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| Make your business work for you in 2004: Communicate! |
| 12.24.03 (4:22 pm) [edit] |
[b]2004 – The year your business pays off your house…[/b]If you are anything like me, you can hardly remember that you’ve even been on holiday. Oh, but your bank does. If you have not yet received your credit card bills, you will soon.
Why not make 2004 your most successful year yet? Make enough money out of your brokerage to settle not only credit card debt, but your car and your house too. Take a long hard look at how you are doing things, and who you are doing them with. Watching commission cheque after commission cheque roll in is plenty exciting.
Those of you who have been in business for a while will undoubtedly have a standard routine of doing things. A routine that works most of the time. You are receiving referrals (not as many as you would like) and your usual leads sourced through your golf or sports club and business associations may be generating enough new business to tide you over. To really cook – to make enough money to become debt free by the end of 2004 - you are going to have to lift your game a little. You need to rekindle the excitement that makes you leap out of bed at 5:00am eager to start work.
Do the sums. Your outstanding bond is R350 000, you still owe R170 000 on your car, MasterCard and Visa - after the holidays - are running at R 20 000…
Make an additional half million this year…
Clearly, you need to make an additional R540 000 this year, to achieve your debt free status. Here’s how: The longer you have been in business, the more contacts you have made. If you have delivered a professional service and managed to keep most of your appointments, your clients will be relatively happy with your abilities. Clients however are not loyal. Witness the massive growth the buy-direct insurance companies have made in recent times. They have stolen your customers. Clients that you used to deal with are now picking up the phone and dialing a toll free number to get better rates, regardless of the 5 year history you have built up with them. Those clients have fallen victim to a very powerful, carefully targeted, advertising campaign. I am not privy to the typical buy-direct advertising budget, but from experience, I can tell you that after the TV shots, magazines, sports sponsorships, newspaper and radio ads, the adspend is probably greater than the health budgets of many of our northern neighbors.
Why they do it…
Popular sales intelligence tells us that it takes an average of seven contacts with a prospect before he converts to a client. Most of us give up way before then. The media campaigns unleashed by your opposition rely on the power of television, radio and print to make those seven contacts for them.
How do you, running a small or medium sized brokerage hope to compete? The answer lies in your existing client database. A regular monthly message to everyone on your list (no, I’m afraid a computer generated birthday card does not qualify) is an invaluable tool and key to achieving amazing results. Carefully chosen content is important. Your communication could take the form of a newsletter or personalised mailing that contains something of interest to your reader. Perhaps a story on office or home security, or the importance of an accurate inventory or similar. It is important that the message contains NO HARD SELL – just information valuable enough to make your client want to read your news every month. You see, if you try to sell through the communication you immediately brand yourself along with all the other junk mailers and your campaign will fall flat. The object here is to carefully research content with a ‘Gee, I didn’t know that!’ value. The kind of value that makes your client look forward to your regular mailings. What you are doing is building what the advertising guru’s call ‘top of mind’ awareness. Couple this to a tactfully placed message in the body of the communication, asking for referrals: ‘If you find this newsletter helpful, and know someone who might also benefit, please ask them to call me, or give me their details and I will call them’. And there you have it, the crux of this article: By positioning yourself as a leader in your field – and you must be, because you know enough to mail inside info to everyone on a monthly basis – you immediately come to mind when it is time for your client, or someone referred by your client, to buy.
Now take the total of the income you need above to become debt free this year, R540 000 – and divide that up by the number of names on your address list, say 500 (that’s an income of R1080 each) who refer you to another 500 (that’s another R1080 each) who refer you to 500… you get my point? Your monthly newsletter is doing your prospecting for you. Properly executed, your newsletter will generate referrals and sales leads like nothing you have tried before.
[i]Writerboy runs a specialist newsletter and direct mail communications practise based in Cape Town.[/i]
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