Marketing to sell a Million by September next year.

I shared a rough outline of what you can do to make a lot of money fairly easily, and a little bit of how it could work. Now I am going to get to one of the two subjects that determine whether you’re going to be successful at it –how to get your customers to notice you.

This is the difference between Marketing and Advertising.

Advertising is sending a message out to attract customers. Marketing is making sure your product and your customers have a great meeting.

‘Sales’ is what happens when that great meeting results in a buying decision.

I do not pretend to have the penultimate sales advice – I’m good, very good, but it isn’t what I focus on. My focus is almost exclusively on Marketing because if it is done properly then every sales professional will tell you that they *love* working for you because 90-95% of their job is done for them. Their leads are all warmed up, the customer already is familiar and educated about the product, the pricing is already structured to be affordable but valued by the customer, all the upkeep and service agreements are all thought out and work for everyone – the complete package is buying-decision-ready. The sales pro then really just needs to tip the scales, collect the orders and keep in contact with the customer to make sure they are happy while leaving the door open for any follow-up orders or referrals.

So if I do my job properly, my team’s job is made much, much easier, and everyone makes a *lot* more money and everyone, including the customer, is a lot happier about it.

So recently I told you to build a product that allows you to share a knowledge base or skill that you have with others who can benefit from it. Whether it’s crafting, cooking, cleaning, carpentry, plumbing, computers, electronics assembly, shopping, history, music, entertainment or anything else, there is an infinite supply of topics that your personal take on could be of value and interest to others.

I also told you that you could format it in a way that you could give courses on how to do what you know how to do. Those courses could add a whole new revenue stream and introduce your products to whole new audiences.

I then told you that a second product in that field could just be what you need to go over the top.

But I didn’t tell you how to do the Marketing to get it in your customers’ hands.

Here’s one approach you could use – remember, just like I described in my earlier blog, there are literally thousands of ways to market your products and services. This is just one example.

Let’s say you’ve written a book on negotiating contracts. It’s pretty safe to bet that not *everyone* you meet in a department or book store is going to want or need to read that book.

Who does need that information? I can think of dozens of groups that would benefit tremendously from it and from a presentation that tailors the interpretation of the book to their needs. Chambers of Commerce, union reps, sales professional development associations, business students at university and college, law students, legal firms, insurance companies, realtors, and many, many more groups and organizations need that kind of information. So do the spouses who run the households, by the way. They do all the negotiating within the family, with suppliers for services and products for the home, work out the insurance policies and coverage, negotiate and organize schedules, and so on. Ever notice that no one has set up professional development days for those who professionally manage our families and our homes? We might want to work on fixing that. Just a thought.

So if you targeted each of those groups above in each neighbourhood near where you live then you should be able to build a pretty decent list of groups that would be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Your next step is to put together the most enticing invitation you can possibly come up with for each group. You want to find a way to present to them and get paid for doing it. Send invitations to every member, to the Chambers, to the local media, to any relevant people. Send reminder notices as the days get closer. Do follow up calls to anyone who calls to ask info about the event. Try and get on local radio or TV to talk about the event. Send letters to the editor and articles to your local papers discussing what's going to happen at the event or why the subject is very topical and important right now. Once you have the list of attendees, this will also give you the opportunity to sell your product – in this case the book on negotiating contracts.

Or you could combine the two and sell your courses and include a copy of the book for free by factoring your profit margin into the cost of the course.

You could also team up with others in your neighbourhood or subject matter and sell the courses or books in package deals to widen the reach of customer base and minimize your per presentation costs by splitting it between the various presenters.

So let’s take some specific examples and do the math, shall we?

Your local Chamber of Commerce has a list of member companies, usually several thousand long and for a nominal fee or free you should be able to send an invitation to all member companies as a special opportunity just for their members. Out of that list, if you have a successful invitation, you should probably expect to get about 5% response rate or at least 50-150 calls, of which you’ll probably close about 1/3 as sales. (These numbers I’m using are industry standards for moderately successful mail campaigns.)

That means that you should be able to expect between 16 and 50 sales by inviting your local CoC. Assuming each other group listed above produced similar results, then you could roughly multiply that number by the number of groups you invite. If you invite 10 groups, you’ll probably end up with approximately 300 paying customers for an event or a book sale.

If you make $25 in profit from each sale, then one event should have a single payout of $7500 or more in your pocket before taxes.

If you want to earn $1,000,000 on that basis, you only need to host 134 events.

If you were able to make as much as $50 in profit per sale, you would only need to host 67 events to make your target income.

That means having an average of a little more than one event per week.

That’s the kind of schedule that most people can handle.

Sure, most of the events will probably be out of town because you’ll run out of local options fairly quickly, but think about it. The only day you really have penciled in each week is the one you deliver your presentation on. Everything else in your life suddenly became a *lot* more flexible.

And don’t forget the $7,500+ per week incentive.

See, what happens here is that you find your customers in an environment in which they see your product for the value it brings to them. If you try and pitch a pool cleaning company to a branch manager at Intel at the office, I can guarantee they won’t be interested. If you pitch them the same option at a pool supplies or patio furniture retailer you are far more likely to get the sale. It’s the same potential customer – but the environment, the circumstances, the sales logic are all completely different.

It’s the ability to meet the customer’s needs that matters. In one environment, they don’t need a pool cleaner. In another it’s a perfectly natural fit. In one case they see no value at all – how is a clean residential pool going to make the world’s largest computer chip manufacturer more profitable? But in the other environment the value makes sense – it’s safer and healthier for your family, it frees up more time to spend with your family, it’s less expensive, better quality…whatever the benefits are, this is where they make *sense.*

By attacking your market in the right environments, where it is natural to the customer to want to do that kind of business, they are already interested in making a buying decision. From there on you add to it by adding in opportunities to reach out to new kinds of customers as well, blending both traditional customer types (busy working business pros for example) with entirely new markets (launching the first PD days for household managers) and offering new products to extend the sales cycle while you’re at it.

In one fell swoop you’ve managed to sell to your traditional client base, a new client base, and to sell add-on revenue.

And if you’re lucky and smart enough to combine your events with those of a couple of other people whose products match up well with yours, then you can shave your costs down and increase your profitability. Of course the more profitable each event is, the fewer events you have to have to achieve your objective of $1,000,000 in new revenue this coming year.

In another blog I’ll start sharing some tips and tricks on how to increase your profitability per event in order to make your goals easier to attain – I just wanted to give you the basic outline of how this can work for now.

Of course there are any number of challenges with this approach. What happens if you don’t like public speaking? You could split the proceeds with someone who is – you write the content, they deliver the show. What if you can’t sell to save your life? Same thing. You split the proceeds with someone who can. What if you can’t write very well. You deliver the show, and have someone work with you to write what you know.

There is usually a way to make this idea work for just about anybody, if you really want to try it, but as I said before, it’s nowhere near the only way to go to accomplish your dreams.

Find your own path and borrow from what you can learn here to make your path more rewarding and productive. That’s what we’re here for.