The accepted logic is that the only way to increase sales is to spend more on marketing and advertising. For the most part this is WRONG!

It’s true if you spend more on marketing and advertising you should bring in a few more sales but wouldn’t you like to spend less and make more instead? Using just a few key ideas you can increase sales by 15 times or more while cutting your per lead costs by thousands of dollars.

How can you make your sales soar and cut your marketing costs? Here’s the story of one savvy Vice President of Marketing and his amazing success.

A couple of years ago, Steve called me looking to adopt the lead generation system I use, which was of course the system that had prompted his call. He was frustrated and looking for ideas to increase sales. His company had a professional-looking web and was spending plenty on advertising, but was getting only a trickle of leads.

Steve explained that they were spending over $750 on pay-per-click ads, but their site was generating an average of only ten leads each week. This made their per lead cost $75 or more. At that rate they were just barely breaking even.

What are your per lead costs? Want to reduce them and increase sales at the same time?

As Vice President of Marketing, Steve wanted short and long term ways to cut costs and ramp up sales. To help them jump-start sales I started by having Steve modify his home page.

First, we added a marketing message that explained the benefit they provided to their clients. After some convincing, Steve agreed to put his company name on the side of their page, in smaller type. Then, we featured their marketing message at the top of the page instead.

The results were instantaneous. Lead flow increased by 300% and per lead costs started to drop.

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Over the next couple of years, Steve and I worked together closely to implement a host of changes. Today, his company’s per lead costs are less than $20, and I know they can be reduced even further. But before I give you the steps we took to help them save over $250,000 and make twenty times that in the last two years, here’s another secret.

After the first success we had together the staff at Steve’s company were believers and healthy skeptics at the same time. Each time a change was made to the site, they checked their web logs to evaluate the number of visitors to leads generated and see if sales were increasing. If the answer was yes, the change stayed, if no then we made additional changes.

For example when we replaced the homepage copy they checked to see if more or less people were contacting them and to see which links site visitors were using. Then we worked to optimize the most highly visited pages on the site to increase lead generation.

The secret of Steve’s continued success? Measuring the effectiveness of each change and then using the past month’s results as a baseline to beat the next month.

Want to increase the conversion rate of your web site to cut costs and make sales surge? Find out how >>

So, what were the most important changes Steve made to his site, which resulted in such an amazing increase in sales?

Some changes were small, some large. Here’s the top seven:

• Replaced the company name at the top of the homepage with a 15-second marketing message.
• Changed the page copy on the site from a focus on the company to a focus on the client and from a focus on selling to a focus on helping.
• Used the location of links to direct visitors to key top-converting pages.
• Developed and offered a helpful free guide.
• Collected and added case studies and testimonials.
• Replaced the sign-up form with a shortened new client focused version.
• Measured the effectiveness of each change!

Want to cut your per-lead costs and increase your sales? You can!

Whether you’re an author, entrepreneur or mid-sized company, you simply need to know how to put the marketing process in sequence and increase your conversion rates. Once you have these secrets, you’ll see your savings and your sales soar.