~ The Zero Resistance Sales Environment ~ We’ve been discussing the folly of trying to be the “low price leader.” So how do you keep your prices up? To begin with, you must recognize that there is no single thing you can do to charge higher prices. No clever sales phrase, no single product, no newspaper [...]
~ The unsustainable market advantage ~ As an entrepreneur, you always want to work to create market advantages. If you want long-term growth and profitability, and if you're going to keep the advantages you have worked so hard to achieve, it’s critical that they be sustainable. If you position yourself as the low price leader, [...]
~You won’t make it up in volume~ If you cut prices by 10%, most dealers think you only need to increase sales by 10% to make up the difference. In his book, How To Sell At Prices Higher Than Your Competitors, Larry Steinmetz mathematically demonstrates that if you cut your prices by 10% (on a [...]
Greetings Flooring Dealers! Years ago I owned a carpet cleaning company. About half of our new business (not including repeat and referral) was being generated by a single campaign. It was a 3-step sequence (as discussed in the last several installments) that we were delivering to carefully-selected upscale neighborhoods in our town. This strategy worked [...]
Greetings Flooring Dealers! In this installment, we’re going to discuss a simple strategy for increasing the effectiveness of multi-step campaigns. But first an illustration from outside our industry. (I first heard this from marketing guru, Dan Kennedy.) Collection companies have the unenviable task of collecting money from people that 1) don’t like them, and 2) [...]
Greetings Flooring Dealers! In the last installment we discussed why sequential marketing is a powerful tool for maximizing your returns from your marketing list. Now we’ll discuss how to set up a multi-step campaign. A standard 3-step sequence I use frequently goes like this: Step 1 letter: Sent on day one of the campaign. Has [...]
Greetings Flooring Dealers! Most marketing done by floor dealers is a one-shot deal: they send out a flyer, postcard, or invitation to an after-hours sale, and that’s it. They stop with one mailing. It’s possible to dramatically increase your returns by turning your successful single-step advertising into a multi-step marketing campaign. Imagine your typical client: [...]
Greetings Flooring Dealers! In the last installment we discussed the Problem, Agitate, Solve (PAS) formula. In this installment we’ll cover another tried-and-true formula that’s extremely effective. Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (AIDA) First you get your prospect’s attention with a compelling headline. People are motivated by two primary impulses: to increase pleasure and to reduce pain. [...]
Greetings Flooring Dealers! Agitate your prospects? One way to get consistently good results with your marketing is to use tried-and-true copywriting formulas. By the way…tried-and-true does NOT mean using the same formula that 98% of floor dealers use, which is Name, Rank and Serial Number. These ads have the name of the business at the [...]
Greetings Flooring Dealers! Reason #1: They aren’t interested. Your job as a marketer is identify people who have some level of interest in buying flooring, and get them to buy from you vs. anyone else. Your job is not to attempt to engineer interest in people that have none. Therefore, if someone is truly not [...]
