Kent Sayre's Blog, page 2

Free Reports

One way you can add massive value to your customers' lives is to give them timely or timeless information. For whatever challenges, issues, or problems they have in life, if they received the right information at the right time, it could dramatically help them. That's why I think you should start providing them with free reports, dishing them out liberally to show you care about them. There's a limit to that strategy, of course; it's attractive to consider mailing these reports to your entire customer list, but if you have more than a few hundred people on your list, it soon becomes cost prohibitive. It's better to mail reports only to all your best customers, however you define them; at Unstoppable Marketing, we define them as anybody who's ever bought a back-end product from us.

So pick a topic and try your hand at it. It could be something like, "Inside a million-dollar business opportunity organization: the behind-the-scenes, earth-shattering secrets I've learned working at XYZ Marketing that no one else could ever know!"

Humanizing Yourself to Your Customers

In general, the more you're able to show your customer that you're a real person, with real goals and dreams, the better. A monthly email or postal newsletter, on top of all the product offers you make, can be a real help in this situation. Now, we don't have an official company newsletter at Unstoppable Marketing, but I'm about to initiate a quarterly for my best customers that will be packed full of tips, tricks, and strategies for making them more money. I'd like our customers to get to know us, because the more they do, the more they'll like us and trust us—which ultimately leads to them buying more from us.

The challenge in our marketplace is that consumers often want to turn us into commodities, so we can be easily compared to other companies, and their respective products and services. Our goal is to fight against this, to differentiate ourselves so much so that they know we're real people who really care about them, people they like doing business with. Nobody loves companies, but people love people. So it's our task as marketers to become three-dimensional, living, breathing human beings to them. It's hard to hug an amorphous company. So when I play the character "Kent Sayre" in my sales letters, it's an exaggerated form of myself, designed to bond the customer to me.

How can you do the same thing? I'm not talking about divulging personal details or having anyone invade your privacy, just giving your customers enough information so they can see you and your employees are great people to do business with. For example, you could chronicle some of your customer service reps' heroic acts in going the extra mile. You could give your customers a glimpse into the daily life of your office, or discuss plans for expansion. You could profile successful customers, and discuss how your products have helped them. If you can let them get to know you, they'll come to like and trust you more…and this will result in more sales.

For my part, I plan to use more photographs and tell more personal stories than ever before. And I'm thinking about doing a list something like "21 Unusual Facts About Kent You Probably Never Guessed." The idea driving this is that as our customer reads it, they see things in themselves they have in common with me, and go, "Oh, wow! Kent and I are quite alike! This means I should order now!"

I want to be like a magnet, a polarizing force attracting who I want to work with (good customers and go-getters) and repelling those I don't want to work with (deadbeats and program-hoppers). I don't want to be perceived as having a blasé, bland personality…and neither do you.

Drivers of Customer Experience

So what drives customer experience? More specifically, what drives your customers' experience with your company? This is excellent food for thought. By knowing what drives your customers' experience, you can home in on and leverage those points, measure them, improve them, and guarantee your customers a wonderful experience with you. Is it the customer service? Is it how quickly their package arrives? Is it the presentation? Is it the ease of making money? Is it the ease of contacting you?

What drives a positive customer experience? What makes turns a first time customer into a repeat customer? What turns a repeat customer into a rabid, lifetime customer? If you can identify that, you can systemize it and do it every time.

This discussion has roots in a recent trip to the dentist for a basic teeth cleaning. Every time I go to the dentist, I get a brand new dental hygienist. Seeing as how 95% of my time when I go to the dentist is spent strictly with the dental hygienist, it does matter who that person is. And my dentist, for the life of him, can't keep turnover down. In the last six visits, I've had a new dental hygienist each time; so when I'm greeted with the umpteenth new person, I sigh and go "Ugh" internally. Every new hygienist will take a stab at making some small talk, and I largely comply…but it seems like an exercise in superficiality. I mean, they're probably not going to be there the next time, and they may know it too. Personally, I would rather get to know someone at a deeper level.

I still remember my former dental hygienist, Tera. She was married with an architect husband who had just begun his own business. She had two children, and they were building a custom-designed house for themselves. Both she and her husband liked investing in Oregon coastal land. They were starting to make decent money with it, too. She was pregnant with twins the last time I saw her. And then she had her twins, and never came back to work. To quote Napoleon Dynamite, "Dang it!" This spun me into a world of revolving- door dental hygienists.

There's zero relationship with all my new teeth cleaners. Perhaps they see me as a commodity, a set of teeth to be cleaned before quitting time. And I don't want to, but I'm starting to see all of them as interchangeable commodities instead of unique, three-dimensional human beings. It's no good, and my satisfaction with my dentist has plummeted. It's in the gutter these days. So why do I remember all these details about my old dental hygienist, my favorite one? Because I got to develop a nice patient-professional relationship with her. I was very pleased with my dental experience during her reign as my chief teeth cleaner, a glorious period of about four years.

So ask yourself: "What drives our customer experience, and what can we do to make our customers thrilled to do business with us repeatedly?" I say you should be as personable as possible. Let your personality hang out. In all your communications with customers, be real and authentic; never come across as wooden or cardboard cutouts. People want to do business with real people. People do business with people they like, and avoid doing business with people they dislike. By allowing our customers to get to know us, I truly believe they'll come to like us—and that will be better for everyone.

It's All About the Customer!

Everything we do as marketers has to originate from being customer-centered. Here's what I mean by that: for every action that we take or don't take, we should bear in mind how it affects the customer. Ideally, everything we do will result in a better customer experience. Otherwise, we risk running afoul of what our customers truly want.

Here's an analogy to demonstrate my point: Suppose I'm the chef in a restaurant, and you wander in hungry for a little dinner. Instead of giving you a menu and asking you what you want, and then cooking that up, I decide what you get to eat—because I'm the master chef, the ultimate arbiter of food tastes for all humans. In my infinite wisdom, completely ignoring your desires, I grill you up a prime rib eye steak. I sear it up with the best herbs and spices…my finest collection, since I am a master chef. And it truly is the best steak in the world. And next, after arranging this meat with parsley and other food decorations, I present it to you. But you justifiably reject it! Why? How could you say no to the world's greatest steak? It's simple. It's obvious. It's because I ignored your desires, what you wanted, and my meat-loving soul projected my desires onto you. Which is no good in the culinary world, or in business. My point here is that everything has to originate and come from the customer. Any biases, prejudices, and personal opinions you have must be set aside when you focus on the customer.

Healthy Habits for Better Productivity and Joy

I think it's critical for you to develop some sort of morning success routine, so that you can come to work calm, centered, focused, and relaxed—yet energetic, alert, and feeling happy. By having a morning success ritual, you can dramatically improve the quality and quantity of work you get done…and raise your enjoyment too.

Suppose, on one hand, that you wake up to a screeching alarm, hurriedly shower, fix yourself up, and fight bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way to work. You skip breakfast, you feel sleep-deprived because you only got six hours sleep, and feel like you're running on empty all day. Now, contrast that approach to getting a full, deep, restful eight hours of sleep, waking up in the morning with exercising, stretching, focused breathing, clearing your mind. You take your vitamins and supplements, eat a nutritious breakfast, read a few pages of a positive book, reread your goals and focus on relaxing; and when you arrive to work, you're truly "in the zone."

Setting Goals

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The Value of Thinking

Never underestimate the value of thinking! Thinking is what sets human beings apart from the animals. In business—and in most parts of life, if you want to get right down to it—it's actually one of the highest and best uses of your time, because of the leverage it provides. One foggy idea can crystallize into something really, really valuable. The ancient Greek philosopher Archimedes once said, "Give me a long enough lever and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." Thinking is that lever.

If you can block out 10-15 minutes daily to think hard about your career and how you can do things faster, easier, more conveniently, more comfortably, and in a more rewarding way, then that might just be the most valuable time you spend all day. Make no mistake: I'm not referring to absent-minded daydreaming here. I'm talking about focused thinking about a subject. If you have a frustration, it's very valuable to spend time thinking hard on how to solve that problem.

There's a mistaken belief that work must involve moving around, pushing papers around, and a frantic level of activity. I believe you should test the definition of work. Suppose, over the course of a few days, you thought long and hard about how to reduce refunds…and as a matter of fact, you came up with a way to cut refunds by a third. Clearly, this would be enormously valuable to the company. Or suppose you spent your thinking time modeling your position, thinking through how all your systems operated and innovating faster shortcuts. The time and effort savings you'd get in the long haul could very well be staggering.

Again, this is why thinking is so valuable: it's a great form of leverage. If you can think of how to automate something you now do manually, that's excellent. If you can think of how to group steps of a process (or eliminate them altogether), that's wonderful. If you can think of how to create a new system to give you a result you don't currently get, that's sensational!

The way to the promised land is through higher and better, more dedicated, and more focused thought. So put your thinking cap on and have at it!

Dealing With Adversity

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More Promotions, Not Necessarily More Products

My philosophy is that once you've got a decent backlog of products and services, you're best off by creating more promotions, as opposed to strictly more products. To me, it's the quality of the marketing system that determines the profits; the product is secondary. So I'm looking to create far-ranging and larger-scale marketing campaigns, with forays into radio and TV sooner rather than later. Direct mail and space ads will be my primary vehicle, of course, but I want to add more media to our arsenal. I believe this is something that you must consider as your business matures.

Let me give you an example: how can somebody make $50,000 on something, while somebody else makes $1,200,000 with the same product? The answer is the marketing system. For proof, I offer the true story of two companies that marketed the same product: a business opportunity program. One guy raked in the dough, while the other guy got a relative pittance. Now, guy number one—let's call him Albert—does have a substantially larger house list than guy number two, whom we'll call Bert. Albert huge list helps enormously, but I believe he also built a better marketing system, and that's what led to his outstanding results. He made $1.2 million; Bert made a decent but hardly comparable fifty grand. Now remember, it's the exact same product; the only variable is the marketing system. That's why you must focus on creating world-class marketing systems as often as you can, with more steps, through more media, with more follow-up, and with more personalization than ever before.

As I've already pointed out, fulfillment is the Achilles heel of all marketers. It's expensive. You may be able to sell like crazy, but it's quite an undertaking to do all the fulfillment—yet it's also an absolute necessity. But aha—if you can join programs that do all the fulfillment for you, and you have a killer compensation plan to boot, then my oh my—that's a jackpot waiting to happen! That is what you should be looking for. It's certainly my model, and it's our friend Albert's, too. As a matter of fact, I don't think Albert has created or currently creates any products of his own. He simply finds opportunities that fit the aforementioned criteria, and milks them for all they're worth with his legendary marketing systems. You should consider doing the same.

Now, I don't recommended that you abandon product development altogether, but you can certainly delegate a larger chunk of it to someone else; and you can strive to create a better system that will eventually make product development happen independently of you.

Take Action, Avoid Fear of Failure

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