Posts Tagged prospecting

To everyone that reads my Blog Posts,

Just yesterday I had written a article to Examiner detailing some important tips to make anyone more effective when selling products to consumers. I’m looking to do some freelance writing for Examiner, and one of the requirements was writing a 200-300 article regarding your topics you plan to cover for the company. Being that I provide content regarding marketing, sales and business tips and strategies I wrote about those areas, and wanted to to share the information that I wrote with everyone here.

For those who aren’t familiar with Examiner, they are a publication that was created in 2008 and quickly grew to be one of the biggest publications on the Internet in a short period of time. The reason being is because they allow freelance writers to get paid for providing valuable content for the rest of their readers. So for instance, if you know a lot about sports, you can write your opinions and any news information you find for them. It has to be your own content, however. So if you’re caught giving them content published by someone else, expect to get in some major trouble.If you are interested in becoming a writer for their publication, click on this link: Write For Examiner.

Below is my article I wrote for Examiner. Check it out.

Increase Your Sales By Providing Value To Your Prospects

When most sales people sale products to prospects, no matter if they try to be nice or be aggressive, the main goal is to get the sale. This is why most sales people struggle. They have been taught by their organizations on techniques to get prospects to buy their products. Some organizations teach sales people how to tell prospects about how great their products are and why they should buy them.

Unfortunately, prospects don’t care about a company and its products and services. They care about themselves. Since most sales people don’t know that, this gives people looking to be an expert in their field and a solution to prospect’s problems an opportunity to come in and reap the rewards. Since prospects care about themselves, they care about finding ways to relieve them of their pain, save them time, cure them of health problems, or ways to make more money. That said, as an expert you must answer the call for help.

If you’re an expert with computer engineering, you should be providing valuable information to your target market that cares about this field of expertise. That way, you’ll be able to gain their trust. Most importantly, you’ll be the go to person for prospects to run to for help. If they are impressed with an article you give them, and it helps them to solve a specific problem, they’ll thank you for helping them, and it’ll be much easier for you to suggest to them to buy your product if they really need it. Being that you’re the expert, you have power, and they’ll listen to you. If you approach every prospect this way, the sales will come, and you’ll quickly be the leader of your sales team teaching them to do the same.

When you are a business owner, you know that you have to talk to several people throughout the day and find out which ones are worth your time and who will buy. No matter how good you are doing in getting profits, customers, and people to join your team, there are obstacles that you face. One of those situations you may face, but many don’t realize it, includes constantly being overworked.

You can be working countless hours on building your MLM home based business, but find yourself hitting your head on the wall. The reason why is because this is a business where you are working hard on getting the right people to purchase your products and also join your team, while also going through the fear and objections you face in order to get the results you want. If you think the people who are making millions right now in network marketing have had it easy and never had any challenges, you’re sadly mistaking.

You can be making more money than what you can do with from network marketing, but still feel miserable on the inside. Why is that? Sometimes the people you try to conduct business with are the circumstance. Most of people in this world don’t take action, are insecure, and don’t have huge goals. So when you talk to people who would rather settle with mediocrity than excellence, it can frustrate you cause of the time you’re trying to spend telling people of a financial opportunity you know that’s excellent but they don’t care about. People will frustrate you; upset you, waste your time, hurt your feelings, and won’t come through for you when you need them to. Tough world isn’t it.

Network marketing is a people business. Even if you build a giant organization, don’t expect to be exempt from people. You’ll still be working hard to build your business depending on your goals, and you’ll always build it the same way, through talking to people and training your downline to duplicate results. And when your organization gets bigger, new challenges will arise that you’ll need to be ready for.

The purpose of this post is to influence you to not focus on people all the time. In network marketing you’ll come across thousands of people, and most of them won’t join your primary opportunity. When you focus on the many “No’s” you receive from people, it’ll cause your stomach to turn, and possibly throw in the towel. Instead, you should focus on where you’re headed in the future. You are a part of MLM because you want to do things that you can enjoy that you couldn’t do when working at a job constantly. The ultimate reward you get for working hard is freedom. Wherever you see yourself in the future, capture that in your mind, and you’ll feel peaceful in the process. It’ll overcome the many “No’s” that you get, cause you know you’ll be in a better place in your life than now.

There’s going to come times where you’ll have so much information about a prospect or client that you need to find a way to keep track of them. You can use a address book, but it can only hold so much information about a person’s lifestyle. A notepad could work, but sometimes you have a hard time managing the notes you’ve written about someone.

If you’re not familiar with Customer Relationship Management software you definitely should.  It’s software that companies use to customer information regarding anything from the last time they called, what the call was about, the last order they made, what hobbies they have, etc. Most companies use it to track customer info. But if you want to think outside the box, you should also use it to track industry information and articles you find.

Though you want to know about your MLM company, it’s compensation plan, its products and the support, you also want to be able to know what’s going on in the MLM industry.  If you can, research once every two weeks on what’s going on in the MLM industry. You maybe able to find important articles regarding other’s prospect’s MLM companies they are a part that they aren’t aware about. Or you can find a good article on how MLM is a great industry to be a part of to make money for funding towards businesses or schooling. You can show those items to prospects you meet locally or online. Think of the value you can bring.

CRM software can be used as a research hub to gather your information you have. Besides researching industry information, you can also research important people you like to connect to sell your products to or bring into your company in the future. The data you should gather of people include the person’s name, address, phone number, e-mail, website information (if they have one), work experience (including information based on the companies and industries they’ve worked in), hobbies, political and religious affiliations, birthdays, anniversaries, donations, favorite sports teams, and more.

The more information you have on prospects, the more comfortable you’ll be in talking to them, and the more they’ll be comfortable in talking to you and hearing more of what you have to offer. To find out information on prospects, just ask. Or if you’re online prospecting, read their profile information. If there are particular things about them you see of interest, ask that in a message to them. You want to keep track at all times of people you meet and connect to. You’ll remember who they are, what they do, and how much closer they are in being sold on your primary opportunity.

In this post I’m sharing with everyone a audio recording of a conversation I had with a buddy of mine named Tone. We had a previous conversation regarding attraction marketing and leadership. The previous conversation covered facts on how network marketers are failing in network marketing because they don’t brand themselves.

This audio recording explains, based on our experiences and knowledge, why self confidence plays a big role whenever you’re networking with others, and how it’ll help you get more distributors a part of your team while also helping you to get more sales of your products. You can also download the audio for later listening. Check it out and hope you all find the information empowering.

I decided to touch back to this topic of removing prospect’s fears, for it’s an important topic to cover since a lot of network marketers are dealing with prospects that may have fear that’s keeping them from making a decision. Without customers, a business won’t stay around long, and so learning how to get new customers and keeping those customers around should be a top priority for anyone in network marketing or in business in general.

Do you want to know one of the most effectively ways that a prospect can become more confident in what you have to offer? The answer is, testimonials.  Yes that’s right. Testimonials are highly effective for getting prospects to do what you want them to do most, which is buy your product or join your business.

Why are testimonials so important? Because they tell prospects that other people have tried the product, was satisfied that the product helped solved their problems, and shows how confident other people are in the product you’re offering. People do not want to be the only one using a product. They need proof that other people are using what you’re selling and are happy with the results they’re receiving. Prospects want others to relate to their struggles and problems. To hear from other customers how satisfied they were using your products or services reduces or eliminates the fear, and makes the prospect more comfortable and willing to buy from you.

Remember this, a customer’s testimonial is a thousand times more powerful than what you have to say. A prospect may not always listen to you, but they will always listen to a happy customer. So when you have a customer, make sure to continuously keep your relationship with them well established. When you have happy customers, they’ll market your offerings for you. That’s also when you can call them and ask them for a testimonial, which they’ll be more than happy to give you.

Once you have a good set of testimonials, include them in your marketing materials, including emails and post cards. If you have a blog, have a testimonials section that has all the testimonials you’ve obtained. You can have a short testimonial on your business cards, only if you can fit one in.  You can even have a testimonials document that you can give to prospects of some of the best testimonials you have. With testimonials the possibilities are very well open.

Remember, prospects are much more likely to listen to happy customers than you. They’ll be more confident to buy by hearing from other people that has been satisfied with your products or services that’s not a part of your business. Think back of that time when you said you weren’t ever going to buy something, but then ended up doing so because a friend tried it and told you how great it was. Then when you bought it you was just as satisfied, if not more.

Let’s face it, when it comes to selling products to customers, we tend to spoil them a lot. Us as network marketers tend to give them total control, to the point where they are the bosses of us. Whatever the prospect says or does goes, which is what we do and what we’re taught at times from MLM companies. It gets to the point where, no matter what, network marketers start thinking that they need people to buy their products, and to join their primary opportunities.

That is far from the truth. We don’t need prospects; they need us. They aren’t in control of us, but we do give them that control. We let prospects ask all the questions and put the pressure on us. But that’s not how it should be. If you’re looking to be a leader, you don’t give prospects any authority to be in control.

By giving prospects the ability to be in control and asking all the questions to you makes you look weak. You can’t expect to get sales by just answering all of their questions. The reason why is that you’re not able to find out more about the prospects and their needs, and because then the prospect gets to decide for themselves if your product or company is right for them.

Let me give you an example of an experience where I was the prospect of a network marketer. Me I ask a lot of questions for I want to know what I’m about to get into is right for me, so I had a giant list of questions to ask the network marketer I was contacting.  I went through every single question and jotted down her answers on a notepad. Sure enough, she didn’t ask me any questions back at all. To add to that her answers were very long and broad. I had control of the whole conversation, and could have easily taken the conversation wherever I wanted to.

I was in control of if I wanted anything to do with the company or not, so the time she took answering the questions I asked was a waste of her time if I would of said no at the end. I could of lead her on for a long time with her possibly begging for me to join if she was desperate for new distributors, but I didn’t for I’m not type of person that expects to get everything he wants.

If you have that “I need prospects” mentally, and give that to everyone that you talk about your primary opportunity to, they can easily suck the life out of you. Some prospects test network marketers to see if they are strong or weak. The weak give prospects everything they need and want in order to make a decision, including brochures, compensation plans, free samples, etc. The strong find out first if the prospects are even worthy of giving them the information they ask for in the first place.

To put it in more perspective, the strong find out if prospects are worth their time. In order to find that out, you asks the prospects the questions, not them. You don’t have a lot of time to answer prospect’s questions all day long. By asking them the right questions from the start, you can find out within the first few minutes if the conversation should continue further. If prospects are being rude or sounding hostile when you ask them questions, end the conversation.  You don’t need rude or short-tempered people taking up your valuable time.

If a prospect asks you a question, always end the answer with a question of your own, or answer the question with a question of your own. That way you can still be in control of the conversation, and you can take the pressure off of you. Most importantly, you can take notes to what the prospect tells you in order to discover red flags or buying signals. Remember in network marketing, you’re in business, not your prospects. Run your business the way you want to run it. Never let anyone run it for you.

Your prospects have done it all before. They’ve bout all the books they could that promised them that they could make sales in the next two hours. They’ve paid thousands of dollars worth in attending seminars and found no valuable information from the speakers They’ve even tried products similar to what you’re selling that didn’t help them lost the weight they wanted, remove the dryness in their hair, or helped them to increase their stamina.

Prospects do have goals, or have dreams of where they want to be. I’m sure everyone dreams sometimes during the day, and for sure at night. But oftentimes, people don’t get to the end result that they want. In business, many people have dealt with that, and so do people in health and wellness, the beauty industry, and sports. People fail often, but with enduring the failure comes success.

When people fail, they hold a grudge on that experience, and will say they would never do such and such again. These types of prospects are cautious, and can be very difficult to deal with, for you can say all the right things to them but they still don’t want to listen to you. That flashback of their last failure pops up in their minds again, and holds them back from making a purchase. You can often times discover when a prospect is cautious when they express doubt through talking about a bad experience with a similar product they used midway through a conversation.

First off, what you should do when talking with a cautious prospect, is being a mentor. You’re trying to sell them your product, but first you must find out more about them. You can ask people what other products or services have they used, and they’ll tell you. Ask them then what results did they receive, and they’ll tell you that as well.

For example, when I worked at Apple, for the prospects I talked to that were new to Macintosh computers, I would ask them “Many of our visitors are PC users and are new to Mac. What has you switching from a PC to a Mac?” Prospects would always at that point express their displeasure of PC computers, saying that they crash often, are very non-user friendly, or would experience viruses. They would express their painful experiences with PCs, and I as an mentor for them would listen and build rapport to show them I understand their pains and that I’m there to help.

So you first be that mentor for them, you ask questions, and listen to their past failures or past pains. Then what you do is build rapport to show that you understand their pain. Justify their failures and then encourage them. Never should you criticize your prospects, even if it was their fault or if they were wrong. That’s a sure fire way to lose a sale and to decrease your reputation.

What you then do is show your prospects the many factors that are out of their control that contribute to their failures. In my case with Apple visitors their PCs did have the tendency to slow down, crash, or automatically install programs they never wanted in the first place. Some products are not user friendly, are difficult to use or understand, are low quality and break easily, have side effects that do more harm than good, or were just the wrong product for the consumer thanks to an unethical salesperson. By showing them the many factors, you’re telling prospects it’s not their fault, that you care, and that despite those shortcomings, they should not quit on their goals and dreams.

By this time the prospect is comfortable with you and realizes that you’re an expert that’s there to help them, and will listen to what you have to offer.  Tell them the benefits of buying from you and working with you. Tell you how they will succeed from using your products or working with you, and how you and your products differentiate from what they’ve used before. So if the last product they purchased was very difficult to use, tell them how easy it is to use your products, and the results they will get based on what they’re looking for. If there is a need you can help solve, it makes perfect sense to take advantage of that.

All network marketing companies have great products. They all have the compensation plan that can allow you to make an unlimited amount of income. Every network marketing company has the info of how great their products are and how it’ll benefit those who use them. However, what are the chances that a network marketing company will have info on the target market? Slim to none.

If you were to join a MLM company, they would tell you to find anyone and everyone to buy your product or to join the company. So basically you’re on your own most of the time to find the specific people that can use your product. Although you can make money getting others to join your company, it’s also a good idea to sell the products your company has. For not everyone you come in contact with will want to join your company, but they could use your products that you sell.

So if, for example, your network marketing company sells financial services, you need to find people that are looking to manage their money while at the same time make the money they earn work for them. How do you find those people? Well one method is finding out what magazines they read. Look for magazines that educate readers on managing finances, and subscribe to their magazines. You should be educating yourself with the same information that your prospects read, so that one you can blog about it or write valuable material your target market wants to read, and so you can position yourself as an expert in financial advise so prospects know you are the go to person for help.

Another reason you should look for the places your prospects read or find their information from is so that you know the right places to advertise at. Remember when advertising, substance matters more than the mere look of your ads. Create an ad that tells your prospects what problem you can help solve for them. That will get prospects calling you in a heart beat.

Lastly, what I recommend network marketers do is look at product reviews of similar products. One site you can check out for product reviews is http://www.amazon.com. Not all competitors are other network marketing companies. Some of those products your MLM company is competing against are from large corporations or small businesses. Find out what customers liked and disliked about other products. You’ll find out valuable information on how your prospects think, which gives you the ability to convey the right message to your target audience in your ads copies and when you communicate with them.

Offering value is something most people don’t do. If you already made it in your mind to offer value, then you’re ahead of the game. But do you know how to be creative? Do you know what kind of value you plan to offer to every prospect that does business with you?

If you’re a network marketer or a small business owner, you should ask yourself, what can I provide to my customers as a bonus for them doing business with me? What one of my companies Heavenly Essence, Inc. does is give customers thank you cards. Something as simple as a thank you card is enough to make the customer feel appreciated for their time and money they spend on you. They’ll remember you for that, and it’s crucial so that you stand apart from everyone else.

Whatever your product or service is, offer something that will make the customer feel glad they did business with you. Take into account also that you could provide something that is of no cost to you that can make a consumer’s life better.

That no cost method is free information. Offer that in a chart, checklist, or a step-by-step procedure that’s easy to read and that offers good instructions that the consumer or downline member can use right away. One example, a marketing free lancer we know offered twenty snacks that were under 200 calories. This is perfect for people looking to lose weight and get in shape, but still need a snack here and there to get through the day.

Make a list of at least five things you can offer of value that is low cost. Offer one of them to each person that purchases and track to see which of those five things offers the most value, and stick with that item. Track them by following up with existing buyers and ask how they like that item you gave them extra.

What can you offer of value? How will your customers who buy from you remember you? How can you get them to keep coming back for more? Provide value, and see how you’ll stand apart from your competitors.

Marketing is one area people tend to put on the back burner when times are rough. But if you run a business, and you want to set yourself apart from the rest, be sure to never take marketing out of your plans. Despite how things are going on in the economy, even if people aren’t showing interest in your product or service, you should not cut down on your marketing.

What you should do is find the right marketing methods to use for your business. Use methods that target your audience, which means research what media outlets your audience watches or reads or what social networking websites they use. And you should put in from 7% to 10% of your funds into marketing.

Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive. In attraction marketing, it’s all about how you convey your message to your target audience. It isn’t about how pretty your website looks or how great your products are. Your message has to be a grabber. You should be having your prospects saying “Wow, he/she really knows what they’re talking about, and I feel they are perfect for helping me with my struggles.”

Trust me, you’ll most likely miss the mark from time to time. Some of your headlines, article/ blog descriptions, or ads may not catch anyone’s attention at all. That’s why you have to experiment. Most of your marketing won’t work. A lot of your marketing will be ineffective from the very beginning. Your prospects know nothing about you, and won’t want to find out more about you until they see your marketing messages thirty times or more.