Charlie Cook's MArketing for Success Insider's Club

Sales

How the Marketing / Sales Cycle is Like Farming

By Charlie Cook   |   May 16, 2005

This morning I was talking with a West Texas sales rep for an agriculture firm which prompted the following farming analogy.

Marketing involves the preparation of the soil, gathering seeds, planting them and then nurturing their growth.

Sales involves waiting for the right moment and then harvesting the results of your marketing endeavors.

Both are essential to making a profit. Without marketing you won’t have any leads to nurture, nor any relationships with prospects that can result in a sale. Without closing the sale you’d be leaving your crop of prospects out in the field.

Is your marketing and sales strategy balanced to generate the leads and nurture the prospects you need to generate enough sales?
– Charlie Cook

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Why Don’t You Discount Your Manuals? or Why You Should Sell Value?

By Charlie Cook   |   January 12, 2005

Its true that you can find others who regularly offer large discounts on their manuals, especially when business is slow. I don’t do this for a number of reasons.

1. The manuals are worth full price, yesterday, today and tomorrow. Past customers certainly thought so and after they’ve paid full price I doubt they’d be happy to discover the item they paid $129 for is now selling for much less. Each year I update the manuals and rather than discounting them I usually raise the price while providing past customers with free upgrades. Overtime they become worth more not less.

2. You’ll find some marketers offering thousands of dollars of bonuses to motivate people to buy their products, in some cases the manuals they are trying to sell only cost $20-50 dollars. I don”t do this either.

You have to wonder too, if the bonuses are really worth hundreds or thousands of dollars why they are giving them away free. Usually the answer is that no one would pay full price for them. If a product isn’t worth buying on its own merit, its rarely worth buying. My suggestion is approach these offers with caution.

3. You are better off providing and marketing high value products and services. If you have a top notch product or service it should generate results that vastly outweigh the cost. Help prospects understand the value inherent in your products and services and you won’t have to resort to essentially begging people to buy your product by bribing them with additional offers.

– Charlie Cook

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