5.   Mail regularly. Once is never enough. The first mailings in even wildly successful campaigns will net nothing. Over time, however, more eyes will see the promotions, and your brand and message will gain prominence (yes, even in the mail).

6.   Limit the offer with a deadline or a set number of first responders. Create urgency wherever you can. Your offering will eliminate his pain. Encourage him to make the right decision in a timely manner.

7.   To increase your response, give something of value for free. I’m not talking about tchotchkes, but something that has worth to the prospect – a white paper, an e-book, an hour’s consultation, a webinar or access to the members’ section of your site. Of course, you’ll want to capture contact information, but just for what you must have. If you’re going to mail, you need their mailing address, not their telephone number or email address. You can capture that info a little at a time as the relationship builds.

8.  Test and track all responses, and adjust your campaign accordingly. This is a must. If you don’t test your message or call to action, and it’s ineffective, you’ll continue to fire bullets in the air with each campaign. One of the easiest ways of testing is to mail an initial small sample with different messages to see which draws the better response. Then, you can make educated adjustments to the copy.

That’s it, the eight rules that will get any direct-marketing campaign successfully off the ground. Once you have this foundation in place, you’ll be able to evaluate the myriad of other options with a more strategic eye.

After you’ve implemented a couple of these ideas, let us know below how it went and share some tips.

Thanks to Péllo for this chance to share what I’ve learned and I hope that it’s been helpful. You might want to submit a blog also? If so, just give Péllo a call.

This cornucopia of options enables direct marketers to more personally, memorably and compellingly fix their key products and services messages into prospects’ minds. They need to be adopted into programs already built on a solid foundation. So, start with the basics – a program built on proven methods – and build from there.

Here are my top eight essential steps to developing any successful direct-marketing program. These will get your program running successfully.

1.   Develop a hook that gets responses. This is your key message, designed to speak to the prospect’s pain points and differentiate you from the competition. It’s about the customer, not product features or benefits. This is your prospects’ vision of how his life should be. That’s why he’ll call you.

2.   Offer a trial. The idea is to eliminate the fear of risk. Department stores with easy return policies do far better than those with you-bought-it-you-keep-it policies. The stores know that people keep good products. They just don’t like to take chances.

3.   Success stories and testimonials work magic. Everyone knows that. However, I’m frequently told that it’s difficult to get customers to endorse products. More often, I find the difficulty is not in customers’ lack of willingness, it’s really the seller’s reluctance to ask. As I was once told, Go ahead. They can’t eat you.

4.   Offer must be easy to understand and obtain. To most seasoned marketers, this means writing in plain English. No jargon. No acronyms. Writing simply is very important. However, writing briefly is just as important. You want to capture the customer with your single key message, not explain everything about your offering. Pique his interest and he’ll call you for the details.

These first four steps alone solve the most common hurdles direct marketers face. They whet prospects’ interest in your offering, and then resolve their chief concerns risk free.

In Part 2, I’ll show you the final four steps, these aimed at keeping your offer in front of your potential customers and then providing an irresistible call to action.

Meanwhile, pull out your most recently completed direct-mail project and examine it against steps 1-4. What would you change? Let us know what jumps out at you – good and bad.

Many sales people are uncomfortable when it comes to talking about money, and, frankly, that makes sense. Most of us from childhood have been taught that it’s rude to talk about money. We’d horrify our parents if we asked someone, How much did that cost? Or, How much do you earn? They taught us that discussing money is taboo.

As tough as it may be to bring up the cost, you need to get over it.

At this point, traditional salespeople try to make buyers curious about the features and benefits of their offerings. They never bring up budget. As a result, buyers lose interest in salespeople’s dog-and-pony shows because they’re wondering: What’s this going to cost? Will I have to go back to the board, committee or my wife who might say that it’s too much?”

In a typical sales scenario, when a buyer asks, How much is this going to cost? The salesperson has to scramble for an answer.

As soon as you discover where their pain resides, find out if they can afford the solution. Get to the answer with questions such as: John, have you put a budget aside for this project? Or, Dave, when I work with other companies your size, I find that they usually have funds allocated for each phase of such projects. Has your company done that?

When the budget question is asked, you’ll likely get a tentative yes, no or not sure. The latter, usually marks a stall or objection that you need to handle.

From time to time, you may come across buyers who are willing to invest in your product or service, but unwilling to commit fully. Rather than all or nothing, split the sale into two parts.

Part one can be a trial period. Let the buyers get comfortable with what you’re offering with limited risk and become comfortable with committing to the rest of the purchase. This will build buyers’ confidence in you and, you’ll stay clear of the buyer/seller situation where you yield control to the buyer.

You are now working together.

Most salespeople are afraid to discuss budgets, fearing that they may offend the buyer and loose the sale. It is best to face the issue head on. Get the financial information right.

At that point, both you and the buyer can be confident that budget won’t be an issue. So, you can move forward with an undistracted buyer. If there are financial hurdles, you and the buyer can either resolve them or, if the numbers don’t add up, part company, saving the time and frustration of further doomed negotiations.

Try this pro tactic on your next sales visit and succeed in two moves. Let us know how it goes. I’m confident it will get you to success twice as fast.

That’s right, while you’re working hard to understand and satisfy their needs, buyers are up to some sneaky shenanigans.

However, I’m going to offer some steps that will reverse the advantage and put the advantage back in your hands.

First, let’s compare your agenda with the typical buyer’s. You’ll see that the goals are counterproductive. The buyer wants what you have . . . for free.

• Buyers lie. They don’t lie because they are bad people, but to defend themselves. They know that salespeople are trained with all the right moves to take advantage of them if they aren’t cautious.
• Buyers want to know what you know. They want to gather as much free information as possible.
• Buyers mislead you. “I need to think it over” or “I’ll get back to you” are common phrases to dismiss you. You provided the information and consulting, completely unpaid, which buyers use to price shop your competitors, or go back to their existing vendors to get them to lower their prices.
• Buyers hide. After they have what they want, they won’t answer their phones, return messages or respond to emails. At that point, it’s over.

From the moment, average salespeople enter buyers’ offices, their sales systems play into buyers’ strategies. Here’s the typical sales process.

1. Salespeople probe for buyers’ needs. It’s only after they understand buyers’ predicaments that they can devise suitable solutions.

2. Salespeople present. Once they have a plan, they provide their buyers with an overview, often in depth.

3. Salespeople try to close. That’s the objective. Good closers are considered good salespeople.

4. Salespeople follow up. This is the agonizing, tedious process of getting the buyers’ to make a decision.

While salespeople are trying to close, buyers are misleading them. While we are trying to follow up, buyers are hiding. This is an outdated system.

Let’s look at a better way of handling this situation. People buy for one of three reasons: pain, fear or pleasure. Unless you are selling exotic cars, or big-screen TVs, my guess is that most people aren’t buying your product or service for pleasure. So, as salespeople you MUST find the pain or fear. Get your buyers emotionally involved. Don’t say, “If you do XYZ you could make this much money.” Instead, go from the perspective, “If you don’t do XYZ, how much are you losing?” Great salespeople look for pain or fear, not needs. Everyone has needs, but people who buy have pain or fear.

In addition to discovering what’s hurting or scaring them, it is critical to get money issues (budget) out on the table, to discover the decision-making process (Is the prospect a think-it-over-type? Does a business partner or spouse need to be involved?).

Salespeople who follow this strategy will have more control of sales calls and more deals that close.

Try it. Examine your own sales process and let us know how it goes.

There are pluses and minuses to both strategies, but more important there are big opportunities at stake if you guess wrong.

Email marketing is seeing major growth for some good reasons. For businesses, it’s cheaper, quicker to create, and an excellent platform for testing and measuring. Customers can respond to offers instantly and share with their friends.

As good as this sounds, cataclysmic spam and fear of viruses is keeping spam filter cranked up and prospects too inundated and untrusting to make much of an effort to read the messages.

Direct mail retains advantages as well. In a letter, postcard or brochure, you have space to make your case in as much detail as necessary and a canvas to make it much more creative than email where you must make your points fast and short.

Elaine Fogel, president and chief marketing officer for Solutions Marketing and Consulting, shared this stunning statistic in an article on MarketingProfs.com: offline communications drive 67 percent of online searches – and 39 percent of those searches result in a sale. [My apologies if you have trouble accessing the article because you're not a MarketingProfs.com member. I'll try to find her sources and provide them in a future blog.]

What’s more, according to Fogel, 71 percent of consumers prefer receiving product offers in the mail and 59 percent of businesspeople trust print to email.

Nonetheless, despite such incredible success, the big knock on direct mail remains its cost.

So, what does this all mean for your direct-marketing strategies? You may be seeing where I’m headed. The future the direct mail industry isn’t email marketing eliminating direct mail. Smart marketing strategists will blend the two for a double-barrel approach. They’ll be using both direct mail and email – and other innovative tactics like quick-response codes –  to get customers buying online.

How have you been handling direct- mail and -email programs in your marketing campaigns? Let us know your thoughts and experiences.

If you’d like to share your know-how, consider becoming a guest blogger. If you’re interested, contact either of us.

Péllo Walker                                                   Scott E. Smith
Daily Digital Imaging                                      Guided Message Communications
pello@dailydigitalimaging.com                       scott@guidedmessage.com
925-935-3621                                                 925-566-4569

Well, maybe some low-hanging fruit will save us from re-inventing the wheel. I’m speaking, of course, of the wealth of existing expressions and catchphrases that make up a big part of the business vernacular.

Colorful, witty, meaningful turns of phrases are the bread and butter of business titans and journalistic luminaries. These clever, smart expressions that can be used in myriad of situations.

We’re all aware of pundits’ aversion to clichés. Yet, they aren’t above dropping a phrase from Shakespeare. Therefore, it seems a snobbish not to borrow from Clint Eastwood or Yogi Berra when it helps make a point. Plus, these passages come easily, regardless of writing skill. Few of us have time to re-imagine new analogies and metaphors for every sales letter, email promotion or leave-with piece.

If you can work the Bard into your work, do it. Beyond that, no matter how often you feel the urge to shrewdly work “Go ahead, make my day!” into your blogs or boost spirits with “It ain’t over ‘till the fat lady sings” – DON’T! This is where the rules you were taught are right.

Clichés are bad-writing commodities and classify your writing and, worse, your ideas as such. Be known for your originality, not someone else’s. Win a sale with sincere thoughts, not banalities. Maybe you can’t write like Ernest Hemingway, but you can achieve success with your own ideas told in your own words than you can with clichés that virtually guaranteed to go in one ear and out the other.

So, where does that leave us regarding how we communicate? It boils down to having your signature on your ideas. You don’t have to be eloquent. Your words will stand out and carry weight because they’re yours.

Try it today. Take your last e-newsletter, press release or direct mail postcard, and edit it for these guidelines. You’ll find yourself much more interesting, persuasive and, yes, eloquent.

As always, we encourage guest bloggers. If you’d like to share your expertise, contact either of us.

Péllo Walker                                                          Scott E. Smith
Daily Digital Imaging                                             Guided Message Communications
pello@dailydigitalimaging.com                              scott@guidedmessage.com
925-935-3621                                                        925-566-4569

At one time or another, a professor or seminar instructor has told us to communicate so ninth-graders, our grandmothers or everyone else can grasp our thoughts. Otherwise, confounded prospects will refuse to buy or will plunk down top dollar for swamp land as long as every aspect of the fraud is explained the simplest terms. It suggests that Starbucks would be even more wildly popular if it translated its caffeinated banter into plain English.

I’ve never bought into that theory. I know a tax consultant and a psychologist with more business than they can handle for exactly because people can’t and don’t want to understand their offerings. OK, the logic’s a bit skewed, but it raises the question: is dumbing down your brochure, newsletter or direct-mail postcard all that’s required for good communication, or are there other things in play.

Writing to the lowest denominator lowest common denominator makes no more sense than replacing caviar with tapioca to broaden appeal for something crunchy to complement the champagne. While everyone will “understand” the tapioca language, it lacks emotion, logic and interest that would entice someone to buy your products over your competitors’. So, while plain English is a good foundation for messages, don’t be afraid to top it with some tasty Beluga.

So, if plain English is lacking, how about making it scientifically precise? I’ve discussed technical language with countless engineers. We’re communicating with our technical peers and high-tech professionals who use the same terminology, acronyms and product specifications. So, shouldn’t we speak in their language to make our case?

That’s a good argument. After all, every industry has its own language. It makes sense to pitch your products and services in the native tongue, and it shows you’re one of them.

Nonetheless, whenever I’ve tried to write an article, video script or product brief in tech speak, it comes out boring, emotionless and not the least compelling.

Think about the language that drives you to action. French, even though I don’t understand a word, has a poetic lilt that makes anything I’m offered sound good. At the other end of the language spectrum, comedian Jeff Foxworthy’s backcountry jargon entices me so much that I’m convinced I’d love noodling.

In Part 2, I’ll show you a treasure trove of ready-made quips that will make your day. Meanwhile, look over the most recent promotional work you wrote. Is it persuasive? Is it Jeff Foxworthy? Is it you? Send us your rewriting questions. If we can’t help, we’ll see if others in the community can.

As always, we encourage guest bloggers. If you’d like to share your expertise, contact either of us.

Péllo Walker                                                          Scott E. Smith
Daily Digital Imaging                                             Guided Message Communications
pello@dailydigitalimaging.com                              scott@guidedmessage.com
925-935-3621                                                        925-566-4569

These rudiments will be most useful in helping those of you who are beginners to sales leapfrog to new levels of success. They also provide a foundation for you veteran businesspeople who, commonly because your expertise lies in another field, have never been exposed to any sales systems.

For experienced salespeople, this is a refresher, though I frequently find even the best let a rule or two slip over the years.

You can apply these rules in many selling situations. Whether you’re pitching Fortune 500 vice presidents in their offices or designing a mailer aimed at community dog owners, these steps will work for you.

These are just the basics. To refine your skills, there are countless books, websites, webinars and conferences devoted to selling. You’ll also find qualified professional coaches in most communities. If you’d like some recommendations, reply at the bottom or feel free to contact me directly.

Here are the six steps you should check off in every sales situation:

• Demonstrate a strong value proposition based on the applicable six areas wired to prospects buy buttons – costs, revenues, ROI, productivity, customer satisfaction and strategy – covered in my previous blog.

• Show you understand prospects’ businesses to generate confidence. If the industry is foreign to you, review “About Us” and “Products” on prospects’ websites, then browse through a couple of the prominent industry sites for relevant trends and issues. Don’t pretend to be an expert if you’re not. Instead, use your research to show prospects you understand them, and bring up examples of similar situations where you’ve succeeded as proof-points.

• Leverage data to demonstrate the merits of your offering. Provide hard proof-points – a 30-percent improvement in clients’ sales, reduction of a similar business’s expenses by $10 million or study results reflecting significantly improved customer satisfaction.

• Overcome objections with facts that will refute concerns. Ask questions to get to the bottom of prospects’ fears and respond to them with concrete evidence. If you frequently hear the same objections, bring them up yourself early and handle them so they don’t become an issue when you’re trying to close the deal.

• Conclude with a compelling call to action. It’s crucial to guide prospects toward what you want them to do next. Never walk away leaving the next step up in the air. Can I show you a demo next week? Take a look at the data I’ve given you in the next couple of days, and then can we meet on Monday to cover any final questions you may have? Click here to see exactly how much you might save.

• Be persistent whether you’re talking to a prospect in person or sending flyers to 10,000 businesses. By persistent, I don’t mean be a pest. Propose next steps that keep the prospect moving forward and that advance prospects’ agendas. With direct mail, PR or email programs, only persistent repetitive efforts will yield desired rewards.

Bookstore shelves are filled with various methods of selling. Some work well overall. Some work with specific audiences or in particular types of sales. Some don’t work at all and are just plain silly.

Let’s hear from you. What’s the best and worst sales advice you’ve ever been given?

As always, we encourage guest bloggers. If you’d like to share your expertise, contact either of us.

Péllo Walker                                                         Scott E. Smith
Daily Digital Imaging                                            Guided Message Communications
pello@dailydigitalimaging.com                             scott@guidedmessage.com
925-935-3621                                                       925-566-4569

There are six reasons that people buy a product or service. To get their business you’ll need to demonstrate how you can solve their problems – provide real value – in one of these areas.

If your offering doesn’t add value in in any of these areas, you have no chance to make a sale. That’s perfectly fine. Part of finding quality prospects is eliminating as quickly as possible those who are least likely to buy. You’re then focused where the odds are heavily in your favor.

At any given time, 3 to 5 percent of your target market is ready to buy. So, sorting them from the rest comes with the territory.

Let’s say you’ve just picked up 15 business cards from people at a networking event. Before you schedule a cup of coffee with every one of them, take a few minutes to rank them on the likelihood that you can accomplish one of the following:

1. Reduce their business costs.
2. Increase their company’s revenues.
3. Provide a better return on how they invest, leverage or spend their money.
4.  Improve their employees’ productivity.
5. Enhance their customers’ experience and satisfaction.
6. Strengthen a new strategy or initiative.

Each reason suggests an objective to guide your approach to each prospect. It’s not building a relationship, gathering information or showing them your wares. Though those tactics may make up some part of the relationship, they’re not the primary reasons.

You’re main objective is solving customers’ problems and bettering their business efforts. If you can’t identify a specific way you can fulfill one of the six reasons that they’d spend money, then you have no chance of making a sale.Sizing up your prospects according to this list will dramatically increase your productivity. You’ll spend more time taking checks and more time over coffee with those who enrich your life in other ways.

The morning after your next networking event, evaluate each of the people you took a card from and make a list of the most promising prospects. Then, let us know how it went.

Thank you to our recent guest bloggers and those in the queue for sharing their experience. If you’d like to share your know-how, consider becoming a guest blogger. If you’re interested, contact either of us.

Péllo Walker                                                   Scott E. Smith
Daily Digital Imaging                                       Guided Message Communications
pello@dailydigitalimaging.com                        scott@guidedmessage.com
925-935-3621                                                  925-566-4569

But what happens to that work if in addition to its domestic purpose in the U.S., you’ll use it in other countries – maybe a product brief for a trade show France, a request for information from a Japanese conglomerate or sales collateral for your reps located throughout Europe?

When faced with this dilemma, companies frequently turn to language agencies to get their pieces translated and laid out for their foreign audiences. It’s crucial that both the companies and agencies act in a single coordinated process.

Translation has the least impact the layout for Chinese and Korean. Their character strings are usually shorter and require less space than English. Japanese too can be shorter, though sometimes it can be longer than English if it’s a translation in a very honorific style.

The big challenges arise for European languages. German translations often require about 10 percent more space than English. Layout gets tougher in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian, which take 20 percent more words to get the message across.

There are three solutions for these languages: build extra white space into the design; use a large English font to be replaced with a smaller, but still adequate, foreign font; or eliminate page-count restrictions. These scenarios afford ample space for language expansion, although the original English design may flow over onto additional pages.

What happens when the English page design is already tight? Or, when it just barely fits into the allocated two, four or eight pages? Now what do you do with the additional translated text?

In these cases, your language localization company needs to draw from a variety of skills as well as exercise some creativity. You’ll need to work closely with your agency to assure that the methods used still achieve your communication and graphic objectives.

Here are a few of the methods that our Auerbach team has developed over the years that you and your agency might add to your practices to avoid losing anything from your original design:

• Reduce the point size of the type…as long as it is still legible.
• Use a smaller or tighter font on the translated versions.
• Reduce the top, bottom or side margins to expand the print area.
• Reduce the kerning, the space between letters and lines.
• Add an extra page or two. (Note that this can increase print costs and change the design.)
• Shrink one of the graphics or pictures.
• Eliminate one of the graphics or pictures, assuming that the words are more important.
• If all else fails and the page count must be maintained as is, cut the extraneous English text by 10-20 percent, providing sufficient space for the translation to expand.

Conceiving the foreign layout in advance when you design an English template is just one of the many issues you’ll confront in a global business strategy. In future blogs, I’ll address more of these issues.

Are there some problems you’re currently wrestling with? Let us know with a comment below and I’m sure the combined know-how of the community can solve your problem.