Chapter One
The P.U.M.P. Marketing System Strategy
Can you get excited about finding the best ways to get more customers, have more clients, sell more and increase traffic to your Web sites? If you answered, “Yes,” to any of these questions, then The Customer Catcher™ P.U.M.P. Marketing System is for you.
Can you see the value in have a nearly endless number of No Cost and Low Cost sales and marketing strategies that has the best prospects calling you, and standing in line, begging to give you their money?
The P.U.M.P. Marketing System is all about how to promote yourself and your business. Whether you have a retail location, are involved in direct selling or coaching, or have authored a book, it doesn’t really matter. This book helps you get known, win concrete credibility and sell your products or services – without feeling uncomfortable or like you’re selling too hard.
A lot of the concepts discussed in this book are ‘evergreen’ and can be used now and into the future. At the same time, there will always be fantastic, new technologies to help you. These are tools that can be very effective, if used wisely, to execute your strategic plans.
Of course, the Internet is certainly one of them and you are going to learn how to leverage the power of the web here. Often, businesses move from one technology to the next looking for that silver bullet, that magic pill, that can let them grow their business and track customers and sales.
However, to be quite direct, lots of people aren’t even using the telephone properly yet! They don’t leave a decent voice mail. They don’t have a decent outbound message that people hear when others call in. It’s not uncommon to move on to the next biggest thing without having squeezed maximum leverage out of lower cost, usually less exciting, tools like the phone.
That doesn’t mean ignore the latest either. At www.RadioTalkShowHost.com, we teach Internet Radio and Podcasting. These are both low cost marketing tools that are also good credibility builders. This is just one example of what you’ll read about. The single underlying of this book is to give you all the help, concepts, plans and tactics you need to know:
How you can get all the customers you want – without doing a lot of work!
Sell ‘Without’ Selling
How much do you like to do sales that involve that “hard closing” feeling? You know the, “You want one?... You’ve got to get it now! …. Here’s what you're going to get… and, that’s not all!” It certainly can be a harsh thing. That rotten feeling in your gut comes when you’re selling something to someone that really doesn’t need or want what you’re offering. Well, the good news is you don’t have to be like that today.
Grab more FREE tips at www.CustomerCatcher.com/free
The Customer Catcher™ P.U.M.P. Marketing System
Peter Drucker, a famous business management consultant, said, “Because its purpose is to create a customer, any business enterprise has two and only two basic functions, marketing and innovation. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of a business.”
That’s really what it's all about. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business. If they're not funding your business, you don’t have one. Many times, the biggest mistake a company or individual makes is to focus mainly on their product.
An author is focused on her book. The technologist is focused on his software. A retail store is focused on its signage and stock. You need to focus on the person who’s a prospect first before they're even your customer. What do they really want vs. what they even really need?
Customer Catcher Tip: Treat people like they are your customers before they are your customers. Ask them specific questions about what they are looking for.
It’s Never Been Easier
There are many trends today that make it so exciting for you to get customers. It’s easier. It's cheaper. It's more effective and it can happen seven days a week, 24 hours a day without you having to work all that time.
The first trend that you really need to take advantage of is that there are millions of people online searching for what you offer. Up until now advertising and marketing has been called interruption marketing. If I interrupt your TV show with a loud piece of music and some cool creative advertising, that’s going to get you to pay attention.
If I send you direct mail, hopefully you're going to open it or if I put up a billboard on the side of the highway, and you're not speeding by, you’ll take the time to read it. By the way, it’s a big mistake to put too much copy or too many words on signs, in direct mail, and on Web sites.
Millions of people are actually searching for information so all you really need to do these days is just put the information out there. It’s like you have a field behind your house and there are deer in your field looking for a salt lick or some food to eat. All you need to do is put the food out there, and that food will make the deer content.
Second, there is a lot of money out there. There has never been a more significant time when disposable income and dollars are being made available. The use of credit cards online is fairly accepted now. There’s lots and lots of money available.
So number one, you’ve got millions of people searching. Number two, you’ve got millions of people searching their wallets at the ready. Why not make it your product, or your nonprofit, or your information that they're going to buy?
The third trend is the use of computers and the Internet. Computers allow us to buy, sell and search online ourselves and computers are cheaper, faster and better than they’ve ever been. You can get a really decent laptop for about $500 or $600 now.
You can get a great desktop that does multimedia and everything else that you really need it to do, for probably $1,000. There’s a lot of information available via the Internet, not just to market your business but to educate yourself.
One of the themes you're going to hear throughout the P.U.M.P. System is about education and it really doesn’t cost you unless you don’t accept it.
Education is going on all around you every day, when you're watching television, listening to the radio, walking down the street, or opening your mail. You are getting a free but valuable education.
What you need to do is change your mindset. I want you to put on your Customer Catcher cap, your brainiac for attracting customers.
Start looking for ways to get leads and learn to recognize trends.
Read the newspaper as a business person looking for opportunity, not as a citizen looking for entertainment and news. Just pick up the paper, look at a different section that you don’t normally read and go from there.
Millions Want What YOU Have
Let's get back to our trends. One is millions are searching. Two, they have money and they're looking to buy solutions. Three is the computer and the Internet. The power of technology is at our fingertips and it's never been easier.
Trend number four is that media is multiplying. We've got search engines, millions, if not billions, of Web sites, hundreds of television channels and we've got hundreds, if not thousands, of radio channels with satellite radio.
IP radio is coming; that’s Internet Protocol radio. IP radio is being put in cars that take advantage of the existing cell phone network towers and not the satellites up in space. If you’ve listened to satellite radio, you may notice that it cuts in and out when it's cloudy or when there's a storm. So people are a little concerned about the consistency of that.
Really, rather than saying the media is multiplying, what's increasing is the number of voids where you can put your information. Wouldn’t it be exciting if you could be the one who provided the information? Wouldn’t it be worthwhile if you were the author that wrote that article that was interviewed by that radio station or that television station?
It's easier than you think and we're going to cover that in Chapters 4 and 5 on P.U.M.P. Publicity.
Trend number five, related to the void, is “Content is king.” One of the most modern trends that I've noticed is that we're actually going backwards. Traditionally when television and radio first started it was sponsored by the soap companies.
That’s how we came up with the soap operas on TV. They would pay for the dramatic, creative content in between and as consumers we would be willing to give up one or two minutes of our time to see what's new about Tide or Palmolive and our fingers soaking in the green stuff.
Now we're going back to that because technology is also allowing people to filter out advertising. So TiVo, that boxy connector TV, allows you to actually skip advertising.
Satellite Radio lets you buy 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, disco, talk, and sports stations generally without advertising. Satellite radio is starting to proliferate because Sirius and XM are looking for more money. They're public companies and they're being judged.
People are paying to keep advertising away so they buy on demand movies. They rent DVDs. They don’t want to see the advertising in between.
The best form for marketing your products and services, your information, your coaching, your consulting, your books, is in creating the content.
Become your own soap opera production, if you will, where you create the content. I hosted sponsored radio for companies like Microsoft or Entrepreneur Magazine. If we changed the channel or the medium in which we presented it, let's say we took it from traditional broadcast radio and put it on the Internet, they actually would strip out the ads to put it on some Web site.
So by taking out the actual advertising that people pay for, what's left? - The content in between. Let’s say I have a guest named Bill on my radio show and I say, “Bill, what's the name of your book,” and, “Bill, tell us about how to reach success sooner.”
In between the show segments is an ad for Sear’s windows and doors. Well, if they strip out the ad, I still hear about Bill’s book. I'm still getting his Web site information. So, start thinking about how content is king and how you can create it.
I've been saying “Content is king.” Cash is king has always been the expression and I actually came up with a new one when I was speaking to a group in Atlanta and that was, “Cash is king and content is queen.” Cash is king, because that’s how we run our business, but content is queen.
Focus on what content you can create that you're not creating today.
Continuous Education
Marketing is generally misunderstood or at least people have a wrong perception of what it is. For the purposes of this P.U.M.P. System introduction, let's say that marketing is “the continual education and gradual process of guiding of people to take a specific action.”
Now what that means is I want to start a relationship. I want to start communicating before you ever purchase something from me. I want people who never buy from me to refer me to others. People who never buy from you can refer you.
Often people wait for somebody to become a customer before they have the system in place to get referrals. Just because somebody doesn’t want a pink umbrella for themselves, doesn’t mean they can't refer it to their daughter, to their sister, or whoever wants a pink umbrella.
If you are perceived as an honest, worthy person, providing a great product or service, there are people who aren’t necessarily in the market for your specific product or service who will refer you, so make sure you take care of that.
The first part of marketing is identifying and attracting prospects or suspects. Suspects mean they're living, they’re breathing, they have a pulse; they might want to read your book.
Prospects are more defined. So if I have a business book on sales and marketing then I may be able to get a hold of a list or create a list of people who have purchased sales and marketing books before.
Marketing is about identifying and attracting people to basically get them to your front door, to get them to your Web site, to get them to phone you.
You might want to flow chart your marketing idea. What is the process? Really, if you want to look at the marketing of your Web site or your book, you need to process that. You need to have a flow chart.
Follow a dollar through your business. Follow a dollar or follow a customer. What happens when somebody comes to your Web site?
What happens when someone phones? How many rings before it is answered? What do they hear when it's answered? What do they hear if it's not answered?
Often you hear a detailed, personal schedule like, “Hi, it's Martin. I'm away from my desk right now because on Monday’s I'm golfing. On Tuesday’s I'm going to the grocery store.” You know, as soon as you get voice mail it's understood the person is not answering the phone. Don’t waste your time doing that.
“Hi, thanks for calling the place where ‘you get customers until you beg us to stop.’ This is Martin Wales. Leave your message and your call will be returned promptly. In the meantime check out www.CustomerCatcher.com for additional free sales and marketing tips.”
Make them feel welcome. State a benefit of your company. Tell them what to do. They already know what to do, leave a message, but it's more about the benefit of, “We will call you back promptly.”
Let them know what’s going to happen. If it's not promptly then it's within 24 hours or a customer service rep will call, but tell them what's going to happen and tell them it's going to happen well.
Then direct them to where you want them to go. It doesn’t have to be your Web site. It could be an affiliate program. For those of you new to Internet marketing, an affiliate program is when somebody pays you a commission when you refer their products or service. It doesn’t have to be online. It could even be offline, but right now let's just talk about online.
Customer Catcher Tip: If your Web site is not up yet, or not all you want it to be yet, then refer your caller to a specific Affiliate product you’re promoting.
My voice mail message could say, “In the meantime check out this great site we recommendcalledWriteYourBookin14Days.com.That’s www.WriteYourBookin14Days.com.”
Then you may get paid a commission for people who are just phoning you to find out other information or tell you that your envelopes are in from the local business supply store. You never know. They might buy something from the Web site you referred them to in your voice mail.
Marketing is something that happens on a continual basis. You should have multiple streams of marketing. Remember this please! TOO many people rely on one thing – one type of marketing or one primary channel of communication.
Right now everyone’s relying on their Web site. It's affordable. It seems easy. We think everyone’s online. It's the shortest route of least resistance in our mind and certainly in some cases, yes, people are searching online.
The other people are busy. They are actually finding it refreshing to get direct mail if you can imagine. People are finding it refreshing to get a greeting card or postcard in the mail.
We use a system called www.CustomerCatcherCards.com and if you want to check it out there's a free sample there. We use Customer Catcher™ Cards because it's an affordable way to use postcards and greeting cards in direct mailing to stay in touch with our customers. Even if we get a client via the Internet or they join our teleconference training, we contact them with paper.
You remember..that white stuff you can touch, sense and have an ‘experience’ with?
Paper is personal. That’s why newspapers are still here. That’s why magazines are still around. How do you feel when you pick up a newspaper? We're going to talk about the power of paper and the way it feels in your hands when we go into publicity in chapters four and five.
Marketing is something you need to do continuously. You need to have multiple channels of it and then it needs to be integrated. Online and offline need to work together. You find me online. I send you a postcard offline.
T.R. Becker, a friend of mine, has an expression, “Rich people say both.” So if someone says to you, “Do you want customers on the Internet or do you want to get customers from direct mail?” successful and prosperous people reply, “Both.”
The best marketing system results in a sale. If somebody goes to a Web site and purchases without calling or having other human interaction, that is fantastic marketing. You can see the benefit of having marketing that allows you to sell in an automated fashion.
I wrote a sales letter for somebody last year. Between June and February of this year it sold $135,000 worth of their subscription based service all on autopilot. This is what we call cold traffic. People who were just searching online for the solution to their problem, just punched it into their search engine and they found that subscription based Web site.
The conversion rate on the subscription based Web site was only about two percent and that’s actually quite good. Out of the thousands of people that came to the site, two percent were buying and sometimes it was as low as one percent in any given month. But in total $135,000 was made just by setting up a proper process. There was a sales process in the marketing.
Selling is really just helping people decide to take action once they find you. The best marketing results in a sale without human interaction.
A friend of mine, Jay Abraham, said something that has always stuck in my mind, “He who lives and runs away, lives to market another day.”
Often people quote the SBA, Small Business Administration’s statistics that 95% businesses go out of business in the first five years. Well, you know what? That’s because they spend themselves out of business.
They focus on buying furniture, paying rent, having a fancy Web site, and over designing the cover of their book. They concentrate on all sorts of bells and whistles that benefit the company or at least the ego of the owner, rather than the customer.
Remember back to our quote, “Because it's the purpose of a business to create a customer, any business enterprise has two and only two basic functions, marketing and innovation.” It didn’t say, “Renting an office.” It didn’t say, “Getting great carpeting.” It didn’t say, “Getting aerodynamic chairs.”
It said, “Marketing and innovation.” Out of those two things, marketing is usually easier than innovation. Coming up with an innovative idea is a painful way to make money, but it’s harder to sell a book on something that people are already doing than to write the first book on a specific subject people know nothing about.
Reduced risk is very important. Ask yourself the following questions. How can I get customers without spending more money? How can I get them for free?
Where are my customers already hanging out? Later in the book I’ll explain the hot dog theory of marketing. That’s something I came up with as a metaphor to explain to people about how you can get tons of customers without spending your money. We’ll talk about how to do marketing with other people’s money, often referred to as OPM.
Sometimes I've paid a premium to be featured on a television show for four and a half minutes. The reason you'll pay a premium is if you’ve got a lifetime to use that credibility. If you’ve got multiple ways to use that one time expense, then you're actually factoring the expense out over the life of your business.
But generally speaking I look for free marketing and my associate, Jay Conrad Levinson, who I interviewed recently for www.CustomerCatcherRadio.com is fantastic at listing off free marketing ideas. He’s called the “Father of Guerrilla Marketing.”
Guerilla Marketing essentially came from the American Revolution. The Minutemen were guerilla soldiers. As they ran through the woods with their rifles, they hid among the trees and took pot shots at the British Redcoats walking in straight lines down the middle of the road.
Guerilla Marketing is relatively easy. You can move fast. There's limited expense. You can react quickly to competition. You can find out more about Jay Levinson at www.GMarketing.com if you want additional information and see how he markets himself as well.
Risk is really something you want to reduce because, “He who lives and runs away lives to market another day.”
I had the pleasure of meeting some people who did a trade show. They spent about $50,000 to set up a retail space with carpeting, computers and staff, and it was a poorly attended show.
I also spoke with someone who scheduled a live seminar where one hundred people had committed to show up. Some of these people had paid $50-$90 to attend and then what happened? Let’s say there was a chemical spill in the area that day. They ended up with sixty people attending. Half of those were really friends and family. For new prospects, the actual number was really thirty people.
Really you have a higher risk with live conferences and trade shows in contrast to a teleseminar that is relatively inexpensive and essentially free. So if you can get people to a teleseminar, great! A hundred people show up! Five hundred people show up! Five thousand people show up!
But you know what? What if zero people show up? Well, then you just hang up and go on your way. If I have not stressed it enough, reduce the risk. Reduce the risk with your marketing and move onto another day.
Let’s define the word customer. If our business exists to serve a customer, what is a customer? Marlon Sanders, who I've spoken with often, is a gentleman in the Internet marketing industry. He is a loud, wonderful presenter and he has this expression, “That duck don’t quack.”
What he's talking about is a business model. When you think about ducks, what do they look like? Where do they go? What are they afraid of? What do they like to eat? What type of water do they like to land in or do they land on water or do they land on land? How often do they waddle versus fly?
Remember, you want to know your customer before they're your customer because that’s how they become your client or a customer. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we knew exactly what someone was looking for and exactly when they were ready to buy? Well, you can, and again it just comes from paying attention.
The first type of customer is a onetime customer. This is the most expensive, most laborious, most, sometimes frustrating experience, because we spend a lot of money getting a first-time customer to try our product or service. We might pay a little bit extra money. We may give them our book to get them to hire us as a consultant.
We pay a lot of money to get a customer to buy our technology. I used to work in software technology and still do, but on the Internet. What’s the cost of the first CD?
Well, that first compact disc is anywhere from a million to $20 million. Every one after that costs two cents. It’s the investment in the RND to do it. Your first one-time customer is the most expensive, and it’s not very efficient if it’s what we call a “one-and-done.”
The one-time customer is certainly one we want because we have a chance to get to the next step, and that’s number two, a repeat customer.
We want to get a customer to become a repeat customer. The most famous upsell is “Do you want fries with that?” from McDonald’s. You always want to have an upsell so the customer buys again. That is a great customer to have!
Let’s say it costs $50 to get a customer to come to us. If we can get them to buy two things, then each of those purchases is now split between that cost of $25.
Essentially, once you get a customer, it’s easier to communicate with them. You’ve got their phone number, you’ve got their e-mail, you’ve got their contact information. You don’t have to go buy or rent their name again.
You don’t have to do all sorts of article writing and speaking at trade shows and so on to get that customer again. It’s much more cost-effective to upsell them or cross-sell them to another product or service you have.
After a third purchase or after an extended period of time, a customer becomes a client. A client has a different meaning. A client is someone who is in our care. A client is someone who looks to us for information. A client is someone who looks to us as the expert in our industry.
There is a level of respect. The client understands the value of what you deliver and is willing to pay more for it. That one-time customer is the barter person. They’re the beat-you-up-for-a- nickel. They’re the garage sale deal.
They’re going to buy your old rocking horse and rusty bike and they want to beat you up and get that down to $2 instead of $5. It’s a game of disrespect, really. So you want to get people to a client level where they respect you, recognize you and refer you.
People generally refer clients because they remember the name of the company that they’re paying. If they’re on retainer, they know who they’re writing a check to on a monthly basis. A client actually raises the bar for you because you have to perform on a continual basis.
Every time you’re in a session with a client, you’re judging you. They’re thinking, “Is this good, am I getting information? Does this guy know what he’s talking about, should I hang up now and run away, what should I do?”
The next type of customer is affiliates or dealers. These aren’t people who are necessarily writing you a check and saying, “Here, here’s the money, I’d like some product.”
Online, we call them affiliates. Offline, they’re often called dealers or a distribution channel. They are customers of yours. How so? You need to pay them with respect, training and motivation. They are the people that you ask to recommend your products and services.
If you’re doing a book campaign online or a virtual bookstore, the owner of the bookstore where you’re doing a book signing is your customer. They want an experience for people in their bookstore.
Although there’s not an exchange of money directly, there is an exchange of value. They’re giving you real estate in their bookstore. They’re giving you the trust and confidence that you’ll treat the audience with respect, and hopefully they’re going to get a few cents off selling your book.
Online affiliates like it if you write the sales letter for them. They like it if you give them the whole e-mail process, all the copy, all the subject lines, all the links. All they need to do is the least work possible.
In return, they’re exposing their customer list to you. They’re recognizing and referring you as a trust. So really, that’s a customer level that most people don’t understand or pay enough attention to. Just think of an online affiliate program as a dealer offline who gets, say, a 25 or 30% commission for selling your product or service.
Get Help From Your “Help”
Suppliers and service providers are great ways to get to other customers. Suppliers can help you get other customers because they serve other companies that you want to become your customers. I was on the Internet radio station that also hosted eBay Radio and Entrepreneur Magazine Radio because I wanted those companies to become my clients.
By being a customer of the supplier, eventually you’re going to be introduced, either via telephone, or more specifically, in a customer appreciation event live offline or special events like eBay Live, things like that. So you actually get introduced into the network of your supplier.
If you’re a consultant and you join associations, or you get one client and you get them to introduce you to the other vice presidents of HR, other vice presidents of sales or CEOs or chairmen, you’re apt to get some of them as customers also.
The best way to get to the big dogs is to have other big dogs bring you in. So treat your suppliers and service providers like customers. The second part of that is pay them well, pay them on time. Very often, service providers are in touch with your customers.
If you have service providers, such as a virtual assistant, they need to be trained so they understand what you do so when your customers call in they get their answers quickly and promptly.
If the service providers haven’t been paid on time, if they haven’t been motivated and trained appropriately, they’re going to answer your customer with an attitude that you wouldn’t like. It’s your customer, even though the supplier or service provider is between you and your customer. So make sure you treat your suppliers and service providers as customers.
Employees and staff, whether they’re contract, full time employees or part time employees, are really sales people for you. They’re marketing for you and they need to be trained to answer questions correctly.
Very often when I’m consulting with my clients, I’ll ask people throughout the business such as the sales departme