Category: Client Retention

Unleash Your Business Potential: The Path to $1MM in Revenue Awaits

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Today, I had an epiphany while writing this blog post, realizing that what I had planned to share might not be what you truly need to hear right now. So, allow me to take a different approach that I hope resonates deeply with you.

Let’s set aside the noise and focus on Web2 — the powerful realm of social influence that holds immense potential for your business. As a small business owner, the social aspect may have been unintentionally overlooked. Take a moment to reflect on your website. Does it simply resemble an online business card or, dare I say, an outdated Yellow Pages ad? If so, it’s time to shift gears.

Consider this: the conversations your prospects have with their peers carry more weight than any message you can create, regardless of its brilliance. Recent research confirms that peers have become the most trusted individuals globally, making their trust and endorsement crucial for the success of your product or service. This holds even more significance as we navigate an AI-driven world. Building authentic relationships and cultivating social proof will be the key differentiators that set you apart from the competition.

Now, let’s explore the essence of our discussion: how can this understanding propel you toward achieving $1MM in revenue with a high net profit?

  • Clarity: The first step on this transformative journey is gaining a crystal-clear vision of your desired outcome and truly comprehending your market-dominating position. When you possess unwavering clarity, everything falls into place.
  • Focus: Once your vision is defined, it’s time to narrow your focus. Identify the ONE pivotal task that will make everything else on your plate either easier to tackle or entirely irrelevant. Honing in on this priority will pave the way for significant progress towards your revenue goals.
  • Consistent Action: Success isn’t born out of sporadic bursts of effort but through a steadfast commitment to taking consistent action. Remember the sage advice: “Consistency beats talent every time.” Embrace the power of daily, purposeful actions that align with your vision.
  • Results: Armed with clarity, focus, and consistent action, you hold the keys to building the business of your dreams. The transformation you seek is well within your grasp.

You might think, “This all sounds great, Amanda, but how does this work for real?!”

Imagine you set a goal to lose 20 pounds. You have a crystal-clear vision of wearing a specific dress at the upcoming summer family reunion (clarity). You know precisely what steps to take, such as cooking more meals at home, adding exercise to your daily routine, and creating a schedule (focus). And most importantly, you take consistent action (consistent action). When we set out on a goal, the first days are great! But the middle days, like days 17, 18, and 19, can feel discouraging – they last forever, and you feel like you get nowhere. But, if you persist, you’ll reach days 30, 31, and beyond while watching pounds melt away (and a need to buy new jeans!).

Let’s apply this concept to your business efforts to sort through the chaos. What can you do differently over the next 30 days to test the concept? 

Simply reply with how you’ll test this out, and I’ll hold you accountable for the next 30 days.

I hope these insights resonate with you and offer a fresh perspective.

 

P.S. I’m beta-testing a new program, Flash Coaching— a streamlined system designed to accommodate your busy schedule. It provides a unique blend of self-paced learning through targeted videos and unlimited, high-impact one-on-one 15-minute coaching sessions.

This is a perfect way to dip your toe into what it would be like to have a business coach on your side. Intrigued? Let’s connect >>

How to Keep Your Clients Satisfied and Generate More Leads

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted all your marketing resources and the chance of a positive word-of-mouth advertising, Google review, or client referral. Instead, you can satisfy your clients by ensuring you provide them with the basics. Find out what you can do to keep your clients returning for more of your products and services!

 

Provide Quality Products and Services

In today’s world, having the ability to hire cheap labor from overseas can seem like a daunting challenge for anyone in the services industry. However, providing high-quality customer service and services gives you an edge over others who cannot compete with a higher-quality product. Your clients will come back for more when you provide a superior product or service. Even though your service or product may be pricier, you can provide your clients with time-saving services that they value and appreciate.

 

Give an Informative Sales Experience

Don’t just sell when you’re trying to sell – educate! Giving your potential and current clients the ability to learn from you, the expert, is a great way to build trust and competence with your lead or client. Educate and give them value, so they can see the expert thinking you can provide their business.

 

Offer a Guarantee

While some services may not be able to offer guarantees, if you can, this is a great way to ensure that your client will have a good experience. You can offer another or repeat your service and make what’s wrong right for your client. Keeping your clients satisfied with your work is important to uphold a good standing in your community and among your clients.

 

Generate More Leads

To generate more business, there are a couple of simple techniques which you can employ in your business.

  • Build your database with a contest
  • Email your clients with educational articles, discounts, or other incentives
  • Offer a free online course, e-book, or another incentive for people to join your email list

 

As long as the reward is directly related to your product or service, you can get more people interested in your business by generating excitement around you, your product, and your services. So why not get started today?

How to Bring in New Customers with Incentives

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

While offering incentives to new clients to generate business isn’t a new concept, it is a process that has worked in the past and still works today. Even in a digital world, incentivizing your offerings gives your client base more ways to buy from you and more reasons to purchase your services.

There are several ways to turn a prospect into a customer. Look through these types of incentives and choose an incentive that works for your vertical and speaks to you. If you’re not interested in creating a specific type of incentive, you won’t follow through. In business, the fortune is in the follow-up, including creating, publishing, and utilizing any of the incentives you choose from this list!

 

Incentive #1 Offer a special price for a beta test

Beta tests are soft launches to test out the idea of a product or service. In a beta test, you can get feedback from your testers on what you’re offering. This way, you can improve upon your original creation and put more marketing dollars and time behind a better product or service when you launch.

 

Incentive #2 Offer affiliate commissions

Offering an affiliate commission is common to have others refer you for work. When others refer you, you kick back a percent of the sale to them as a “thank-you” for the paid referral.

 

Incentive #3 Free or inexpensive first product to build trust

Lead magnets, newsletters, and other freebies are a great way to get people onto your email list. Once you have them on your email list, you can sell a low-cost entry-level product to them, such as an ebook. In addition, you can also offer a low-cost ebook as a direct sell on your website.

 

Incentive #4 Package deals and bundling products or services

Bundling packages for your clients to get a better deal is a great way to upsell or get your clients to purchase from you. When you bundle, you can show the savings they get by purchasing the bundled product. In addition, the package price clearly shows how much they are spending, so they don’t have to continually purchase an add-on product.

 

Incentive #5: Trade-up or upgrades

Offering a trade-up or trade-in is a great way to get your client to buy from you or purchase the next-level product. You can offer these in any vertical, and they make for a great upsell incentive.

Incentives are an excellent way to persuade your followers to buy from you, regardless of your vertical. First, decide which one best fits your business and start there. Then you can see what works the best. When you find the incentive that takes off, utilize that specific incentive in your marketing to optimize your sales!

How to Generate More Business for Your Company

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Generate More Business by Having Satisfied Clients

While getting new clients is essential for growing your business, obtaining new clients is 11 times more expensive than keeping your current clientele. So, suppose you can keep your current clients happy and return to repeatedly buying your products or services. In that case, you can create a more sustainable and profitable business model that allows you to spend more time getting business and less time pounding the pavement looking for your next job or project.

 

Customer Satisfaction is Important in Business

If your customers aren’t satisfied, you’ve wasted time, money, and marketing resources. In addition, your word-of-mouth advertising is also compromised because if your customers aren’t happy, they either aren’t talking up your business or telling others about you; it will be a negative association. Now while you can’t make everyone happy all the time, if you offer a quality product or service and make customer service your top priority, then most of your customers will be satisfied. You can satisfy your customers by:

  • Providing quality products and services
  • Giving high-quality customer service
  • Creating a low-pressure, highly informative sales experience
  • Taking away risk with a guarantee

 

How to Generate More Business with Marketing

To grow your business, you’ll also need to use marketing. Digital marketing, or using the online space to market your company, is essential in today’s business world. You’ll want to make sure you are putting out consistent content relevant and valuable to your clients and prospective customers. 

When you start off with digital marketing, or if you’re revamping your marketing, you’ll want to start off slow. Choosing one of the following marketing ideas and utilizing that idea for three to six months, you can use one or more of these marketing techniques to generate more business for your company.

Build your database with a contest. This is a fun way to get your base involved in what you do. Create a challenge, make it fun, and think outside the box.

Schedule regular mailings or workshops on Zoom with sales, discounts, or other incentives. Having consistent meetings, whether once a month or every week, is a great way to contact your buyers.

Create educational blog content. Making consistent blog content of 300 words or more for each blog you write educates your customers and creates terrific SEO for your website. In addition, when you post blogs regularly, you increase the searchability of your website, so more people online will see your business.

Three Key Elements to Turn Prospects into Long Term Customers

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

Your prospects may come from many different sources, such as your website, Google My Business reviews, or email newsletter. You’ll want to have several ways to gather prospects and leads; however, if your leads don’t turn into clients, your money on acquiring that prospect can burn up quickly.

Once you have a customer, you’ll want to retain them in your business. The best ROI on the money you’ve invested in your prospect is to continue to sell your product or services with them over a period of time. If you want to turn prospects into long-term customers and retain them for future marketing, you’ll need to know the three key elements to draw them in and seal the deal. 

 

To Obtain Prospects, You Want to Be Inviting

People like friendly faces, so be sure to smile and address your prospect’s pain points. Make sure to listen to their concerns, and don’t sell them on a service or product that doesn’t fix their issues or problems. 

You’ll want to be perceptive, look at their body language, pick up on visual cues, and talk through their challenges. Ease them in your conversation, so they feel welcomed and comfortable talking to you. 

 

Educate Your Prospects and Be Informative

The biggest fear of most new customers is the dreaded buyer’s remorse. Often, buyers have remorse because they weren’t sure exactly what they purchased or what services they were buying in a package. 

If you educate your prospects and give them time to ask you questions, you can avoid buyer’s remorse from your clients. Make sure that you offer a quality product or service that delivers on the marketing claims.

In addition to educating prospective clients on the details of what they will be getting when they work with you, you can also offer them guarantees to sweeten the deal! First, you can offer a refund in a specific period if they don’t see results and have completed all the work necessary for them to have results. Second, you can offer them a bonus they can keep even if they return the product they purchased from your company. These money-back offers to a prospect can build trust in your client relationship, just for offering these options on your services.

 

Show Your Prospects You’re Enjoyable to Work With 

The third and most crucial element is to be enjoyable! Have a positive attitude, and when your client comes upon a challenge that they can’t overcome on their own, make sure to offer support. When your client sees that you care about them, they will be your client forever! 

You can use these elements and other ideas to find what works the best for your business and target market. Then, by making your product or service inviting, easy, informative, inspiring, and their experience enjoyable, you’ll loft your company above your competition.

 

Need help with figuring out the best strategy for converting prospects into customers? 

Use my simple Strategic Plan template and learn the exact formula that helped me grow my retail business from $389k to over $2.2 million annually. https://simple-strategic-plan.com/go

Her First Million 5-Day Focus Give Me Just 60-Minutes A Day… And Over The 5 Days, You’ll Walk Away With A 7-Figure Framework And, More Importantly, You’ll Know How to Use It To Calm the Chaos Of Growth So Revenues & Profits Soar https://5-dayfocus.com/go

McMinnville Business Mastery Lunch & Learn

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

EVER FELT LIKE MARKETING, STAFFING, AND GROWING YOUR BUSINESS WAS LIKE NAVIGATING A DIFFICULT MAZE?

What if you could follow a proven and time-tested roadmap that provides you the EXACT steps to more cash flow and freedom?

At my Business Mastery Lunch & Learn events, join area business owners as we tackle the business challenges of the day. In each session, walk away with no-cost strategies that can be implemented immediately.

Lunch and beverages are provided but registration is required.

To register for an upcoming event, click on the date you want to attend:

January 25 – Topic: Finding & Keeping Employees

(POSTPONED) February 8 – Topic: Position Your Business for a Bank Loan

February 22 – Topic: Exit Your Way – Grow with the Exit In Mind

March 8 – Topic: Pricing Workshop (details coming soon)

March 22 – Topic: No Cost Conversions & Sales Strategies (details coming soon)

Past events included Non-traditional Ways to Find & Keep Superstar Employees, No-cost Lead Generation Strategies, Increase Conversions and Sales With Small Tweaks, and more!

What these events aren’t:

NOT a disguised sales pitch

NOT a boring presentation about buying ads that don’t result in new customers anyways

NOT a place for me to listen to my own voice for a whole 90-minutes 🙂

 

What you will get is:

REAL strategies that you can implement yourself

INSPIRATION that can only come from being in a room with like-minded business owners doing the same work at the same time

The PEACE OF MIND knowing that you’re focusing on the business activities that really make a difference so you can work smarter rather than harder.

30 Ways to Effectively Market Your Business

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

A step-by-step guide to creating and executing a successful advertising campaign

Have you spent thousands of dollars on radio or Facebook ads and seen zero sales from the advertising spend? Maybe you’ve been burned by a marketing consultant that promises the world only to fail to deliver results… today, I want to lift the veil on how to create a successful advertising campaign. 

To do that, first, we must understand why people buy products or services. Every purchase is an emotional response. People always buy a higher emotional state. They’re buying for one of three reasons

  1. to solve a problem or stop pain
  2. an experience that feels good 
  3. for certainty 

To develop emotion and a call to action, the majority of successful professionals use a succession of information-based commercials. What we find is that information-based advertising is much more effective compared to usual brand-based advertisements.

Here, I want to share with you that the principles used to put together high-impact (and oftentimes, high-priced) ads can be adapted to fit your needs and offer you similar results. 

Here are some ideas for creating and executing a successful advertising campaign:

  1. Put together a short report that you’ll automatically send to prospects when they contact you. This should include a short description of your business and what you specialize in. Don’t forget to include case studies, samples, or other proof of your success.

  2. Develop value-oriented “yellow page” like ads.

  3. Consider newsletters as a way of educating and informing customers about your industry and the services offered.

  4. Offer a free lecture or webinar to raise awareness of your business, but make sure the content is relevant to your target market and that the presenters are well-known in the field.

  5. Buy an existing business, improve marketing and grow this new business faster than a “from scratch” business.

  6. Always test different versions of your ads to determine which ones are the most effective.

  7. Use direct mail marketing to grow your business.

  8. Put together a database of previous customers and send them new information.

  9. Offer incentives such as frequent purchasing benefits, loyalty programs, or referral programs.

  10. Approach large firms who may need your services and negotiate a deal to be their exclusive expert in your field.

  11. Offer a 24-hour information line with a regularly updated recorded message. Make this available to all current and prospective customers/clients.

  12. Donate time or materials to local charities to show support in your area.

  13. Offer public clinics for the general public to come along and discuss what they need that’s free and approachable.

  14. Organize seminars your customers/clients can pay to attend by putting together a high-perception value package.

  15. Approach local newspapers by offering to write a weekly column about your area of expertise. Don’t ask for a payment, just a byline, and bio.

  16. Develop a weekend or other destination seminar for customers/clients, not only does this give you an action-packed weekend with the most important people, it gives them a tax-deductible business adventure.

  17. Take a good seminar and turn it into written form as a home study, member site program, audio, or video program.

  18. Approach large companies and offer to give seminars to their employees, investors, or management.

  19. Be proactive with your marketing plan.

  20. Trade for your marketing. Offer products or services instead of payment.

  21. Be willing to bring in new clients, even if at an initial loss because it will likely pay off later.

  22. Adjust your marketing budget to maximize the potential income from them for the following year, and try to postpone advertising costs for the following year to offset your expenses.

  23. Make offers to target markets or target market businesses to pay them for referrals or shared databases.

  24. Offer loaner products to replace equipment that’s being repaired or refurbished.

  25. Give away something free to everyone who brings in a print version of your advertisement. This is a great way to see which ads are giving you the most bang for your buck.

  26. Continually consider what new products/services you can offer to current customers/clients.

  27. Develop a mail order division of your company.

  28. Offer a proposition to your competitors to trade customers/clients you were both unsuccessful in selling to.

  29. Use different marketing tactics as an excuse to attract new customers/clients with new offers and goodies.

  30. Offer a “you-pick-a-price” program. This is especially good for products you just can’t seem to sell.

So now you have it: 30 ways to market to other professionals and businesses. Other great ways to get your name out there for little or no money are as follows:

  • Get engaged in your community-volunteer, donate to local events, etc.

  • Join your local Chamber of Commerce and attend networking and other activities throughout the year.

  • Join local, state, or regional professional associates for further networking opportunities.

  • Become a board member of a local organization.

Advertising should never be your only method of marketing strategy, there are numerous ways to get your name out there in a way that feels personal to potential customers/clients.

 

“Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people. Humans care about the entire experience, not just the marketing or sales or service. To really win in the modern age, you must solve for humans.” – Dharmesh Shah, CTO & Co-founder of Hubspot.

 

If you’re not sure where you start with your marketing plan or how to reach out to your local community, competitors, customers/clients, and others who could influence your business in a highly positive way try our GUIDED TOUR to experience the tools and resources we have to boost your business to the next level and beyond.

Educate your customers

Posted on by Amanda Bedell

You may be thinking to yourself, “Educate them about what?”

Entrepreneur and documentary filmmaker, Jia Wertz, says it better than I ever could in the opening sentence of her Forbes article, “Majority of customers visit your website or your brick-and-mortar only one time. Think about that.”

She goes on to explain that we’re spending all that money to get people in and we get one shot. Consider this, many businesses focus solely on attracting new customers, but I encourage you to spend a good chunk of your time retaining current and former customers. I know it feels like a no-brainer but so few businesses create a system to bring back people who already know you and have bought from you.

Take the time to market and sell new products to your old customers and less time trying to sell old products to new customers and you will see a drastic change in your sales, customer quality, and branding position.

Here are key elements to use to retain your current customers:

  • Stay in contact: This means by phone, email, e-newsletter, in-person, and by carrier pigeon if you have must (lol)!
  • Post-Purchase Assurance: This means you need to follow up with customers. They need to feel supported for what they purchased. How many times have you purchased a product, then felt completely abandoned? Something as simple as a ‘Thank You’ note with your contact or customer service information can go a long way in retaining a great customer.
  • Deals & Guarantees: Always offer your current customers the best deals and guarantees you have. Show them you appreciate their business or even come up with a club specifically to reward loyal customers. You can also do this with a preferred pricing option.
  • Integrity: Using good business practices and simply upholding integrity, dignity, and honesty go a long way with customers. Let’s face it, there’s a lot of swindling with substandard product out there, and the safer and more confident you make your customers feel, the more they will trust you. That makes for an amazingly supportive and loyal customer.

There are three cornerstone ideas to a successful business:

  1. Quality product/service
  2. Offering useful products/services that solve a problem for or enhance the life of a customer
  3. Offer content your customers find interesting

Use this approach of educating your customers and offering them real information and insight and you will be rewarded with loyalty and success.

Stop wasting all your time on new prospects while your current customers fall by the wayside.

Legendary business strategist, Jay Abraham says, “Your best prospects are your existing customers. If you’ve been putting all your marketing efforts into acquiring new customers, stop and diverts some of your resources into reselling, upselling, cross-selling to those same customers. In every way possible – through package inserts, regular mailings, special offers – stay in touch with those customers and get them used to buying from you.”

Remember, you can access free support by signing up for our training videos. The videos can help you harness techniques to educate your customers and watch their lifetime value go up and your revenues pay off many-fold.