Pillar 5 Lead Conversion And How To Increase The Number Of Orders You Receive

Rich Schefren is one of my business heroes, and in this 13-minute video, he gives you his thoughts on how to write a good sales letter.

Copywriting is a very big subject and there is a lot on this website about copywriting. See this video from Rich – who isn’t a copywriter but has worked with some of the very best – as a high-level introduction to the art or a reminder of the key issues.

David Garfinkel is one of my business heroes, and in this 30-minute video, he talks to Roy Furr, another copywriter who I see very much as a rising star and feature on my blog.

It’s great to have them both together.

You will know that you need to have a competitive advantage or competitive edge as the basis for your unique selling proposition.

Are you clear on the dimensions?

For years, I talked about this as the ABCD Rule.

Your Advantage needs to be Better, Cheaper or Different.

Then I came across an article I wrote on the difference between vertical differentiation and horizontal differentiation where I went further.

I said your Advantage needs to be Better, Cheaper, Different, Easier or Faster.

This became the ABCDEF Rule.

This gives you five broad directions to think about when you are considering your customer value strategy and your customer value attribute map (also known as the strategy canvas in Blue Ocean Strategy). These will help you to be clear on which factors are your order winners and which are order qualifiers.

The Purchase Tipping Point refers to the buying decision and how it tips from uncertainty about which is the best choice to certainty that you have made the right decision.

It’s not to be confused with the Profit Tipping Point, the name of my free report to help business owners make more profit.

You’ll have experienced the purchase tipping point yourself many times and there are two different decisions.

1. The decision to buy something.
2. The decision to buy the particular item.

Your internal dialogue will go something like this…

“That’s nice.

So is that.

I can’t afford both and I probably shouldn’t buy either.

But I deserve a treat.

Then one of

• I’ve done very well recently
• I’ve worked hard this week
• I have resisted temptation and not bought anything for ages
• I’m feeling down and I need cheering up
• I really need it – my current one is old, shabby, broken or worn out

Which should I buy?

[Notice the first purchase tipping point decision has been passed because you’ve gone from not buying to deciding to buy something]

I really like both.

That one’s more practical but the other is so stylish.

I wish I could buy both.

But I can’t. I mustn’t.

Come on which do you want most?

That one.

[This is the second purchase tipping point as you move from a generic purchase decision to a specific one.

How Do You Influence The Purchase Decision?

I’m planning to write a lot more in my blog about how you influence the purchase tipping points:

• The decision to buy a generic product or service
• The decision to buy a specific product or service

I believe not looking through the customer’s eyes is a common failing in many marketing and sales books and courses. I’ve argued for a long time that your job is to make it easy for a customer to buy.

It may seem obvious but when you look back at your own buying, you’ll see how often businesses stand in the way of you buying and stop you from tipping positively at either or both of these purchase tipping points.

The Purchase Tipping Point & Mistakes In Communication

One thing businesses are very bad at is not understanding where you are in your buying cycle as a potential customer. This means you get a mismatch in communication.

There are only four combinations – two right and two wrong.

• Before purchase tipping point 1 (deciding to buy generic)
  The right way – to explain why a generic purchase is right and lay the groundwork for why you should make a specific choice.
  The wrong way is to concentrate on why the customer should buy from you. The customer isn’t ready to be sold, just helped to make the initial tipping point decision.
• After purchase tipping point 1 but before tipping point 2 (deciding to buy a specific item.)
  The right way is to explain why your specific product is right for them and is different and better than those products available from competitors.
  The wrong way is to explain why buying the generic product is the sensible thing to do.

The Purchase Tipping Point & Emotional & Logical Reasons To Buy

The idea of the purchase tipping point can also be applied to the emotional and logical reasons for buying. You can see this in my sample of internal dialogue above.

To make the purchasing decision, you want ticks for both logic and emotion.

You can know you need something and not want it.

You can want something and not need it.

Either way, you can find that you can’t justify buying.

The Purchase Tipping Point & The Pain Of the Problem Versus The Pain & Gain Of The Solution

Pain and the desire to reduce or avoid pain motivates you to make decisions but there is also pain involved with buying solutions to the underlying problems.

I don’t smoke but it’s well established that smoking is bad for you so the logical thing is to give up. But there is pain involved in quitting (withdrawal symptoms, increased tension and irritability, gaining weight). People who continue to smoke haven’t been able to reach the decision tipping point and to stay on the right side. In this case not smoking is considered more painful than smoking and suffering the high risk of serious health problems in the long term future.

I am overweight and, after losing a few kgs, it seems to be creeping back up. Not as high as it was before I was ill, so I still have plenty of clothes to wear. I’d like to lose weight but I haven’t hit the decision tipping point where my exercise goes up and my calorie consumption goes down. Just like in the internal dialogue above, I find myself thinking “I’ve been a good boy. I deserve a treat” and I have another chocolate bar.

Two Questions

Have you noticed that you have this internal dialogue as you work your way through the two tipping point decisions involved in buying? Have you noticed how some companies and sales people help you “tip positively” towards making the buying decision whilst others seem to do their best to get in the way?

Secondly, if you’re selling a product or service, have you identified ways that you can;

• Help your customers to tip towards making a buying decision?
• Identified ways that you might get in the way and then put together an action plan to stop these things happening?

In particular, pay attention to the understanding where the customer is in his or her buying journey and make sure that you are selling the generic product when you need and educating the customer on choosing their appropriate buying criteria and then selling your specific product as different and better than your competitors.

I want to tell you about Jay Abraham’s Three Ways To Grow A Business.

This is very different from the famous Ansoff Business Growth Model which can be thought of as the four ways to grow a business.

The Power Of Business Models

One of the big advantages of uses a “business model” is that it helps create a shared view of the way the business works and the way it can be improved. That’s the same when you use a strategic model to look at the environment like Michael Porter’s Five Forces.

I make this point in my Profit Tipping Point Report, but there is a tendency to over-complicate business and focus on too many tactics without getting the bigger things right.

The Three Ways To Grow a Business

The three ways to grow a business are:

1. Increase the number of customers who buy
   .
2. Increase the average sales transaction value
   .
3. Increase the number of times a customer buys

It’s a very useful framework because often when you look at strategies to grow the top line, the automatic focus is winning more customers (method 1) and little attention is given to getting more sales from the existing customers in terms of selling more and more often.

The Three Ways To Grow A Business Video

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Robert Cialdini, the acknowledged expert on influence, has created a doodle video to help explain the six factors of persuasion.

You may have already come across these ideas but the video is a great reminder because it puts the concepts across in such a powerful way.

Robert Cialdini Doodle Video

Do You Use These Six Factors Of Influence In Your Marketing & Selling?

It’s many years since Robert Cialdini first popularised these ideas but how well do you use them in your marketing?

My advice is to take a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle and head up one column with “do” and the other with “can do”.

Then work through the six factors – reciprocity, liking, authority, consistency, scarcity and consensus (social proof) – and look at how you currently use the ideas in your business and then, how you could use the concepts more.

David Deutsch has long been regarded as one of the very best of the A-List copywriters. I’ve seen him providing support on trainings from John Carlton and he attended Harlan Corben’s course on NLP Copywriting.

Up until now, he’s kept many of his secrets to himself. There’s no widely distributed book and there hasn’t been a course. A few years ago I bought a series of interviews David did with other copywriters as they talked copy which also meant I received a pdf copy of a book he did write called Million Dollar Marketing Secrets.

Now David has produced a course called…

A-List Copywriting Secrets

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Brian Kurtz is a direct marketing legend who worked with Marty Edelston to turn Boardroom, Inc. (now Bottom Line Publications) into a remarkably successful information publisher. They did it by finding the very cream of copywriters.

Here is an interview between Brian and copywriter Roy Furr. Roy is the copywriter Brian choose to write the copy for a memorial event to celebrate the life and achievements of Marty Edelston. It was called The Titans of Direct Response.

Here is how Roy describes this recorded interview:

“I asked Brian to come up with ONE BIG LESSON he got from each of the Titans.
… One big reason why he’d invited each to take part in the event.
It turned into a rapid-fire session of lessons on marketing, business, and life.”

It’s 55 minutes long but it’s a great way to spend the time.

I’ll also take this opportunity to recommend Brian’s book called Overdeliver (link to Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com). I’m not sure where my 5 star review has gone as it’s not on Amazon or this website. Sometimes I have had trouble posting so, hopefully, my tablet has captured it.

The full title of this book by Charles E. Gaudet II is

The Predictable Profits Playbook: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Dominating Any Market – And Staying On Top

In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave the book a 5 Stars rating. This means it is Excellent.

Here is my book review.

An excellent guide to business growth

I bought and read this outstanding book back in 2015 but for some reason, I didn’t review it [continue reading…]