3 Powerful Ways To Convert Prospects Into Paying Customers
Consider how marketing works in everyday life.
If you want to meet the love of your life and get married, you wouldn’t randomly walk up to someone in a bar, tap them on the shoulder, and say:
“Hello, I’d like to marry you.”
If you did, you’d probably get an unfavorable response.
Now, if a friend introduced you to somebody, the chances of going on a date and having rapport with them increase dramatically because of everything that happened in advance.
In many ways, selling is very similar.
It’s extremely difficult to push people uphill. Instead, you need to coax them to climb the hill on their own. Rather than pushing prospects into a sale, let them first engage with your automated customer conversion system.
The main customer conversion method you should use is education-based marketing, which lets you explain your product or service in a way that helps people trust you can solve their biggest problem. Examples of this include:
- Free recorded messages
- Online videos that give people information about what you do
- Webinars
- Video sales letters
Attracting qualified prospects, however, is just the first step. The real trick in any business is turning those prospects into paying customers.
Here are three important elements that will help you transform prospects into customers:
1. Use audits to package your products and services.
Since so many businesses give people quotes, consultations, and estimates for a particular product or service, you need to do something people will perceive as much more powerful.
You do this with an audit.
When I offered a Carpet Audit in my carpet cleaning business, I would go into a client’s home and write down basic information about:
- Condition of the carpet
- How many people and pets lived there
- Whether any occupants smoked
- Condition of the carpet
- What type of vacuum cleaner they used
- Any other things that might be unique to that particular home
Instead of treating every client as a number (the cost per room or the square footage of the carpet), I treated each potential job as a customized service that provided noticeable value to the customer.
Once I started doing audits instead of estimates, it completely changed the way prospects viewed my company. I was educating my clients on what I was doing and why, which separated me from my competitors and validated the fact that I charged more than anyone else.
Remember, people don’t buy from you because they understand what you do. People buy from you because they feel understood.
Audits make it so easy for prospects to see the value you deliver that they will automatically want to do business with you.
2. Make the most powerful offer of all: free offers.
Free offers lower the barriers to someone doing business with you.
If people receive a sample of your service, a free report or a video and like it, they’ll be much more likely to buy from you.
My friend Robert Cialdini, one of the most cited living social psychologists, studied how the Hare Krishnas used to pin plastic flowers on a person’s collar, then step back and ask, “Would you like to offer a donation?” Most people didn’t really want the flower, but after the Hare Krishna had given it to them, they felt obligated to make a donation.
What Robert found was that when you offer someone something for free, it creates a feeling of reciprocity that causes people to want to do something for you in return. So whenever you offer something for free in your business, it causes people to want to buy your products or services.
When I was running my carpet cleaning business, for example, I gave away a free room of carpet cleaning (combined with a Carpet Audit) to show prospects the enormous amount of value they could receive if they decided to do business with me. I made it very clear that prospects were under no obligation, and the free cleaning was my way of showing them what kind of service I could provide.
Naturally, if prospects were happy with the free room of carpet cleaning, they’d want the rest of their house done. And if they weren’t pleased for whatever reason, I would simply thank them for trying my service.
This took away all the risk for people to do business with me.
Give prospects a wonderful experience with your free offer that educates and wows them and they will naturally want more.
3. Take away people’s fear with money-back guarantees.
Businesses often spend lots of money on advertising and trying to acquire new clients, yet a money-back guarantee will cost you far less and increase your chances of attracting new clients.
The reason for this is simple: when an individual sees you’re willing to assume the risk of doing business together (rather than asking the prospect to take on that risk), it becomes much easier to do business with you.
Almost everything I sell comes with a 100 percent money-back guarantee.
And as a result, you won’t be able to find anyone who has anything bad to say about my products, because if they do have something bad to say, we give them their money back.
For example, my Genius Network annual events offer a risk-free satisfaction guarantee. If, after attending the first full day of the event, an attendee doesn’t feel he or she has received $250,000 worth of value, that person can get a full refund for their tuition, plus up to $2,500 in additional travel fees.
In all the years I’ve been running events and of all the thousands of people who have seen my guarantees, can you guess how many people have requested a refund?
Two.
And neither of those people fully participated in the event itself, spending most of their time outside of the room.
Ultimately, the amount of business you can generate from a guarantee will far outweigh the number of people who will try to take advantage of you.
Audits, free offers, and money-back guarantees are all tools to help convert suspicious prospects into loyal customers. If you have something valuable to sell, you’re doing a disservice by not making it as easy as humanly possible for others to do business with you. By removing these hurdles, you’ll make more sales, make more money, and make more people happy with your product or service.
1.Grow Your Business 10x
If you listen to the podcast Joe does with his dear friend Dan Sullivan, founder of Strategic Coach, you can discover untapped potential in your business, multiply your opportunities, and grow 10x — Click Here.
2. I Love Marketing: Get over 300+ Hours of The Best Marketing Education On The Planet
Check out this podcast with Joe and his co-host, Dean Jackson, where they talk about new marketing ideas, direct mail ideas, lead generation, lead conversion, getting referrals, stick strategies, email marketing, psychology, books, people, productivity, and a lot more — Click Here.
