Making Your First Million.pdf - Association of Net Entrepreneurs and ...

Making Your First Million
If the phone is too busy to answer it on the third ring, you need more phone staff. In our
office there is no receptionist. Each of us is trained to follow the phone standards listed
above and if the phone rings a fourth time I make my irritation known. Nothing is more
important than serving your customer. Unless you are already directly serving a customer
you must drop what you're doing and answer the phone.
We apply the same concept to serving at the counter. Nobody is kept waiting. We are not
the railways or the post office. We can't afford to alienate our customers. When a
customer comes into the shop and fronts the counter one of our staff goes up to them and
says: "G'day!" This is deliberate. We don't say "Can I help you?" We ask an open
question like "G'day, how are you going?" so as to engage the customer. The customer is
there for a reason and if you can make her feel comfortable and unthreatened she will
relax and open her purse for you.
These ideas may seem like common sense to you as a business owner but you will need
to inculcate them into your staff, and for that you need to write them down as
performance standards. The key to it is to look at things from the point of view of your
customer. What would your customer want here? What would she like or expect?
Some time back we implemented a standard of ringing up new customers 10 days after
we despatched the goods asking them if they received the goods, welcoming them to
D.A. etc. This is a powerful technique for converting customers to clients and is well
worth experimenting with. We have also recently adopted cold-call outbound prospect
telemarketing to businesses and organisations. This technique alone now generates $3 in
profit for each dollar of cost. And it's immediate. You don't have to wait 9 months to get
a result. It happens right now and it accumulates and grows bigger each month.
Outbound telemarketing is powerful and immediate. You need to employ people
specifically for this task and nothing else, as most people, given the choice, will do
anything else rather than make cold calls. We tried this using existing staff in quiet times
and it doesn't work. You need to be a peculiar type of person to excel at and enjoy
telemarketing. Dogged, determined, placid and focussed. We are presently experimenting
with telemarketing for incremental business and have a team of three experienced
telemarketers cold calling businesses from the phone book. They do not cannibalize our
existing client base as they have no access to our computer system or our customer
database.
Another low cost technique for increasing sales is selling through small classified ads.
We often overlook these as they are seemingly trivial but many thriving businesses are
built solely on repeat classifieds. When you consider that a full page ad can cost fifty
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