If you’ve run your own company for any length of time you will know that generating new prospects and converting them into paying clients is the most expensive part of growing any business.

Yet selling more to existing clients costs 5 to 9 times LESS, and is actually an easier sell because the client has already been involved buying from you. As long as they have had a good experience, they are more likely to buy again.

So why is it that people INSIST on driving their customers away?

To give you some examples which may seem familiar to you, here are a few of the things I’ve seen just in the past few weeks…

• A restaurant I went to the other night for dinner with friends had serving staff who were so rude I will NEVER go back (and I won’t be recommending them either)
• A franchise opportunity where the franchisor didn’t answer phone calls or respond to emails, even though a friend of mine had spoken to them once and already expressed an interest in spending £60,000 to buy a License (they kept my friend waiting for nearly a week and when they finally contacted him, it was only to say they were “too busy” to have the meeting!)
• A well known mobile phone provider where the Customers Services representative actually called my partner ‘a liar’ regarding an upgrade request she had previously placed for a new mobile phone (then the girl found the detail already on her computer system but I think she forgot the call was being recorded!)
• A hotel which is actively being marketed as a place with “Good Coffee and Quiet Meeting Environment” to encourage business people to meet there, but where they serve you pre-made (and quite disgusting) coffee. (I like my coffee…)
• A major Energy Provider who sent a number of threatening letters to a friend of mine just before Christmas, to pay an electricity bill for £3,425.37 which they later admitted had been sent to the wrong person in error.

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It’s true – last Monday in fact…

I told them I couldn’t help them any more.

Have you ever done that – sacked a client?

I sacked them because they were completely ignoring my advice – the same advice they were paying me to give them…

It happens sometimes, but I think 3 months of excuses is more than enough to put up with.

When I work with a client, I do everything I can to make things work for them. I give them the best advice I can to get the best results I can to give them the best return I can.

But I do expect clients to listen to what I’m saying.

Here’s a brief rundown of what happened…

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Most people make the mistake of selling what they offer to the wrong people, because they don’t truly understand WHO their customers are and WHY they buy.

But that’s just the beginning…

Did you know that your prospect makes their decision to buy, or not to buy from you within the first few minutes (at most) of meeting you… yet they won’t necessarily know it themselves?

This all happens at the subconscious level.

Of all the articles I’ve read on the subject, I think Michael Gerber explains it the best in the ‘E-Myth Revisited’ – if you want to read the full version, then you can find it on page 218, but this is the gist of it:

Picture your customer standing before you – neither happy nor sad, not frowning or smiling – he is completely neutral.

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Over the last 60 years or so, billions of pieces of mail have been sent by businesses, with the sole intention of growing sales.

These mailings have included everything you could possibly think of:

Simple letters and postcards, CD’s and DVD’s, three dimensional brochures, dustbins and even boxes of cereal have all found their way into letterboxes across the Globe – including the UK!

It goes without saying that billions of pounds are dependent on the success or failure of these mailings.

But what can YOU do to make your Direct Mail Campaigns more effective?

Campaign success is measured as return-on-investment (ROI) – or how many total sales were generated compared to the cost of the marketing campaign.

It’s a proven fact you can dramatically increase the response you get with a personalised telephone call as a follow-up. This has the advantage of making it easy for customers to respond to your message and for you to be able to measure the results. The downside is that it does require extra resource (and cost if you outsource), but certainly worth considering a test on a sample of your list.

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