I think it’s a safe assumption that you’d like more people to buy from you. But, you want to do that in a way that’s classy, professional and isn’t overtly “salesy”.

Here’s the process I use, perhaps it will be helpful to you. I didn’t invent it myself but picked it up from one of the experts I follow, Frank Kern. The point is that it works for me, it’s worked for many of my clients, and if you give it a try, I think it will work for you too. We call it Results in Advance.

Basically, the theory behind Results in Advance (which we’ll refer to as RIA so I don’t have to type out Results in Advance over and over) is to ease our prospect into desiring to buy from us. The classic mistake a lot of us make (and this was a huge error I made for many years) is asking people to buy from us too early. Before people buy, they need to have a picture in their mind of what their life will look like once they have your product or service. The more we can create that image of the results they’ll achieve, the greater the likelihood is that they’ll invest with us.

So let’s use an example to illustrate this. I have a service in which my team prepares a free report for clients, we put an opt-in box on their website and then each month write up to 4 stay-in-touch messages. Fundamentally, it’s a turnkey, lead capture & drip marketing system.

Now, when it comes time to market this program, I could simply describe what it is and I’d probably get some sales. But, if I want to get as many sales as possible I need to shift from a “Here’s what I got” approach to a “Results in advance” approach.

Here’s how I do that, and if you follow this model, you can do it too.

I like to flow chart stuff out (probably the result of being the son of an engineer and a mathematician). So on one end of the spectrum I have “prospective client” (if you like to doodle you can draw a stick figure ) and on the other end, is the result you want (you might just put a big $ sign).

I then put 4 blank bullet points between “prospective client” and “$” sign. These bullet points represent the outcomes that my prospect needs to visualize before they get to the point where they are motivated to buy my little turnkey marketing system.

So the first one might be; clients calling you rather than you having to chase after them. I know for my market this is huge. Many of my readers spend a lot of time either at networking events or even cold calling, trying to chase down business. So having a system that gets people to come to you is a real big benefit.

The second point might focus on “feast or famine’ business cycles. Again, this is big issue for my group. In fact most of them go out of business (either for financial or psychological reasons) because the “famine” cycles just kill them. So at this stage I want to create the picture in their mind of what their life would look like if they had consistent streams of new clients.

A third point I’d emphasize might be about getting better quality of clients. If you don’t have lots of people contacting you, then you feel compelled to do business with most anyone who will hire you. Unfortunately that means you wind up working with a fair amount of jerks. So again, I want to create that visual image in their mind about how wonderful it would be if all their clients were nice people who were great to work with.

You get the idea.

These RIAs are what you want to communicate in your marketing materials, your presentations and in your one-to-one sales discussions. The more your prospect visualizes the outcomes…the results they’ll get by buying your product or service…the more they’ll want to do business with you.

Give it a try and let me know how this works for you.
Mark

Want to learn more about the Turnkey Lead Capture & Drip Marketing service I used as an example? There’s some info here.