If you already have an existing business that is not entirely internet based, then this is almost always the case.

The incoming call is your first contact point with a new prospective customer and is extremely critical in obtaining the desired result.

In most cases, a sale is not made over the phone, but every business has a desired action they would like the customer to make, as a result of the conversation. Eg. Go to the physical store, got to the web address, fax an order form here, request a brochure etc).

This means your conversation needs to be scripted to maximize the number of customers that take your desired action.

A call conversation is just as critical as your advertising, or any other marketing materials you may have. There is no point in getting leads if you can get them to take your action once they have made the call.

If you are not already aware, copywriters who write advertising, as well as advertising firms get paid a lot. This is because ad writing is a skill, a unique talent that not everybody has.

Good advertising makes business big money, and that’s why business pay them big money in return.

The reason why I stress this is because you need to think of your incoming call as an opportunity to leverage a well written conversation script that gets the caller to take your action.

You need to think of it as a very valuable marketing contact point, and you should invest in it as such, exactly like you would with any advertising or marketing materials.

Its very common for a 2 page incoming call script to be sold to companies for up to R50k, simply because the ROI is worth it.

Now of course you may not be in a position to buy a custom script, or have one professionally written, but it was important for me to stress the importance of your call script, and the massive impact it can have on your sales.

Now, I’m not a copywriter myself or a professional salesman, so I won’t presume to tell you how to put together a good sales script. For now I will simply provide some resources where you can get once written specifically for your business.

So far we have gone over how to increase the lifetime value of each customer by increasing the number of purchases (part 1) and then we discussed increasing the value of each sale (part 2)

Part 1 and 2 focused on great cost effective ways to leverage your existing business to increase your profits and I hope you got some great ideas already, but more importantly, I hope you have taken action on what you have learned so far.

Part 3 will be looking at leveraging existing lead generation sources such as advertising or referrals, direct marketing etc (don’t worry, well discuss those in part 4) and increasing the number of sales you get from existing leads.

You may have wondered previously why generating more leads has been the last section we discuss and the simple reason behind this is that generating new leads and prospects is the most expensive and time consuming activity in your marketing plan.

Additionally there is much less value in generating new leads if you have no back end sales funnel to generate additional sales from these new customers, no sale value increasing strategies in place to maximize the value of each sale, and lastly, no optimized sales process to maximize the percentage of new leads which convert to sales.

You see, once you have the first 3 steps implemented & optimized you will have much more leverage and power when it comes to lead generation, since you will be able to spend much more on advertising and other lead sources simply because you now make much more revenue per new customer than ever before!

So, let’s begin with your incoming call script.

This is 1 of 2 articles that focus on marketing metrics and the value of analyzing and measuring all your marketing efforts and customer data.

Once you understand your marketing metrics and customer data you are in an incredibly valuable position whereby you can tell exactly what works and what does not, what you should do more of and what you should stop doing with regards to your marketing spend.

The lifetime customer value metric aims to calculate how much each of your customers are worth on average through a certain period of time, usually a year.

Let’s say on average each customer spends R4000 with you over a period of 1 year. What can you do with this information? Well, this number tells you exactly what you can spend in acquiring each customer.

Most businesses only focus on generating more profit from the first sale then they spend on advertising or other lead generation sources.

This does not take into account your back end sales.

So, let’s say that as a personal trainer you begin a new lead generation campaign for R4000 each month and get 10 new customers at R300 each, for your fitness training program. That would be R3000 revenue off your R4000 advertising spend.

Initially this would seem like a loss, and most business would stop this advertising immediately.

What’s not being taken into account here however is the value of these customers after the initial sale. Now after our previous tutorials on back end sales, you understand that these customers are not only worth their initial sale, but any sales you can make to them in future.

So, let’s say you had a good backend in place and and know that 50% of your customers will make 2 additional purchases from you over the next 2 months at R400 each.

So now we know that the 10 customers we acquired with our new campaign are actually worth the R300 initial sale (10 * R300 = R3000) PLUS 50% * backend (5 * R400 = R2000) = R5000.

So, in reality the advertising campaign is profitable and not the other way around, as we initially though.

(By profitable make sure you taken into account any additional costs in acquiring those customers, that may not be covered by the cost of the lead generation campaign)

By understanding this metric, it opens up many more avenues of advertising and marketing that you would not have considered before and gives you the power of knowing exactly what you can spend to acquire each customer.

This calculation does require you to have certain data on hand, and most businesses won’t have the customer data on hand to make this calculation right away. You may have to start going over purchase records to be able to put this data into a usable form.

Actions:

What I would recommend however is begin tracking the correct data from today.

Make sure you track each customer, what they buy, when they bought and at what price over a period of at least 6 months.

Make sure you implement a good back end sales process and optimize it to your satisfaction.

After 6 months of tracking your customers and sales that have resulted from your current front and back end sales process, you will now have the data to calculate lifetime customer value.

The calculation: Simply take your total revenue for the 6 month period and divide it by your number of customers. This will equal your average customer lifetime value.

Now you will be able to compare the results of all advertising & lead generation campaigns against customer lifetime value and have an accurate picture of which campaigns are profitable or not.

You do this and you will be be able to run profitable and successful campaigns in many mediums and locations that you competitors wont, because to them it will seem like an unprofitable endeavor. It will leave them mystified on how you could possibly be doing what you are doing.

The sad thing is that most small business owners simply don’t understand most of these strategies and many even think of marketing as handing out fliers or branding coffee mugs.

In so many cases understanding these fundamentals can be the difference between running a successful profitable business or failing miserably.

This course will contain easy to understand actions you can implement to obtain measurable results in your business, so I implore you to read through it all carefully and TAKE ACTION by implementing these steps.

The course is broken up into 4 parts, which, incidentally, are the only 4 ways you can possibly grow your business:

1. Generate more sales from existing customers
2. Increase the value of each sale
3. Convert more leads to customers
4. Generate more leads

We begin with part 1 which covers leveraging your existing business to increase revenue generated from existing customers.

Its a well known fact that it can be up to 10 times easier selling to existing customers or those that have purchased from you before, then it is to obtain a new customer.

This means that the fastest way to grow your business and increase revenue right now is to focus on generating additional sales from existing customers.

In part 2 we focus on increasing the value of each sale. By doing this we attempt to get prospects who have already decided to buy from us, to spend more then they may originally have intended.

Part 3 focuses on converting more existing leads into customers. This leverages existing lead generation sources such as your current advertising, and attempts to convert as many of these leads into paying customers as possible.

By doing this we generate more sales and profits with a minimal increase in marketing expense.

Lastly we look at generating more leads for our business.

You will see that our initial focus is maximizing our return on current business, customers and marketing spend, before we invest any additional spend in generating more leads.

This allow you to easily increase revenue sometimes up to 100% without spending a single cent more on lead generation then you are spending right now.

This also means there is no longer any excuse to not implement these steps right away, since most of them can be done with only time invested, and not cash.

Now, before we begin with Part 1, we need to first take a look at your offer as well as your USP (unique selling proposition). Every bit of our marketing will be leveraging your USP and thus its critical that we get this right first.

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE WITH PART 1 – UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION