Selling With Integrity:

How To Choose Your

Customers

Welcome Back

Welcome to the third part of the series: “Selling with Integrity.”

First of all, thank you for your feedback!

I heard several times:

“Excellent customer relationship” sounds nice, but if you are soft to your customers they will eat you.

This raises a fundamentally important topic:

Choosing the right customers or clients.

Choosing the Right Clients So today we discuss that problem: How to choose and attract the right clients.

The character of your relationship with a client depends on both, on you and on your client.

Many people see life as a championship in cheating. If you didn’t make a clear decision to target them, keep them away.

Others like to bully everyone around. If you don’t enjoy that, keep them also on distance.

These are two extreme examples, but you get the point.

I Personally Paid for that Insight Rejecting people didn’t come easily to me. I learnt it the hard way.

After earning my Masters Degree in Business Administration in the year 2000 I opened an online travel agency.

At the time I knew little about the travel industry. So I bought into a franchise system. Their business model was to provide price comparison tools to travelers and then to sell the cheapest offer for a hotel, flight or vacation package.

Accordingly I called the travel agency Bestprice.Travel, implying the availability of price advantages to travelers.

Providing Remarkable Service It became quickly clear to me that it is a folly to sell on price without the ability to control prices. It didn’t work for me, although it seemed at the time to work for others.

But I found plenty of room to compete on customer service, especially when selling flight tickets.

So I started to organize flights with more than one stop. I combined, if needed, flights with railway and road segments.

I added the ability to get an option for a ticket without buying it immediately.

Devastating ResultsI kept the name Bestprice.Travel, attracting a crowd of bargain hunters.

It took me often a full hour to create a travel plan for somebody just looking for a small discount of €5.

My bargain hunters asked for offers from many travel agencies, but bought only once. Specific needs absent, they got the same price everywhere. This led to a conversion rate of only 10 per cent.

At times I worked ten hours to sell a single ticket.

Segmentation and AutomationI could have changed the name, but this would not have solved the problem completely. So I decided to add a filter into the system, directing simple inquiries to a booking engine.

The prices quoted by the booking engine were not particularly low, but I allowed reservations with delayed ticketing.

The booking engine was connected to my desktop reservation system. This allowed me to add extra features like rail segments.

And my customers had the opportunity to confirm their schedules with business partners before making a firm commitment.

The Impact of a Price Tag

Routings with several stops or surface segments landed directly on my desk. I added to such inquiries a price tag of €30.

I offered to new customers a free trial and gave a waiver to repeat buyers. This removed the risk for doubting prospects.

In fact, nobody paid this €30. But 70% of my old customers left, and in spite of that my annual sales volume doubled.

Wonderful ResultsThe results were wonderful:

The annual sales volume doubled.

My conversion rate went up from 10 to 80 per cent.

My work load declined.

The quality of my service improved.

My customers were happy.

And the quality of my own life improved also.

Clarity Saved my Business Through the booking engine and the price tag visitors of my website knew what to expect before initiating a transaction:

Reasonable, but not super cheap prices

Extra service

And the 30 Euro price tag told them also:

I am aware of the value of my work

I do not allow people to exploit me

A Systematic Approach I did this segmentation intuitively. But it is important to select clients using explicit and clear criteria.

Write the criteria down. This helps to refine your approach over time.

After defining your ideal customer with written criteria, create a persona embodying him.

Find for him an ideal body. Draw a picture of his face. Know his name, age, habits, tastes, family, friends, past experiences, fears and desires.

Such a persona is called in marketing a Customer Avatar.

Using a Customer AvatarYou should be so familiar with your Avatar that you can slip into his persona, and then back into your self. You can see in him your best customer, and you can also see yourself from his perspective.

This means:

If you create a presentation, you present to him.

If you write an email to prospects, you write to him.

If you want to know, what else you can do for your clients, you ask him.

If you want to know where you can improve, you ask also him.

Where to Look for Clients

You know a lot about your Avatar: his challenges and desires, his fears, his hobbies and tastes, his family and friends, what he reads, where he hangs around.

This allows you to find him and to approach him.

And you know where and how he is different from those friends and peers who are less interested – or whom you want to keep on distance.

Manually Selecting ClientsIf you are selling high priced products with high margins, like luxury cars with a price tag of 100,000 Dollars, you can afford to select your customers one by one.

After a first contact with a prospect you arrange a series of meetings, where you check if he meets your criteria.

If you find he does not meet the criteria, you drop him and look for somebody else, who better suits your business.

You find in the resource list a link to a book, discussing this approach in detail.

Automation Most businesses cannot afford the luxury to approach and select potential clients one by one.

Their revenue form a single sale plainly does not pay for personal attention to every potential buyer.

They need an automated sales system, combining …

Elements attracting potential clients and leading them through the sales process up to the purchase

Elements keeping those away who do not satisfy the criteria they have established for their clients

I call those elements magnets and filters.

Magnets

Magnets lead a prospect through the sales process from the point, where he becomes interested, up to the point, where he makes a purchase and converts into a customer or client.

This magnetic energy originates mainly from three sources:

Samples (free or paid)

References and endorsements

A Personal relationship (very important for services)

Samples

For complex products and services, sellers typically provide a sample to those who express interest. Here are two examples:

Car companies allow a test drive, or arrange an opportunity to rent the car of your dreams for a weekend.

Amazon offers a four weeks free trial for Amazon Prime.

If you sell a knowledge based service or product, you should follow their lead: Provide free reports, webinars, books, etc.

References and EndorsementsYou demonstrate with your sample that you have something of substance to offer. Putting yourself into the shoes of your prospect, you know his next questions:

Is that solution really so good?

Where is the catch?

Is there somebody who can do that even better?

References and endorsements help to establish, that you are expert and provide the benefits you promised.

Personal RelationshipAfter establishing credibility using samples, references and endorsements, a potential buyer needs confidence that he will get along with the person providing the service.

Service provider and client need to be at ease with one another. This is obvious for lawyers and doctors, but it applies also to business advisers, financial advisers, teachers, personal coaches, hairdressers, nannies etc.

The necessary personal bond grows through a sequence of interactions in various environments.

FiltersFilters are the opposite of magnets. They discourage potential clients. Such filters exist, whether we like them or not. Some of them are:

The price tag

The structure of your offer and

Your personal appearance and behavior

You should manage the filters with great care to get the clients you want and keep others on distance.

The Price TagThe price tag states first and foremost the value of your service for the customer or client.

This helps buyers and your audience in general to appreciate your work.

It helps also to weed out potential buyers who would not appreciate your work.

It is totally O.K., if very few buyers pay the full price. You can and should offer discounts as long as you receive more than the cost of providing your service.

Structuring the OfferYou need to defend your business against those, who would like to use your service, but think there is no need to pay.

You can’t repossess services and digital products. Therefore you should slice up your offer into a series of transactions. The client pays and receives his service step by step.

Seller’s and buyer's risk is then reduced to a fraction of the whole transaction value.

One example is cloud based software like Office365, where you pay a monthly or yearly fee.

Personal Appearance and BehaviorYour appearance and behavior have always the power to turn some prospects away and to attract others.

You have to make sure to attract the ones you want, and to turn the ones away, whom do not want to serve.

This is a difficult task. It demands awareness of your personal traits and habits, and your ability to control them.

But when you gain that control, quality of your life and prosperity of your business will grow and grow and grow.

The 6 Rules of Persuasion

I created a blueprint outlining the implementation of the concepts behind the three presentations you have seen. The blueprint is called The Six Rules of Persuasion.

This blueprint is based on timeless psychological principles, best practices in the online world and two decades of my own experience, selling online and offline.

In the coming days a small number of people get access to the blueprint. I never published it before. The first buyers will get a deeply discounted price.

You Are Invited The fact that you made it to this point gives me the confidence, that you have what it takes to implement

The Six Rules of Persuasion

I invite you to have a closer look. For now I allow only very few sales. This enables me to support those, who implement the system.

Add your name and email address into the form below to receive an alert as soon as the first slots become available. You will also get the resource list for this presentation.

Thank you for listening and see you soon.