Chapter Thirty

The Six-Part Formula

That Guarantees Your Business Success

By Ben Hart

I’ve distilled the formula for business and marketing success to six key elements.  If these key elements are in place, your success is assured.  Here they are:

1) Stand for something . . . and you’ll attract a crowd.

One of my key principles in marketing is that you will never stand alone if you stand for something. 

I first discovered how true this principles was when I was a student at Dartmouth College back in the early 1980s, I was one of the very few conservative Republicans on campus at the time.

I knew of maybe five or six other students who were also conservatives.

We got together and started a renegade conservative student newspaper called the Dartmouth Review.

Many of the articles were humor and satire.  The paper caused shrieks of outrage across the campus.   There were protests outside the Review offices.

The college administration tried to shut down the paper. It would not allow the paper to be distributed in student mailboxes or placed on tables in any Dartmouth facility for people to pick up (or not) as they wished.

When we distributed the paper door-to-door in the dorms, we were chased by campus police.   The Dartmouth faculty assembled and voted 113-5 to denounce the paper and recommend that the paper be banned from campus.

Review editors were hauled before the College disciplinary committee on absurd trumped-up charges and recommended for expulsion.

One Review editor was charged with having photocopied a press release that was in plain view on the bulletin board at the college news service.   He then used part of it for an article he was writing for the Review. He was charged with theft. He escaped punishment after a full-day of Kafkaesque kangaroo court hearings.

But a funny thing happened.

Students came out of the woodwork to join the Review.

We quickly had scores of students writing for the paper, selling advertising (for 20% commission), and helping to distribute the paper in the dorm rooms and across campus, chased every step of the way in Keystone Cops fashion by overweight huffing-and-puffing campus police.

The paper was controversial.   It was also a fun place to hang out.

I wrote a subscription solicitation letter to all Dartmouth alumni.

The college produced a directory of all alumni, so we simply keyed the list into a computer.   We knew nothing about direct mail marketing at the time, but I figured this list was valuable.

I wrote a letter describing the paper and what we were trying to do.

I made it very clear that this was a conservative student newspaper with an edge.

Another point I stressed was that the paper would give alumni the truth about what was really happening on campus.

No longer would alumni have to rely on the official Alumni Magazine (written and created by Dartmouth’s fundraising department) for their news about what was happening at Dartmouth.

My letter was four pages, plus there was an order form.

We mailed it at bulk rate since we could not afford first-class postage. We also mailed it in stages because we could not afford to mail all alumni at once.

Without knowing it, we were doing many things right.

I had written a letter because we could not afford a slick four-color brochure (I did not know then that letters are always best and that slick brochures almost always depress returns).

We were also testing and then rolling out as the letter proved successful (again, having no idea that this is the correct procedure in direct mail marketing).

Not only did subscriptions pour in, we received several $1,000 donations, one $5,000 donation and even one $10,000 contribution.

We soon had more money than we knew what to do with. In fact, we quickly had a yearly budget of about $200,000 — not bad for a few students.

The Dartmouth Review soon became a major student enterprise.  In fact, it’s still publishing today, 27 years later.

What made the Dartmouth Review such an astonishingly successful student marketing venture was that it stood for something.

The controversy this renegade student paper generated attracted a lot of media attention.

CBS’s 60 Minutes did a story on the paper, as did ABC’s Nightline with Ted Koppel.  The editors, including me, appeared on all the morning TV news programs.

The point is, if you stand for something, especially if it’s controversial and in the minority, you will gain followers.

And your followers will be committed and loyal to you.

This is why Rush Limbaugh has been such a successful radio personality.

The more outrageous he is, the more he is attacked, the better he does, because the more his audience likes him.

Ann Coulter is making a very profitable career out of saying controversial, often outrageous, things. Her books are always bestsellers.

Michael Moore does this on the Left.

This is called the “Law of Polarization” in marketing.

And it’s a well established law.  If you kick up controversy – almost no matter what the controversy – you will gain attention and you will attract followers.

The point is, when you stand for something, and when you are attacked for your position, your friends, those who like you, those who agree with you, will rally to your side.

“The enemy of my friend is my enemy too” is the logic here. “If the people I oppose don’t like this guy, he must be doing something right,” is another way to put this principle.

Being controversial and outrageous may be the easiest way there is to make a lot of money.

Howard Stern understands this as well as anyone.

There are few radio personalities more successful and profitable than Howard Stern. He is attacked all the time. I don’t like him much. But there he sits, laughing all the way to the bank.

Every commercial enterprise can apply this principle to improve their marketing and selling.

In all your marketing, tell your prospects why you are different, why you are not at all like your competitors.   Often you can do this by going again conventional wisdom.

      Here are some headlines that capture this idea:

“What Wall Street Doesn’t Want You To Know About Investing”

“Why Doctors Won’t Tell You About Herbal Remedies.”

“Why Most Diet Plans Will Actually Make You Fatter Than If You Had Not Gone on a Diet at All.”

Defying conventional wisdom, by definition, differentiates you from the crowd and gets attention for what you are doing.   Defying conventional wisdom, by definition, tells everyone you are different.

You will do very well simply by doing the exact opposite of what the conventional wisdom says you should do.

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is a terrific example of how this can work for a run-of-the-mill product where there is almost infinite competition.

How do you make ice cream different?

Ben & Jerry’s ice cream became popular at exactly the same time we were being told everyday to get rid of all the fat in our diet — that fat was terrible for us, that fat was the lead cause of heart attacks.

Ben & Jerry’s made no secret of the fact that it contains more fat per scoop than any other major ice cream brand.  It also tastes a lot better, precisely because it’s so thick and creamy -- precisely because it contains so much fat.

In marketing,  the more identifiable you are, the better you will do. Never try to be all things to all people. Never worry about controversy.

In fact, controversy can be great for you, your product, and your business.

Controversy will get you noticed, will attract attention. And as long as your position, your stance, has a constituency, your path to profit is a clear one.

Your task then is to find your constituency. More often than not, if you are at all competent, your constituency will find you.

All you have to do is put the bait in the water.  Turns out a lot of people did not want low-fat ice cream.

Turns out a lot of people do not care what the Surgeon General thinks. Turns out a lot of people just want ice cream that tastes great, no matter what the fat content.

Turns out people were sick and tired of blandness and sameness in their ice cream.

What they wanted was Cherry Garcia.

So be different.  Never be afraid to say exactly who you are and what you stand for.  Stake out your role.  Never shrink from controversy, as long as it’s defensible controversy.

The “Conventional Wisdom” is almost always wrong anyway.  The great thing about the Conventional Wisdom almost always being wrong is that you will become automatically controversial simply by clearly stating the truth.

And controversy will cause people to talk about you, and this is good for your business.

So don’t worry about controversy and don’t try to be all things to all people in the vain hope of gaining a greater market share. If you keep these principles in mind, you will attract loyal followers.

2) Target a Niche

Now, the easiest way to make money is a find a narrow niche and market exclusively into that niche – assuming you have a way to find those who want what you are selling.

Let’s take the most extreme example of this to make a point.

The easiest way to make money is to have no competitor.  If you are the only gas station in town, you will do very well.  That’s so obvious it’s hardly worth stating.

The easiest way to improve your chances of having no competitor, or very few competitors, is to identify a small market niche that you can dominate.

It’s better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small, struggling fish in a big pond. In the big pond, you will likely be eaten alive very quickly.  In a small pond, you will live a very happy, nearly stress-free, comfortable life.

Let’s look again at my very first enterprise, The Dartmouth Review.

 This small conservative renegade and independent student paper was the only source of reporting and commentary on events at Dartmouth, written and produced entirely by students.

Talk about a refined and narrow product!

So not only was The Dartmouth Review different, it had staked out a monopoly. The truth is, the Review could have raised $500,000 a year, $1,000,000 a year, or even $10,000,000 a year.

There was almost no limit to the amount of money we, as mere students, could have brought in if we had run the paper like a business instead of as a part-time hobby.

But we were just students.   We did not need more than about $150,000 or $200,000 a year to publish the paper and have some money left over for parties.

So we just stopped there, sending out a fundraising letter whenever we ran out of money, about four times a year.

So when you think about your product and marketing strategy, think of ways you can give your customers something they can’t get anywhere else.   And it’s best if your market is small and highly specialized, because then the big boys are not as likely to come in and crush you.

Highly specialized information for a niche audience is always great, especially if your niche audience is relatively easy to find.

The more specialized, the smaller your potential audience -- but also the more committed your audience, and the more you can charge for you newsletter or magazine.

A newsletter with just one editor can do well with 1,000 or even a few hundred subscribers . . . if the cost of a subscription is $95 a month.

Fiber Optic News would be a good candidate for such a business model, or maybe get even more specialized than that. Maybe your publication would do best by focusing on a specific kind of fiber optics. I know nothing about fiber optics, so I don’t know.

The point is, if you can find 1,000 people who want all the cutting-edge info on Fiber Optics because that’s their livelihood, they will pay a premium for your newsletter, perhaps $1,000 a year – which is $1,000,000.

That’s about what specialized newsletters like this sell for, by the way.

 Of course, it’s critically important for the information to be really good – that it be essential insider news that fiber optic manufacturers, developers and buyers can’t get anywhere else.

The big mistake businesses make is to try to be all things to all people.

For example, the temptation for the editor and publisher of our hypothetical Fiber Optic News will always be to expand the reach of the publication -- o cover all kinds of cable and wiring, or perhaps all kinds of high-technology.

The assumption here is that Fiber Optic News will reach a wider audience and gain more readers if it becomes HIGH-TECH NEWS.

But then the publication is no longer unique.

The publication is no longer as valuable to anyone.

Your marketing costs will skyrocket as you try to reach this wider audience, and you will have to drop your subscription price radically to have any chance to gain readers, because you will be competing with dozens of other generalist magazines covering the high-tech industry.

Instead of a unique source of information on a highly specialized topic, you will have become a commodity, always competing on price.

Time magazine can never charge much for a subscription because it’s a general news magazine. It wants to be all things to all people.

As a result, gaining a single subscriber is a Herculean task for Time and enormously costly. It takes Time about two years on average to pay for acquiring a new subscriber -- that is, for the revenue generated by the new subscriber to cover the acquisition cost of that subscriber.

Not many enterprises, especially start-up enterprises, can afford Time’s business model.

In fact, Time is having difficulty affording Time’s business model.

3) Figure out your “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP)

This is different from the “Law of Polarization” – though it can certainly be related.  A Unique Selling Proposition answers the question “How are you different from your competitors?”

This difference does not need to be controversial – though it can be.

A friend of mine here in the Washington, D.C. area is an Interior designer and decorator.

This is a very competitive field with all the wealthy suburbs around here.

So I urged her to figure out how to be different from her competitors.  That’s how you stand out from the crowd. Be different – not like clown, but in a plausible way.

Figure out a difference that people want.

One way to do this is to take a poll of your prospects.  Get them on the phone and talk to them about what they are looking for

So that’s what she did.

She first called her friends to ask them what they would want from an interior designer.

She took them to lunch to have a discussion about it.  This was a kind of focus group-type poll.  Political campaigns do this a lot. And then she started calling strangers in the neighborhoods she was targeting to find out what they would want from an Interior designer or decorator if there were looking for one.

After doing all this polling and talking with people, she found this common complaint about interior designers.

They tended to be too fancy.  They viewed their profession as art.

They wanted to create showcase works – that might qualify for being on the cover of Better Homes and Gardens or Southern Living.

What she discovered was that families with children did not want the insides of their homes to be works of art.

They wanted functionality. 

Yes, they want the inside of their homes to look good. 

But they want it to look good ever after the kids have put handprints on the wall and dropped their peanut butter sandwiches on the sofa.

They want their homes to be family and child friendly.

So that’s how she started to market herself.  She started to market practical, functional Interior design for families with children

She distributed fliers in churches and in neighborhood where she wanted to do business. 

She also emphasized this difference in her Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising, as well as on her website.

She started her company in 2001 and is now doing $2,000,000 a year in business here in the Washington D.C. area.  And she has four other interior design consultants working for her.

The point is she found her niche by asking people in her target market what they were looking for from an interior designer . . . and then she delivered it to them.

It turned out that all the other Interior designers were not delivering what people wanted.

People did not want fancy and artsy.  They wanted practical, durable interior designs suitable for families with children.

She polled her target market to find out what people really wanted -- and then tailored her service accordingly – and at the same time developed her Unique Selling Proposition, so essential to successful marketing.

I need to define Unique Selling Proposition for you here because this is a principle that is often misunderstood.

A Unique Selling Proposition does not mean that you want to sell something that is completely new.

You will probably go broke doing that.  The inventor of the fax machine, the inventor of the air conditioner – they went broke.

Inventors usually go broke because it requires too much money and too much explaining to get people to understand why they should want your new invention.

You would not have had much luck explaining to King Arthur why he should want a personal computer or an automobile.

You need to be selling products and services that are already pre-sold in people’s minds – products and services that you know for certain people want already.

Then, you must come up with an attractive Unique Selling Proposition that differentiates you from your competitors – that sets you a part from the crowd and makes you stand out.

For example, there are a lot of mortgage brokers and lenders out there basically offering the same thing.  I get a call everyday from a different one.

How do you make yourself stand out?

Well, Lennox Financial did a brilliant job at this by offering refinance loans for no out-of pocket money:  “No points, no closing costs.”

Well, that’s very attractive to people.  People are hesitant to fork over thousands of dollars in closing costs to refinance their home.   But if you eliminate that barrier, then it becomes a no-brainer for people to pull money out of their home by refinancing.

If you are selling a big-ticket item, a high-cost item, you must come up with a way to reduce or eliminate a big out-of-pocket cash outlay.

You want to structure your deal so your customer can pay later and pay over time.

Get that contract signed first, then have the payments start later.

If you have a cash problem yourself, once you have a signed contract, it’s not at all difficult to find lenders to finance your receivables or buy your receivables.

So that’s how Lennox Financial differentiated itself – “no points, no closing costs, no out-of-pocket cash.” Zero.

The founder of Lennox started off as just a one-man mortgage brokerage in Texas a few years ago. Now he has 700 employees.

That’s what coming up with a Unique Selling Proposition can do for you.  That’s how you stand out from the crowd.

Figure out what it is about your competition that your target market doesn’t like.

Turns out a lot of people do not want fancy, artsy interior design.  Turns out people don’t want to pay points and closing costs to refinance their homes.

A local contractor here in the Washington, D.C. area is running ads on the radio that says he does not sub-contract out any jobs.  All work is performed by his full-time employees, no part-time employees, which ensures that the job is done right.

I think he’s doing well with that proposition because the ads are running on the radio a lot.

There’s a dental practice that does a lot of advertising for sedation dental work.

If you come in for dental work, you have the option of being knocked out with anesthesia while the work is being done. 

In other words, no pain.

Painless dental work is attractive.  The ads are running all the time.  So this Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is clearly working.

Find a way to differentiate yourself from the crowd.  You aren’t just a realtor.   You are a realtor who specializes in a particular town, or perhaps a particular area of town.  You do that job and that job only.

If you are successful in your small pond, then you can think about expanding into other areas.   Keep in mind that McDonalds started out as just one restaurant.

Remember, people want to hire a specialist, an expert to solve their problem.  The more you try to be all things to all people the more likely you will mean nothing to anyone.

Now, if you pick a niche where you have absolutely no competitors, that can be great . . . or it can be bad.  Generally, people flock to where the money is.

If no one is occupying the niche you are targeting, there’s probably a good reason for that.

I actually prefer to go into areas where there is a lot of competition . . . because where there is a lot of competition, there must be a lot of money being made.

But then figure out how to come up with a Unique Selling Proposition that will cause people to notice you, that makes you stand out from the crowd.

If you are a financial advisor, maybe it’s that you take no commissions on the financial products you recommend.

“Would you trust a restaurant critic who is being paid by the restaurant she’s reviewing” . . . or “a movie reviewer who is being paid by the movie studio who created the movie he is reviewing?”

That’s a pretty good argument against relying on a financial advisor who is compensated by way of commission.

I believe that coming up with a Unique Selling Proposition that is both memorable and highly attractive to your target audience is just about the most important thing you can do before you launch your marketing campaign . . .  or at least before you spend a lot of money on it.

So now we’ve established that figuring out your Unique Selling Proposition is absolutely essential to your success.

But that really won’t do you much good unless you have a cost-effective way to reach your target audience – those who have a very strong likelihood of wanting what you are selling.

4) Focus on Building Your List

Let’s go back my earlier Dartmouth Review example again.

Not only did we have a Unique Selling Proposition.

We were an independent conservative student publication that would give alumni that unvarnished truth about what was really going on at Dartmouth College.  No longer will you need to rely on the propaganda fed to alumni by Dartmouth alumni relations department – which is really just a fundraising department.

“You can read the unvarnished truth here – the Good, the Bad and Ugly – in The Dartmouth Review.”

So we had that going for us -- a pretty attractive Unique Selling Proposition, especially if you were a right-of-center Dartmouth alum who was probably disgusted with the far-left faculty and the leftward drift of the Administration.

But this Unique Selling Proposition would not have done us much good if we did not have a way to reach our target audience.

We needed a mailing list of Dartmouth alumni.

And, to our great good fortune, there was a printed Directory of all Dartmouth Alumni – all 60,000 or so.  So I just went over to the Dartmouth Alumni office, bought a copy for $8, and had it keyed into a computer data base.

Presto!

We had an instant mailing list to send our subscription letters to for The Dartmouth Review.  A list is not just a way for you to reach your market. It is your market.  You really have no market without a list.

So we had an efficient way to easily reach our target market – a market of alumni starved for information – starved to know the truth about what was happening on the Dartmouth campus, their alma mater.

What’s the best way to sell hamburgers?

Well, the best way is to sell hamburgers to a starving crowd.  And it’s best of all if there is no other source of hamburgers or food in the immediate area.

So that’s what we had here.  And those are the four big reasons we were so successful:

1.  We milked the “Law of Polarization” the hilt – attracting all kinds of media attention.

2.  We had a Unique Selling Proposition.

3.  We had an easy way to reach our target audience (a qualified list of leads).

4.  We had a “message to market match.”

But having that mailing list all set to go was what made it so easy for us.

Having this highly-qualified list of Dartmouth alumni starving for information on their alma mater really made our marketing like fishing in a barrel packed with fish.

That is, we had an audience of not just hungry, but of starving people for what we were offering. And we had a way to reach this audience – a directory of Dartmouth’s 60,000 or so alumni.

It was this experience that I had as a student in 1980 that gave me an appreciation for the enormous power of direct marketing.

Okay, you might say: “But Ben, how can I replicate this for my business? This sounds like a pretty unique situation.”

Fair point, in the sense that we had no idea what we were doing at the time.  We were just lucky to have this directory – this list of highly qualified prospects  – already compiled for us.

We knew a list like this was probably valuable.  We just did not understand how valuable.   We did not realize that a list like this was worth many millions of dollars over the years.

But the fact is, there are all kinds of ways to build your list of qualified prospects just like this.  The Internet allows you to do this very cost-effectively.

You can also rent lists of people who have bought products very similar to yours. We have already covered these two ways pretty extensively in past Inner Circle teleseminars.

But lets just review here some of the key precepts – so you understand how to target the niche that is exactly right for what you are selling.

Let’s start with the Internet.

When people are looking to buy something or looking for information about something, 8 out of 10 now go to the Internet first and type keywords and keyword phrases into their browser.

So if I did not have a directory of Dartmouth alumni today, what I would do is set up a website designed to capture the names, email addresses and other contact information of alumni who are looking on the Internet for Information about Dartmouth.

Well, I just typed “Dartmouth” into Yahoo’s keyword selector tool, and I find that there were 10,327 searches on Yahoo in February for keyword phrases that contain the word Dartmouth.

Triple that number for Google because three times more searches are done on Google than on Yahoo.  So that’s roughly 40,000 searches for Dartmouth in February alone.

And there are other search engines as well.

So that will bring us to about 55,000 searches for “Dartmouth” in one month. 

So if you had a website that was an independent source of news about Dartmouth, you would have a lot of visitors.  And if you offered something free to your Dartmouth visitors in exchange from them filling out your sign-up form, you would then begin to build a big list of people intensely interested in goings on at Dartmouth -- a list perhaps even better than the directory of alumni that we had in 1980

You might offer, for example, my bestselling book on Dartmouth titled Poisoned Ivy, or perhaps a free issue of The Dartmouth Review, or maybe both.  Because, let’s face it, not every alum is really all that interested anymore in their alma mater.    And not every alum is conservative and supportive of The Dartmouth Review.  Many hate it.

But anyone who is actually searching for news about Dartmouth on the Internet is clearly interested in what’s going on at the school.  And anyone who fills out sign up form on The Dartmouth Review’s landing page to get a free sample issue or the free book is clearly a highly qualified prospect.

Keep in mind that there are 55,000 searches for Dartmouth every month – which is about 660,000 searches for Dartmouth during the year.  So that’s how you could build The Dartmouth Review today.

In other words, you would not need a printed directory. 

Using the Internet this way, you can actually build a much better and more targeted list of likely prospects today using the Internet than if all we had was that big directory of undifferentiated alumni.

The Internet is the greatest niche marketing tool in the history of man.  And it’s super cheap to use.  You can build a highly-targeted list of qualified leads quickly and super cheaply on the Internet.

But there’s something else most businesses need to know how to do.

5) You Must Know How To Make an Irresistible Offer

This was not as important for The Dartmouth Review because we had no competitor in our market niche.

If you have no competitor, and you are selling a product that’s in high-demand, you can charge almost whatever you want.  Hence the $6 bucket of popcorn at the movie theater.

The theater has a captive audience (and won’t let you bring in your own popcorn).  People get hungry.  They will pay almost anything for the popcorn.

Most businesses don’t have that luxury.  They don’t have a captive audience of very hungry people who will pay almost anything to buy some stale popcorn.

Most business have competition.

Once you have an easy way to reach those who you know buy the kind of product or service you are selling, now the only question then is: “Will they buy from you, or your competitor?”

Your biggest challenge is to persuade your prospect to buy from you the first time.

Your first-time buyer is your most expensive buyer.

If you deliver on your promise, if you exceed your first-time buyer’s expectations, you’ll have no trouble making repeat sales.  People would much rather buy from someone they know rather than take a chance buying from a stranger.

So your biggest challenge is to persuade your prospect to buy from you the first time.

To do that, you need to know how to make an irresistible offer.

The most powerful offer is the “Free Trial” and to require “No Money Now.”

That’s how magazine subscriptions are sold. 

** “Try Newsweek for three months.  If you are not thrilled with your subscription, just write ‘cancel’ on the invoice we send you in 90 days.”

** “Try Comcast for one month free.”  Or “try xyz software for 30 days free.”

A variation of this is to ask for an absurdly low price for the first purchase: “Buy any of these four bestselling books for 10 cents.”  You are then enrolled in a Book-of-the-Month Club type of program.

Another staple of an irresistible offer is not just to have a money-back guarantee, but to offer a “money-back-plus” guarantee. 

For my physical seminars, I offer a “money-back guarantee plus an addition $500” if a participant decides to quit by the lunch hour of the first day.  So far no one has cashed in on that offer.  But this kind of a super-charged, money-back-plus guarantee increased attendance at my seminars by about 500%.

Mostly what you must do with your offer is eliminate the anxiety your prospect has about buying from you the first time.  Your prospects don’t know you.  They worry about buying from a company they have not bought from before.

You must do everything in your creative power to eliminate that anxiety.  You do that by taking on all the risk . . . and by making an offer that, frankly, only an idiot would pass up.

6) You must have an endless stream of follow-up products that are exactly in line with the first product you sold them.

Your profit is in your repeat buyers. 

Usually you lose money on your first-time buyer – especially if you follow my step-four described above – which is to create an irresistible offer. 

What you are doing with your irresistible offer is paying for your first-time buyers.

So you will go broke if you don’t have a big stream of follow-up products and services to sell.

And your follow-up offers need to be exactly in line with what you sold the first time to your prospect.

If you sell exercise equipment, keep offering more and better exercise equipment and fitness stuff.

Many businesses go wrong by only having one product to sell.  You need follow-up products, accessories, and up-sell offers. 

Great products to sell are those you consume and use all the time.  Gevalia coffee and Omaha Steaks are direct marketing powerhouses.  They sell a monthly program.

They get you in the door by offering a one-month free trial.  Gevalia also gives you a really nice coffeemaker – which I have because I’m enrolled in the program. 

But some of you sellers of big ticket items will wonder . . .

“But, Ben, how does this apply to me?  I’m a realtor. I can’t let someone try the house for a month! And it’s not like someone who buys a house today needs another one tomorrow.”

Or

“But I’m selling heavy, expensive equipment. How does this apply to me?”

Of course, that’s correct.   But also the reward (profit) for selling a house or heavy equipment is much bigger than for selling a magazine subscription.

Your commission might be $10,000 or more for big ticket items like these.

People buy a new home on average about every eight years.  So you do have repeat buyers. And heavy machinery wears out.  So the machine needs  to be fixed and eventually replaced.

Even for these big ticket items, you find your customers the same way.   The same principle apply.  You will still need to pay for your first-time buyers.

You will still need to invest time, money or both to reduce fear and anxiety in those who have never bought from you before.  That’s even more true when selling a big ticket item – like a house or big piece of farm equipment.

How do you do that?

You do that with your “frequent contact” program.   You do that by building a relationship of trust with your prospects.  You do that by becoming a regular presence in the lives of your prospects and customers.

You do that with your email program, and your printed monthly newsletter that arrives in a physical mailbox.  You do that by sending thoughtful free gifts to your prospects and customers – gifts that are useful and make sense.    You do that by always being on the scene.

I encouraged a realtor friend of mine to develop a program of sending thoughtful free gifts throughout the year to her key prospects and clients in the Great Falls, Virginia area – focusing on the high-end homes.

The high-end homes are where the big money is for the realtor.

One mailing would be an attractive calendar, with a nice cover letter.  Of course, the calendar would have her photo and all her contact information on the inside cover. 

Another mailing would be an attractive  refrigerator magnet with emergency phone numbers – also with her contact information.  Another would be a sheet of postage stamps, which everyone can us.  Another would be a box full of candy and other goodies at Christmas time.

And, of course, she would be sending out her newsletter every month with a lot of useful information on property values and trends in the Great Falls area.  She is a constant presence in the lives of people in the Great Falls area – always on the scene with thoughtful gifts and a great monthly newsletter.

She even holds free seminars on how to buy or sell a home.

How many houses would she need to sell a year to make all this marketing and all these freebies she gives out pay off for her?  One, maybe two.

And she is one of the most successful realtors in the region.  She has a big staff of people working for her.

Obviously, she can’t give out a free trial for a house.  Nor can she give away a house as a “free sample.”

But she can give out a lot that’s free.  And when the time comes when her prospects need a realtor, she’s the first one who comes to mind.  She also gets a lot of repeat business and referral business.  She’s one of the best known people in the region.

Her irresistible offer is that she’s trusted.  And that’s what an offer is designed to accomplish – to reduce anxiety in the minds of your prospects – to get them to trust you.  The way you do that is to let them know you.

Besides, the question is not whether her prospects will buy a home.  They will.  That’s for certain. The question is “Which realtor will they use?  A stranger? Or someone they know and trust?”

The point is, never worry about giving a lot away and doing a lot of nice free things for people.  In a nutshell, that’s this realtor’s marketing program.  That’s her system – a system I helped her set up.    And it’s just about the cheapest form of marketing you can ever do. 

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