SuccessBios.com

In this section you’re going to learn about the lifetime value of a customer, building a list, creating a sales funnel, sequential marketing, multi-modality marketing and back-end sales.

These are some of the most important concepts in marketing and business.

If you’re already implementing them, congratulations. If not, get ready to watch your business, income and net worth expand.

Let’s get started.

In all of your marketing, you need to factor in the lifetime value of a customer.

Too many businesses focus just on making the sale in front of them, but the amount of revenue that a satisfied customer can bring you with repeated buys over the long term can dwarf the initial sale.

Doesn’t it then make sense to do everything you can to just get that customer through the door?

Unfortunately, that’s not the way a typical business operates.

Here’s the usual model:

• Sell stuff to the customer — and hope they call again.  Or try to sell a high-priced product or service upfront.
• Play the numbers game and cold-call until you’re blue in the face and have annoyed 9 out of every 10 people you sell to. Or sell to a customer who then asks for a refund 30 days later because of feeling too pressured and embarrassed to say no to your pitch.

Don’t laugh. That’s a big part of the high failure rate among businesses.

Wouldn’t it instead be nice if you attracted customers to you instead of knocking on doors to find them?

Wouldn’t it be nice if they bought from you regularly with minimal involvement and hassle from you?

Here’s an approach to consider:

• Offer a free white paper or report through direct mail, e-mail or advertising.
• Allow interested parties to call to listen to a recording or go to a web site that creates interest in the free offer.
• In exchange for the freebie, the interested party leaves contact information.
• The prospect’s information is entered into a database for follow-up contacts by snail mail or e-mail.
• You shower the prospect with valuable free stuff for the next half-dozen contacts spread 3 days to a couple weeks apart.
• After a month or so, you offer an e-book, video, CD or physical book for, say, $27.
• Because you’ve already proven your value and haven’t done any direct selling, the customer decides to give it a try.
• The $27 product is actually worth several times as much.  It also contains gentle announcements about other stuff you offer.
• You send some free stuff — tips, tutorials, audios, CDs, articles, blog posts and the like.
• You then offer a monthly product-of-the-month membership which takes you little time to create, but brings monthly recurring revenue.
• You then offer something for $197, followed by more freebies.  Your next offers after that ramp up the price to $497, then $997 — in each case offering more free material of informational or other value.

Are you starting to see a pattern?

By the way, never in this process have you had to do any personal selling or convincing.

All of your contact has been made automatically using audio, video, e-mail and physical mail, so you engaged all of your customer’s senses in what’s called multi-modality marketing.

You made contact regularly and sequentially, using a process known as sequential marketing. This built up familiarity in the mind of the prospect, and your offers were always there in case — at any time — there was a need or want.

You provided offers at gradually increasing price points only AFTER proving you could deliver value. These are your ”back-end sales“.

See how much smoother and easier the process is than the usual confrontational, stress-inducing hard sell?

It’s like sales judo. And it works.

This process — known as your sales funnel — is where a large batch of curious or interested parties enter one end.

They are showered with value and freebies, educated about your offers and come out the other end as satisfied, responsive buyers.

Your sole job then boils down to the three main things we’ve mentioned before:

1. Building the list to enter your sales funnel.

2. Providing value.

3. Selling more stuff.

In the next section we’ll show you how your customers become more than just buyers. You’ll hear an idea almost no one teaches or practices, yet its power is mind-boggling.

Stay tuned.

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