How Going For The "Big Fish" Deals Can Increase Your Business

Too often business owners try to fight over the scraps. They try to make deals or land sales with anyone and everyone that they can find, regardless of if those deals are barely worth any money to them.

It’s amazing what can happen when you try to go for the bigger clients or choose bigger businesses to partner with. Just a single deal can often make for a very good month (or even year!).

There’s two main ways of doing this. First, you can target more high-end prospects with higher end offerings. By raising your prices and offering more “done for you” services and products, you can try to target the elite buyers instead of focusing on being the low-priced leader barely scraping by. The second way is to try to focus on big “competitors,” or on other business owners who are far bigger than you in a similar market, but not necessarily competing, and then trying to strike a deal with them to sell or promote your offers (for a big cut). If you make this hands-free, super easy, and very profitable for them, you’d be surprised how many are willing to do deals with you.

One way of doing the second suggestion here is by offering to white label your product or service. This is where you allow someone to sell your offer as their own while you do all the work to fulfill it. This can be a win-win for both, as they can get a good cut of the sale for doing virtually nothing except making easy sales for you, while you fulfill the sales, do the support, and make lots of extra sales without having to spend money on advertising or do any marketing yourself. A single big fish deal like this can make an entire business.

One thing that still amazes us to this day is that it’s often just as hard to make a huge sale or business deal as it is to make a tiny sale or business deal, yet the vast majority of people tend to focus on the little fish because they don’t think they’re able to land a bigger deal! This can be applied to almost any aspect of business – whether it be finding big players to partner with, selling high end products / services, or even just being an affiliate for more expensive products! Quite often times it’s just as hard to sell a $5,000 product as it is to sell a $50 product, as long as you’re targeting the right kind of prospects. One just results in you making a lot more.

Try going for the big fish now and then, whether by going after more elite prospects, at higher prices with better offers, or by seeking out big partnerships to do white label deals, where they sell your offers for you for a cut.

For more great marketing and sales tips to increase your business, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How to Use a Sense of Urgency to Increase Your Sales: Offering a Limited Time Deal

A sense of urgency can be a great motivator, both in encouraging a sale and in life. To use urgency in business, look at offering limited time deals, especially ones that don't last more than a few days tops.  And if you have an e-mail list, mail them a lot more on the final day with reminders to the deadline.  You'll often get most of your sales on the final day! Countdown timers can be another great way to emphasize this.  The idea is similar to furniture stores that seem to always have sales that end on the weekend... even though we all know they'll probably have another sale in a week or two, we're more likely to buy now if we think there's a sale on it now vs. later.  People like to procrastinate, so limited time deals can get them off their butt to take action.

For example, if you run a gym, you may run a sale on gym membership, where if they sign up over the next 3 days they receive a discount on the total price, or X amount of personal training sessions as a bonus. The time limit creates a sense of urgency, encouraging people to buy that may have sat on the fence or procrastinated otherwise.

One huge marketing tip that we’ve perfected over the years, which has made us a lot of money, is a limited time deal method that we call the 3 Day Money Maker or the 1, 2, 3 Limited Time Offer. It can especially work well if you have an e-mail list and can e-mail them about the special offer.

Here’s how it works. You setup a special offer (ideally either a big discount like 50% or a big bonus to include with it) that only lasts for three days. We typically either start this on a Thursday or Friday and have it end over the weekend on midnight (either Saturday or Sunday night). On the first day, you only e-mail your list once to announce the special deal, provide them with a link to the sales page to buy it, etc.. You then tell them that the deal ends on midnight on X Day (three days from then). You typically will get some initial sales then, but not necessarily a ton. Then on the second day, you send them one e-mail in the morning and one e-mail later in the afternoon or evening. You likely will get few if any sales then, but that’s okay. The third day is where the real magic happens. On the third day, which is the final day of the sale, you e-mail them once in the morning, once in the mid to late afternoon, and once in the late evening. Your subject lines should increase the sense of urgency with lines like “Final Chance – 50% Off Deal Ends Today” and “Only Hours Left to Save 50%” or “Final Warning – Deal Ends in a Couple Hours” (they don’t have to be exactly that, but you get the general idea of making it seem urgent).

The final day, especially the final hour or two, will get A LOT of sales typically, especially in the final minutes of the special offer. In fact, we’ve found that if you leave the offer up until the morning, you can get several sales in the wee hours of the morning that think they gamed you by getting the deal just after it technically was meant to close. Using this method properly exactly as we laid out can make some businesses more money over a few days than they might make in several weeks or more!

Think about how you can create a time sensitive deal where people only have a limited time to take you up on it. The sense of urgency encourages people to buy. If you have an email list, constantly remind people of the deadline, as often the most sales will happen in the last day near the end.

For other cool strategies and tricks to increase your business, check out this book full of marketing and sales tips 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How Offering A Premium Support Service Can Increase Your Profits And Margins

You’ve probably bought electronics before and been offered the purchase an additional warranty. Or maybe you’ve purchased furniture before and been offered a white glove service to deliver and setup your new couch.

These are all examples of premium support services that can have very large profit margins, so even if only a smaller percentage of customers take you up on them, they can add a lot to your bottom line.

Some of these premium support services can be at little to no cost to you. For instance, one business we’ve seen had a warranty offer where you could get free replacement charger cables forever on your phone, if they ever fail, for a small one time extra fee as long as you just cover the small shipping and handling fee. However, these cables have such huge margins anyway that the small S&H fee literally covered the cost of the cables and the shipping. The “warranty” that was sold was essentially 100% pure profit, despite how it would appear to be an awesome deal for the buyers (paying $5 for S&H instead of $29 for a new cable sounds like, and is, a pretty good deal).

You can even sell access to one on one help, a Facebook group page for extra (and faster) help, etc. Some of these offers you can literally put together in a few minutes, yet some people will naturally buy them just because they think they might have a use for it one day.

Another example would be offering faster support, faster shipping, faster service, etc. All of these can have huge margins for little to no extra work!

So brainstorm at least a couple of extra premium support services that you can offer your buyers (like extra warranties, faster support, faster service, etc.) that come with huge margins despite not really increasing your costs much, if at all.

To find out more tweaks that could drastically change and increase your business, check out our business analyzing tool here BizFire's Free Business Analyzer and Growth Tool.

Using Trust To Build Your Business: What You Need To Know To Use Referrals To Your Advantage

Have you ever tried a product or service based on the word of a friend, colleague or family member? Many of us have, because we trust that person and are more likely to take their recommendation over someone we don’t know. This is the power of referrals. Ask your current customers if they have friends, family, or people they know that they think would love your service, then contact those people on behalf of them, offering your services/products. This is a great way to get access to potential new customers, while also having a warm introduction – you’re not cold-calling (or emailing!) them, as you’re essentially being introduced by their trusted friend/family member (your current client).

For example, say you have an ecommerce business where you sell natural beauty products. You could email out to your customers, asking them if they know anyone that would love your products as much as they do.  If so, ask them to pass on the email address of those people and explain you’ll not only offer their friend a free sample of your most popular product, but that they too will receive a bonus 15% off their next purchase online as a thank-you. When you email the new lead with your free sample offer, mention that their friend thought they’d like your products, which is why you’re emailing and would love to offer them this free sample as a gift.

So put the power of referrals to work for you and piggy-back on the trust that your customers have already built with their friends and family. Ask your customers if they know people they think would love your product/service, and if they’d be willing to pass their contact info on to you. Contact those people on their behalf and make them a special offer!

Are you after other great ways to reach new leads? Check out a demo of this software, which can help you find new leads already interested in your niche, and grab a special deal!  Web Fire

How Split Testing Can Massively Increase Your Conversions and Sales

Too many business owners and marketers will only create one version of an offer, sales page, opt-in page, ad, etc., and simply hope that it works. If it does, they’re happy. If it doesn’t, they think that the offer simply doesn’t work.

That’s a horrible way to go about it. If your first attempt doesn’t work, you’ll want to create several different versions of all of those to see if maybe it’s something in your sales copy. And even if you get lucky and get a winning offer right off the bat, you’ll want to constantly test new things in the sales copy to see if you can increase clicks to your ads, lead conversions to your opt-in pages, sales to your sales page, and upsells to your upsell pages.

It doesn’t have to be hard. Even just changing around headlines or little things here and there can often have drastic effects. For instance, you might find that changing a headline and shortening down the length of an opt-in page might boost your lead conversions from 20% to 30%.  That alone could increase your sales by 50%! And by tweaking an upsell page just a bit, you might find that you move conversions there from 5% to 8%, which would be a 60% increase on the backend! Little changes can go a long way and can easily turn a loser campaign into a winner.

And the best part about all this is that little increases in conversions here and there can be responsible for massive increases in money made overall. But having said that, you want to be sure to focus your efforts first on the parts that make you the most money. For instance, improving your front-end conversion rates or those on your biggest money making upsell will almost certainly make you a lot more than focusing on your fourth upsell that doesn’t sell much currently (not to say you can’t improve that and make more, though).

One awesome free tool you can use is BizFire’s Funnel Maker, which you can get for free at www.bizfire.com/funnelmaker. This tool not only lets you build out funnels to simulate a real business, but it lets you see what happens when you increase or decrease conversions in various parts. It’s perhaps our favorite tool to play around with and plan out our businesses!

So make sure you are always testing new sales copy and upsells in order to see if you can increase your opt-in rate, sales conversions, or upsell conversions. Little changes can often have drastic effects that can turn a bad campaign into a winner.

And to check out the Funnel Maker software for free to see how even small changes can massively impact your conversions, click here BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer.

How Outsourcing An Offer That You Sell Can Make More Money For Your Business

There’s only so much time in the day, and although it can be a great idea to add extra services that you sell and fulfill yourself, it’s not always practical. This is why it can be a great idea to look for other services or offers that you can sell yourself but easily outsource to others to do with little to no work on your part.

For instance, you might be a web designer that often gets requests to create and add videos to your clients’ sites, but it might either be very time consuming or nearly impossible for you to create nice looking videos to sell as a service even if you could get hundreds to thousands of dollars per sale for them.

Instead of just passing on that easy money, why not look for others online who already offer those services, reach out to them, markup their prices (or make them more “done for you” to increase the value and prices you can charge) and get permission to use their testimonials, social proof, examples, sales pages, etc. as your own (or that you can modify) to sell to your own clients. This can be a great way of making extra money at huge margins.

For instance, there’s often places online like Fiverr.com, Craigslist.com, Freelancer.com, etc., that have tons of workers for almost anything you can think of. In some cases, you can find workers who can make nice looking videos for $25 to $50 (less in some cases) and you could turn around and sell that service for hundreds to even thousands of dollars.

We’ve done that with a variety of services ranging from social media management to video creation, and it’s easy money without any work or extra hassles on our part. And it’s a win-win, because our prospects really wanted those offers and would’ve likely bought something similar at some point, so why not have them buy from us?

Adding a couple of these services of your own can be super easy, add almost no work to your plate, but make you a fortune almost completely hands free!

So be on the lookout for other services or offers that you can sell that you’re able to outsource to others for pennies on the dollar. This can add some easy money to your sales funnels without adding extra work for you to do.

For more great marketing and sales tips to increase your business, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How To Sell To Other Businesses

Business to marketing seems like a foreign language to many people who are trying it for the first time. The consumer markets seems so much plainer and easier, after all, we're dealing with every day people. With businesses we feel we are dealing with some mysterious entity or some divine VIP, a thing whose persona is foreign to everything we knew in the every day human consciousness.

The reality that most people miss, and it's a well-kept secret, businesses are people. They are decision makers, executives, highly paid company officers, and even midgrade managers. At the end of the day though, they are people, selling to other businesses is no different than selling to people, except that you have to consider the kind of person you're selling to. Much of this involves trying to get into a person's head. What does a business owner or manager need and/or want? What things will improve their lives, and more importantly, the operations of their business? Answering these questions is the first key to selling to other businesses.

1: Identify Your VIP

The first step in creating a strong pitch for your product and service is considering your VIP, there may be more than one to consider depending on how the decisions are made. You have to know who you're selling to and then consider how your business can benefit them personally. As we discussed, you're dealing with real people, and they taking their own needs and desires into consideration as well as their roles in serving the greater needs of the company. Is your contact a buyer, a manger, or a business owner?

Depending on who you're speaking to, you'll want to come with ideas and features about what you have to offer and how it makes their lives easy as well benefiting their employer.

2: Don't Just Sell, Give Them Something They Can Use

Whoever your VIP may be, you can expect that someone has found them too, and they probably get multiple pitches a day for what you have to offer. A simple letter with a sales pitch is no longer enough to draw people in anymore. Because of this, you want to attach your sales pitch to something they can use. Many companies do this by offering white papers. White papers may be written as guides on important industry topics and trends, and may even highlight problems the industry is facing. This can be accompanied by a pitch explaining how you offer a solution. Either way the white papers are free and useful, so there's no harm in reading.

Writing effective white papers isn't easy, but it can be done.

3: Start With Value Over Price

When you're making a pitch to any business, you may find yourselves in the middle of a bidding war. Too many entrepreneurs focus in only on their prices as a way to put their best foot forward. While pricing certainly is important, it's far more vital to highlight the value your product has to offer. What can your product do that others can't. Can it save the company time or money even while requiring an investment? Can it make life easier for managers or help improve employee morale and productivity?

When you're making your bid don't advertise that you are cheap. If anything this will raise red flags if it's all you have to offer.

4: Highlight The Business Benefits

Whether it's in consumer to consumer or business to business marketing, even professionals have made this terrible mistake in copy-writing. Never just tell someone about the features of what you have to offer. Features are boring and no one wants to hear you list them all day long. They want to know how what you have to offer is going to solve a common problem. Just don't tell them “My computers have a lot of RAM” but instead consider, “Are you tired of losing valuable company time and money waiting for your computers to load? With our CPUs high RAM capability your upload, download, and processing speeds will be through the roof. You'll save time, money, and your business will be moving at lightning speed when processing your data!”

Benefits are everything. Nobody wants to know what you can do, everyone wants to know what you can do “For me”

5: Make it Easy To Act

Your call to action (CTA) is the grand finale of any pitch you write. It needs be dazzling and out of the park, but more importantly, it needs to be easy to act upon. Links in emails should be large, thought not obnoxious, and easy to see and click on, and MUST NOT BE BROKEN OR INACCURATE. Contact info should be prominent, accurate, and very visible. Like it or not, nobody likes a hassle. If your final pitch is hard to act on, even a little, or your lead finds it hard to get in touch you may lose your sale to someone else out of sheer convenience.


6: Gather Leads
This probably should have been the first step, but you need to gather solid prospective leads to sell to. It means nothing if you have the greatest product in the world and killer sales pitch to back it up, and no relevant people to sell it to. Gathering leads can be tricky, but made much easier by programs like Macroleads that help you organize, streamline, and even somewhat automate the process.