4 Essentials to Business Success

Attracting Prospects, Converting to Customers, Leveraging for referrals and Retaining as clients. Attracting prospects. Attracting Prospects is vitally important to the life blood of any business success. Whatever means you use to attract prospects, don't be boring and like everyone else. Be creative, bold, unique and exciting. What makes you business different and more appealing than your competition in the market place? When you answer this quesion you have the beginning of a great marketing campaign. The number one way of attracting new prospects is "word of mouth" from your present happy, satisfied and loyal customers. This is why the most important thing you you do in your business is to make sure your employees, your product and service are excellent. The Stew Leonards Grocery Store in Norwalk Ct has a sign etched in stone that reads, OUR POLICY Rule #1. The customer is always right. Rule # 2. When the customer is wrong, refer to Rule # 1. His employees are well trained, have a positive attitude, helpful and live by this rule. Go to his web site and see how he started and what taking care of customers can do for your business. Some ways of attracting prospects: Today you have to have a good Web Site. Targeted Direct Mail for your business and web site. Targeted E-mail campaigns. Newspaper, Magazine advertising. Radio and TV advertising. Coupons. Good Signage. Networking groups as well as internet social networking. Cold calling and it can be fun if done in the right frame of mind. Always, always and always capture and build a data base of your prospects, customers, clients or patients contact information including e-mail address. Converting - Prospects to Customers is the art helping them buy. Jeffery Gitomer, speaker and author of many books on sales says, and I agree, "People Hate to be Sold but Love to Buy". Sign up for his free ezine at gitomer.com. Most business owners don't like this part of the business, but this is so important to your success and you have to be constantly converting prospects to Customers ( Clients or Patients). Train all your employees in sales and excellent customer service. A great example of this is the Apple store. You can go into any Apple store and everyone is helpful, friendly, with up energy. They don't try to sell you anything but you want to buy. If you and your employees are helpful, friendly, have a yes attitude and believe in your product or service then this shouldn't be that difficult. When you think about it everything we do requires some form of persuasion, whether it's trying to persuade someone to your point of view, your suppliers/vendors for better terms or the Banker for a line of credit. Learn the art of persuasion or fail, so get good at it. And it begins with a great attitude. Leveraging - Customers for referrals. Once you have converted the prospect then the next step is to make sure your customers get what you promised when you persuaded them to buy or use your services. If their experience with you business is as good or better than you promised and you go the extra mile to make sure they are blown away, then they will be delighted to recommend your business to others. Don't shy away from asking customers for referrals even testimonials. Here is where the art of persuasion is important to your business again. Retaining - Customers, Clients or Patients. Stay in touch with them. "Out of sight, out of mind". Develop a survey form and send out or put in every package to find out how you did in their eyes. Give some incentive for them to return the survey. This is so important to the success of your business that it is amazing how few businesses do it. You will be surprised how many customers will returned them. Always call and thank them. If they had a great experience and tell you about it, you have the makings of a testimonial or referral. This is a good time to ask if you can use their comments in your marketing material. If the experience was bad then you have an opportunity to correct the problem, apologize, tell them how you corrected the problem and how much you appreciate their business. You might want to make an adjustment in their purchase or next order. Bill Glass is a Certified Business and Personal Development Coach and a Commercial Real Estate Consultant He was a manager with UPS, owned two very successful businesses and served three terms as an elected public official. He can be reached at bill@consultbillglass.com / http://www.small-business-resource.com/ Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Bill_F_Glass