From: dlhpfm!dlh@NCoast.org (daniel lance herrick)
Newsgroups: misc.entrepreneurs
Subject: Re: 900 numbers
Date: Wed, 02 Sep 92 10:32:32 EDT
Organization: dlh Performance Marketing

burgoyne@highlite.uucp (J. Robert Burgoyne) writes:

> dlhpfm!dlh@NCoast.org (daniel lance herrick) writes:
> : 
> : Jay Abraham has trained about a thousand proteges in marketing
> : consulting.  Jay's philosophy is to find clients where he can make
> : money by collecting a cut of the profits generated by his efforts.  Jay
> : is very good at it.  So are some of his proteges.  Anyone who wants the
> : kind of guarantee Robert described can get it if the deal looks like it
> 
> I saw a Jay Abraham advertisement in a magazine. I believe it was Inc.
> 
> He mentioned the service you are discussing, but failed to mention his
> clones who are out there. From the sound of the ad, it seemed like what
> he personally was looking for were companies which had already established
> high quality products. Such people who were looking to increase sales
> quickly seemed to be his best prospects.
> 
> What was the extent of the training you folks received from Jay? I'm
> curious about some of the non-proprietary details.

I'm sorry, Robert, but you asked for it:

He told us to look for setups, not start-ups.  Then, acknowledging that
we would not obey him, he told us to treat start-ups as missionary
projects with no hope of financial profit for us.

I spent several months, Robert, training you in some of the basics. 
Remember "Test, Test, Test"?  What is your U.S.P.?  Do you now make
every ad a Direct Response Ad?  (You should be working on turning your
business card into a direct response advertisement.)  

Those are three of the Ten Common Mistakes Almost Every Business is
Making.

I sent you an article I wrote about headlines that I haven't put on the
net, yet, because I want to get it into a magazine first.

Reseller Management carried an article by me in their July 1992 issue. 
They edited it heavily, for the most part improving it from what I sent
to them.  Copied below is the version I sent them (that's the version I
have in machine readable form).

The things I have done here in misc.entrepreneurs on marketing problems
are applications of Jay's training.  My opening salvo as the first
Amway war was dying down was something like this:  "I'm going to give
away the best possible marketing advice I can on this newsgroup because
I want the people watching to think, `If he gives this much away for
free, what could he do if he were really working on the problems of my
business?'"  I think we spent some time exploring how Lakeview Software
could do something similar in one of our phone conversations.

You taught me that sending a demo diskette in response to an inquiry is
a way to delay (and thus put off indefinitely) a sale.  My reading is
that the demo puts an obligation on the prospect to make a more
intelligent decision by working on the buying decision before there is
any possibility of doing useful work with the product.  I think you
learned not to send a demo diskette, but it was some time after I told
you.  We argued about brochures in the first phone conversation.  What
I wanted you to see is that the brochure allows the person opening your
mail to make a conscientious response to the mail by putting the
brochure in a file somewhere and forgetting about it, while what you
are trying to elicit is to get him to pick up the phone.  What you saw
was the pile of brochures the printer was going to deliver in a few
days and how much time and money you had poured into them.  Did the
brochure produce one sale?  (You do know exactly how many sales you
made that could be traced to each marketing document you have used,
don't you?)

Robert, if my answer seems personal, well, your question seemed
personal.  The world has watched about half my communications with
Charlie Lear of New Zealand Shareware Distribution.  That was
applications of Jay's training (he got more of my world view than you
did, but most of the things I said that changed his business were
tracable to Jay).  The young man from Gun Dog Comics did all his
discussions with me with the world watching and it was application of
Jay's principles.  (Jay's ethics are sound and important to him, but
they tend to be pragmatically based.  When I comment on ethical issues,
I am trying to root my comments in Biblical Law.)

(I have now installed a mail-server on dlhpfm.  If someone has done the
work of assembling some of the useful threads of misc.entrepreneurs
into digested form, I can set up an archive server that will send them
out in response to mail requests.  Send e-mail.  I have an unorganized
archive of misc.entrepreneurs with holes in it - if someone wants me to
mail them the pile so they can do the cataloguing work from what
remains in my archive, we could do it that way. send email.  My archive
has holes arising from interruptions in my feed and arising from the
disk errors that plagued me in June and July (why did I put up with it
for so long?  The wedding was more important.) Also, I didn't start
until after that first Amway war was over.  Speaking of Amway wars, Tom
Limoncelli did a beautiful spoof in news.admin a couple weeks ago - Mr.
Sterling posted a root article about validating the identity of news
posters and Limoncelli immediately posted 20 or 30 followups from
accounts on three machines containing all the material of the flame war
that was almost certain to follow and the flamewar didn't happen. 
Beautiful!)

Back in February 1990, when I took the training, Jay was saying that he
had read Hopkins' Scientific Advertising 43 times.  Most of Jay's
principles are applications of what he found there.  You have read the
books I listed and gone beyond to other books.  I published a broadside
in misc.entrepreneurs telling the world to measure all the marketing
advice they read against Hopkins and Ogilvy and Caples.  That
injunction was intended for J. Robert.

Is Lakeview Software a setup, yet?  I'd enjoy finding a way to
participate financially in her success.  I have tried, thus far, to
shelter her from some of the opportunities for disaster that lie
waiting for new businesses.

dan

------------------------------------------------------------------------
daniel lance herrick                                    about 1700 words
POBox 1419                                           First Serial Rights
Mentor, Ohio 44061                   Copyright 1992 daniel lance herrick
(216)974-9637


Give Them a Reason to Call You Instead of Your Competition

by

daniel lance herrick

     In the Yellow Pages, all the direct head-to-head competitors are
side by side, every one of them saying, "Call me! I want your
business." Not very many of them tell the reader What's In It For Me.
It is possible to write an ad that makes clear to the prospect reading
it how his life will be better if he calls you instead of your
competitor.

Before you can write such an ad, you have to know how his life will be
better if he calls you. What is your Unique Selling Proposition or USP?
What do you offer to your clients that they can't get from any of your
competitors?

There are many possibilities:

         We will not be undersold
         We deliver in 30 minutes or it's free
         When it absolutely, positively, has to be there by 10 o'clock...

are three USPs that you have heard more than once. Each one communicates
clearly and unambiguously what this company will do to make their
clients happy. What do you do for your clients that no one else will do
for them?

         Are your offerings better matched to your client's real needs
because you spend more time studying his business before recommending a
solution?

         Does your service staff jump through hoops to keep the
client's system up?

         Do you work with your client to help them find the most cost
effective solution that fits within their budget?

         Do your systems grow to meet new needs as the client grows or
becomes more sophisticated?

     Each of these is a possible USP for a Value Added Reseller. What is
your Unique Selling Proposition?  Your clients can help you identify
your USP. They will be happy to tell you what they think you do well
and what they think you could do better. When you ask them about it,
you can be surprised. They may not mention the things you thought were
important and moved mountains to accomplish, and they may attach great
importance to things that you did not even think about.

     In the April issue of Reseller Management, Jan Hooper provides
Twenty-Five Questions To Help You Market Better.  These questions are
designed to help you focus in on your USP (Jan calls it your unique
selling points).

     When you have a clear, concise, short statement of your USP, the
next question is, Do your clients know what your Unique Selling
Proposition is? Have you told them? How have you told them? How can you
tell them?

     The answer to those questions is, Every time you communicate with
your client, you do something to remind them of your USP. You have your
computer print the paragraph length statement on your invoices. You
answer the telephone with a slogan version. You print it on your
business cards, short on the front, or long on the back, or both. If
your clients come to your place, the long statement of your USP is on
the wall. If you use visual aids for a presentation, the cover on the
flip chart or the slide you use to focus the projector is a statement
of your USP.

     Perhaps the best way to reinforce these ideas is to develop an example:

When you buy a computer system for your business, you spend a
little money on hardware and you spend a little money on software
and you spend a great deal of money on training. Joe's System
House recommends systems that can grow as you grow and as you
become more sophisticated without requiring you to throw away all
that training and start over from scratch.

     This may even be your USP, or part of it. How do you communicate
your USP to your client and your prospect? Remember, if your client
does not know, then you do not get credit for it, no matter how
wonderful it is.

     Answer the phone with "Joe's System House where you find systems
that grow with you."

     Print the slogan on the front of your business cards. Print the
long statement on the back of your business cards. Have your computer
print the long statement on your invoices.  Print the long statement in
the corner of your letterhead. Prepare a plaque for the wall in your
office or store. You want your client or prospect to worry about all
that extra training cost every time they even say "hello" to your
competitors.

     Are you thinking your competitor could make the same claim? Do his
clients know that? If you are the one who teaches the local systems
market that the hardware and software is the smallest cost of owning
and depending on a computer, he gets perceived as "Me too" when he says
"Oh, we have always done it that way."

     You can even go to the Chamber of Commerce and the local service
clubs that business owners belong to and offer to speak on "Holding
Down the Total Cost of Owning and Using a Computer." Tell them to call
you when the scheduled speaker calls up at 11:30 and says they just had
an auto wreck and are not going to make it to the luncheon meeting, you
will fill in on short notice.

     This example USP is directed to telling your client or prospect one
specific thing you always do to make your client's life better. It is
not generalities about "better service and higher quality," it is
specifics he can understand and measure the value of.

     We started this discussion of your Unique Selling Proposition by
pointing out that all the businesses in direct competition with each
other gather together in one place in the Yellow Pages. For the most
part, the number of phone calls they each get depends on how big their
ads are and how close to the beginning of the classification they are.

     Not every Reseller belongs in the Yellow Pages. If you already know
every prospect in the area, the Yellow Pages would be a waste of money.
There are other profiles that don't work well in the Yellow Pages.
However, if you do belong in the Yellow Pages, you should do something
to make it pay. Yellow Pages sales agents will say you can't control
your location in the classification because your name is what it is,
the only thing you can control is how big your ad is and bigger ads
bring more calls.

     If they said anything else they would be giving different clients
different quality help and this might develop into a conflict of
interest or ill feeling on the part of some of their clients. However,
you and I are only interested in your ad and there is no possible
conflict of interest if we make it better than all the other ads in the
book.

     What is your purpose for your ad in the Yellow Pages? Someone who
is letting their fingers do the walking through the classification
where your ad appears is already a prospect for your business. You want
him to call you first and then to not need to call anyone else.
Anything less is not making the most effective possible use of the money
you spend on the ad.

     My approach to this problem is to provide valuable information in
the ad. Not teasers. Solid, specific information that he can use in
carrying out the task that brought him to this classification in the
Yellow Pages. And offer to freely give him more of the same if he
calls. Here is a sample of what Joe's System House could do:

Read This Before You Call a Computer Dealer
Here is one question to ask yourself before you
call a dealer and three questions to ask the
dealer when you are talking to him.
Ask yourself:
What do you want the computer to be doing in your business
one month after it is installed? One year after it is installed?
Ask the dealer:
What will it cost, besides your bill, before I have this system
integrated into my business?
When I have grown so much that this system no longer meets
my needs, how do I expand?
What other questions should I be asking you, I don't know a lot
about computers?
Call Joe's System House at 555-2121 for a free report showing
how five popular systems stack up against these questions.
Joe's System House 3 Main Street Hometown
555-2121

     The questions in this example are feeble because they are
hypothetical questions from a hypothetical Systems House. You would use
questions that are on your clients' minds as they talk with you, the
questions that are bothering them that they don't know how to put in
words.  You prepare a script of answers to the questions and keep it
beside every phone in your offices.  You train everyone who may answer
your main phone to take care of any caller who sticks to the script in
the ad, and to refer any caller who goes beyond the script to the proper
person.

     You write a report evaluating the systems you sell, and at least
one system you don't sell, according to the issues raised in the ad.
You do not knock the competition, you give it a good honest comparative
treatment. You quote evaluations from PC Magazine or UNIX Today or
whatever rag is relevant to your line. You quote your clients, the
neighbors of the people who call your phone number, with their
permission and by name. You fill the report with hard information that
is valuable to anyone who takes the trouble to open the Yellow Pages to
the classification that has your ad in it and call you.

     You get that report into the hands of anyone who asks for it as
quick as possible after they ask for it. You do not hand deliver it on
Wednesday if First Class Mail would have it there on Tuesday. You may
send it Federal Express (this may be the cheapest way to always get it
across town tomorrow morning) or Express Mail. You may hire a high
school student with a bicycle to take it in a Federal Express style
envelope and deliver it the same day the prospect called, getting a
signed receipt.

     Summary: You can make the prospect call you first. You must know
yourself why it is to the prospect's advantage to call you. After you
know what your Unique Selling Proposition is, you must communicate it
to your clients and prospects every time you communicate with them. And
we showed you how you can write an ad that will make your prospects
ignore your competition's ads right beside it and call you.

---

dan herrick is a marketing consultant who specialises in finding
non-traditional marketing approaches that produce measurable sales
results.  You can reach him at dlh Performance Marketing, POBox 1419,
Mentor, Ohio 44061 (216)974-9637 or at email addresses 
dlh%dlhpfm.uucp@ab.com or ncoast.org!dlhpfm!dlh
------------------------------------------------------------------------

dan  of dlh Performance Marketing  POBox 1419  Mentor Ohio 44061
       NCoast.org!dlhpfm!dlh or ab.com!dlhpfm.uucp!dlh   (216)974-9637
"`Bad, bad,' says the buyer; but when he goes his way, then he boasts."
Proverbs 20:14
Xref: sparky misc.entrepreneurs:2685 alt.business.multi-level:420