How Offering A Premium Support Service Can Increase Your Profits And Margins

You’ve probably bought electronics before and been offered the purchase an additional warranty. Or maybe you’ve purchased furniture before and been offered a white glove service to deliver and setup your new couch.

These are all examples of premium support services that can have very large profit margins, so even if only a smaller percentage of customers take you up on them, they can add a lot to your bottom line.

Some of these premium support services can be at little to no cost to you. For instance, one business we’ve seen had a warranty offer where you could get free replacement charger cables forever on your phone, if they ever fail, for a small one time extra fee as long as you just cover the small shipping and handling fee. However, these cables have such huge margins anyway that the small S&H fee literally covered the cost of the cables and the shipping. The “warranty” that was sold was essentially 100% pure profit, despite how it would appear to be an awesome deal for the buyers (paying $5 for S&H instead of $29 for a new cable sounds like, and is, a pretty good deal).

You can even sell access to one on one help, a Facebook group page for extra (and faster) help, etc. Some of these offers you can literally put together in a few minutes, yet some people will naturally buy them just because they think they might have a use for it one day.

Another example would be offering faster support, faster shipping, faster service, etc. All of these can have huge margins for little to no extra work!

So brainstorm at least a couple of extra premium support services that you can offer your buyers (like extra warranties, faster support, faster service, etc.) that come with huge margins despite not really increasing your costs much, if at all.

To find out more tweaks that could drastically change and increase your business, check out our business analyzing tool here BizFire's Free Business Analyzer and Growth Tool.

How to Improve Your Marketing and Create Hot New Products That Your Customers Already Want

How can you improve your marketing and create new products - products that your customers already want? Simple. Ask for feedback from your customers and see what the common themes are. What do your customers like most about your product? How can you focus on that more in your marketing? What do they believe that your product/service currently lacks? Think about how you can use their feedback to create a new/improved service and offer that to your customers.

For example, perhaps you have a business that creates websites and the common feedback that your customers give is that they wish you also helped rank their site on search engines. You could create an additional service, where for a monthly fee you help rank their website. If you don’t know how to do this yourself, you could always outsource this part, but white label it as your own service - you still make a profit on the service, but don’t need to do any of the work. You can offer this to your current customers, saying that due to their feedback and the demand, you’ve created this service to help them with what they want most.

Ask for feedback from your customers, specifically on what they like most and what they dislike most/wish you offered. Use the feedback, on what they like most, and highlight it in your marketing. With what they like least/wish you did, create an additional or improved service/product and offer it to your customers.

For more great marketing ideas to improve your business check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!

How to Increase Your Profits by Offering A Range of Different Upsells

Looking for a way to capitalize on the value each customer is worth to you? An easy way to do this is by offering different upsells. Upselling is offering a complimentary or upgraded version of a product/service that a customer is currently purchasing. One of the most well known upsells can be heard when you head into your local fast food joint: “Would you like fries with that?” Even not so great upsells can add a quick 33% or more to your revenue stream.  Some really good upsells or funnels can even double your initial sales or more! An upsell is a great way to increase the total value of a sale.

For example, if you run a dance school, and each class is $15, you could provide a number of upsells. You could offer 3 different upsells, of varying amounts:
Upsell 1 - 4 week course for $50
Upsell 2 - Gold Membership where for $120 a month you can attend as many classes as you like.
Upsell 3 - Pro dance package for $200 a month, which allows you to attend unlimited classes and receive 2 private classes a month.

A good upsell path, often referred to as a funnel, can make or break a business. One model that we’ve used over the years is to offer a crazy deal on the front-end (a low priced, deeply discounted offer or a free plus shipping and handling offer) while having several upsells ranging from continuity offers to high end offers. The money is made in the upsells – not on the front-end – in this case. We’ve started multiple seven figure businesses this way over the years, and the model is easily repeatable in almost any niche, but it wouldn’t be possible without a great upsell path.

But it’s important to note that you don’t have to build a business around an upsell path like we did (although that certainly can work). Just adding one or two upsells to your existing offer can greatly increase your earnings with minimal effort.

For instance, we helped another business owner once with a new offer that he was about to launch. We encouraged him to add at least one upsell to it, but since he was behind on his launch schedule, he was very hesitant and didn’t feel he had enough time to do so. So we said to just create a simple offer based on something he already sells, shoot a quick video on his iPhone, and throw it up on a page to see what happened.

The quality of his video sucked, he looked like he was on zero sleep (or high…), yet when he launched his new offer, the upsell made quite a few sales! In fact, the upsell actually MADE MORE MONEY than the front-end offer itself. It was responsible for about two-thirds of the total money made. That means that if he didn’t follow our advice, his launch would’ve been a third the size that it was (costing him tens of thousands of dollars just in those few days).

Upsells don’t have to be perfect, but you need to have them!

So consider offering a range of differently priced upsells to your customers to increase the total of each sale. Your upsell could be a complimentary or additional option on the offer your customer is already purchasing. Remember, include at least one upsell!

For more great upsell ideas and strategies to grow your business through improving your sales funnel, check out his awesome tool: BizFire's Free Funnel Maker & Analyzer

How Affiliate Programs Are A Great Way To Bring In More Sales With Less Effort

Want a way to make sales without paying for any ads and with zero risk of losing money in doing so? The obvious answer is a big YES, but very few business owners take advantage of running their own affiliate programs, which can do exactly that!

Affiliate programs are where you offer others a cut of any sale that they send your way. When this is done online, there’s traditionally special “affiliate links” that they get from you. When they send people through those links that later buy from your site, they’d get credited for and paid a percentage of the sale. You can do a similar concept offline just by letting others refer your prospects directly (and manually crediting them), or even by handing out special “unique” coupon codes to others to hand out to their prospects so you know where they came from. This could be a special coupon that you hand out, with a code or ID on it, so you know where it came from. Regardless, in either case you only pay them after a sale is made, which makes it virtually risk free for you.

If you go the online route, there’s various places you can sign-up to, in order to have your offers on their networks, like Clickbank.com, Amazon.com (which is great to sell on just by itself), CJ.com, etc., as they can instantly let affiliates sign-up for and start promoting your offers. Alternatively, there’s also private affiliate programs/scripts out there that you can get free or for fairly cheap to run your own affiliate program without the need for another network.

Regardless of which route you go, don’t expect to magically get lots of affiliates signing up and promoting your offer without you raising a finger. It can take some work to reach out and recruit these affiliates to get them promoting you. It’s best to reach out to those who you can also help in return first, as well as to make sure that you truly have a great converting offer with good payouts to make your offer attractive to these affiliates.

So consider creating an affiliate program and recruiting affiliates to help promote your offers at little to no risk to you. Make sure that you have attractive offers and payouts, and that you proactively reach out to the best affiliate prospects out there.

Liked this strategy? For more tips to increase your sales, check out this book 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!.

How Focusing on the Benefits of Your Offer Can Help Convert Sales

So how can focusing on the benefits of your offer increase your sales? It’s a marketing technique that encourages customers to focus on the end result that your product will give them, which is a powerful motivator to encourage customers to buy.

Your offer will have features (specifications) and benefits (the end result). In your marketing focus on the benefits of your service/product, instead of the features. It’s the benefits that sell your product, not the features. For example, does a person buying an anti-aging cream want to know that it contains the ingredient Q10 or that it visibly reduces wrinkles and makes them look younger? Think about how you can use the benefits your product provides in your marketing - you can still list the features, but link them to the benefit that the feature will give your customer.

For example, if you have a business selling a course teaching guitar lessons, you might have three main features that you could translate into benefits for your students:
Feature 1: Over 50 pages of guitar lessons
Benefit 1: Learn to play the guitar in under 3 hours!
Feature 2: Get training on how songs are made.
Benefit 2: You’ll be able to create your very own songs!
Feature 3: Practice on over a dozen songs with step by step instructions.
Benefit 3: You’ll be able to play over a dozen top songs in no time!
Each time, the emphasis is on what the student is actually getting out of the feature by explaining the end result that they’ll receive from that feature.

It’s amazing the difference changing your sales pitch from focusing on features to focusing on benefits instead can do. We’ve seen pitches go from poor conversions to great conversions just by changing that up.

One big trick that we’ve learned over the years is that you can even start your own side businesses mostly hands free by utilizing this concept! To do this fairly easy trick, all you have to do is look for other offers that seem to have lots of happy customers (testimonials, reviews, case studies, etc.) but don’t do a good job on the sales page of talking about the benefits. Many service providers on places like Fiverr.com and other “services for sale” type sites often do a poor job at this, but you can either create your own service (can also work with products) where you use them to fulfill the work for you but with a better sales page, or you can just reach out to them and ask if you can use their testimonials, case studies, etc. as long as you use them to provide the service that you’ll be selling to your prospects. Many are happy to agree to such a thing, and this allows you to literally be selling something within a day without having to do much of any ongoing work yourself. All you do is make a better pitch and sell it yourself!

So, in your marketing, look at how you can emphasize the benefits that customers receive from your service, as opposed to focusing on the features. You can still list the features, as they are important, especially with certain products, but link them to what the customers will get out of that feature. Why should the customer care about that feature - what end result does it deliver to them?

To find out how other simple tweaks can drastically improve your sales, check out this survey tool that helps analyze your business for areas of improvement BizFire's Free Business Analyzer and Growth Tool.

How to Show Value and Position Your Price to Encourage Customers to Buy

One way to show value and highlight the great price you’re offering your customers is to point out when you are giving a discount or savings, as this lets customers know you’re giving them a great deal and lots of value. A discount also has a psychological effect - we feel we are getting a better deal and are more likely to buy. Seeing that an item is discounted not only is an incentive to buy it now, it can also encourage new users to buy that might otherwise have not considered it.

For example, when listing your price, you might write: "$97 --- 50% Off Today!" This makes people feel they are getting a great deal, helps them justify the purchase to themselves and is more likely to push them over the line.

If you have several similar offers that are slightly better or more/less expensive than the other, instead of just listing off the benefits of each one next to their price, you can also not only list off the savings, but say “Good Deal,” “Better Deal,” and “Best Deal” next to each one (or “Most Savings” or something similar). Never assume that people will just do the math in their head and know which one is the best deal.

Think about how you can apply this to your business. Can you put a savings amount next to a price point (eg, “$97 --- 50% Off Today!)? This makes customers feel they are getting a great deal and can encourage customers to buy that may not have bought before.

After more tips to show customers the value of your product? For more marketing tricks and strategies, check out this book here: 50 Marketing Tips & Tricks Learned After $100 Million in Sales Over 20 Years!

How To Sell To Other Businesses

Business to marketing seems like a foreign language to many people who are trying it for the first time. The consumer markets seems so much plainer and easier, after all, we're dealing with every day people. With businesses we feel we are dealing with some mysterious entity or some divine VIP, a thing whose persona is foreign to everything we knew in the every day human consciousness.

The reality that most people miss, and it's a well-kept secret, businesses are people. They are decision makers, executives, highly paid company officers, and even midgrade managers. At the end of the day though, they are people, selling to other businesses is no different than selling to people, except that you have to consider the kind of person you're selling to. Much of this involves trying to get into a person's head. What does a business owner or manager need and/or want? What things will improve their lives, and more importantly, the operations of their business? Answering these questions is the first key to selling to other businesses.

1: Identify Your VIP

The first step in creating a strong pitch for your product and service is considering your VIP, there may be more than one to consider depending on how the decisions are made. You have to know who you're selling to and then consider how your business can benefit them personally. As we discussed, you're dealing with real people, and they taking their own needs and desires into consideration as well as their roles in serving the greater needs of the company. Is your contact a buyer, a manger, or a business owner?

Depending on who you're speaking to, you'll want to come with ideas and features about what you have to offer and how it makes their lives easy as well benefiting their employer.

2: Don't Just Sell, Give Them Something They Can Use

Whoever your VIP may be, you can expect that someone has found them too, and they probably get multiple pitches a day for what you have to offer. A simple letter with a sales pitch is no longer enough to draw people in anymore. Because of this, you want to attach your sales pitch to something they can use. Many companies do this by offering white papers. White papers may be written as guides on important industry topics and trends, and may even highlight problems the industry is facing. This can be accompanied by a pitch explaining how you offer a solution. Either way the white papers are free and useful, so there's no harm in reading.

Writing effective white papers isn't easy, but it can be done.

3: Start With Value Over Price

When you're making a pitch to any business, you may find yourselves in the middle of a bidding war. Too many entrepreneurs focus in only on their prices as a way to put their best foot forward. While pricing certainly is important, it's far more vital to highlight the value your product has to offer. What can your product do that others can't. Can it save the company time or money even while requiring an investment? Can it make life easier for managers or help improve employee morale and productivity?

When you're making your bid don't advertise that you are cheap. If anything this will raise red flags if it's all you have to offer.

4: Highlight The Business Benefits

Whether it's in consumer to consumer or business to business marketing, even professionals have made this terrible mistake in copy-writing. Never just tell someone about the features of what you have to offer. Features are boring and no one wants to hear you list them all day long. They want to know how what you have to offer is going to solve a common problem. Just don't tell them “My computers have a lot of RAM” but instead consider, “Are you tired of losing valuable company time and money waiting for your computers to load? With our CPUs high RAM capability your upload, download, and processing speeds will be through the roof. You'll save time, money, and your business will be moving at lightning speed when processing your data!”

Benefits are everything. Nobody wants to know what you can do, everyone wants to know what you can do “For me”

5: Make it Easy To Act

Your call to action (CTA) is the grand finale of any pitch you write. It needs be dazzling and out of the park, but more importantly, it needs to be easy to act upon. Links in emails should be large, thought not obnoxious, and easy to see and click on, and MUST NOT BE BROKEN OR INACCURATE. Contact info should be prominent, accurate, and very visible. Like it or not, nobody likes a hassle. If your final pitch is hard to act on, even a little, or your lead finds it hard to get in touch you may lose your sale to someone else out of sheer convenience.


6: Gather Leads
This probably should have been the first step, but you need to gather solid prospective leads to sell to. It means nothing if you have the greatest product in the world and killer sales pitch to back it up, and no relevant people to sell it to. Gathering leads can be tricky, but made much easier by programs like Macroleads that help you organize, streamline, and even somewhat automate the process.