it a glowing report then you have taken part in referral marketing.

By ramping up your repeat and referral sales with intentional programs, you can increase the amount that you sell while decreasing your expensive marketing and time-consuming prospecting… and that means more profit for you. (You won’t want to eliminate them altogether but you can reduce them slightly).

Here’s how to do that. Up-front it might take slightly longer than ten minutes to put the programs into place but, once they are in place, you only need to spend about 10 minutes per day managing them.

Start now by thinking about who your current customers are and what they buy. The more you think about this, the more effective the rest of this effort will be. Ask yourself:

• What is their demographic?
• What motivates them to buy?
• What else do they buy?
• What needs do they have in my life that they fulfill with my products and services and with the products of other businesses?

Once you’ve spent some time thinking about this, you’re ready to create ways to sell more through repeat and referral business.

Repeat business is slightly easier to do because it’s often simply a matter of finding something else that you offer that your existing customers need. But here’s what takes ten minutes a day: Don’t wait for them to come shopping at your business. Instead, take ten minutes and proactively think about and then recommend something that they might find valuable.

In many businesses, these ten minutes might be spent on a single customer in which you think about their needs and then decide how one of your products or services fits. In some cases (especially in low ticket retail situations), it might take less time, but if you spend 10 minutes on a single customer to figure out what they need and how to present it to them, you’ll be fine. Most of the subscribers to this email are in the kinds of businesses that can spend 10 minutes on a single customer.

And here’s the result: With just 10 minutes per day, you’ll be presenting your solution to someone who has already bought from you and who trusts you. They know the value you deliver. And if you do this every week day, you’ll present an additional 261 products or services to people who are more likely to buy from you. (When I say more likely to buy I mean that people who have never bought from you before might convert from prospects to customers at, say, 5%, which means that 5% of your pitches will sell. But presenting your solutions to existing customers might create additional sales volume among that group of a much higher percentage; say, 15% or 20% of your pitches might sell; perhaps even more.).

So, let’s do the math on this. Let’s say that each month you have 100 prospects and you convert 5% of them and earn $1,000 each. That means you’ll have 5 customers and you’ll earn $5,000 which was an expensive $5,000 to get because you had to market to those 100 prospects. Over the year, you earn that steady rate and make a respectable $60,000.

Now it’s time to add in repeat sales. If you take ten minutes and pitch to one of your customers each day, and you convert them (at a higher percentage) of one per week, you’ll have an additional 52 sales per year. If those sales each bring in $500, that’s an extra $26,000. And guess what: More of that $26,000 is profit because you didn’t spend a lot of time or money on marketing!

So, how do you get more repeat business?

• Start by making unsolicited recommendations. If you’ve added good value in the past your customers will appreciate that you’re thinking about them, even if they don’t buy from you.

• Some business might want to implement a popular type of system: The buy ten get one free. We’ve all seen this in retail, fast food, and auto maintenance situations but there’s no reason why it can’t work in other places.

• Create an “insiders club” in which frequent buyers get ongoing discounts (which might still be more profitable to you than if you marketed your business to new customers).

Referral sales are similar. Referral sales are successful because people tend to hang out with people like themselves. Soccer moms have soccer mom friends. Newly married couples have friends who are also newly married. Small business owners talk to small business owners. Empty nesters spend time with empty nesters. If you target your products and services to a specific demographic, you’ll increase your likelihood of sales to that demographic through referral sales.

It works because, over coffee, one entrepreneur will say to another, “I’ve noticed that your business really took off this month. What happened?” And the other would reply, “I’ve been working with Jim’s Business Consulting”. Voila. Referral.

As a business owner, you need to do what you can to encourage these. These are difficult to implement and difficult to monitor but there are a few things you can do.

• Invite customers to give you the name and contact information of their peers. Note: This is difficult to do and it’s not always met with enthusiasm my customers but it is a mainstay in the financial services industry and there must be a reason why they continue to use it.

• Hand out coupons with a special customer-specific code on each one. When they hand them to their friends and their friends use those coupons, you’ll be able to track with “source” customer handed out the original coupon and you can reward that existing customer with some kind of bonus, discount, or kick-back. This is a great way to build your business but you do need a system that can track these things.

• Simply ask new customers who walk through the door, “how did you hear about us?” and keep track of the people who say, “I heard about you from my friend”.

As you can tell, these will take ten minutes or less each day simply because they are so fast once your referral program is up and running.

Ultimately, to get the most repeat business and referral business in just ten minutes a day is to spend that daily 10 minutes ensuring that you add LOTS of extra value for every single customer. When you do that, you will become invaluable to your customers and they will naturally buy from you again and tell other people about you.

Related posts:

1. Mastering Sales and Selling More -Part 1
2. Mastering Google AdWords in 10 Minutes – Part 1
3. Mastering Google AdWords in 10 Minutes – Part 2

In this Tips in Ten, I’d like to give you a quick review of the top autoresponder programs out there to help you decide which one is best for you.

There are five big autoresponder systems out there, although you might find other ones that suit your needs but aren’t listed here. I’m going to give you a neutral review of all five and then later I’ll tell you which ones I use and why.

I’ve highlighted some of the features of each service, as well as the prices, but be aware that this information is relevant at the time of this writing. If you archive this email and read it later, the features or prices might have changed! Also, I’ve done my best to make the comparisons as “apples-to-apples” as possible to help you decide which one is right for you. Oh, and I should mention that my pricing metric is based on 5,000 to 10,000 emails as much as possible, but there are some exceptions as noted. (Note: I encourage you to visit each systems website, as these details are not exhaustive, each has many more features than listed here)

Constant Contact:

• What do they do: Constant Contact lets you create autoresponders to stay in touch with your audience, as well as online surveys to generate information and interaction from your website’s users
• Experience: They have worked with 275,000 small businesses and organizations.
• Pricing (http://www.constantcontact.com/pricing/pricing-plans.jsp): Send 5,000 – 10,000 emails per month for $75/month
• What makes them different: These are seasoned pros and have been leading the industry for a few years.

Aweber:

• What do they do: Aweber lets you create email newsletters and autoresponders for your audience, and they also let you turn your RSS feeds into emails that can be sent out to subscribers.
• Experience: They’ve been in business since 1998 and are one of the originals.
• Pricing (http://www.aweber.com/pricing.htm): 5,000 – 10,000 emails per month for $69/month.
• What makes them different: This company is the granddaddy of autoresponder systems.

Icontact:

• What do they do: Icontact allows you to generate surveys, autoresponder messages, and convert your RSS feeds to regular emails.
• Experience: They have over 51,000 customers.
• Pricing (http://www.icontact.com/pricing): 5,000 – 10,000 emails per month for $47/month:
• What makes them different: This company has enterprise partnerships available for people who have over 100,000 email addresses to send to.

1Shoppingcart:

• What do they do: 1shoppingcart offers email marketing services like autoresponders, but it also offers powerful ecommerce solutions like a shopping cart and credit card transactions, too.
• Experience: In terms of ecommerce shopping carts, this is THE company that defines the industry.
• Pricing (http://www.1shoppingcart.com/shopping-cart-features.asp): Their autoresponder-only package (which allows for a database of 10,000 people) is $29/month but you can get a much more robust system for $99/month which includes an ecommerce suite, too.
• What makes them different: This company combines a powerful ecommerce system with their autoresponder system.

Vertical response:

• What do they do: Vertical response is a mix of online and offline services, allowing users to send email newsletters, offer online surveys, and send direct mail postcards.
• Experience: I’m not clear on how long they’ve been in business or exactly how many customers they’ve helped but they say “tens of thousands” of customers.
• Pricing (http://www.verticalresponse.com/pricing/): 4,000 to 8,000 emails per month is $72/month and 8,000 to 16,000 emails per month is $120/month.
• What makes them different: This company mixes online and offline marketing together and they claim that they were founded to provide better customer service than their competitors.

There are other systems, too, so I could write all day about them; companies like StreamSend and Infusionsoft are 2 others that are popular. I just listed the ones that are among the most popular and useful but if you have the time and want to continue hunting, you will find many more. However, in my opinion, stick with one of the ones I’ve mentioned above and you’ll be working with a company that has the critical mass of customers and revenue to be able to help you.

It’s also worth mentioning what is common across all five of these providers: When your marketing newsletter is successful, they will be successful (and earn more money) so they provide you with a lot of really useful information on how to get your emails delivered, what to do about spam, how to avoid being mistaken for spam, how to write emails that get read and saved, and so on. They also all provide some form of email tracking so you can see who has opened their emails and who hasn’t, who has forwarded emails, and how often links inside of emails have been clicked.

Ultimately, you want to consider this: Why are you going to use an autoresponder? When you know that, you’ll figure out which service to use. Here are some thoughts on choosing:

• Don’t automatically jump into one based solely on price. I’ve listed the prices above to compare but there are many other factors that might influence the price. Perhaps a level of service between one and another will impact the price, for example. If you just want to send out autoresponders and have no plans for anything else, then you might compare by price; but first consider all the services available.

• If an online and offline mix of marketing (including direct mail postcards) is something you’d like to do, then Vertical Response might be the service for you. (However, don’t rule out using another service for direct mail marketing – like my favorite SendOutCards. (Note: You need a sponsor to enroll in send out cards, my sponsorship code is: r90776.)

• If you want to integrate your autoresponder and an ecommerce solution, 1shoppingcart might be the right service for you.

• Figure out how many people are in your database, and how many more you’ll realistically add over the next few years, and use that as the apples-to-apples metric to determine the price-to-service ratio you’re looking for.

• Each one of these systems also let’s you send out Broadcasts (non-autoresponder Emails)

And now the million dollar question: What system do I use?

Before I tell you that, let me say that I have used all 5 in some way, shape, or form. (That doesn’t mean that I’ve sent autoresponders from all of them but I have used them in some way; perhaps through the work I do with clients or for some of their other services).

I currently like and use 2 programs: Aweber and 1Shoppingcart.

I use Aweber for a few of my sites in which a newsletter is the only email marketing item in the sales process. On these sites, I’m not capturing emails to do other kinds of marketing or to ultimately promote a product or service. When I’m ONLY planning on delivering newsletters, I use Aweber. Aweber is easy to use, priced fairly, and exactly what I need for newsletters.

I use 1Shoppingcart for occasions when I want to do some email marketing but I also plan on possibly (either now or in the future) marketing services to that list of people. When I was deciding between systems, I looked ahead into the future and realized that there was value for me in selecting one system that did both the autoresponders I needed at the time as well as an ecommerce system that I would use (and subsequently, I have been using) to sell products on my sites. That way, I didn’t have to get one system then and later get another system. It was a “two-for-one” deal in my opinion. I saved time on implementation. I like the long list of services that 1shoppingcart offers, which have always been more than adequate for my needs: http://www.1shoppingcart.com/internet-marketing-tools.asp.

However, just because I chose those two, doesn’t mean that they are right for you. So, take 10 minutes right now and think about what you want in an autoresponder system… both now AND in the future. Then, tomorrow, take ten minutes and revisit each site to see if it has the solutions you want at the price you want to pay. In fact, it might be worth taking ten minutes each day until the next issue of Tips In Ten to decide what you want and click around in each site.

In the upcoming Tips in Ten I’m going to show you how to create an autoresponder, and in a couple of weeks I’ll show you how you can make money from it!

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While there is still a lot of effort to be put into climbing out of this hole, we are hopeful that economists are correct in their prediction of a current economic recovery. While I am not an economist, I am an avid reader and I watch the trends and signs closely and everything does indeed seem to be pointing in the right direction.

So, if that’s the case, are you in recovery mode?

Here’s what I’m talking about: During the darkest depths of the recession, many businesses stopped spending to save on expenses. They redoubled their efforts to drive income (although the wise person will note that if everyone is watching their spending, they’re not buying, so increased sales effort doesn’t always work because it’s a vicious cycle).

And things are turning around and will boom again within the next couple of years. Unfortunately, many small businesses will wait until things are booming again before they finally unlock their wallets to begin buying. That’s a bad strategy. If they do that, they miss out on the highly lucrative growth period between the depths of the down market and the heights of the up market.

So, how can you take advantage of this growth period?

1. Start by investing in your business. Customers are starting to buy again and your business needs to be fresh and ready to serve them. Is your website up to date?
2. Slowly increase your inventory. You don’t have to create a huge backlog, but orders will start coming in and you’ll want to have some inventory to sell. (Colleagues of mine who are service providers are booking up weeks and even months in advance now).
3. Prepare for increased capacity, perhaps by hiring and training additional staff or developing systems and processes that will increase efficiency. It’s best to do this now while you are still a little slow and only just starting to pick up rather than waiting to be bombarded with orders before you do something about it.
4. If you have a good system of upsells, cross-sells, or incremental sales, then lower your prices to generate more marketshare right now. If you don’t have a good system of upsells, cross-sells, or incremental sales, then put one in place first.
5. Consider raising your prices. Don’t make too big of a leap but bump them up slightly in the next six months because, if the market blossoms in the next couple of years then your prices will already be where they need to be.

Now is a good time to start spending because you’re probably beginning to get some more income coming in but many prices are still low because there are lots of businesses still in “recession reaction mode” with extremely low prices to stay afloat.

Lastly, this is the perfect time to stop and look back over the recessionary period and think about what you learned. Are there things you’d do differently in the future? It could be as simple as melting down emotionally at the beginning because you thought that the world was about to end but realizing one year later that business marches on and you’ll be okay. Or, it could be slightly advanced, like the top ten things that you need to do if a recession were to strike in order to stay profitable. Once you’ve figured out what that “if it happened again” list is, write it down, put it in an envelope, and on the envelope write something like: “In Case of Emergency, Open Envelope”. This is your recession survival guide and it will help you to keep a clear head if and when the economy flushes down the drain again.

Good luck!

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However, success tends to breed success. Soon you may find yourself with a steady stream of projects. You may even get to the point of turning down projects that you simply do not have time to complete. The decision then becomes, do you continue to do it yourself, or hire someone? It can be a difficult decision. But you must take into consideration that continuing to work alone can be counterproductive.

There are several reasons for this:

No business owner is good at everything
You probably have a natural aptitude for the work that your business produces. You can quickly and easily turn out finished projects that are of the highest quality. Other types of work, however, may not come so easily to you.

Perhaps you have trouble producing high quality written work. You struggle with putting words together in just the right combination to convey your meaning. Consequently, preparing written reports, ad copy and other documents takes you an inordinate amount of time. Or maybe math is not your strong suit. While words flow quickly out of your fingers, you struggle to understand spreadsheets, complete payroll and perform other tasks that involve long strings of numbers.
No matter what your weaker area is, you will find yourself dedicating extra time to those projects. You will lose valuable productivity simply due to a natural weakness.

No business owner has time for everything
The sheer quantity of tasks that must be performed by a small business can be onerous. Even if you are the rare person who is equally talented in all aspects of business management and production, performing them all by yourself ensures that you have less time to produce your main product. Every task takes time to complete.

So you have to make the decision, should you do it yourself or hire someone?

The solution
You may not be ready to hire an on-site part time or full time staff just yet. That’s okay; after all, those costs can be high when you factor in overhead and equipment purchases. But there is an intermediate step you can take: Outsourcing. Whether you choose a virtual assistant to work consistently with you or a freelancer to take on specific projects, you can scale up or down or hire on an as-needed basis.

The advantage here is that you can start small and slowly build your business in an organic way, rather than hiring an employee and hoping that you’ll get enough extra business to cover their wage. Outsourcing your work is the way to go!

About the author: Heather Villa, MBA CMA MSM, is a Business Coach and Entrepreneur. She helps business owners achieve success in operations, productivity, project management, and social media. Read her other articles at http://hireheathervilla.com/resources/articles/ and visit http://heathervilla.com for more information.

Disclaimer: © 2009 Heather Villa. Permission is granted to repost this article. Article must be published in its entirety, including author bio, and all links must remain intact.

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In a recent blog post at LocationIndependent.com, a site for businesses that can work anywhere (i.e., freelancers or web-based entrepreneurs), they listed a number of really useful things to do to automate business.

Now, before I reference the blog any further, let me just say that automating your business is one of the smartest things you can do. The more you automate, the bigger your business will grow, and the faster it will get there. That’s because so much of our day is sucked away with time-intensive tasks that are often (more than we realize) repetitive. If you can automate these, you can focus more of your time on the unique stuff (and usually that’s the stuff that adds value to your customers).

So here is a brief recap of what LocationIndepent.com talked about in their blog post “Tactical Tips to Put Your Location Independent Business On Autopilot”.

The first set of tips is a Mac-only tip recommending Mac’s Automator function. For those who don’t use Mac, many of the tactics are still easily accomplishable on our lowly PC’s. For example, the writer recommends using Mac’s Automator to automatically back-up files. I have the same thing with JungleDisk and Amazon S3. It’s automatic.

The second set of tips has to do with your browser. This is a huge area of opportunity for people because they often do more repetitive tasks online than they realize. Even though I already do a lot of this stuff I still catch myself from time to time opening and closing a tab a zillion times in a day. (“Hello, Heather, you can keep it open and save yourself a lot of time”).

The third set of tips offered some good advice for Gmail users (and if you’re a reader of my Tips In Ten, I recommend some software for business owners who use email on their own servers to accomplish a lot of what is mentioned in this blog.

The fourth set of tips is for blogs and is some great advice. If you’ve ever posted the phrase “I’m sorry I haven’t blogged in a while, I’ve been busy” on your blog, these tips are for you. (And yes, I know that everyone has typed that at one time or another).

Take the five minutes to read the blog and another half an hour to incorporate many of Location Independent’s techniques and you’ll save yourself many multiples of hours in the future.

Until next time!

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In a recent blog, The Three Natural Phases of Successful Small Business Growth, Jantsch talks about the 3 phases that he sees small businesses progress through.

The first phase is foundation, the second phase is growth, the third stage is momentum. Jantsch describes each phase and encourages readers to identify where they are.

To recap (and to add on to what Jantsch has said):

• Foundation is the early start-up phase where entrepreneurs start their business and work through all of the initial stage work, like creating systems and developing the business plan. In this stage, the business owner is often working solo and the work, although thrilling, might not be extremely profitable.

• Growth is the next phase where the business moves from a solopreneur who runs it all into a revenue-producing machine that probably includes additional staff and refined products or services. Jantsch wisely says that businesses feel the pull to add new markets and products but the better choice here is to narrow your markets and focus.

• Momentum is the third stage and businesses owners who achieve this stage hit a “zen” stage in which they just keep doing the smart, profitable things again and again to consistently build a strong business. But this stage is so easy to fall out of that mindset and it needs to be carefully cultivated and nurtured to be successful. Jantsch also says that this is a stage when other businesses want to partner and align with you.

Jantsch’s blog is so relevant to the work I’ve done and it mirrors closely the clients I’ve worked with over the years as well as the businesses I’ve been involved with.

As a consultant, I’ve helped businesses jump into that Foundation stage. As the owner of IAC Professionals, my staff helps businesses (often those in the growth stage, run by entrepreneurs who need to delegate in order to grow).

If you’re a small business owner looking for the next step in your business, you should consider where you are in this spectrum and how you can advance your business to the next level.

Until next time!

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In comparing mileage notes, it was interesting to think of the parallels with business: The SUV took a massive investment to start and run, and it would only run for a short time before it needed more fuel. Many businesses – especially small businesses and solopreneurs – are like that: They market their business, then do the work, then need to market again for more business.

Conversely the “Prius” of businesses can do a bit of marketing and go for miles on that small amount of marketing “fuel” investment.

So that begs the question: How can businesses go from gas guzzlers to efficient?

The secret is in branding, positioning, and effective marketing that runs without a lot of effort. I’m going to mention a few items here that I think can help businesses make that transition:

• Twitter, when combined with a professional Twitter client like HootSuite (2.0), allows professionals to schedule tweets and tweet more consistently and effectively.

• An assistant, or a virtual assistant like IAC Professionals (hello, of course I’d suggest this!) takes the pressure off of business owners by taking care of some of the marketing to increase their billable time. One client just reported that he had a record-breaking quarter because he gave his virtual assistant nearly all of his marketing tasks to do for him.

• Checklists, CRM systems, and autoresponders are all ways to improve the efficiency of your marketing to reduce the amount of time you need to “stop for gas”.

• As I’m writing this, one of my clients just told me about a coaching class she’s offering. It’s relevant here so I thought I’d mention it: Trish Lambert of Success in Sweatpants is a certified “Book Yourself Solid” trainer (based on Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid system and book). She’s offering a “coaching in sweatpants” class that covers how to build a foundation for success, how to build trust and credibility, and how to promote yourself. The classes cover critical topics like “how to have a brand”, “how to be an expert”, “how to have effective sales conversations”, and more. Read more about it here: Coaching in Sweatpants and sign up for her class!

Business growth does come from marketing, but not just any marketing. It comes from strategic marketing built on a solid foundation and one that aims at reducing how much you actually market while increasing the effectiveness of the time you do spend marketing.

Speak Soon!

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My role with small businesses when managing their projects is to help busy entrepreneurs who don’t have time to give the attention to the project that it deserves. They may have a vision for the project but simply don’t have the energy or space to get any traction on it. They’re busy running their business so it makes sense to outsource that effort to someone who can get it done for them.

Larger companies that contract my project management services use me for a different reason: They often have 2 or 3 teams – as many as a few dozen people – working on a single project and those teams need to be managed and corralled and political battles need to be worked out. They have the time and energy to run the project but there are so many voices that want to be heard and personal, professional, and “business-political” agendas that want to be fulfilled. They need someone to keep it all together.

So, to borrow imagery from another time, large businesses need me to keep the horses harnessed and going in the same direction while small businesses need me to find some horses and a harness and hook them up to the wagon.

Some further differences are related to the amount of ownership I’m granted over the project. Small businesses often give me a huge amount of ownership. The business owner “transmits” his or her vision to me and I’m asked to run with it (and often to leverage my own experience and expertise to deliver). Large businesses own the project and expect little in the way of ideas and input on product development itself. By the time they’re ready to move forward with a project, there is already an owner.

Lastly, investment and return on investment are two interesting comparisons. Small businesses will usually work on smaller projects themselves and only engage my services when a project is large. Therefore, when comparing a percentage of the budget, small businesses are dedicating a large amount of per-revenue-dollar-earned to the project than their big business counterparts, for whom a project might only be a small fraction of their budget. But the ROI difference is dramatic: Small businesses that are implementing projects big enough to require a project manager are going to see huge returns, even to the point of total business transformation. Large businesses, though, even if they spend a similar budgetary percentage, are not going to see the same dramatic change.

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