As the end of 2006 approaches, are you going to reach your goals for th year? Do you know if you’ll achieve the objectives you set out at the beginning of the year with respect to new customers, financial objectives, etc?

What’s that you say? You didn’t really have any goals set, so you don’t know if you’ve acquired the number of new cusotmers you wanted? Or, you didn’t really have any financial goals, so you don’t know if you’ve reached your financial targets or not?

Well, if that’s you, let’s just say you’re operating under tenuous circumstances. You’re basically operating your business blindfolded. If you don’t know where you’re headed, how will you know when you’ve got there?

Fortunately, this time of year gives you an opportunity to start fresh, set new goals, and lay out a clear path for the next 12 months. If you don’t know where to start, I encourage you to check out my program, ‘7 Little Known Steps to Putting an End to All the Marketing Mayhem, Madness, and Miscues‘, which will give you step-by-step instructions on how to put together a very clear plan for taking your business to the next level.

But whether or not you decide to invest in my program, I strongly encourage you to put together at the very least some semblence of a plan. Be sure to include goals for new customers, retention %, financial goals, etc.

If you’ll take the time and put in the effort to do this, I promise you’ll really look back on 2007 and thank yourself.

A lot of businesses make the mistake of talking about themselves instead of talking about their customers.  I’ve written here many times about the importance of stressing benefits, benefits, and more benefits.  To put it another way, try to look at it like this:

You know your customer is already having a conversation with himself inside his own head.  He’s talking about the problem he’s trying to fix, but he’s not sure how.  He’s certain there has got to be a solution somewhere, but he’s not quite sure where it is or how he’ll recognize it once he finds it.

The key to making sure your marketing hits the mark everytime is to understand this conversation your customers are having inside their own head, then inject yourself and your solution into the conversation.  When you know the issues they’re struggling with and present the answers via your marketing materials, you’ll find your marketing to be 100x’s more effective than any type of image advertising you could ever do.

So, figure out the conversation going on inside their head, craft an answer that ties the solution to your service, and present the solution via a direct response marketing mechanism.

Whether you believe this or not, you’re always marketing your business.  That’s right, whenever you’re just ‘out and about’ you’re sending out a message about you and your business.  People will see you and associated the behaviors you exhibit with the type of business you run.

So, if you drive around in a dirty pickup truck there’s a good chance people will assume your business doesn’t pay too much attention to the details.  If they see you wearing grubby clothes with holes all over them, then chances are they’ll think of your business as low class that doesn’t put a whole lot of stock in appearances. Or, if they see you in the neighborhood cussing up a storm, it’s a pretty good bet they’ll view you as a roughneck neanderthal and think twice about doing business with you.  And the list goes on and on.

Now, that’s not to say you need to go out and buy and brand new pickup truck, or splurge on a new wardrobe, or never utter a four letter work, it just means you need to remember the image you portray whenever you’re out and about.

Your image and actions really do carry a lot of weight and people associated the business with the business owner.

As we celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday here in the good ol’ U-S of A, I wanted to share a few thanksfulness thoughts with you from my good friend Richard Flint.

Be thankful you can laugh; it will keep you from having a breakdown.

Be thankful for tears; they flush out your pain.

Be thankful for dreams; they keep your world filled with possibilities.

Be thankful for friends; they will hold you accountable.

I hope your Thanksgiving is filled with family, friends, and lots of gratitude. I know I’m thankful for all of the many blessings, opportunities, and love ones I have in my life.

Thanks!

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In working with numerous clients, one thing I’ve noticed is that many businesses make the mistake of thinking of marketing as a one time action.  Unfortunately, this results in wasted $$$, lots of frustration, and limited results from their efforts.

The important thing to keep in mind about marketing is that it’s a process.  It’s a series of steps you go through to slowly move your prospects along the path to becoming customers.  The number of steps in your series depends on the type of product or service you provide.

Your responsibility at each step in the marketing process is to answer the biggest question in the mind of your prospect at that time.  Once you’ve managed to answer the current question and they’ve taken the next step, your next job is to answer their next question. And so on and so on, all the way up until they finally become a paying customer.

If you’ll look at your marketing as a series of steps along a path, try to determine the burning question in the mind of your prospect at that particular step, and then figure out how best to answer that question, you’ll soon find your marketing working like magic.

No more wasted $$$.  No more frustration.  And best of all, your marketing will yield more results than you know what to do with!

Today I’ll finish up the list of 7 profit stimulating ideas I started last week.  As a quick recap, here are the first four we’ve already discussed:

1. Create a frequent buyer’s program
2. Provide occasional discounts
3. Use premiums
4. Package your services together

The 5^th way to stimulate your profits is to give your customers the option to prepay for your services.  For example, let’s say you have someone that’s interested in signing a year long contract for services but instead of you sending them a monthly invoice, you give them the option of paying it all upfront in exchange for 2 months worth of services free.

Now, you obviously need to know your costs very well to know how much you can afford to give them, but by providing this type of incentive you’ll get a number of customers that would be more than happy to avoid all the hassles associated with sending payment PLUS they get 2 months worth of services for free.

The 6^th way you can stimulate profits is to accept credit cards.  Now I know this one may seem a bit elementary, but believe it or not, there are quite a lot of companies out there that still don’t.  Consumers today are used to convenience.  They love the convenience of using a credit or debit card, knowing everything happens instantaneously.

Believe it or not, if you offer your customers the option of paying by credit card you’ll pick up a healthy number of new customers that are interested in that convenience.  They just don’t want to mess around with writing a check each month.

Another way you could really take advantage of this idea is to set them up on automatic draft so that each month, their invoice is paid automatically.  Once it’s set up, you don’t have to worry about remembering to charge their card.  They don’t have to worry about returning the invoice.  Everything happens automatically and everyone’s life is a whole lot less complicated.

Of course, you need to remember to cancel the auto-draft if they are no longer your customer.  Trust me, all the hassles and headaches you avoided by having them on auto-draft will be multiplied if you don’t change that when they cancel.

The final profit stimulating idea is to communicate constantly with your past and present customers.  Your customer list is your most valuable asset and by failing to maintain constant contact with them, you’re allowing that asset to simply waste away.

While many will tell you “it’s okay to contact them quarterly”, I say that’s baloney.  If you’re not contacting your customers AT LEAST once a month with something other than a service call or a bill, you’re losing 10% of that relationship.

Each contact doesn’t have to be something extraordinaire and it doesn’t have to be something expensive either.  A monthly newsletter is an excellent way to maintain contact and you can get them printed and mailed for less than $1.  Now, if you’re saying that $1 is too much to spend to strengthen the relationship with the one’s that are putting at least 25 times that much into your pocket each month, then you’re in the wrong business!

There’s a recent conversation going on in the GopherForum about whether or not telephone directory advertising works.

Here’s my latest addition to the conversation:

“So what can you do to give your prospect a reason to call?

Since marketing is a step-by-step process, the reason should be a baby step towards actually becoming a customer. And since at the stage where most prospect are when they’re scanning the yellow pages (trying to decide which of all the choices would be best to call), give them something to help answer the questions in their mind.

Instead of just listing your services like all the other advertising lemmings, offer them some free information to help make their job easier. Put something like:

“Do you know the ‘5 Questions You Should Ask Any Lawn Care Provider Before Letting Them Care For Your Lawn’? Before calling any other company, listen to this FREE recorded message by calling XXX-XXX-XXXX 24 hours a day.”

You would then set up a special voice mail where you list the 5 reasons on the message. At the end of the message, you could present them with another offer that encourages them to leave their contact information after the beep, thus allowing you to continue to educate them on your services. This next offer could also start the process of weeding out the tire kickers.

Finally, you could create a free report on any topic that answers any number of questions going through your prospects mind while searching the yellow pages, but that’s the general idea - give them a non-intimidating reason to pick up the and find out more about you. “

You can read the entire discussion HERE.