How to Out-Sell, Out-Market,
Out-Promote, Out-Advertise Everyone Else You Compete Against
Before
They Even Know What Hit Them
PAUL F. GORMAN
DEDICATED TO JOANIE, MY WONDERFUL WIFE
Copyright 2011 by Paul F.Gorman
Smashwords Edition
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
“This book is an eye-opener to success and wealth through proven
strategies – if you don’t feel inspired when you read it you best
check yourself for a pulse!”
Charles Hallett, Expense
Reduction Analysts
What this book can do for you
* How to take total control of your business – and results!
* Why investing in your business will make you 100-times more money than any passive investment you can name
* How to increase your sales by 500% - maybe more – virtually overnight
* How to create headlines and opening gambits that bring your riches
* You have only 4 seconds to grab a customer’s attention – here’s the key.
* 16 response words that increase the power of your headline.
* 21 money-earning headlines – adapt them for your business!
* The greatest success principle of all time – it’s virtually impossible to ever fail in business when you apply this to everything you do.
* A powerful 7-step formula that keeps customers riveted to your sales message.
* How to spot endorsements and testimonials that persuade customers to buy – and reject those that do not.
* Why it’s true “the more you tell, the more you sell.” The most important lesson you can ever learn about communicating to your customers or clients.
* ‘Reasons-why’ advertising – it will significantly increase the validity and selling strength of your letters, advertisements and brochures.
* Why every business should have a profit-generated database installed
* 33 point check list for your business
* The 7 biggest sales letter mistakes and how to avoid them.
* Become a customer of yours for a day – you’ll be amazed what you discover!
* Why you MUST specialise to achieve outstanding growth.
* Six effective ways to ask for the order and get it!
* Five golden rules of customer targeting – use these to as much as DOUBLE your sales.
* My Secret Weapon. Not one in twenty businesses understand this critical customer philosophy. As soon as you apply it to your business, your sales and profits will soar through the roof.
* 10 rules for writing sales letters that make big money.
* Add one component to your sales letters and response will increase by up to 300%
* 10 winning techniques to make small ads pay.
* 10 winning techniques to make large ads pay.
* How to increase response to your flyers and inserts by up to 800%!
* Revealed: How to multiply sales from brochures and catalogues.
* How to skyrocket your sales by adopting this simple method of communicating with customers.
* Analysis of a £2.4 million sales letter.
* How to double your sales – or more – by accessing other company’s customers.
* How to attract 100’s – 1000’s of new customers or clients within just weeks.
* Plus much more!
Let this book guide you to outstanding levels of business success and wealth. Read it again and again, do exactly as it says, and you will open the door to fabulous achievement and riches, plus a nobler, finer and satisfying life.
Table of Contents
PART ONE HOW TO PRIME YOUR BUSINESS FOR MAJOR LEAGUE RESULTS
Chapter 1: How To Change The Odds Of Winning And Super-Charge Your Business With New Sales
Chapter 2: The Key To Super-Growth Most Business Owners
Chapter 3: Marketing Your Business Is The Ultimate Investment
PART TWO HOW TO WIN NEW CUSTOMERS BEFORE YOUR COMPETITORS
Chapter 4: Image Or Direct-Response?
Chapter 5: The Million Pound Sales Key
Chapter 6: How To Keep Customers Riveted To Your Sales Message
Chapter 7: Explain What You Sell In Detail
Chapter 8: Generate Higher Response By Giving Your Reasons-Why
Chapter 9: My Secret Weapon... Risk Reversal
Chapter 10: Risk Reversal PART 2. Getting It To Work For You
Chapter 11: Market To Your Intended Customers Only
Chapter 12: How To Target Your Most Ready-To-Buy Customers
PART THREE HOW TO WRITE SALES LETTERS, ADVERTS, FLYERS, INSERTS & BROCHURES THAT SELL
Chapter 13: The Key To Writing Sales Letters That SELL
Chapter 14: Increase Response To Sales Letters Up To 300%
Chapter 15: How To Out-Advertise Every One Of Your Competitors
Chapter 16: Chance Discovery Reveals How To Increase Flyer And Insert Response By Up To 8 Times
Chapter 17: Revealed: How To Multiply Sales From Brochures and Catalogues
PART FOUR 7 RAPID BUSINESS MULTIPLIERS – HOW TO GENERATE £10,000 - £100,000 NEW BUSINESS AND CASH, VIRTUALLY OVERNIGHT
Chapter 18: Rapid Business Multiplier #1: Test And Market The Clear Winner
Chapter 19: Rapid Business Multiplier #2: Communicate Regularly With Your Customers Or Clients
Chapter 20: Rapid Business Multiplier #3: Start A Profit-Generating Database
Chapter 22: Rapid Business Multiplier #5: Make It Easy And Pleasurable For Customers To Buy From You
PART FIVE THREE BONUS CHAPTERS
Bonus Chapter 1 How To Put Your Business On A New Course Of Success In 30 Days Or Less
Bonus Chapter 2 How To Find Up To £1,000,000 New “Cash” To Rapidly Increase Your Sales
IMPORTANT NOTES
Publisher’s Notes
This book was first published in 1998. Although the information, help, tips and advice remain just as valid and helpful today, some things have changed. Prices, for example. And most of us have now probably heard of a company called Amazon! I’ve left the prices as they were - any changes made for this edition will just go out of date as well. Please do remember the date of the original book as you read this one though.
Where possible, I’ve converted sales letters to plain text so that they will work in whatever formats and sizes you are using. Images have been used to display layouts, but the original detail has suffered in the conversion to ‘one size fits all’ ebooks. That’s the nature of the beasts, I’m afraid. So where relevant, I’ve also included the body copy text of the ads.
I do hope you enjoy the book, it is one of my all-time favourite business references, and has certainly helped me along the way.
Paul Hurst
How To Use This Book To Grow Your Business
This book is divided into five parts. Although I know you will be tempted to flick through it, and go straight to sections which apply to you most, you should, when you’ve finished flicking, read the whole book in order.
Why? Because this information is most powerful only when you use it in combination.
For instance, if you skipped right to Chapter 15: How To Out-Advertise Every One Of Your Competitors, without understanding the secrets of human-response found in Part 2, you’d miss out on the power of persuasion that enables you to write powerful ads.
The book gives you—Part One: a revealing understanding of your business’s real potential to attract customers and generate wealth. Part Two: an understanding of human nature—the strategies and communication approaches that compel customers to respond to your sales message. Part Three: high-profit marketing techniques, methods and concepts you can use to rapidly build your business. Part Four: Cash generation—how to generate up to £10,000-£1,000,000 new business and cash, virtually overnight.
Commit to applying the strategies in this book. They work! Here’s what I suggest: If your e-reader makes it possible, highlight every passage that is important to you as you read it. Tests have proven that when you highlight a passage, you absorb information two-three times more effectively.
Second, take immediate action on each worthwhile strategy.
That said, let’s move on...
Introduction
Growing your business is a SCIENTIFIC process. Contrary to most professional advice, the process of attracting buying customers to your door is uncomplicated, logical, and systematic.
Fundamentally, you only need grasp one simple— but critical— principle, in order to build your business to almost any size and financial level you want. Nothing can stop your progress once you incorporate this foundational principle into every contact you have with customers and prospective customers.
It is this:
No matter what business you are in, you are really selling to the same customer as every other business: a PERSON!
Think about it. Whether you are looking to buy a bar of soap, a washing machine, a car, a copper pipeline, a PC, a holiday, a.... book!, you want the same basic fulfilment from your purchase— benefits, results, and value for money.
That’s all you care about as a customer. That’s all your customers care about when they buy from you. “Will this really work for me?” is the same question every customer asks every seller, no matter what they are buying. When you understand how to market your product or service with human-response strategies by interestingly, informatively, and educationally demonstrating the benefits, advantages, results, and value your customer can expect when buying from you, you possess the ammunition to rapidly increase your sales and multiply your bottom line profits, by many hundreds of percent.
Perhaps the most surprising—and exhilarating—suggestion I want to put to you is this: You always have been, and you always will be, in total control of your business results.
When I suggested this at one of my business-building seminars recently, an experienced businessman stood right up and said, “That’s not true! Every external factor that I have no control over affects my business results, like whether the economy is booming or depressed, whether customers respond to my advertising, the cost of my overhead, what my competitors are charging!”
Of course he was correct, right?
Wrong.
I will show you how to profit in both boom and depression, how to guarantee customers respond to your advertisements, how to make so much residual money that overhead is not even a consideration, and how to gain powerful competitive advantage, almost overnight.
When you apply marketing principles, methods, techniques, and strategies that have for years proven to be more sales and profit-effective than any others, and you recognise that your customer is king, your business success becomes predictable.
My goal in writing this book is to furnish you with the precise sales-building and profit-generating strategies that will change your business from run-of-the-mill to runaway success, from marginally profitable to cash rich, from industry henchman to industry leader.
One more thing. It’s important.
Many, if not all, the concepts, methods, and strategies you’ll learn in this book go against ‘traditional’ business wisdom and teaching. You won’t learn these techniques at business college, or in most marketing books, or from your peers, bank manager, or accountant.
Neither, regrettably, will you get the results I promise you if you commission an advertising agency, bar a handful.
So I ask you to keep your mind open. Don’t be wedded to tradition. Your first instinct, when you see a result quoted, or a strategy that promises large, geometric increases in sales, might be to disbelieve that you can achieve the same results in your business. Don’t make that mistake. Change your paradigm. Adopt a different mind-set. Become a believer of possibility, not impossibility.
There is no theory here. Every figure I cite, every improvement in sales and profits, are actual results obtained by real businesses today.
Let’s now get straight on with building your business!
PART 1
How to Prime Your Business For Super-Success
CHAPTER 1: How To Change The Odds of Winning and Super-Charge Your Business with New Sales
Imagine you could change the rules of doing business. Imagine you could influence every sales process, marketing strategy, promotional event, and advertising campaign you ever undertake, in your favour, so the odds of you winning... and generating substantially higher sales and bottom line profits... were multiplied up to many hundreds of times.
Equally, imagine if you could reduce, or eliminate entirely, the risk you take as a business owner. What if there were a set of sales-multiplying strategies sufficiently powerful and profit-driven to make your success predictable?
Impossible, right?
WRONG!
You CAN change the rules of business so the odds of winning are in your favour. More than that, you can apply marketing strategies, concepts, methods and principles that will change the performance of your business, virtually overnight.
When you apply the marketing procedures that, for years, have proven to be more sales and profit-efficient than any others identified, your success indeed will be predictable.
Too bold a statement? Consider this.
Eighteen months ago, the proprietor of a computer company asked me to help him grow his business. He designs and builds PC’s and provides maintenance contracts for office machinery. He’d been in business seventeen years and built an impressive list of high profile clients, including a number of well known national companies.
But although he’d attempted various ways to gain new customers his response was disappointing. What could he do? After seeing his marketing I realised the problem. He was marketing himself in the same way 95 percent of his competitors were marketing themselves.
What distinguishes one business from another when nearly every company in an industry markets themselves in fundamentally the same way? This company was saying: we offer a good product and service, buy from us! They received little response from this approach. Hundreds of computer companies claim they sell quality PC’s, at competitive prices, with good service. He was only one in a big crowd of businesses trying to wave down passing customers.
I suggested he use a strategy that would give him immediate competitive advantage, and position his company favourably in the eyes of his prospective customers.
For less than £1,000 spent on marketing the strategy his turnover increased by 31 percent in just six weeks.
It was not difficult to implement. It was not costly. It was just a strategy that made his success predictable. You can use it in your business too. (See Chapter 13.)
Another entrepreneur who ran a secretarial training school wanted to know how to increase response from her advertising. Her ads were pulling only four or five new students a week, not enough to pay for themselves, nor to grow her business.
But, like most businesses I see, her ads were institutional not direct response. They didn’t grab her prospect’s attention, provide a compelling reason to respond, or ask for action. They simply stated her school’s name, listed courses available, and gave an address and telephone number. But this wasn’t enough to compel students to take her courses! Consequently, her advertising was largely a waste of resources.
When the ad was rewritten, her response skyrocketed by 400 percent within seven days. Bear in mind, the ad was the same size; it cost her not a penny more but her response was now four times higher. Instead of five students from each ad she now got twenty. This was possible because she used a marketing strategy that made her success predictable. You can increase response to your advertisements, too. (See Chapter 15.)
A young client of mine owns a hair styling and beauty therapy salon. It is well positioned on the high street, she is highly qualified, and her existing clients are loyal to the salon.
But try as she would, only a trickle of new clients came into the salon each month. To make matters tougher, there were five competing salons in her street, each of which seemed to have more money to market with than she did.
She wasn't getting anywhere.
Like most businesses with competitors on the doorstep, she needed to gain competitive advantage. What she didn’t understand at the time was how straightforward it usually is.
Until this time, she had tried advertising to bring in new clients, as her five competitors did. Only their ads were bigger and more impressive.
So I suggested a simple strategy that no other salon was using. The result? She gained powerful competitive advantage almost overnight, and increased her turnover 22 percent in four weeks. Now, whenever she wants additional clients she simply repeats the strategy. Her competitors are scratching their heads wondering how she is attracting all the business while they continue to run big, fancy— and costly—advertisements with marginal response.
She won a stream of new clients because she applied a marketing strategy that made her success predictable. You can do the same in your business. (See Chapter 13: letter #3, plus Chapter 23: Rapid Business Multiplier #6.)
You do not have to ‘gamble’ to win customers—if you use proven, time-tested, profit-driven, sales-multiplying strategies. You never have to only ‘hope’ to significantly boost your sales and increase your profits. You don’t ever have to just ‘wish’ you could succeed.
Gambling, hoping and wishing doesn’t play any part in it. You can take quantum leaps forward if, and as soon as, you apply principles that cannot fail to grow your business.
How To Apply These Business-Building Strategies To Your Business
These principles work in any business. And I do mean any.
Do you believe that? Surely, selling insurance is different to selling clothes? Selling houses is different to selling computers. Selling memberships to a health club is different to selling tables at a restaurant? If you believe that, you are right... and wrong!
Selling houses is different to selling computers. But the principle of persuading prospects to respond to your sales message is the same.
When you understand how to compel prospects with your sales message, and you apply those principles to the idiosyncrasies of your particular business, you win more buying customers.
Why? Because the principles of human-response are scientific. Just as the law of gravity applies all over the planet, whether you are a good or bad person, whether the economy is sluggish or bullish, whether you are in Britain, the USA, Australia, or Fiji, so the law of human-response applies to all customers. We’d all be in chaos if gravity suddenly decided to stop working because a very important person was about to fall from a tall building. Gravity won’t stop working for anybody. So you’d better watch out for it!
So it is with human-response. When you use the principles and specific strategies that I’ll show you, you increase the odds in your favour. Attracting customers becomes a certainty.
I Challenge You To Grow Your Business NOW!
I challenge you to apply the business-building strategies, concepts, principles and methods revealed in this book, and see your venture grow exponentially. Have no doubt: You can take major, major leaps forward when you apply the specifics I’ll show you.
Every year approximately 450,000 people in the UK start a business. 56 percent fail within the first three years. Two years 22 How To Change The Odds Of Winning And Super-Charge Your Business With New Sales later the failures rise to 76 percent. Sadly most of these businesses had a good idea, a good product, or a good service. You can have a great product, and fail. You can have a second-rate product, and succeed.
It’s not only your idea, product, or service that counts. It’s how you market yourself that creates the titanic difference between runaway success, and mediocrity, or failure.
Most businesses never succeed in growing to the size they quite easily could, or they fail, because they use strategies that make it difficult for them to succeed.
They never reach their potential because they don’t understand the strategies that would virtually guarantee their success. They assume it’s difficult and expensive to acquire new customers in a competitive market. But it’s simple when you adopt and apply proven sales-winning techniques.
Over the years, I have spoken to hundreds of business owners. Here are the top five challenges they quote as being difficult to tackle:
* Business is slow. Customers are cautious about spending money.
*
I don’t know how to acquire more customers.
*
Competitors are selling on price—I can’t compete at rock-bottom
prices without going bust.
* I haven’t got the financial
resources I need to market my business effectively.
* I am in a
catch-22. I need extra staff to grow but I cannot afford the
salaries.
All valid reasons. But when you look at their marketing you realise these businesses are keeping customers away with punitive sales attempts. They erect a barrier between themselves and prospective buyers. Unknowingly, they make it difficult not easy for customers to buy from them.
A self-made multimillionaire who grew a fledgling carpet shop into California’s largest carpet and flooring supplier with thirty-six outlets told me, “If all this was taken away from me to-morrow, and I was left with no money at all, I could start over and within twelve months, I’d be a millionaire again.”
He understood human nature. He knew how to compel customers with his sales messages. He realised the importance of giving value. He could repeat the ‘formula’ without any start-up capital and customers would once again flock to his door.
These pages reveal how to engineer your own business supremacy, create mammoth sales and profit leverage, and provide you personally with rich financial rewards. You’ll discover how to win more customers than you’ve dreamed of, realise how to garner additional sales from your existing customers, how to increase the average worth of each sale, how to create multiple profit-centres, arrange high-profit joint ventures and host/recipient alliances, engineer large cash windfalls from hidden assets within your business, become a customer-oriented organisation. You’ll discover how adding value to every sale attracts ten times the number of customers.
And you’ll see how to position yourself as a leader within your market and ride profitably through even the most competitive and economically challenging conditions.
The challenge is set! I know what amount of financial value the information on these pages is worth to your business—and to you personally. Apply the secrets I’ll share with you and you will reap high rewards.
Read how each strategy will produce higher sales and improved profits. Then start applying the strategies to your particular business situation. As you introduce them, and keep on applying them, your business will grow exponentially, gain leadership, stability and poise within your market, accumulate large cash resources, and provide you with the competitive advantage you are looking for.
Flip the page now to discover: The Key To Super-Growth Most Business Owners Overlook...
CHAPTER 2: The Key To Super-Growth Most Business Owners Overlook
If I asked you, “What is your business?” you might reply the computer business, or the restaurant business, or the steel tube business, or the airline business, or the photographic processing business, or the vitamin supplements business, or the fashion business, or whatever business yours is.
But if you answered by telling me what business you are ‘in’, I would know you are probably holding your business back from growing as successfully as it could. The good news is you can correct this subtle— but critical— mistake very quickly. I have seen miracle changes and new sales occur within weeks as soon as a business owner realises the simple but largely overlooked key to super-growing any business.
What is it?
Whatever your type of trade, service, or profession, never... ever... work ‘in’ it.
What do you do if you don’t work in it?
You work ‘on’ it.
A businessman telephoned me once in desperation. He was in the kitchen refitting business.
He told me he manufactured high quality kitchen units and because he sold them direct to the public, cutting out the middle man, he was able to sell at lower prices than most of his competitors. Yet his sales were slow and he was rapidly losing money He was frustrated and dismayed. What was he doing wrong?
After listening to him explain his business, I told him he was working ‘in’ it, not ‘on’ it.
He had a good product. He was selling at competitive prices. But he was viewing his business from an internal perspective not an external perspective.
He was too involved in the minute-to-minute, everyday running of his enterprise, instead of allocating some specific time each week to marketing his business.
To paraphrase Joe Karbo, the late marketing genius and self made millionaire, he was too busy earning a living to make any money.
Most entrepreneurs, directors, and professionals I see are too busy running their business to make any money.
How To Change From Working ‘In’ Your Business To Working ‘On’ It
To understand how to change from working ‘in’ your business to working ‘on’ it, and to multiply your results, throw open your imagination. Use your mind to play a game.
Imagine you are playing the board game, Monopoly™. Imagine you could shrink your body to the size of one of the game pieces on the board.
You’d notice tall buildings; huge, oversized piles of money; you’d be moved from one end of the board to the other without your consent. You’d be wheeled and dealed by someone controlling you.
You’d be ‘in’ the game.
Now imagine you enlarge yourself to full size again and take control of the game. Now you control the moves. You make the deals. You evaluate the board situation and make your moves based on what you think will profit you most.
You are now working ‘on’ the game. You’re no longer a game piece, you’re a game player—in control.
Do you see the difference? Do you think you’d win more games controlling the board from above, rather than being one of the game pieces? Of course! You are significantly more effective playing from above.
The same is true of your business.
Millions of pounds are made by savvy entrepreneurs buying an ailing business at a knock-down price, increasing its value with effective marketing, and selling it at large profit.
Why is one entrepreneur able to succeed while the founder failed? Because the founder was too attached to his or her venture.
If you hold dear your product or service, or you don’t recognise the absolute need to systematically market what you’re selling, you can mistakenly assume customers will recognise it’s value without being presented with the full sales story. That very rarely happens!
To succeed you have to market your products or services with interesting, compelling, believable sales messages that evoke a buying response.
Understand This Key And You’re On Your Way To Big Success
In order to grow your business successfully, always—everyday, every hour—work on it, not in it. What do you work on? Work on marketing your product or service.
You’re not in the business of computers, or restaurants, or steel tubes, or vitamin supplements, or whatever—you are really in the business of marketing.
This is the key to geometrically growing a business that most owners, directors and professionals overlook. Whenever you see a business out-selling its competitors, don’t scratch your head thinking, “If only I had their product or service, I’d be selling high volumes too.” No, look at their marketing!
Marketing your business is the powerful key to creating all the success and wealth you could ever want. When you market your business you are working on it, and you’ll reap one hundred times more reward than if you keep working in it.
One caveat: The marketing keys I am showing you are highly effective sales and profit multipliers. The strategies, concepts and principles you’ll learn are responsible for millions of pounds of additional sales throughout a diverse range of companies and industries.
Unfortunately, they work as effectively on bad products or services as they do on good ones, at least initially. So, in knowing how to generate high response you have a responsibility to yourself and your customers.
I am sure you are honest and are interested in giving good value. Of course, you’ll be far more successful, and far wealthier, selling good value than you ever will selling bad quality or valueless products.
But if you were dishonest you would... initially... be able to sell high volumes with good marketing. Why? Because marketing is the key.
Why Bad Businesses Often Succeed And Great Businesses Often Fail
You’ve seen bad products sell consistently. You’ve seen great products bomb. It is all down to how they are marketed.
You can use effective marketing to sell high volumes of good... and, unfortunately, bad... products.
And you can use ineffective marketing on a great product, and it will be doomed to mediocrity or failure.
You might have heard about the coat-hook scandal some years ago. An unscrupulous businessman placed an advert in a national advertiser selling a new design of coat hook. “Hang your coats anywhere in the house—on any door or wall—with these attractive new, easy to fix hooks. 10 hooks just £3,” promised the advert.
A few thousand people bought the hooks, for the publication had over one million readers. But when customers received their package, all they got was ten steel door nails.
Not surprisingly, the trickster had to flee when he was bombarded by angry customers.
Does effective marketing work, even on a bad product?
Absolutely! Is it worth trying to make a quick buck dishonestly? Absolutely not. Had this rogue offered genuine, good value coat hooks he could have continued advertising and made a lot more money. His ad worked well!
The key to optimum business success is to offer the best value product or service you can afford, market it powerfully, ensure your customers are satisfied, and sell your back-end repeatedly.
Always remember, what determines how successful you will be is not so much to do with your product or service, it’s how well you market it.
What difference will marketing really make to your sales, bottom line profits, and to your personal wealth? Flip to the next chapter to find out...
CHAPTER 3: Marketing Your Business Is The Greatest Investment You Can Ever Make
There is not a faster or more effective system of creating wealth for yourself than through the powerful process of marketing your business.
When it boils down to fundamentals, you are in business to make money. Hopefully you have a product or service that you enjoy selling, even cherish.
But when it comes time to go home at the end of the week, and you’ve been honest and ethical in your dealings with customers, you want to be in a position to take the largest financial payoff for your effort that you personally desire, or need.
More than this, I believe it is your responsibility as a business owner to create wealth for the livelihood of yourself, your family, your employees, your vendors, your suppliers, and your community.
These people rely on you either totally or in part for their livelihoods. By creating wealth—by optimizing your business performance and generating the highest possible profit returns for your efforts—you not only increase the quality and capability of your life and the life of your family, you play a significant role in increasing the quality and capabilities of your employees and vendors lives, and those in your community.
I believe in optimum performance. Why have an asset lying in your business that isn’t producing the highest profit-return it is capable of? Or isn’t producing any profit at all?
Right now your business has hidden assets you can gain powerful leverage on within days or weeks. The biggest of those are your customers themselves.
But most businesses I see market themselves so ineffectively, they drive customers away in droves, rather than attract them in masses.
Imagine! Did you ever think your sales approach could be driving prospective customers away, allowing them to give money to your competitors? I see marketing every day that is doing just that.
When you use interesting, informative, compelling, educational, ethical marketing, and you apply it to every asset in your business, then customers will beat a path to your door, and you will generate more wealth, more efficiently, more quickly.
If You Want To Make a Million Pounds There Are Two Ways You Can Succeed
If you want to become financially independent, there are basically two ways you can achieve it: you can invest in a passive growth vehicle—stocks or shares or property, for instance.
Or you can generate it yourself by marketing your business.
I want to suggest that you can create far more wealth, more rapidly, in a business of your own, than you ever can by investing in stocks, shares, or property.
If you invest in stocks or shares, just as you can make a profitable return on your investment, you can also, of course, lose your investment. There's a direct correlation between risk and return.
But when you invest in marketing your business, you may be surprised to learn you have very little risk, or no risk at all.
Why? Because stocks and shares are a passive investment; you have no control over the growth of your money. If you invest £100,000, along with the potential to make money, you risk making no money if the market remains stagnant, or losing your entire £100,000 if the stocks you’ve invested in fail. Do you want more money to improve the quality of your life now? Then don’t invest in stocks or shares! Generally, if you want a fairly low-risk stock investment (I would!) it takes years for you to gain on your capital.
Are you impatient for results? Are you a now person? I know I am. I want results now! I don’t want to wait forever for things to happen. Particularly where business and financial success are concerned.
If there’s a faster way of multiplying sales, an overlooked method of winning new customers, a more efficient system of amassing cash resources, I want to know about it and apply it right away!
How You Can Invest And Make £1,000,000+
If you are willing to invest long-term, you can put money in reasonably safe trusts—Unit Trusts—and reap considerably higher returns than is possible from any high street.
Unit Trusts (Mutual Funds in the US) have proven to be amongst the highest returning ‘safe’ investments. Over the last twenty-five years, top performing funds have produced an average return for their investors of between 16 - 21 percent.
But even if you invested £200 a month—£6.60 a day—with a 20 percent annual compound growth on capital, it would take you ten years to get £75,219, fifteen years to get £233,140, twenty years to get £621,930, and twenty-five years to get £1,697,057.
Don’t get me wrong, £1,700,000 is a lot of money. But twenty-five years is a long time to wait for it if there is a faster way.
Your Business Has The Leverage To Out-Perform Any Investment!
But in business you are in control of your results. You can accumulate wealth considerably faster. You always have been, and you always will be, in total control of your business results.
If you invest £100,000 in your business, and you use specific, profit-driven marketing strategies to grow your enterprise, you can reap a return of £150,000, £200,000, £300,000, £500,000, £1,000,000 or more, substantially faster.
How? Your business always has, and always will have, the ability to generate up to hundreds of percent return on your investment, with very low risk, or no risk at all.
Here’s an example.
Let’s say you are in the pet food business—you make premium dog food and sell it in tins to retailers nationally.
You run an advert in a prominent retail trade magazine to encourage more stores to stock your tins.
Your advert costs £1,000. Each box, consisting of six tins of food, costs the retailer £5 to buy, from which you make £2 profit. Currently, you sell an average of 575 boxes from every advert.
So you make £150 profit. (575 boxes x £2 profit = £1,150 minus £1,000 ad cost = £150 profit.)
Now what if I could show you how to increase the number of boxes you sell without increasing the size of your ad?
What if I showed you seven key elements your advert was missing that would significantly increase your response?
With the right elements of response in your advert, your sales can increase by 50 percent, 100 percent, 200 percent, 500 percent, or more. Results of this magnitude are everyday events when direct response strategies are applied to institutional advertising.
Massive increases in response are being achieved by businesses applying these strategies. Amongst the most powerful response-multipliers you can use in your marketing are headlines.
You’ll see how straightforward it is to add £1,000’s, £10,000’s, £100,000’s, or £1,000,000’s to your sales with powerful, benefit-oriented headlines. (See Chapter 5.)
But in case you accuse me of being over-enthusiastic let’s be conservative. What happens when you apply a few of the marketing techniques you’ll learn in the following chapters to your dog food advert?
Let’s say by including a compelling headline, an interesting and persuasive sales story, a risk-reversal guarantee, and a call-to-action, your sales from each advert increase by 50 percent. Here’s what would happen:
Previously you were making £150 profit per £1,000 advert. In other words, you were achieving a 15 percent growth on your money: (£1,000 to £1,150 = 15%.) Not bad.
Your new advert increases your sales by 50 percent. Now you sell 863 boxes instead of 575. Your profit is boosted from £150 to £726 per advert—a 484% increase in profit on the same £1,000 investment (863 boxes x £2 profit = £1,726 minus £1,000 ad cost = £726 profit.)
You have increased your return on investment simply by recognising and gaining leverage on an asset you already have— in this case, your advertising.
Always remember: You always have been, and you always will be, in total control of your business results.
You can—at any time—switch your business on or off to suit your circumstances. You are in control.
What if you tested various other adverts, and your response increased by 100 percent, or two hundred percent, or more? Your profit would skyrocket even further.
Where else can you influence the outcome of your investment by applying growth strategies that increase the return you receive?
No other investment I know of provides you with the same leverage. No passive investment can earn equally high returns within just weeks or months, with little or no risk.
What other opportunity in life gives you the ability to compound your profits month after month, year after year, by such large multiples?
In the early Eighties I was selling an audio home study course on how to play rock and jazz-rock guitar. It was the first ‘interactive’ home study course available.
When students completed each lesson, they were asked to record a musical assignment on cassette tape and return it for a recorded critique and helpful hints on how to improve their playing. A live guitarist would also play examples on their tape.
I placed adverts in the national music press asking readers to cut a coupon and send for a free information pack. The headline I used was:
Rock
Guitar
Course
The ads were making a profit. But I wondered if I could generate more response without enlarging the ad or spending more money. So I wrote and tested five different headlines that I thought would motivate budding players to send for details of the course.
Two of them produced less response than I was getting already. One pulled about the same. One pulled a little more. But one pulled a massive 500 percent more response.
Overnight I was receiving five times more inquiries every time I placed the ad. Bear in mind the size and cost of my ad was the same.
From that day on I realised the tremendous leveraging power you have as a business owner when you understand that marketing is the key.
What was the winning headline? Here it is:
Be A Successful
Lead Guitarist...
Earn While
You Learn
One company selling English language courses changed the headline of their advert from,
The Man Who Simplified English
to,
Do You Make These Mistakes In English?
The new headline pulled 300 percent more response than the previous one.
An Insurance company tested two different headlines for a lower cost motor insurance for drivers with a good driving history. The headlines were:
Auto Insurance At Lower Rates If You Are A Good Driver
and,
How To Turn Your Careful Driving Into Money
The first headline pulled an incredible 1,200 percent more than the second.
Apply These Sales-Boosting Strategies To Every Area Of Your Business
Never doubt you can boost your advertising results by quantum leaps when you apply simple, but powerful, marketing techniques.
But it doesn’t only apply to your advertising! Every area of your business can generate higher profits. Whether you are advertising, sending sales letters, brochures, flyers, blow-ins, direct mail, one, two, or three-step selling, using telemarketing, employing sales people... every area of your business can be recognised as a leveragable asset, and coerced into producing a higher profit.
That is why I suggest marketing your business gives you the greatest investment opportunity.
YOU Are In Total Control Of Your Business Results
Most business owners, directors and professionals are not aware that they control their business results. In owning a business, you control your success and your ultimate destiny.
Most believe they are at the mercy of circumstances they have little control over. If sales are slow they presume they can’t do much to change them. If no one comes into their store they think there’s no other way of selling. If a new product fails to make an impact on consumers they say it’s the fault of the product, not the marketing.
But external circumstances do not control your results. You control your results by the effectiveness of your marketing. How you market your product or service is the key to how prosperous your business becomes.
Not one in twenty businesses I see uses savvy, direct-response marketing strategies that enable them to optimize their performance. When you apply them, not only will you multiply your results, but your competitors won’t understand how you’re doing it. It won’t make sense to them. They believe there isn’t an alternative, more effective way.
Right now, commit every element of your business to the strategies of peak performance. Understand that marketing and optimizing your assets provides you with the ultimate investment opportunity. Realise that you are in control of that opportunity.
In my seminars I show business owners, company directors and professionals how to grow their ventures up to tenfold over twelve to twenty months, using the strategies in this book. You can do the same.
Marketing is the key to all the sales, growth, industry leadership, and cash resources you ever want... and need... to compete successfully in today’s environment.
Now let’s get specific in Part 2: How To Win New Customers Before Your Competitors…
PART 2
How to Win New Customers Before Your Competitors
CHAPTER 4: Image Or Direct-Response: What Do Customers Respond To First?
Most print, radio and TV ads, brochures, sales letters, flyers, blow-ins, inserts, card decks I see are largely a waste of cash resources. Businesses ceaselessly broadcast unconvincing sales messages hoping to capture new customers. Most of these—unbeknown to those who write them—are so ineffective at persuading a prospect to buy, they waste 80 or 90 percent of the cash spent on them.
Most marketing I see in the UK, USA, and Europe is ‘institutional’ or ‘image’ marketing. It portrays a selfish me-the-business message instead of an altruistic you-the-customer message.
It says to prospects: Buy what I am selling. Give me your money instead of a competitor.” Messages like this are largely ignored. They may look graphically appealing, or they may amuse your prospects, but they don’t compel them to buy.
From the very first time Stone Age man traded a club or flint with his neighbour, the only thing he was interested in was “What’s in it for me?” There's no way he wandered up to the club-makers cave wanting to know what business name the bearded one traded under, what beautiful wood carving went into his club making, or how long his enterprise had been established. All he wanted to know was, “How is this club going to help me clobber my next meal?”
Not much has changed! In most respects human nature is the same today. All your customers want to know is, “What’s in it for me?” They’re screaming, “Tell me the benefits of your product or service, and show me the advantage I will gain, and I’ll buy large quantities from you.”
As a business owner trying to sell as many of your products or services as possible, the nearer you get to specifically answering the What’s in it for me? question, the more you will sell.
Institutional or image marketing does not come close to compelling a prospect to buy from you? Why? Because it fails to persuasively demonstrate the benefits and advantages your product or service offers. It doesn't lead your prospect through the sale to the point of purchase.
How To Grab Prospects Attention And Lead Them To Buy Your Product
Since the early 1900s, tens of thousands of market tests, and millions of pounds of investment, have proved unarguably that direct-response sales messages out-pull institutional marketing by large margins. Customers and prospects respond in significantly greater numbers to a direct, specific, compelling, and detailed sales message, than to a glitzy institutional me- message.
Any piece of marketing, advertising or promotion that does not evoke some form of immediate response from your reader, listener, or viewer, either as an inquiry or a sale, is at worst a blatant waste of your cash resources, and at best not able to produce the considerably higher response you could receive for no extra expenditure.
The Folly of Institutional Marketing
Institutional marketing is what most businesses produce. Typically they will create an advert with their company or product name emblazoned across the top, a list and perhaps photographs of what they sell, prices, an ‘established since...’ statement, with their address and telephone number at the bottom.
They are saying here we are, this is what we sell, this is the price, and here’s where you can buy it. But just presenting me with your product and its price isn’t going to persuade me to buy it.
This type of marketing will hardly, if ever, recover its production cost let alone generate an optimum profit.
Think about it. When have you ever bought a product after simply seeing it? Before you buy something, you want to discover as much about it as you can—what it will do for you, how it will benefit, help, enrich, make easier, faster, better, your life or your work or your play or your relationship, how long it will last, why it is better than a competing product, whether it will really do what you want it to do.
Institutional marketing doesn’t answer these questions.
Change Your Institutional Marketing To Direct- Response and Multiply Your Sales Exponentially
When you change your marketing from institutional to direct-response you will see your sales increase exponentially, for no extra cost. You can invest £1,000, or £10,000, or £100,000, or £1,000,000 and turn it into £10,000, £100,000, £1,000,000 or £10,000,000. Direct response marketing gives you the power to invest your money, and garner a rapid profit-return of up to hundreds of percent, or more.
Do you fully understand this? With the same marketing pound, you can multiply your response from marginal or unprofitable, to highly profitable. You don’t need extra cash to reap dramatically higher sales and profits from every sales message you put out.
What is direct-response marketing? It is giving your prospect or customer enough of your full sales story to compel him or her to take action and inquire about, or buy whatever it is you are selling.
It provides sufficient, persuasive sales information to evoke an immediate response from your reader, listener, or viewer. It stirs up interest, creates desire, fulfils needs, and leads your prospect or customer into taking action now.
Turn the page to discover what gives your sales message its most persuasive appeal: The Million-Pound Sales Secret...
CHAPTER 5: The Million-Pound Sales Secret
Years ago, when I was a struggling entrepreneur trying to make a success of my first business, I drove a cab to make extra money. Little did I know while ferrying people around town I was just about to learn a million pound sales secret.
One day I picked up a friendly but rough-looking guy who said to me, “ ’ow much to the station, mate?” I told him the price and he said, “Blimey, that’s cheap! Give me the name of your cab company so I can put it in my phone and book you every day.” I gave him the name but it was too long. His mobile would only accept nine digits. So he said, “Come on mate, what can I put you in as?” Before I could think of an alternative he said, “I know, I’ll put you in as CHEAPCABS.”
And there it is. Cheap Cabs. All this guy wanted to know was that the cab company was cheap. He didn’t give a darn what the company name was, or how nice we were, or how long we had been established, or how new the car was. Just that we would charge him less money than other cab companies for the same journey.
For this customer, CHEAP CABS said it all.
As for me, I always thank this stranger for giving me a million pound sales lesson—the power of creating compelling, benefit-oriented headlines.
The first key to generating thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of pounds of sales is creating powerful headlines for your sales messages. You must grab your prospect’s attention and compel him or her to buy your product.
An attention-getting headline at the top of your print adverts; the first words spoken in your radio or TV advert; the first sentence uttered by your salespeople or telemarketing people; the headline, first sentence or first paragraph of your sales letter, brochure, flyer, insert, or blow-in. You must capture your prospect’s interest immediately, or you’ve lost the chance to ‘sell’ to him or her. You could spend hours writing the best, most descriptive, most appealing, most persuasive sales description, but unless you first capture your prospect’s interest your efforts are futile.
In just a few seconds you have to captivate and interest your reader, listener, or viewer with a powerful headline statement.
You Have Only 4 Seconds to Capture Your Prospect’s Interest
Four seconds is all you’ve got—maximum. Often, it’s just one or two seconds. Here’s what happens in your customer’s mind when you are vying for his or her attention amongst the bevy of other sales messages they’re being bombarded with: Pick up any newspaper or magazine. Start glancing through it just as you would normally. Now stop at the first article that catches your eye.
Now think. How long did it take you to find that particular article? First, you scanned each page looking for an article you’d be interested in reading. How long did you take you to scan each page? A matter of seconds, right? Let’s assume you found an article that interested you on Page 3. It probably took you about 3 to 10 seconds to decide you didn’t want to read anything on page one, and about 3 to 10 seconds on page two. In those 3 to 10 seconds, how many articles did you skip because they didn’t interest you? Six per page? Maybe ten? Let’s say six. So to get to the article that did catch your eye on Page 3, you scanned but ignored at least twelve articles in less than twenty seconds—1.6 seconds per article.
Tests have confirmed you only have 1 to 4 seconds to capture your customer’s interest.
Now think further. Why did you stop at that particular article? What caught your eye? Was it the editorial? Was it the name of the journalist? Was it the layout of the article on the page? No! The only reason you stopped at that article was because the headline caught your attention.
Even if other articles could have interested you, you didn’t stop at them because those headlines failed to grab your attention or interest.
There is no difference between what compels people to read, listen, or watch editorial or interest features, than what compels them to read, listen, or watch your sales messages.
If you fail to capture your customer’s or prospect’s attention instantly, you’ve lost them.
A powerful headline is the number one key to maximising sales. You could be selling the greatest product or service on the planet, but if no one notices your sales message you’re not going to get rich.
Create compelling, attention-grabbing, benefit-oriented headlines for all your marketing, in every media you use. Then you’ll get your sales message noticed.
One Headline Can Out-Sell Another By Hundreds of Percent
Amazingly, 90 percent of the reason customers and prospects respond to a sales message is because of what they have read, heard, or seen in the headline or opening statement.
A moment ago you stopped at the news item only because the headline caught your interest. Not the editorial. Your customers will respond to your sales message for the same reason. They will only read or listen to your offer if you give them with a powerful, interesting headline.
Make an indelible mental note of this—write it on a big piece of card and fix it above your desk—remind yourself of it every day: 90 percent of the response you get is because of your headline.
To put it another way, if you fail to create a compelling headline you are banking up to only one tenth of the sales you could be
An effective headline doesn’t cost you any more money than an ineffective headline, or no headline. But an effective headline added to an already good sales appeal can generate up to hundreds of percent additional response.
How a Powerful Headline Is Created
If I arrived at your office one day and said, “Hello, I’m John Smith,” you would say so what? and show me the way out. If I arrived and said, “Hello, I'm John Smith, can I interest you in office stationery?” even though I’ve now revealed what my business is, you are still likely to show me the door. Why? Because I haven’t given you a reason to be interested in what I am selling.
Yet this is how most businesses approach their marketing. They plaster their company name at the top of their ads. They simply state the name of their product or service. Hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of customers who could benefit from their offer and who could be motivated to buy it, ignore it instead because the sales message does not capture their interest, or show the benefit they would obtain.
But if I arrived at your office and said, “Hello, my name is John Smith, and I’d like to show you how I can provide all the stationery your office uses all year for typically half the price you are buying it at now—same brands, same-day free delivery, plus every item you buy has a no-questions, 90-day money-back guarantee if you’re not 100% delighted...” and then I went on to prove that this indeed was the case, and that as an average sized business you could save in the region of £2,000 to £5,000 a year on your stationery costs, you are more likely to be interested, aren’t you?
You would be more interested because I’ve now provided you with a good reason to be.
At the very least, you are significantly more likely to respond to my offer.
Can you see the difference? Can you see how a targeted, specific, headline or opening statement will reach out to your prospects, interest them, motivate them, and compel them to read, listen to, or watch your sales message?
No headline, or a weak headline, cannot capture the considerably larger numbers of customers who would buy from you if your headline appeal caught their interest.
How To Create a Winning Headline For Your Product or Service
I always aim to write one hundred different headlines for the same product. From those, I’ll choose the four, five, or six I think are the best, most attention-grabbing, compelling, and targeted. Why come up with one hundred if I only want up to six? Because the more ways you can dream up of describing the benefits of your product or service, the greater chance you have of finding the one way that will pull the highest response.
Why do I want five or six different headlines for the same product or service? Because one headline appeal can out-pull another by massive margins. One headline can out-pull another by 50 - 500 percent, or more. It can mean the difference between marginal profit and runaway success.
When you find the sales appeal that attracts more customers than any other appeal, by testing one headline against others, you can multiply your sales by enormous margins without increasing your marketing budget. Why be happy accepting a small return from your pound when the same pound can generate a return many times higher?
One company changed the headline of an already profitable advertisement and received 2,100 percent more response— 21 times more sales from the same advert at the same cost. That’s the power of headlines.
4 Tips For Creating Winning Headlines
1. Aim to write one hundred different headlines presenting your offer in the most attention-getting, compelling, interesting manner possible
2. Concentrate on the real benefits of your offer. Remember, all your customers are interested in is, “What’s in it for me?”
3. Select four, five or six of the most powerful headlines you’ve written.
4. Test each headline separately. Track the response each one produces. One of your headlines will out- pull the others. Use that headline in your offers and make it your ‘control’ until you find a better headline that beats it. Then use that headline as your ‘control,’ etc. (See Chapter 18: Test And Market The Clear Winner.)
Four Headlines That Increased Response Up To 1,800 Percent
Some years ago I had a client in the dry cleaning business. He was already successful but wanted to increase his sales still further. He’d been trying to market additional related services by handing out leaflets to customers as they collected their dry-cleaning. One of the offers was for the clothes protection treatment, Scotchgard™.