There are an endless number of marketing experts and business people who will line up to tell you how direct response marketing doesn’t work. Don‘t you fall for that line of faulty thinking because direct response marketing is alive and well.

A Real Example

As a direct response experiment, I recently wrote a 10 page sales letter and order form and used it at one of my day long seminars. With 10 pages to read, I correctly assumed that the participants would need some time to peruse it before I made the offer, so I put the letter only on the table in front of them before the seminar started.

After the last afternoon break, I passed out the order form and took 5 minutes explaining the offer and how to fill out the order form. I was very direct that this offer was only good the day of the seminar. (Actually, it was only good until I left the building.)

The Results

The full color sales letter and order form were printed on high quality semi gloss paper, and cost about $4.00 each to have designed and printed. At the seminar, I distributed 30 letters. When I finished my seminar, 8 of the 30 sales people ordered a specially designed package of sales tools and products. One additional company owner enrolled in our year long Masters Sales Program. The total revenue from these 9 new customers was $5300.00.

The total return on my $120.00 (30 letters x $4.00 @)) direct response investment was 4,416 percent! That’s $177.00 for each of the 30 people in the audience whether they bought anything or not. At that rate, I only have to speak to 5,650 people to sell ONE MILLION dollars worth of products and tools. The only question is how fast I am going to do this.

If you would like to talk with me about how to develop a direct response marketing plan for your business email me at sclark@newschoolselling.com.

Good Selling

Steve

PS Want a FREE copy of Prospecting To Fill the Pipeline?

PPS If you know someone who could benefit from this message or the FREE CD please forward this  message to them. It could change their life.
 

Each year there are over 1,000,000 small businesses started in North America. 800,000 of these fail in the first five years. Of those 200,000 that make it past five years, 160,000 fail in the next five years says, Michael Gerber, the author of the E-Myth, one of my favorite business books, and one of the top 5 best selling business books of all time.

Recently, I participated in a conference call with Michael Gerber who said, “I know more about small business than any human on the planet”. It would be hard to disagree with a man who has consulted with over 10,000 small businesses since 1977.

In this conference call, Gerber said the biggest problem small business owners have is that they are too busy “doing it, doing it, doing it” to really develop the systems that are necessary to run their businesses without them. He went on to say that owners of businesses who don’t have systems to run their businesses without them don’t really own a business. They own a job. He further stated that in this scenario the owner is not really building an asset to sell because no investor wants to buy a job.

He mentioned that McDonald’s is the classic and perhaps best example of a business that is run entirely on systems. These systems allow them to run a worldwide business that does hundreds of billions of dollars per year even though they have a 400% annual turnover rate and employee primarily teenage labor. Their secret? SYSTEMS RUN THE BUSINESS NOT PEOPLE. This reliance to systems is hugely successful and requires no day to day involvement from the franchise owner.

When questioned why small businesses fail he mentioned several reasons:

1. In most cases the owner got their start as a really good “doer of the thing” they are now in business to do.

 He mentioned that most small business owners lack the full range of business skills necessary to effectively manage and run a high level organization. As owners, they still think like technicians or sales people, and as a result have not elevated their business management skills beyond that of a “doer”.

2. Arrogance and Ignorance.

Because the owners are technically good at what they do, they think they know how to run a business. However, most of them have had little if any formal business education other than running their own business, attending industry trade shows, and modeling whatever is considered accepted “industry business practices”. They suffer from the myopic “herd” mentality and lack innovation or imagination, which is the currency of 21st century business leadership.

3. They don’t realize that they are the primary obstacle to their business growth.

 Instead of being open minded, they think they have the answers. The reality is that they don’t know what they don’t know.

4. They mistaken think that whatever business strategies and practices that worked in the past will work in the future.

As a result, they make faulty business decisions about the future, fail to implement effective systems, and their business falls further and further behind the change curve until one day they wake up and realize that the world has changed and passed them by. By then it is usually too late.

Because of changing market conditions, increased competition and technology, the lack of systematic processes and methodologies that allowed a business to succeed previously will not be good enough to sustain it at its current level long term, much less take it to the next level.

As surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, change will happen in business. The only question is will a business owner proactively choose to embrace change or will they be forced to change by external circumstances?

To quote Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, “when the change outside your business is greater than the change inside your business the end is in site”.

Good Selling

 Steve

PS Want a FREE copy of Prospecting To Fill the Pipeline?

PPS If you know someone who could benefit from this message or the FREE CD please forward this  message to them. It could change their life.

   

I woke up thinking about what I am doing and why I am doing it. My mind would not let go of the question, “why are some people enormously successful while others seem to struggle to find clients.”  So I sit here at 2:55 am journaling my thoughts and sharing with you.

I don’t understand why selling is so hard for people, because it has never been hard for me. Obtaining clients has always been easy for me when I did the prospecting behavior.

Why is that?

 I think it is because I am so convicted about what I do and why I do it that it is impossible for someone to attend one of my classes, or to spend time with me, without coming away with the impression that I believe in and am passionate about what I am saying and  doing. They may not become a client, but they sure do believe that I believe in what I am doing. I have always believed, even when I struggled financially.

Where does this belief come from?

It comes from the fact that I am I engaged in an affair of the heart, and I that I love what I do. Teaching and training people and watching them grow and develop new skills has been a passion for me since, as a sixteen year old lifeguard, I first experienced the thrill of teaching two year old babies how to swim.

I am doing what God created me to do and it comes easily for me.

What is your primary reason for doing what you are doing?

If it is only to make money, you will never become fabulously successful. You will struggle and never find true happiness and peace of mind.

Why are you here? What is your life purpose? Are you trying to do your will or God’s will?

These are some powerful questions that beg answers. The answers to these and other equally important questions are buried deeply inside of you. If you want to find the answers, you must become deeply introspective and get real with yourself.

Truly, successful and happy people have spent a great deal of time answering these questions. They know who they are and why they are here. They know their strengths and their limitations. They accept both of them for what they are and they don’t wish or try to become someone else. They are content, but not satisfied and they don’t covet others gifts or success. They are very rare individuals indeed.

Are you one of these people or do you find that life is a grind and a daily struggle?

If you are not consumed with passion or have a burning desire to do what you are now doing, quit immediately and go do what you are passionate about. You owe it to yourself, your family and to mankind to pursue what God meant for you to do. Until you do this, you will, in Henry David Thoreau’s words, be among the “mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation”.

Good Selling

 Steve Clark

PS Want a FREE copy of Prospecting To Fill the Pipeline?

PPS If you know someone who could benefit from this message or the FREE CD please forward this  message to them. It could change their life.
 

In my consulting practice the hardest thing to get clients to do is to change their behavior. While they logically agree —at the intellectual level—that they need to change things they seldom make the significant changes that would propel their business forward.

Before you start thinking you are different you must realize that they are you and you are they.

A Universal Truth

The human organism is resistant to change. The body tries to maintain what physiologists call homeostasis. This is the physical state of equilibrium or status quo. The body is designed to operate in a very narrow range of physiological processes. The brain is no different.

We all refuse to change our ways for reasons that are often hard to articulate.

Until, that is, you begin looking at it from a scientific perspective. In the past few years, improvements in have allowed researchers to track the energy of a thought coursing through the brain in much the same way that they can track blood flowing through the circulatory system. Watching different areas of the brain light up in response to specific thoughts has brought a new understanding to our response to change.

The major neuroimaging techniques used research are positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), along with electro-encephalography (EEG), an earlier technique for monitoring brain activity. Advances in all these techniques are enabling scientists to produce remarkably detailed computer-screen images of brain structures and to observe neurochemical changes that occur in the brain as it processes information or responds to various stimuli.

These brain analysis technologies show that our responses to change are predictable and universal. From a neurological perspective, we all respond to change in the same way: We try to avoid it.

Why Change Is Painful

Change creates psychological stress.

Change engages the prefrontal cortex, the conscious part of the brain that is responsible for judgment, planning and decision making. The prefrontal cortex is like RAM memory in a PC. It is fast and agile, able to hold multiple threads of logic at once to enable quick calculations. But like RAM, the prefrontal cortex’s capacity is finite—it can deal comfortably with only a handful of concepts before becoming overloaded. When it becomes overloaded it generates a palpable sense of discomfort, anxiety, fatigue, and frustration.

Like a computer the brain prefers to run off its hard drive or basal ganglia, which has a much larger storage capacity. This is the part of the brain that stores the hardwired memories and habits that dominate our daily lives.

“Most of the time the basal ganglia are more or less running the show,” says Jeffrey M. Schwartz, research psychiatrist at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles. “It controls habit-based behavior that we don’t have to think about doing.”

In a sense, it is the basal ganglia that keeps us in that very narrow range called our comfort zone. If you want to make changes in your life you must realize that every change comes with a certain amount of psychological stress. The bigger the change the bigger the stress. Now you know why so few people are willing to consciously embrace change.