What is Marketing?
The purpose of marketing is to find prospects and convert them into customers (make sales).
The purpose of business is to make more sales or increase the value of those sales (preferably both).
Good marketing is to minimize the costs of time, money and resources.
A service is a product with no physical item to deliver (eg. electricity or phone account).
In many cases it is easier to sell a service than a product as there is often nothing to manufacture and delivery is instant.
AIDA
AIDA is a long used acronym governing the laws of marketing and sales.
- ATTRACT: Your product (or service) needs to be attractive in order to grab their attention.
- INTEREST: When you create interest or desire you now have a prospect.
- DECIDE: Demonstrate value and benefits so they can make a decision to become a customer.
- ACTION: A good business converts customers into marketers (word of mouth) to generate more sales.
Ten Stages of Qualification
- Suspect: Everyone who MAY be interested in your offer but does not fall into one of the following stages
- Lead: When a Suspect is profiled to be in your target market
- Prospect: A Lead who shows interest in your offer
- Contact: A quality Prospect that you can actually talk to
- Customer: A Contact who buys something from you
- Client: A Customer who buys more than once
- Champion: A Client who refers others to your products
- Affiliate: A Champion who earns income for their referred Customers
- Associate: An Affiliate who repeatedly earns Affiliate income
- Leader: An Associate who teaches others the sales and referral process
If you have been engaged in any form of marketing for a while then you will probably already have Leads, Customers, Clients, Champions, Affiliates, Associate and maybe even Leaders. These are the ones you need to talk to first.
Everyone knows it is easier to sell more to an established customer than it is to convert and sell to a prospect or lead. They already know and trust you. You have an investment in them and them in you.
Your Friends fall into the Leads category or higher because you have many of their details already. Besides their email and phone number you probably know their family, how they live and what sort of financial and lifestyle desires they have.
DO NOT focus on looking for Suspects and Prospects until you have exhausted your Leads and Contacts. You will learn why later.
Marketing & Sales Rules
- Initially, everyone is a suspect. People you know and people you don't (yet) know.
- All marketing is prospecting for new or more business.
- Real marketing reaches out to find interested people.
- Use ALL forms of communication. Email, text, social media and even mail.
- The more people you market to, the greater your chance of success.
- The better you are at converting each stage (above) the more successful you will be.
- The more you sell to each customer the easier it will be to make money.
- Enlist your champions to help find more prospects, leads and customers.
- Track everything so you know if it working (or not). This is called analytics and metrics.
- Expect nothing to come to you from a search engine.
Cool to Warm Market
Your COOL Market List is the people you currently know.
Your WARM Market List are the subset of your COOL list who you have profiled, to determine who of them have a need or desire for your product (your target market).
This is only to Inform and Qualify. To find out what level of interest they might have.
The responses you will receive will be from "No Way, Jose" all the way up to "This is My Life's Purpose".
That's great. Don't get caught up on who said what.
The purpose of that exercise was to find the ones who DO have an interest in making money.
And the ones who DON'T. So you don't have to talk to them again.
The best part is that you found a bunch of people who are committed to saving the forests and making a difference (financially or environmentally).
And your team has jumped in numbers.
All you have to do is keep this process up for a while until a few more are doing what you are doing. Without your input. That's networking.
Be aware that some people will be just in it for the money. That's OK because you know the planet is a better place because of them.
Cold Marketing
Only after you have exhausted your WARM list (people you DO know), then you can start working on your COLD list (people you DO NOT know).
Go back to your warm list now and check you have not forgotten someone or not followed up.
It is 100 times easier to convert a WARM prospect to a sale than a COLD prospect. (trust)
It can take a lifetime of experience to market to these people.
Professional sales people do this for a living... are highly respected... and make a fortune.
Cold Marketing (advertising) is partially ART and a lot of SCIENCE.