There is nothing more amazing to me than price objections. Yet for some reason we always encounter them. I don’t know why that is. Oh, probably because everyone wants to make a deal. Also we are becoming more and more conditioned to price shopping.

There are an ever expanding number of discount vendors in every strip of business. Look what you can get done on Fiverr.com, look at Ikea, all the chains selling discount anything and everything. This behaviour is common with governments – contracts awarded to the lowest bidder. Build a bridge that is going to last for 100 years – who’s the cheapest?

So it is understandable that when faced with making major investment decisions, most people start to wonder what they can do to cut the costs.

There will always and I mean always be someone willing to do it for less. The question you need to be asking is what are they cutting out in order to cut the cost. Is it quality, performance or what else could they cut out?

What is always missing in this conversation is the value of what is being done. What is the return you are going to get from buying?

That may sound obtuse but in the end it is about return and not percentage returns, but gross returns. You can’t bank a percentage, only hard dollars. Invest to make money, not for the best possible ROI.

While we are being conditioned to look for a better deal all the time, we usually mistake ‘better deal’ with ‘cheaper.’ When in fact it is never about that at all.

When we spend money in business we are looking at how much more we can get back, not how much it costs us in the first place.

If I told you to write me a cheque for $11,000 and I could show you how to make an extra $60,000 per year would that be a good deal?

What if I said if you do a newsletter with us, it will cost you a little more than if you have to do it yourself but that extra investment would help you realise $30,000 in additional profits, would that be a good deal?

It would. So stop worrying about the price of what your suppliers are charging and focus on the value return.

The dollar return is what matters, not getting the lowest possible price. It’s not how business people think.

“The rich aren’t different from you or I…”

“Yes they are?”

“How?”

“They’re richer.”

In a lot of ways there aren’t that many differences between successful people and ‘unsuccessful’ people. They tend to look pretty similar, they sound pretty similar and to be honest, when you compare the thoughts of the two camps there still aren’t that many differences.

With that said there seems to be a handful of key differences.

The most important in my opinion is actually the willingness to go above and beyond to meet a deadline.

Meeting deadlines means getting work done and on to the next person or out the door. Successful people are ruthlessly focused on this. While the people who aren’t successful tend to cut themselves more slack, get less done and don’t get the results they could.

In our time with Newsletter Marketing Systems, our clients who have gotten the best results from their newsletter are always the ones who know the value of a deadline. Especially an imposed deadline. They are the ones who know that the deadline is there to help them get their newsletter in the mail every month. So that it arrives in their clients’ hands at the same time every month so that their newsletter is seen as an educational publication, not as a randomly appearing advertisement.

Conversely, our clients who aren’t committed to meeting deadlines and need to be cajoled, pushed and prodded in the right direction are the ones who need most managing and also are the ones who see the least response.

Because they are late they compromise quality to get the job done.

This sort of lazy, sloppy and half-arsed approach runs into other areas of their business and their life as well.

It is a sad, sorry state of affairs all caused by their lack of commitment to being meeting a deadline. If you don’t make deadlines a focus, you’ll never be able to get the mountain of work done in order to be successful.

At the end of a day, I will stop working when I am tired, even if I have unfinished work. However, that unfinished work will all be done by Sunday night come hell or high-water.

The reason I hated my roof restoring business was the dread of knowing tomorrow I’ve got to get up and knock on enough doors to speak to 50 people about roof restorations. I knew if I did that I would be able to eat, if not then I would starve.

Making a sale meant I ate this week. It didn’t mean a steady stream of future income.

Cold calling either on the phone or in person is gruelling, soul-destroying work. It crippled me emotionally – but I pushed through and did it anyway. If you can do it for 30 years then power to you. Every time I knocked on a stranger’s door I felt sick.

Before I even dialled the phone to make a cold call I had to mentally brace myself before I even pressed the buttons. Then I felt that same sick/sinking feeling when I heard the first ring.

Force the nausea down… Oh wait, remember to smile…

“Shit! Somebody is home” (or answered the phone). And you are ‘on.’ One down 49 to go. Drudgery come on down.

It was never as bad once you actually got to talk to someone, but all the same the torture I put myself through before every phone call or knock made me think it might be time to find a better way.

When I was making calls I was the system. I needed to own the system.

I found my way to create systems – direct response marketing and being able to write sales copy that actually sells.

I may have meandered a long way off course here but let me bring you back.

Without sophisticated systems and relying solely on grunt work, your business will never achieve stability. Predictable, reliable on-going sales. You are doomed to perpetual grunt work and always on the hunt for the next score.

There are two ways to create that reliability. The first is to create a lead-generating, lead nurturing and conversion process. Think of it as an assembly line for your new customers with each lead coming to maturity over time – getting in touch with you when they are ready. I build these for my consulting clients, Newsletter Marketing Systems grows largely on auto pilot because of these exact systems.

The second is to assemble a client retention system that locks your clients in for life, so that they buy everything they need off of you, complete with sales systems to market your other products and services to your clients.

The first step to having this asset is putting the retention systems in place to make sure that your clients are yours and not going to leave you for the next shiny thing. A list of loyal customers is the most valuable asset your business can ever have! And the fastest way to get and maintain customer loyalty is still the printed newsletter.

Referrals are tricky, one way or another they are always tricky.

Most of us sit around complaining about not getting enough referrals. I know I’ve been there and done that.

What I hate about referral marketing is just how damn hard it is to figure out from the ‘marketing gods.’ There is almost nothing revealed about how to get more referrals. All of them will sing the high praises of referrals but when it comes time for the rubber to meet the road nobody has anything that even remotely resembles a solid action plan.

There is the E.A.R. formula. Earn, Ask, Reward.

Okay, got it. Now how do I do that if I am a dentist? What about if I run a professional services organisation? How do I Earn, then Ask for, then Reward?

This is what makes referral marketing difficult. The implementation of the formula.

I was listening to an IMA CD about a dentist who works with kids – name completely escapes me. He runs an annual event called Smilepalooza. It’s a big circus type event that is hugely successful for generating referrals and also retaining customers – in this case children.

The big problem with these events is coordinating them. Most business people have almost no experience putting on events, so it is incredibly overwhelming.

That said, everyone who has run these events with the agenda of giving back to their customers has always done well generating referrals. It keeps this guy’s dental practice full so it can’t be all bad.

Of course that isn’t the only option. We’ve had tremendous referral success ourselves using the model of newsletter and referral competition in our own business.

Getting referrals is all predicated on having an engaged customer base who love you.

I have now been on the other ‘side of the fence,’ Ben and I have had more referrals coming in than we can keep up with.

Surprisingly, there isn’t that big a gap between too few and too many in this case. But of the two problems I can tell you which one I would rather have.

I hope none of you have a business as badly conceived as my first business – selling roof restorations. It is nothing more than a gigantic churn-a-thon.

Every week I would have to go out and knock on enough doors to talk to about 150 people in order to get enough people to do enough quotes in order to sell 2 of these each week – so that I made my money, kept my roofers busy and paid all the bills. About half of my working time was pounding the pavement knocking on doors and usually nobody was home.

The best part of the business was it meant every week I was pretty much starting again from scratch.

This was 100% churn if ever I saw it. There was no repeat purchasing built into the business at all. How poorly built was this business? Yeah, pretty bad.

In retrospect this business was a churn-a-thon. There was no getting ahead, there was no creating future income from the same amount of labour. It was a classic case of making minimum wage with brawn rather than maximum wage with brain.

It took a while before I worked out that I could cross sell the same people other home improvement products. S.L.O.W. should have been my middle name.

Once I understood just how important customer loyalty is, I realised just how much more important it was to be in a business that capitalised on customer loyalty.

Avoiding the churn-a-thon.

Every business is going to churn customers. Some of your customers are going to stop buying from you any given year. It is almost unavoidable. However, you can do your best to minimise that churn. A 25% reduction in churn means that is 25% less new customers that you need to replace the lost ones.

That increased loyalty means an increased customer lifetime value because those customers are going to be staying with you even longer. Which means you should invest more to get keep them and invest more in order to get them in the first place – making it easier to grow your business.

If you are stuck in a business where you can’t get ahead because you are always having to start again, it’s time to do something to end the great churn-a-thon.

This past month has been a real challenge for me. My pregnant girlfriend Hollie has been in and out of hospital with a Kidney infection. Hollie’s pregnancy has been a rough one, It’s left me with a list of tasks longer than I’d care to admit. On top of working full time trying to grow this business, I’m the full time parent, I’m cooking, cleaning, washing folding, dropping kids and school and driving Hollie around from appointment to appointment. On top of that I have my fortnightly toastmaster meetings, I have weekly landmark seminars, I’m currently organising a large charity event and I am currently on a health kick and pretty intense exercise regime… Life has just been busy!

For some people this is just how life is always… and I don’t envy you. I prefer to have a little more spare time each week if possible, try to take the weekends off! But since circumstance has put me in this position, there have been a few things that I’ve done to get myself through it without getting too overwhelmed and I thought I’d share what’s worked for me!.

Schedule Everything

When time is scarce, scheduling is amazing. I usually schedule the next day, the night before. I write a list of everything I need to do and want to do, how long I anticipate it will take, and then slot it into my day. I find scheduling your meals, snack breaks, exercise and even your lazy/leisure time.  I use my phone calendar and to-do lists and just try to stick to the schedule.

Multi-Task The Unimportant

I usually try to stay away from multi-tasking, especially when it comes to work, I much prefer to be focused on one specific task at once, it usually gets done quicker and it’s a better job. But I do multi-task the less important things. For example I might watch TV while doing a work-out or folding washing, making work calls while picking up kids from school (hands free of course!). It can be quite rewarding knowing that you managed to fit 2 hours worth of ‘stuff’ into 1 hour!

Define Specific over Broad Activities

I try to set aside specific actions to be completed, I’d prefer to break the cleaning into 5 x 10 minute tasks. Eg – dishes -10 mins, folding – 10 mins etc. rather than just scheduling in a 60 minute cleaning block. – The main reason I do this is because the chance of finishing a task early and having 60 minutes spare to fit in the cleaning isn’t going to happen, but finishing 20 minutes early and being able to complete a couple of smaller activities will happen!

Rest, Eat & Drink

Get a good nights sleep, as tempting as it is to try and stay up and cram in some extra work, make sure you get 7-8 hours sleep a night. Schedule in some time each week to just laze about, even schedule in a 30 minute nap during the day if need be! Keep yourself well hydrated and eat well-balanced meals!

Don’t be Scared to Ask For Help.

It is completely okay to ask for help! Don’t be ashamed of saying ‘I’m overwhelmed and need help’, Friends and family are willing to help where they can. Clients will usually be happy to wait an extra day or two for jobs, suppliers may grant you extended trading terms. If you don’t ask, you never know. The worst that will happen is someone will say “no”.

I’m looking forward to baby being born, Hollie recovering and things becoming a little less hectic… With a new-born though, the next few months may be just as busy as ever!

I was speaking at a seminar a while back. It went quite well. Got some good leads out of it. Which isn’t really the point about the story. But none the less I am new to the world of professional speaking and so getting leads was a real buzz.

What I find really interesting was the behaviour of one of the leads in particular. So we scheduled a follow up call.

During the call he outlined what his problems were. He explained what he felt he really needed. And I knew going in I wasn’t his first priority, I was more interested in establishing when would be the right time to start to talk about what he and I were going to do.

Specifically his newsletter.

So this guy says to me, “I like this newsletter idea, but I only need to do it two or three times a year.”

So I asked ‘why?’ and the reply was “Oh I need to stay in touch with my clients but I don’t need to send them something monthly. They aren’t interested in anything but printing and I don’t have that much to say about it.”

My response was you can. “One of our clients is in your industry, does it monthly, does the exact opposite of what you just said and makes a 5:1 ROI. A big part of their success is their frequency. And they have plenty to say about printing. They are also able to create opportunities for their products that weren’t there before.”

Awkward silence and then he went back to telling me about how to do my job. Newsletters sold by this printer none. Newsletters sold by newsletter marketing systems… I have no idea what our customer count will be by the time you read this – but it is steadily rising at a predictable rate and at the time of writing we appear to have cracked the conversion code – the rate we are adding new customers is rising.

But I find it interesting when people ask you for advice and then go and do their own thing. It happens all the time in my consulting work. Regrettable for both me and ultimately the client – who never gets the result they want.

Interestingly, the problem with the opportunities we find doing existing customer opportunity audits, we find large amounts of very green grass within reach. Sometimes even embarrassingly large amounts of money.

Often times it is the client’s disbelief at the opportunity that makes it really difficult.

At this point the potential client will start telling me how to do my job. Or about how to do a newsletter properly. I don’t think that is so smart. I don’t advise businesses about how to do their core skill. I don’t tell printers how to print, engineers how to design and build things. I do know business, sales and marketing though. And to be honest, most people don’t.  So I stop telling me how to do my job.

I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker With Flowers In My Hair I mean a Sequoia.

In what was somehow a great use of my holidays I had the TV on, and I wound up watching a countdown of the greatest 00’s one hit wonders. Down time is a blessed thing – it must have been meal time during the cricket or something.

I have to admit I was kind of chuffed when I discovered that Sandy Thom’s ‘I wish I was a Punk Rocker’ was the number one, one hit wonder of the 00’s and this was the first time I had EVER heard the song. (Worth noting that in my experience punks hate hippies and hippies try to love punks…)

Kind of an achievement, but considering I usually listen to community radio or business/ self improvement materials then not so hard. Considerably easier when most of the time when I go out, I see live bands or I am at some sort of ‘Indie’ establishment.

The ‘I wish I was’ part of the title sort of side tracked me to the question “if you could be a tree what sort of tree would you be.” ‘My brain isn’t right’ especially when I am on holidays.

Anyway, I would be a sequoia and more importantly Newsletter Marketing Systems would be one too. Sequoias are massive and permanent. They live for hundreds of years and spawn entire ecosystems by themselves.

Its everything you want in a business except for one thing – by being so massive, so permanent and by virtue of being a tree, it has zero mobility. Despite my size I prize agility over resistance. The ability to move to avoid being hit is far more valuable in my eyes than being able to absorb a blow.

Any sort of fight is costly in terms of time and resources. And the recovery time from the fight is long.

Speed is an underutilised asset. And you need skill to be able to use it effectively. Anybody can don body armour and wade into the killing zone hoping their armour is good enough. But it isn’t always enough. Anybody can hole up in a fort and try and wait out a war.

Look at all the companies who win legal battles just by having deeper pockets and draining the other side’s coffers dry.

Speed on the other hand requires guile, planning and thought. Used wisely it can overcome the toughest foe. While it is nice to be the big massive sequoia, there are more opportunities to be had when you are nimble. And you can strike fast and get out while the getting is good.

Just don’t ever get hit. Then you’ll regret it. When you stay agile you tend to sacrifice armour.

In the business owners guide to getting more repeat business and referrals, Ben and I talk about churn:

The idea that so many of your customers are going to turn over in a given year.

And that if you want to keep your business at its existing size then you have to be adding customers in order to replace the ones that go.

Then if you want to grow you can add customers after you’ve replaced the ones you’ve lost.

Not too hard now is it?

We seem willing to take a lot of things for granted. One of them is customer defections.

We just accept them. We never try and get them back when we lose them. Or should I say go out and get them back?

We don’t try and keep our customers around for longer.  Which is the reverse side of churn.

The longer you can keep a customer the lower your churn rate. I was talking with a client recently, she has a capacity of about 200 customers in her business.

Her clients typically stay for about two years. They should be staying closer to 5 and if she gets them for five there is a good chance to turn them into lifers.

This means at the moment that she needs to be adding close to 100 customers per year in order to keep her business full.

Now if she was able to keep those customers for 5 years that would mean that she would only need to add 40 customers a year (200÷5) in order to maintain her business at capacity. That is much easier to do compared with adding 100 customers a year.

Want to know the easiest time to raise your prices?

It’s when supply exceeds demand. So if your business is full then it is really simple, you can raise your prices and there is none of this begging or making excuses stuff.

“Our suppliers put their prices up…”“Utilities and fuel have gone up…” “Blah blah blah”

Your customers don’t really care about that sort of stuff. That is pitiful excuse making. They buy because the value exceeds the price they pay. And when they know there is someone standing in line behind them with cash in hand ready to take their place, they are going to pay up and make sure they get their money’s worth – so you get a better client to boot.

Nothing is more powerful than having that line of customers begging to buy from you.

Sadly, most people try and turn the new customer wheel. The easiest way to go about creating the line of customers is making sure that once you’ve gotten a customer they don’t leave.

After doing an existing customer opportunity audit with a potential client I got a rather interesting reply.

Here is the general gist of it:

Client: This would require a substantial shift in our marketing budget which is skewed towards customer acquisition but is definitely a consideration. I will raise it in our next meeting.

I’ve taken some liberties with the reply to protect client details and maintain confidentiality, but what really struck me was this idea of a marketing budget. It’s one of the few places in the world where you can set yourself up and use a system to make money at will.

In business I hate spending money that doesn’t come back with little friends. If I spend a dollar it had better come back, and with more dollars in tow. Or if I am investing in customer acquisition then that dollar had better come back with a new customer and ideally some more dollars.

Here is my reply to the client:-

Your answer does open up some business-philosophy discussion. Firstly the concept of a marketing budget. It automatically implies marketing is an expense and a necessary evil. Kind of like an accountant or a lawyer.

Customer acquisition marketing is about buying an asset i.e. the customer that can be monetized. Kind of the way you buy a rental property. You fork out to buy the house so that you can rent it out for its life time.

Your customers work fairly similarly. You invest in marketing and you get a customer and then they buy repeatedly off of you for years. All well and good. So if you know your cost of customer acquisition (I.e. I spend $500 I get a customer who orders for the first time) then your cost of customer acquisition is $500. And for that $500 you get a steady stream of future orders worth say 5 years of monthly orders. Or over their life time 5 years X 12 months X order size.

We are talking about two different types of marketing.

A newsletter is a way to get customers to stay longer, buy more from you, buy other products from you. (I call this customer retention) So that customer that we just said you paid  $500 for goes from being with you for 5 years to say 7 years and for 5 years they  buy a product from you at a similar rate they buy the first.

In this case my friend, you would increase your lifetime client value by 240%. (The amount of money a client spends over their lifetime…)

And we are helping you add this ‘bonus’ return from the customer for the measly investment of $74 per customer per year. ($514 over 7 years) you are currently happy to spend the $500 to get a customer how many more lots of $500 do you want to spend now that they are worth 240% more?

“Oh I have to stop I used up my budget…”

I understand that cashflow may be prohibitive in the short term. But if you don’t make the investment now it will be prohibitive in the long term too.

The thing about investing is if you cut your losers and keep your winners you’ll only be invested in proven money making opportunities that will pay off.

Marketing is not a cost it is an investment – when done intelligently and tracked for its performance relative to its costs. In my opinion anyone who does NOT TREAT MARKETING as an investment may as well be gambling. Take your “marketing budget” down to the casino drop your chips on 00 on the roulette table and *spin*.

This is why the concept of a marketing budget rankles me. If you have proven systems for getting a customer at an affordable rate and a way to make money out of your customers once you have them then you should be investing into them at a rate that you cashflow allows. That is the ‘science’ of making money with a business.

“Advertising (and marketing) in some hands has reached the status of a science.” Opening sentence of Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (published in 1923). 90 years ago all of this was figured out – if you operate with a marketing budget catch up – you are way behind the game.