A friend that works at a car dealership was recently discussing a sales technique with me. “We’re not allowed to let customers leave until they take a test drive,” she said. “If they take a test drive, the chances that they’ll buy really improve.”

Photo via Flickr user Emilio Labrador

That does this have to do with today’s topic? The car dealership’s policy clearly illustrates the difference between selling features and selling benefits.

So what’s the difference?

A feature could be the structure, physical description, or attributes of your product or service. When you talk about features, you are simply describing what it does, how it’s designed, what it looks like and how it works. It’s rational, makes perfect sense, and is really, really interesting—but mostly to the person who designed or sells the product.

Unfortunately, describing features is not a great way to actually convince anyone to buy.

A benefit on the other hand is the emotional reasons or connections your prospect makes with your product or service. Research shows that every single buying decision people make is based first on their emotional response. People use features to back up a decision they’ve already made emotionally.

Think about the largest purchase most of us will every make—buying a house. Real estate professionals know that if people fall in love with the house, they usually end up buying in less than thirty seconds! (If you watch those shows on TV about how to fix up your home to sell it, you’ll know what we’re talking about.) It’s only after they’ve found “the house for us” that buyers look at the features in detail to reaffirm their decision to buy.

At a car dealership, putting the consumer in the driver’s seat changes the way they view the vehicle. No longer are they looking at the “features” of the car, they are experiencing the benefits. (Hence the increase in sales.)

So what can you do to make sure your message is speaking to your prospect’s heart and not their head? Ask yourself a series of questions:

• How will their life be better, easier, or more fun with my product or service?

• Why will they want to tell their friends about my company?

• Without my product or service, what will the prospect be missing?

• How will the prospect justify this purchase to themselves or their spouse?

By answering these questions, you will discover the benefits that will attract your prospects. No matter how tempted you may be to point out the incredible “features” of your product, sell with the prospect in mind.

When you constantly put the prospects emotions first, you will create marketing messages that drive sales like you’ve never seen before.

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Clate Mask is CEO of one of the Inc 500’s fastest-growing companies, Infusionsoft.com. Ask him about how to build a successful business, and he’ll say, “There are three, and only three, factors that really have an iron grip on the profits of any marketing effort. The smartest marketing minds on the planet have boiled these factors down to this simple, but incredibly powerful, formula: The Right Message… To The Right Market… At The Right Time!”

The problem is, most businesses send out a message that’s only relevant to the company owner—that is, to people who are not in the market for their product or service, at a time when they are probably not interested in buying!

We often hear people say “I meant to get around to doing some marketing, but I just didn’t have time, so we just put something out there.” Or, worse, “I got a great deal on this program but I didn’t realize 90 percent of it went to people who don’t buy what I sell.”

Many small business owners spend money on “image” advertising, with no direct response offers included at all. There is no “next step” called for, and thus, no way to measure the effectiveness of the ad. Advertising just your brand is great if you’ve got a million-dollar budget like Nike or Coke, but it’s marketing suicide for the rest of us!

The objective of your marketing efforts is to generate leads—finding people you can follow-up with. When you convey the right message, to the right market, at the right time, you get leads. Social marketing tools in particular, can really help you do this inexpensively and effectively.

Here’s how: You want to attract people who are interested in what you’ve got to sell so you create a dozen powerful, benefit-filled headlines offering to provide free reports or “how-to” documents (or even a dozen different titles for the same document), e.g. “Free report—What you should know before hiring a contractor.” Or, “Get the facts: Learn how to work with a contractor before you renovate.” Offer them on Twitter.com and see which headline generates the most response. Expand the program by posting the same short message on your company’s Facebook.com “fan page” and your LinkedIn.com profile (you have these, right?). Use the same approach to learn what generates the most interest in a free webinar (that you could offer).

Create a series of three-minute videos introducing yourself and offering something—a free guide, a seminar etc. (this will take you about five minutes each using the camera on your computer and an on-line helper like JiveSystems.com). See which one gets the most response and build on that knowledge.

Marketing today is all about getting people to come to you . Stop just talking about your company, and start conversing with your customers and prospects. Offer them content they value—use some easy (and fun) tools and a little bit of learning how to test and track, you’ll soon see results.

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Until recently, if you had some expert knowledge in a specific area of business, you kept it pretty secret and only shared your hard-earned expertise with paying customers.

The Internet has changed that. Sites like Meetup.com, Flickr.com, Facebook.com, LinkedIn.com and Slideshare.com allow members to create interest groups around a niche or a topic and freely share their expertise.

This may not make much sense, at least initially. Why would you give away something you can get paid for? Well, there’s a new generation of Web-savvy customers for whom this makes total sense, and you need to pay attention.

Here’s how it works: I want to find an expert in widgets in my area, and I want to make sure the person I work with really knows what’s happening in the widget world. I want to be sure my work will be done expertly, and since I don’t know much about widgets, I need a way to “test” potential suppliers.

What’s more, maybe I don’t really trust widget company sales people. Maybe I’ve been over-promised and burned in the past.

So what do I do? I Google “Northumberland widgets” and look for every reference I can find that gives me the information I’m looking for. When I find a Facebook group or a Meetup in my area that’s packed with widget users, I know I can ask them all my questions and be sure of getting the information I need to make a good decision.

I find a series of PowerPoint presentations on SlideShare made by a particular widget company that tell me how to buy and maintain widgets, what to look out for when assessing competitive bids, and ways to lower my widget operating costs. Now I have concrete examples of what they know that can help me.

And when I look up the company principles on LinkedIn, I’m impressed by their professional history, and I join some of the groups they are part of.

So whether your business is selling washing machine parts or kite making supplies, you can start a group that’s attractive to people interested in those activities. Think it might lead to some business opportunities?

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

I love year-end posts where we see the flood of “Best of 2009” lists of tips, tricks and ideas to steal.

I actually love getting these. I like to review them and see if we’ve used any during the past year, and whether they have worked for us. There are always nuggets to mine, and in a pinch we can compile all the lists we get and send them to clients, who love getting them too. (Yes, we always get permission first.)

So far though, no one has replaced the question Barry Nalebuff, co-founder of Honest Tea, and Oxford and Harvard economics guru asks: “What is your added value?” where “added value” means “total value, minus the value without you.”

How about it? If you asked your customers, suppliers and colleagues how you added value, would they have a clear answer? Here are some ideas we can all turn into New Year’s resolutions for 2010.

Write down and categorize everything you know about your industry: all the players, the laws and regulations, current perceptions, market definitions and so forth. Now you can see your industry as a game, with well-understood rules, traditional ways players can move, and a shared understanding of how the game is won.

Now, think of what would happen if you changed any of those elements. Start by examining the tactical rules; these are the moves that don’t fundamentally change the game, like opening gambits in chess. Then look at the strategic rules, or the ones that actual define the game; for example, the way a knight is allowed to move is one of the defining rules of chess, and if the knight moved another way you could legitimately ask if chess were being played any more.

Now you’ll start to see how to re-write the rules and make up your own game. What would happen if you could reframe the industry?

Game changing doesn’t always belong to the technology big boys like eBay and Google. When the first marketing consultant or ad agency renegade offered coaching to clients, in effect installing expertise instead of selling it, the consulting game changed. In 1984 Cirque de Soleil (with a government grant for struggling arts groups) offered a theatrical, character-driven spectacle that omitted the animals, and the circus changed.

Reframing the value equation is not a guarantee of success (Cirque de Soleil almost went under about three times). But it seems to me that as we head into what may or may not be a recovery, we need to ask the question of how we provide value. If we did not offer the products and services we do, would anyone notice? Would anyone care?

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Business people often say the presentation of any concept or sales call is as important as the content, in some cases even more important.

So what are the ingredients of a successful presentation? What practical insights are there on how to improve your personal skills? What do you need to know to create presentations that not only get rave reviews, but also succeed in getting recommendations approved and vigorously supported?

In 30 years of teaching presentation effectiveness at one of Canada’s premier business schools, we’ve had a real life lab in what works, and what business owners, executives, and sales people really need. They told us they want a way to reduce the time required to prepare a presentation significantly. They want to know how to respond to challenges and objections from the audience; and, they want to stay in control of the situation and not have their meeting hijacked. And of course everyone wants to know how to control the nerves and fear of standing up to present.

This is a rich subject for discussion. Let’s start by looking at what we see are the biggest mistakes people make every day.

As a starting point, please realize that nobody wants to talk about your product or service! Your business is the most important thing to you, but your prospect’s or client’s business is the most important thing to her. A good rule of thumb is to talk a lot about them, and very little about you. Your audience wants to know one thing only: how is your product or service going to help me compete in a dynamic, cluttered, and puzzling market. So don’t tell them about how fast your widget processing speed is, tell them how much faster their product will get into customers’ hands and start pumping out cash.

Start your presentation with a promise of value. We feel so strongly about this we insist that all our clients begin their presentations with these exact words, “At the end of this meeting you will have…” Make it as relevant as you can.

A good trick is to find out what the audience’s biggest frustration is with your product or service category, and build a promise around solving it. You might say, “At the end of this meeting, you will have a proven solution to your inventory problem, which will increase stock turns by 14 percent.” Be focused. Be specific.

End your presentation with a clear request for meaningful action, and double your chances of getting a positive response by demonstrating that you have skin in the game too. This simply means that you will ask your audience to do something, and promise to do something meaningful in return.

Here’s how that might go: “Bob, I’m asking you to purchase twelve dozen of our gizmos for delivery by the end of the month, and in return I will provide our advanced training for the whole team a week before the stock is delivered.”

Simple rules that will make a real difference in how well your presentations and sales calls go: talk more about the customer than about your company; start with a promise; end with a clear “ask” and another promise.

Why does this work? Well, when we talk to heads of companies large and small and ask them what bugs them most about sales calls and supplier presentations, they tell us (and very frankly I might add): people who don’t understand their business; lengthy meetings with no clear outcome or value proposition for them; and no commitment by the supplier to contribute to success.

There’s an old sales guy motto you might recall right about now: the customer is always right. In this situation, it’s worth paying attention to.

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Have you ever thought that running a business, especially a retail store, is a lot like dating? There you are in your store and in walks Mr. or Ms. “Right”, that ideal customer who simply loves your store and goes wild for your stuff.

You have a great time and Mr. or Ms. Right leaves the store, hopefully purchases in hand, and you think, That was great! I wonder when I’ll see him/her again?

Hmmmm? Too often, you just wait until they happen to show up another time. You can sit next to the phone and wait for it to ring, or you can take action!

Remember that guy who used to have his “little black book” with the names and phone numbers of lots of cute unattached girls? He always had a date. Here’s how to be that guy in the retail world:

When he met an attractive girl, the guy with the little black book probably said things like, “May I have your phone number so I can call you?” By doing that, he got permission to call, because if they gave him their number, they were probably interested, maybe even flattered that he’d asked.

You need to get permission to follow-up too. “Permission to Market” is something you want to achieve with every one of the ideal customers who enter your store—those people who you’ve identified as the ones who are most likely to be interested in the things you have to sell—in other words, your “target group”.

This shouldn’t be too difficult; after all, they already came into your store and bought something.

But even if they didn’t buy there’s no reason to think they might not buy at another time. Maintain contact. While you’re transacting with them, say, “Would you like to be on our VIP list and receive advance notice of specials and sales events?” …or “We love to keep in touch with our neighbours. Can we have your contact information?”

You might simply have your own little black book next to the cash and ask people to sign up. Lots of them will. Or better yet, start a database on your computer.

Now you’ve got permission to market to them, so start with a simple message thanking them for their business. You might add an extra, like a coupon good for a small gift with their next purchase—whatever you can afford. You want them to know you appreciate their business and are offering a value added service by staying in touch.

Next, send them an invitation to a special event at the store, a preview of new fashions, a demonstration of something that’s of interest, or an exclusive pre-sale VIP customer night. Anything you can come up with to make them feel special and get them back to the store.

But be careful, don’t pester the people on your list, space the messages out, perhaps than a month or six weeks apart. Be sure the emails have an “opt out” provision as a courtesy—most people will not use this.

You’re thinking, when am I going to find the time to do all this? Good question! The answer is: you automate the whole thing with contact software. Check out Master of the Moment— the Art of Follow-up Marketing on the download section of the Marketing Masters.ca website to learn more.

Just as in dating, if the chemistry is right, your goal is to further and build the relationship. Having ideal customers that you see often, can be a marriage made in heaven!

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

We recently helped one of our clients, a skills training centre, do some research with a group of small business owners. We discovered that the three top issues on the minds of these business people were: how to find new customers; how to stay ahead of their competition; and how to spend their marketing money more effectively. They were all interested in taking their business to a higher level.

A good first step in getting to the next level in your business is to “discover” what your company is really good at. In business lingo, this is called “defining your core competency,” and it’s often surprising that many business owners have never nailed this down.

Ask yourself this question, “If you were forced to divest your company of everything it does every day except one set of activities, what would you keep?” What really generates your profit and keeps your customers coming back? What activities could you discard with no real danger to your business?

Once you know the activity that is core to the survival and prosperity of your business, it gets easier to see who the prime prospects that you appeal to are, and because you know precisely who you are appealing to, it’s easier to find them, and easier to determine how to spend your sales and marketing dollars.

Here are some ideas to start your thinking about core competency:

Are you better than your competition at the nuts and bolts of sourcing raw materials and components, turning them into products, and setting up a great distribution and sales network? This is probably the only time we will recommend that you look at your pricing — if you can drive cost of your development processes and guarantee delivery times, you can keep your profit margin while passing savings on to customers and create long-term business relationships. A good example of this is Walmart.

If research and designing great products is what you are good at, you can go to market saying you really have developed the equivalent of the better mousetrap! Unique products is the niche where you’ll compete. Apple (iPhone, iPod) is probably one of the better examples here.

If your company is known for creating a great customer experience and able to promote it with a marketing system that ensures customer relationships, you’ll be able to say that you are easier to do business with than your competition, and be able to prove it. If your team excels at creating happy customers who can’t wait to refer you to others, you’ll want to focus on the results you offer. Think of TD Trust and all those easy chairs in their ads.

Yes, we know, the examples are all multi-zillion dollar companies with megabuck advertising programs, but you can play the game too. It’s a simple idea: find what you are good at, and only spend your hard-earned marketing money on finding customers who want and appreciate just what you do best.

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

“One of the best business-building tactics is to demonstrate your knowledge to a receptive audience,” say Marketing Masters Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker. “Public speaking is particularly effective if your business has a service or consulting component.”

In their recent article, ,Speak Up! Get out there and find an audience for what you do on Mplans.com, Burgin and Walker point out the hows and whys of business owners getting out into their target market communities and engaging in different forms of public speaking, e.g. demos or hands-on workshops.

Click here to read the entire Marketing Masters’ article.

One of our favourite clients is a business training centre at a local college. For the past few months, we’ve been working with their team to find out what small business owners want most from training, and how they want to receive it.

We began by doing a telephone survey. It was illuminating to see how extremely satisfied the training centre’s clients are with the great customer service they get from the staff, and a bit daunting to think that we could help grow such a well-established business even more.

We could have asked a standard question like, “Is (subject) of interest to you?” or “Do you or your employees need training in anything?” …but our work with entrepreneurs has shown us that the answer to this question is usually “No. I don’t have time.”

We ended up asking “What topics would be worth taking time off from your business to learn about?”

Small business owners told us they would indeed take time off work if they could learn: a better way to find new customers; stay ahead of their competition; and spend marketing money more effectively.

This was a great start. But these topics cover a lot of territory and the training centre wisely wanted to do further research to hone the new offerings. To do that, they decided to offer a series of free seminars to businesses in three separate regions, teaming up with partners in each area.

The seminars will be samplings of the broader courses they are considering offering at the centre. They will gauge interest in the topics via the number who enroll for the seminars, and circulate a questionnaire to gather even more information. They will also ask for permission to continue sending information to participants.

The results should provide guidance on what courses to offer and what kind of businesses will be interested in each. Further, the seminars will kindle interest in training in those companies that participate.

Sampling is a standard strategy in package goods marketing. This project by a training centre shows how the same technique can be used to develop or improve a product and build new business.

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/

Some of our best business conversations happen in the most unlikely places, including our daily walk to the local coffee shop we fuel up in, and the dog park where Liz takes her border collie, Mike.

One of our dog park buddies is a woman we’ll call Mary. She’s a self-employed consultant who knows we’re always open to providing what insight we can while we throw tennis balls for Mike and his doggy pals.

We like what Mary does, so we took her along to meet a client of ours who needed the kind of services she provides. Now, when a colleague accompanies you to meet a client with a stated need, you can be pretty sure there is real business to be had, and that you have a better-than-even chance of getting it.

Here’s how the meeting went. Client to Mary: “Here’s what I need (gives detail). What would you charge me for that?” Mary to Client: “That would be X dollars. But I could give you a discount if that’s too much.”

So Mary got the job, but gave away about 20% of what the client was willing to pay her because she didn’t know the Three Magic Questions she should have asked.

Magic Question Number One:
What is the biggest frustration, or the most powerful opportunity you have been facing in the last twelve months?

Magic Question Number Two:
If you had solved that problem, or been successful with that opportunity, what would that have meant to your company (In dollars? In market share? In profit? In store traffic? In lead generation?)

Magic Question Number Three:
On a scale of one to ten, how committed are you to solving that problem, or succeeding with that opportunity, in the next twelve months?

Can you see why these questions are pure magic? Because the client has the opportunity to talk about his favourite subject (himself) and is actually telling you exactly what he wants to buy and how much it is worth to him.

If the prospect had said his commitment level was eight out of ten or more, Mary could have said, “I specialize in providing solutions that (solve the biggest frustration the prospect has) so that my clients can achieve their goal of (what the client said he wanted to achieve).” She could have quoted a fee that was reasonable in relation to the answers to Magic Question Number Two.

If the prospect had said his commitment level was under eight out of ten, Mary would have suspected that the client was not willing to pay her usual fee. She might also suspect that the project might be terminated early, or even that she would have trouble getting paid on time.

In this case, she could have said, “You’ve said your problem is (restate the problem or opportunity) and that resolving it would result in (restate the results he mentioned). But it doesn’t sound like it’s your number one priority in the next year. I specialize in this type of work, and I feel that you should invest X (a reasonable fee). How does that sound?”

Based on the response she got, she would then be able to make a decision to accept the job, decline it, or negotiate a short-term contract she and the client would be happy with.

Increasing the value of your sales? All it takes is a little magic!

Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker are the Marketing Masters (www.MarketingMasters.ca), a full-service marketing and advertising partnership that helps build busy businesses. Send your ideas on How to Thrive in Times Like These to liz@marketingmasters.ca or ken@marketingmasters.ca, or call 1-866-908-5720.

web: http://www.marketing,masters.ca
blog: http://thebuzzwithkenandliz.blogspot.com/