Archive for Sales

Book Recommendation…”Failure is Obsolete”

By Rob Minton · Comments (0) · Monday, March 4th, 2013

 

Hopefully if you’re reading this blog, you understand how important “testing” is in business. Well, I have a new book recommendation for you. The book is titled, “Failure is Obsolete – The Ultimate Strategy to Create Recurring Success in Your Business and in Your Life” and was written by Benji Rabhan who owns multiple businesses. This is a book you can download and read in a weekend, which is what I did.

The premise of the book is to TEST before making any significant decisions in your business. The author suggests that we should consider using this approach in all ares of our lives and I have to agree. From the book…

“Testing is all about gathering data involving actual behavior in the most low-risk, low-cost way possible. So you can pre-prove that your idea has legs without going through the time and expense of carrying out the entire idea to see if it’s successful.”

When you TEST before you make any significant changes, you can save yourself a great deal of time and a hell of a lot of money. A great real life example of why you should TEST before you make significant decisions might be JC Penny. I’m sure you’ve heard that JC Penny hired Ron Johnson from Apple and decided to completely change their marketing approach. Basically, they decided to eliminate all promotions and discounts. They quickly rolled these changes out to all of their stores with hopes to improve their revenues and market share.

Since this change, JC Penny has lost $4.3 billion in revenue when compared to the year prior to the change. They are now in the process of unwinding these changes and going back to their previous model of offering discounts, promotions and coupons. Had the experts at JC Penny invested $8.00 in this little book, they might have saved themselves from this significant loss. I’m not kidding. The reason why is because they could have designed a simple test to see how this new strategy worked before rolling it out to all of their stores. In other words, they could have pre-proved this approach BEFORE moving forward.

A few weeks ago, I was watching Shark Tank with my family. One entrepreneur pitched the Sharks on investing into his new Teddy Bear business. Apparently, he had spent $400,000 designing a Teddy Bear that you could record personal voice messages on remotely. The idea was traveling parents or family members could record personal messages for their children and grandchildren. The Sharks asked him what price he needed to sell the Teddy Bears at to make his projected profits. Thankfully, he knew this answer – $60 a bear! Their next question was…”How many Teddy Bears have you sold at this price point?”  His answer was 0. He had sold some Teddy Bears through Groupon at a discounted price, but none at their full retail price of $60. In other words, this guy invested $400,000 on this idea without having any idea if it would work. More than likely, this idea is not going to work and this poor fella is out big time.

Are you contemplating any significant changes in your business or personal life? If so, is there a way you can test these changes before moving forward? I’ll bet you can and you’ll see a few ideas in’ Benji’s book. I used one of the ideas in this book to test a new training program I was going to launch. In the past, I would have spent weeks creating all of the training materials. Once these materials were complete, I would then go to work marketing the new program hoping it would sell at a level to justify the time investment.

Instead, I marketed the training program on a limited basis as a simple test to see if it would sell first. This little test showed very quickly that the new training program would not sell at the level needed to move forward. My test pre-proved this idea was not a winner and I was able to cross the entire project off of my schedule. I saved well over 100 hours of my time, which is a significant savings.

In this book, you’ll see little ways to test just about everything. You can see how to test new marketing ideas, prospective new employees, web pages, lead generation advertisements, marketing funnels, and more. In fact, he even writes about why we should “test” renting a home before we buy it. You might consider “testing” a marketing campaign around this idea in your business!

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Categories : Marketing, Sales, Succcess, Time Management

Controlling Media for Your Business (My Secret Market Domination Strategy)

By Rob Minton · Comments (0) · Tuesday, October 23rd, 2012

In this article, I’m going to share a project I was working on back in 2006 for my real estate business. This was a pretty big project at the time and I had invested a lot of $$$ and time into getting it off the ground. My business worked exclusively with real estate investors. We helped our clients buy single family homes that were kept for rental income. I had engineered lead generation and lead conversion campaigns to attract first time investors. Most of our clients managed their own properties, but as my business grew it became obvious that we were losing sales to prospective clients that had no desire to manage rental real estate.

We began offering different services to help our clients with their rental properties. One service we offered was a tenant placement service. With this service, we would charge the investor a flat fee and we would advertise, show and screen rental applicants for their properties. Once the home was rented we would turn it over to the investor to manage. In addition, we also started offering property management services, too. See StartPropertyManagement.com for more info on how to do this in your business.

The more I thought about my business and our clients, the more I realized that our ultimate success would be based upon the number of prospective tenants we could attract. If we had a large database of prospective renters and could fill vacancies quickly, we would keep our clients happy and make our lives a lot easier in the process. We also had experimented with other strategies and realized that we had unlimited demand for profitable auto-pilot investment properties. In other words, we could sell homes at will if we had tenants for them offering attractive cashflow.

One of the ideas I had to attract prospective tenants to our investor’s properties was to create a “Homes for Rent” Magazine that would be dropped at grocery stores and other locations where you would find the “Apartments.com” and “Home Buyer” magazines. So I designed the “Rent2OwnListings.com” magazine and you can download my first issue from 2006 in PDF format here:

Rent2OwnListings Magazine PDF

NOTE: Before we go further, please understand that when I sold my business the new owner quickly abandoned this project because he thought it was a waste of money. This means the phone numbers and websites detailed throughout the magazine are no longer active.

There is a lot to share with you about this magazine. Let me summarize some key points for you here:

1. The title of the magazine was one of our websites, “Rent2OwnListings.com.” The idea was to brand the website and get more visitors. This website featured the investment properties of our clients and the properties we had in property management. When a visitor to the website wanted more information about a home listed, they would submit their contact information and we would capture them as a new lead helping to build our database of prospective renters. We would then email them a weekly “hotlist” of new rent to own property listings.

2. We sold advertising space in the magazine to our investors. We would post our client’s homes on the Rent2OwnListings website for free. However, if they wanted to advertise their homes in our new magazine, they had to pay a fee. This fee was simply used to offset the cost of the magazine. I had plans to sell more adverting space as the magazine grew over time. Other advertisers would be insurance agents, lenders, credit repair services and more.

3. The magazine had two different types of advertisements. The primary advertisement featured throughout was a specific advertisement for homes we had for rent. The advertisement featured a picture of the property, details and a phone number for the prospective tenant to call. These leads were called back and invited to an open house at the property. The other advertisement you’ll see in the magazine was a direct response offer for a free report. You’ll see this advertisement on the cover of the magazine. The prospect had to call the hotline and leave a message with their name and mailing address. We would mail them a report (aka sales letter) that ultimately brought them back to us to help them find a nice rental home for their families. The idea was to capture as many leads as possible. If someone reading the magazine didn’t like any of the homes featured, they would hopefully call for the free report.

4. This magazine was published in December of 2006 before social media. Today, the magazine would obviously be designed to leverage Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media opportunities.

5. As you look through the magazine, notice that I didn’t brand myself or my real estate company. You won’t see “Multimillion Dollar Producer” or my picture. The goal wasn’t to make the magazine about me. It was to create media that would attract investors and renters to my business. The goal was to control media. I was “flying under the radar” as Craig Proctor taught us many years ago. You will see my company name as it was required by licensing laws for advertising.

Now this magazine was expensive and time consuming to produce. We paid to have the magazine designed, printed and hosted on the magazine racks throughout our area. It was a long-term investment for the business. The goal was to create advertising media that we controlled. Over time the plan was to completely dominate the rental side of the market. If a prospective tenant wanted to rent a home in our area, they would look for our magazine and to our Rent2OwnListings website. I realized that if we controlled the rental side of the market, we controlled the investor side of the market, too. The investor side of the market followed the rental side and we could sell homes at will because we controlled the income flowing into those rental properties. In addition, we could turn many of the renters in our database into regular home buyers extracting more sales and income.

This magazine was an asset that would grow in value over time. In fact, had I not sold my business in 2007, I believe the magazine would have become a business in and of itself that could have been sold separately after we had a few years of production and had fleshed out other opportunities surrounding it. The best way to build your business is to solve your client’s biggest problem. When you do this, you become indispensable. In my business, vacant rental properties became my client’s biggest problem. My goal was to solve this problem for them and build a very valuable asset in the process.

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Categories : Business Building, Marketing, Sales
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A Marketing Strategy We Can Learn From Studying Boxing

By Rob Minton · Comments (0) · Friday, August 24th, 2012

This photo is of James Braddock.

Back in the 1920′s and 1930′s boxers were the most famous people on the planet.  As an example, in 1935 the average attendance for a Yankees home game was just under 9,000 fans. In the same year, Max Baer fought Joe Louis at the Yankees stadium in a non-title bout with over 100,000 in attendance.

From the preface of the book Cinderella Man about the greatest upset in boxing history:

“… the heavyweight champion wasn’t just the best-paid or the most significant athlete in the world; he was – with the possible exception of a few world leaders, such as Stalin and King George V – the most famous person on the planet.”

How was this so? How could one non-title fight draw 100,000 people when only 9,000 go to a Yankees baseball game? Remember this was before TV, so these fights weren’t plastered all over the boob-tube. Well, most people got their information about what was going on in the world from the the newspapers.

Now, it wasn’t just that the fights were published in the newspapers. The sports writers actually turned these boxers into legends. They created ethnic and racial rivalries that the fans loved. According to Cinderella Man...

“And at a time when the heavywieght champion of the world mattered in a way in which no athlete now matters, Americans of all hues and ethnicity found inspiration in the story of a man who rose, … from relief (rags) to royalty.”

Before I get into how we might use this to our advantage, let’s spend a minute on $$$. Again I’ll return to the book Cinderella Man for some perspective…

“On September 22, 1927, for thirty minutes’ work – plus nine minutes of catching his breath between rounds – Gene Tunney made $990, 445 in his second fight against Jack Dempsey, more money than Babe Ruth had made in his fourteen major league seasons to that point.”

This income distortion also flows through to the sports writers. One of the best sports writers at that time was Grantland Rice and it was reported that he was making more money than many of the athletes he covered. In fact, he was said to make $250,000 a year in the 1930s when the country was still fighting through the Great Depression.

This all cool and interesting, but what can we learn from it?

Well, we can become sports writers and turn our clients into legends. This is one of the strategies I used to triple the home sales in my real estate business. One of my real estate clients bought 20 homes in 12 months. At the time, he worked 60+ hour weeks as an engineer for one of the largest car manufacturers. He didn’t enjoy his work and his goal was to use the income generated from these 20 properties to “retire.” I just had lunch with him last week and he is still “retired.”

In essence, the idea is to turn a simple testimonial into a compelling story. This story is then weaved into your lead generation and your lead conversion systems. I used this strategy so much that this one client became a celebrity in our area. Many of our clients wanted to meet him, get their picture with him, and learn more about what he did. If we had a client appreciation event, he was always surrounded by prospects and clients. It was pretty cool.

This strategy led to hundreds of new clients and home sales for my real estate business. It worked so well, that I simply repeated it with other clients. Other clients didn’t buy 20 homes, but they had neat stories and these stories are very compelling. You can do the same thing in your business. Turn your clients into celebrities by simply sharing their stories in your lead generation and lead conversion systems.

The odd part is that I used this strategy extensively in all of my marketing campaigns and other agents completely missed it. Sure they read about my clients buying multiple homes, but they didn’t SEE the strategy of turning clients into celebrities as a way to generate and convert leads for their businesses. Other agents were too focused on trying to turn themselves into celebrities by running tons of image advertising saying they were the best. In what I’ve shared from boxing, you should be able to see that these boxers were turned into celebrities by the sports writers. These celebrity boxers made large sums when they boxed because demand to see the fights sky rocketed. In the process, the sports writers also got rich because newspaper publishers needed the compelling stories to sell more newspapers.

Telling compelling stories is very profitable on many levels.

Please understand you don’t need a client to buy 20 homes to use this strategy. You simply need one client that has a neat story and I’ve found that every single client has a neat story. You simply need to uncover the story and share it in your marketing. If you dig a little, you might find a client who tried to sell their home for months without luck before they met you. Or maybe it could be about an investor who bought their first foreclosure. Or it could be about a family that struggled through hard financial times and finally bought a home. Your role, should you decide to accept it, is to become the sports writer and tell their stories in a compelling way.

In fact, experiment with creating an entire marketing campaign around one of your clients. You might be surprised when it turns into your best campaign!

Before I wrap this up, I thought I would share more finding from my business about turning clients into celebrities. At one point in my journey to build my business, I actually hired a celebrity, who was also real estate investor, to endorse me, my books and our approach to investing. I paid thousands of dollars for this endorsement. However, this celebrity endorsement didn’t result in any increase in sales. For my business, it was significantly better to create my own celebrity(s) than it was to hire one.

The same might be for you.

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Categories : Marketing, Sales
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Study & Copy This To Generate High Quality FREE Leads & Instant Expert Positioning

By Rob Minton · Comments (2) · Tuesday, July 10th, 2012

Most real estate agents study other real estate agents to look for ideas they can use in their real estate businesses. The idea is to copy success and this definitely does work. However, it’s not very innovative. A better approach is to study businesses OUTSIDE of real estate and copy their successful strategies INSIDE your real estate business. Well, I recently stumbled across a great marketing strategy that you may want to study and copy for your real estate business:

Right now, The Future of Health Now 2012 is hosting an free online event that features 20 health and fitness experts. Anyone can attend this free online event simply by opting in with their email address. From what it looks like, this event is being sponsored by Whole Foods, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and the X Prize Foundation. It’s a pretty cool event with some great presenters.

If you visit their website at http://www.thefutureofhealthnow.com and scroll down, you’ll see a list of the experts and the various presentations that will be included in the online event.

This is an incredible strategy that you might consider using for your real estate business. You can setup a similar FREE online event featuring various experts for home buyers, sellers, and investors. These experts might include:

Lender
Home Inspector
Attorney
Accountant
Financial Planner
Insurance Agent
Home Staging Expert
Self Directed IRA Specialist
Real Estate Professional (YOU)

Setup a opt-in website similar to The Future of Health Now featuring each expert and a highlight of what they’ll be covering in their presentation. Each expert included in the online event would market the event to their database of prospects, current clients and past clients. As people register to attend this online event, they’ll be added to your database and you’ll be able to build a relationship with each one going forward through your email newsletters.

You may be able to double, triple or quadruple the size of your database with high quality leads for FREE. More importantly, you’ll have instant expert positioning with each person who opts-in to attend the online event because you’ll be one of the experts presenting. Expert positioning is extremely important for you and will help your business immensely, because you will no longer be compared to other agents in your market.

The best part of this online event is that it doesn’t have to be “live.” You can simply interview each expert over-the-phone and record this interview. When you want to release this presentation as part of your online event, simply email a link to the recorded interview to everyone who signed up to attend the event. Go back and review The Future of Health Now opt-in page and you’ll notice that this is not a “LIVE” event. They are simply releasing recorded interviews on specific days. I would recommend this teleseminar service for your expert interviews because you can record them with a click of the mouse and you’ll be able send an email link to each online interview in seconds.

In my Renegade Millionaire Strategies for Real Estate Agents book, I shared an idea on how to get free high quality leads and instant expert positioning by writing a book with various experts. Each expert would write a chapter for the book and the book would then be marketed to each expert’s database. This idea would provide high quality free leads and instant expert positioning, too. The problem; however, is that writing a book is a great deal of work and it’s challenging to get various experts to write their chapter for the book.

This “free online event” strategy eliminates the majority of the work and provides the exact same end result.

In my Referrals on Steroids program, I show agents how to use content reports as a tool to generate high quality free leads. The idea is to have other professionals market a great content report from you to their database. To get your great free content report, the other professional’s prospects and clients would have to opt-in giving you their email address. These opt-ins would now be high quality leads in your database!

All three of these ideas, if used, would allow you to build your database of quality prospects for FREE. This “free online event” strategy may be the best approach because it can be setup with minimal work and would give great exposure to each expert included in the event. What insurance agent/lender/financial planner wouldn’t want free exposure to all of the online event participants?

If this is something you would want to do for your business, here’s your action plan:

1. Make a list of the experts you might want to include in your online event and approach them with the idea. You’ll simply be interviewing them over the phone and can provide the questions in advance.
2. Setup your teleseminar phone service so you can quickly record the interviews and replay them online as part of your free online event.
3. Setup your opt-in page to market the event and capture email addresses. I would strongly suggest copying the format of The Future of Health Now and using it as the format for your online event.
4. Write the marketing emails each expert would use to market the event to their database. I would give them 5 to 10 emails they can use before and after the event.

That’s it. Not too hard, right?

You could also market your free online event to the public with direct response advertisements including pay-per-click, facebook, print advertising, solo emails, direct mail and more. You might also send a few press releases to local news outlets to attract free publicity to drive more attention to the event and build a bigger database.

This really is one of the best marketing strategies I’ve seen in years and I strongly suggest you do something similar for your business. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

P.S. You should also register to attend the Future of Health 2012 online event for two reasons. The first reason is that there are some great experts in the line-up and you’ll learn a great deal about how to be healthier. I will be listening to many of these presentations myself. The second reason to register is so that you can see how they handle each presentation when it’s released. This may give you a few ideas on how to release your presentations.

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Categories : Marketing, Sales
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