www.abraham.com
I taught one client, who was generating leads for office equipment, how to make more money off his office equipment competitors than he made off his own business. Every time my client mailed 1,000 pieces of direct mail, it cost him $1,000 and brought a 5 percent response - 50 inquiries for $1,000.
Of those 50 inquiries, he would sell 10 percent of five people - meaning he did not sell 45 of them. Until he met me, he just kept sending out 1,000 letters for $1,000, selling five more people and discarding the non-converted prospects. I told him “Your goal is to ethically exploit every profit opportunity in all these prospects and customers.”First, I had him figure out why the other 45 people didn’t buy from him. He identified some as “tire-kickers”, but most of them didn’t buy for one of four reasons. Either (a) his product of service was too expensive, too complex, too intimidating; or (b) it was not sophisticated enough for them; or (c) his sales personnel irritated the customers; or (d) the price or financial terms weren’t affordable.
That didn’t mean they didn’t want to buy office products. It just meant that client was unable to sell to them. If he could convey these prospects to his competitors – those dealers whose products, services, sales people or pricing were what these people wanted - they could probably sell to many of them.
The client reluctantly allowed me to prove the point. I made a deal on behalf of his office products client for his competitor to work the unsold leads. His client got half of the profit from the sales his competitor made and ended up making more money off the people he didn’t sell than on the ones he did sell. Non-traditional? Yes. Unorthodox thinking? Absolutely. But it quadrupled the profit from the clients business with absolutely no extra effort or expense on the client’s part.
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