There’s a traditional, somewhat logical, pattern to how business has always been done. The seller describes a product or service, promise benefits, maybe even paints a rosy picture of the prospective buyer’s life with said product or service, and asks the buyer to pay a set price in order to acquire it.
While this how it has always been done, there are a couple of inherent problems with this model, particularly when it comes to acquiring a fairly new product or service with little history or buyer success to point to as proof of promised results.
Problem #1
The biggest problem is that the buyer is left to shoulder the entire burden of risk. What if they don’t get the promised results? What if it isn’t what they need? What if, heaven forbid, it’s not as good as the commercial suggested?
Now, some of this doubt can be dismissed with guarantees, but still, the buyer must wade through the process.
Problem #2
Because we’ve all experienced problem #1 at some point, we’re reluctant to believe the claims and value propositions of something that really may be the answer to our challenges. In some cases, we forgo products and services that we need because we just aren’t sure the price risk outweighs the value or results promised.
I believe that one of the most effective ways to address this is to look at using a fee for value or results based pricing model, particularly in the case of new services.
Imagine for a moment the competitive selling advantage of a message like this: You’re in total control – you decide how much to pay at the end of the session – based on how much value you think you’ve received.
Or this: These are the results you’ll receive, but you don’t owe us a dime until you realize them fully.
I know that kind of pricing model is open for abuse. Some people just don’t value anything the way they should, so it would require careful consideration, but I really like a couple of things that it offers.
Benefit #1
It changes the relationship between buyer and seller. This kind of offer is quite likely very attractive to the buyer because the seller is now effectively shouldering a great deal of the risk. This means the seller can and should be very picky about whom they allow to enter into such an agreement and what they require from that buyer in terms of working together. This can’t be a come on to attract people that want a deal or it will never work. This has to be a serious offer meant to remove the barrier of doubt and that comes with it’s own price – accountability. If done correctly, this method could allow you to attract more ideal clients rather than price shoppers.
Benefit #2
This is the one that might be the real reason a seller would resist this model. If you make this kind of offer and your pay day really does depend on delivering the goods as opposed to writing a great sales letter, you better bring your A game.
Imagine if your created a service in a laboratory where you started to build how it would work, how you would engage the client, what support materials you needed and what price you needed to charge in order to make a profit. Now, fill this lab with ideal clients for this service and ask them to give you continuous, real-time feedback as to the results and value they are receiving as you continue to improve the offering until they are willing to pay what you needed.
In many ways, this could be the ultimate method for developing the perfect engagement for a new service.
Once you established the ultimate value through people’s realization of results, you could benchmark and prove this value in ways that would allow you to move the model to a fee based one, but my guess is the service would be far better than the one you dreamed up in the quarterly strategy meeting.
While shouldering the risk you would get better at what you do and create services that would surpass anything your competitors would dare to offer. In fact, you would have to do this, or you would go out of business.
There are pitfalls in this model, no doubt, but if you can profitably overcome and manage them, you’ll have a tool without competition.
This kind of bold confidence in what you have to offer, if positioned correctly, sends a very strong message to the potential market about your belief in your ability to deliver results.
Taking my own advice
Like a great deal of the advice I dispense on this blog, I’m taking it myself.
I am conducting a full day live and in person workshop in Kansas City in June called – How to Build the Marketing System That Is Perfect for Your Business and I am going to employ this the model of exchanging fee for value.
Attendees won’t be asked to pay anything until after the workshop is over and they get to determine how much. This won’t be a light, stripped down version – this is me, testing what my best stuff is worth, so you can bet I’ll be prepared and you can bet I’ll ask a lot of the attendees.
If you’re interested in finding out more or applying to attend (there are two dates available, but the groups will be very small) – have a look here
As I’ve written here in the past, I think there are solid business reasons for participating in most social networks these days, but if your business sells primarily to other businesses, you must get more active on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is not the biggest or most talked about network these day, but when it comes to connecting with people who mean business and generating leads, few can compare to the power of LinkedIn. A study conducted by Hubspot earlier this year suggested that LinkedIn is “277 Percent More Effective for Lead Generation than Facebook and Twitter.”
While those numbers were taken from their user base, my experience suggests that the professional decision maker audience that prefers LinkedIn is much more prepared to participate in the kind of traditional authentic networking that leads to lasting business relationships than any other network.
The power tool on LinkedIn is Groups. For me this is the closest thing to the proven offline networking groups that exists online today. Groups can give you access to people and discussions related to an industry, topic or even geographic region. Working LinkedIn Groups effectively is a solid way to build a network and generate leads.
Back up to that last sentence and dwell on the word effectively. Effective networking is about providing value, sharing, helping and informing – it’s not about spamming, promoting and selling. Participate in the latter before you’ve earned any credibility and your efforts won’t gain any steam.
Join groups
Currently LinkedIn allows basic members to join up to 50 Groups. Find industry, topic and location specific groups that contain concentrations of people that you would like to network with and join them. Spend time looking at the level of participation and conversations. If all you find is updates with members promoting their businesses move on as this group will be of little benefit.
LinkedIn has a “groups you may like” function that suggests groups based on your current profile and connections.
Ironically, the best groups for lead generation are those that don’t tolerate blatant self-promotion.
Connect with members
Once you’ve joined a group, you have a natural common connection with each group member and LinkedIn gives you the ability to connect based on the mutual group membership. It’s a little thing, but it’s a step beyond simply saying you want to connect.
Reach out and make some connections and very simple introductions as to why you joined the group.
Look for active members and add relevant replies to a number of posts. This starts the process of some one on one conversation and, since your replies are publicly available to all group members, you can use this technique to demonstrate that you have a lot to offer.
Create groups
Once you get the hang of Groups you should consider creating your own topic group. This is not a company group, it’s one that is set up to discuss a topic that your prospects, customers, partners, and even competitors might find worthwhile.
A word of warning – if you want your group to grow and give you the ability to benefit by virtue of your status as the group’s manager, you have to commit the time to curate, moderate, stimulate and facilitate group participation.
You must add starter content that gets people talking. You must participate in conversations. You must promote. And above all you must not tolerate spam and self-promotion. Tell people this is you intent up front, give them one warning and kick offenders out. If you don’t set this tone from the very beginning you’ll group members won’t want to stick around.
To get the most from your group manager role create a landing page on your own website that promotes the idea behind the group and encourages visitors to join. This will deepen your connection to the group and help people better understand what the group is all about.
Lastly, use, but don’t abuse, the announcements function. As a group manager you can send direct announcements to all group members via email. This is a great way to continue to keep your group and its activity front and center.
Five notes
Once you start to get more active on LinkedIn make it a habit to reach out to five connections each week with the sole purpose of saying hi, thank you, I see you got a promotion, wonder what you’ve been working on, etc.
I’ve done this in the offline world with handwritten notes for years and the impact is dramatic and long lasting.
I can’t tell you how often this simple, personal touch has led to business – even though that was not the intent in any way.
It’s amazing how relationships bloom when you genuinely care about people.
I spend a lot of time talking to and about the stuff that we do to make it work now. So sometimes it’s a real treat to get to talk to someone that’s so far out ahead of most of us in their thinking that you pretty much just listen with your mouth open when they talk. (I would put my conversation with Kevin Kelly in this class)
Recently I had a chance to visit for a bit with one of those folks – Doc Searls. Doc is senior editor for Linux Journal, alumnus fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and co-author of the seminal work – The Cluetrain Manifesto with Rick Levine, Christopher Locke and David Weinberger. (Look for our conversation in a coming episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.)
In 2000, Searls and company painted the road map for what was coming only to have it high jacked to some degree by marketers that misinterpreted the manifesto as a foreshadowing of social media. When Cluetrain told the world that markets are conversations, they meant, I fear, that we as marketers should have an actual conversation and not simply listen and react in ways that tailored our marketing conversations to the research we are now able to obtain via social sharing. (Click on this search for “markets are conversations” and you’ll get an even grimmer sense of this.)
In Searls’ latest work, The Intention Economy, he returns to the notion of conversations but puts the onus and control firmly in the hands of the consumer and not the organization. A great deal of the work that Searls was engaged in at Berkman surrounding the notion of something that’s become known as Vendor Relationship Management or VRM.
The idea of VRM is drawn from the traditional customer relationship language, but shifts the management aspect to the customer instead of the organization. In a VRM environment, the customer controls a great deal of the data and experience and is the determining party in how much or how little is tailored to their wants.
One doesn’t have too look to far out into future space to imagine a technology that enables customer to interact with CRM platforms in a way that allows them to decide what to share, what to update and what to request.
Can you imagine how powerful this type of true conversation could be?
The real hurdle is data trust, or lack of, but I believe we are sitting on a privacy bubble.
So, at what point do we rebel against being used as part of Facebook’s product? At what point do we start to demand the ability to control our own health records? At what point do we tell CVS to shove the little stupid rewards card and start to spend only with those that accept markets are conversations and that relationships are not data.
Enable true intentions in your customer relationships and open your organization to a world of commerce that does not currently exist.
Next week is National Small Business Week in the United States and to help celebrate all things small business I’m holding a live webcast where, among other things, I’m going to give a number of lucky participants some awesome business tools like:
A copy of Premise Landing Page Software from Copyblogger
A copy of the Ultimate Marketing System from Duct Tape Marketing
A year access to Live Plan from Palo Alto Software
A year of Spring Metrics Analytics
A year of Nimble CRM
A Pro Membership to Marketing Profs
Tickets to Social Media Explore Events
A bundle of books, iStockphoto credits and more
But, in order to have a chance to win one of these great prizes, you have to attend our small business educational webcast event being held Wednesday, May 23rd at 11am CT (http://worldtimebuddy.com to check time zones)
I’m going into a television studio and broadcasting a live streaming video presentation on the very important topic – 5 Ways to Use Online Tools to Drive Offline Sales.
We all know that prospects today do their research online, even if they fully intend to buy a product or service offline. In this session I’ll share some great ways to use the new breed of online tools to drive your prospects into your offline stores, meetings and presentations including:
Online calls to action
O2O Advertising
Networked networking
Local social groups
Online and on the go
Join me for what will prove to be a fun and informative celebration of small business – heck, I might even get my guitar out and sing a bit. (No promises on that one.)
To sign up and reserve your seat for the show – Register Here (While you can’t win any of the prizes unless you attend, we will record the event and provide an archive for all that register.)
I addition, some of the Duct Tape Marketing Consultants are holding local networking and watch events and providing additional education – find a local event near you.
Do you know other small business owners that might need this important information? Why not share this post with all your small business friends?
And a special thanks to our sponsors for support of this event!
Online marketers have used the term “landing page” for many years to describe a sales tactic focused on getting people to take one, specific action. Today, landing pages have simply become a required element in the marketing toolbox for every imaginable business, including local brick and mortar types.
Example of a personalized lead capture landing page
A landing page is just the page people land on because an ad or email directed them to that specific page as opposed to your site’s homepage.
Effective landing pages make it very clear what a visitor is going to get from a page and how to get it. That’s it plain and simple. There are many great articles on how to create better landing pages (including this one from Unbounce) but today I want to focus on why you need to create and use landing pages as a core online tool
Local content
One of the best ways to get your site to rank higher when people search locally and on mobile devices is to have lots of local content. Creating landing pages that feature very localized, down to the neighborhood perhaps, content is a great way to start building the local content and link necessary to have your pages move up in the search index for local search.
Social content
Sending your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook connections to landing pages that are personalized to each network is a great way to deepen the connection. By running Twitter and Facebook feeds on these pages and acknowledging the connection with those that come from those networks you will also find a much higher degree of engagement in those networks.
Smart content
By creating landing pages that address the specific market segments, product segments or key content segments for your business you can begin to better funnel people to the specific types of content they desire. Using a tool like Survey Funnel in conjunction with your landing pages could allow a visitor to tell you what they are looking for and be directed to specific content based on their choices.
Lead capture
Landing pages are your lead capture workhorse. If you have a great eBook or free workshop to promote you may want to create signup forms for most of your web pages, but your signups will soar when you create a page that details, sells and demonstrates the benefits of acquiring your free report. A landing page with video, audio, images, descriptions and very intuitive call to action is a must for lead capture campaigns.
Advertising conversion
Any form of advertising will be much more effective if it is targeted to a page that contains nothing but content that supports the message in your ads. The more relevant the page to the ad, the more effective. Smart marketers constantly experiment with ad and landing page combinations, including creating keyword optimized pages for specific groups of PPC ads.
Get Premise
There are many resources geared towards helping you create landing pages, but my favorite at the moment is Copyblogger’s Premise. I run my entire website on WordPress and Premise is a WordPress landing page plugin that gives me total flexibility in the creation of landing pages. The tool includes predesigned configurations for sales pages and opt-in pages and is very easy to configure and style. A tool like Premise is a must if you plan to take today’s advice to heart.
Plenty of startups try to determine the perfect business model to take to market only to find that the market doesn’t need, want or understand what they are presenting.
The fact is most books or courses on business models take this into consideration by suggesting trial and error scenarios and market hypothesizes prior to launch.
Any business model, or plan for that matter, is little more than a guess and I believe that your best chance for getting that guess right is to build your business model based on a marketing strategy.
This assumes the role a fully developed marketing strategy actually should play in determining the direction of an organization. The fact is most people, if they consider marketing strategy at all, stop at a core message, identity elements and perhaps a sales proposition and call it a strategy.
A marketing strategy is how you plan to use the resources available to you to build an ongoing case that your business, products and services are the obvious choice for a narrowly defined ideal customer.
If you accept this expanded view of marketing strategy then I would suggest you answer the following questions in an attempt to measure where your strategy stands today and where it could go if your understood and integrated it fully as your business model
What about this job, work, or organization are you passionate about?
How does this business serve a higher purpose for you and your customers?
What value do you really bring that benefits your market in ways that your competitors wouldn’t dream of proposing
What’s the dominant personality trait that you need your customers to associate with your business?
What does an ideal client look like?
What is the simple 10-word core message that explains and excites?
How will your market become aware of your business?
How will your market come to trust that you have the answers?
What are the revenue sources that you can tap to grow this business?
Can you describe the perfect customer experience throughout your organization?
What resource gaps and constraints do you need to overcome to achieve your strategy?
What partnerships do you need to create in order to achieve your strategy?
What would the result of using this strategy model to run your business look like?
Everyone, from PR firms to individuals with a product to sell, pitches bloggers these days. Getting coverage or exposure for your business by way of a number of highly read blogs should be a foundational element of your PR approach.
So, I thought I would share of few of my thoughts on the most effective ways to get a blogger’s attention and stand out in a way that gives your pitch a far better chance of garnering coverage.
Sadly, it would much easier to write a post on what not to do, but I like to stay on the positive side here.
Whether your goal is to land a guest post, get a review of your product or just advance an idea you’ve got to put in the work to personalize your pitch and build relationships by demonstrating you’re a resource and not a pest.
Make non-spammy comments
One of the best ways to get on the radar of a blogger is to join their community by making relevant comments. Don’t drop in just to add a comment about your business or point to your recent blog post about some unrelated idea. Add to the conversation like someone who actually cares about the conversation and you’ll start to build a relationship based on trust.
Find regular features
Take some time to dig around in the archives of a blog and you’re likely to find some regular features just like you might in a magazine. Then, when it comes time to pitch your idea, you can suggest that it would be a good fit for a certain feature. This will always give your pitch more relevance and offer proof that you know a bit about the blog and that yours is not simply a bulk pitch.
I’ve run a Saturday post for several years now where I feature three services or apps that I call my weekly favs. Smart marketers have picked up on that and often pitch their product for a feature in that post. It’s a little thing, but it suggests a lot.
Look beyond the blog
If you buy that this is a relationship building game, then why not employ a few tools outside the blog to help. Build a Twitter list of your targeted bloggers and pay attention to what they tweet and what the retweet. Look at what they favorite on Twitter for some real meaty clues about what they like,
By monitoring what they do beyond their blog and in social networks you can often find angles that won’t be apparent on a simple media list.
Connect with guests and get referred
Many blogs run guest posts these days and one of the best ways to get your content on the list of potential guest posters is to study and connect with those that are already posting. In fact, you might go as far as to target these folks as suggested above and reach out to a few and ask for introductions.
A guest post on a highly read blog may be one of the most effective marketing tools you can employ so don’t just blast guest post requests, build a case for your post by becoming a part of the community and creating a network within.
Ask for an interview
Many bloggers, even well known bloggers, still work on building their awareness and will jump at almost any opportunity to spread the word about things they are working on. Many bloggers have business interests beyond their blog that need exposure. Many bloggers are also authors and have books to sell.
Consider interviewing some of your targeted bloggers for your own blog or podcast or connect them with other journalist or even customers of yours that might have a reason to want to interview them. An interview might consist of a twenty minute phone conversation or it might just be one well thought out question that you send via email, either way, this a great approach for building both content and relationships.
It warrants repeating, if a mention or link or review in your favorite blog is a worthwhile objective for your business, then put in the work required to get it done right.
My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.
I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from Flickr or one that I took out there on the road.
New Duct Tape Marketing t-shirt design via Hugh MacLeod Gapingvoid
Good stuff I found this week:
Ming.ly – A personal relationship manager that aggregates your contacts from Gmail, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter into a searchable merged address book that allows you to update and communicate on social networks without leaving your Gmail inbox.
Pinstamatic – Allows you to add locations, music, quotes, calendar dates, Twitter profile links, sticky notes and websites to to Pinterest.
Meetings.io – free and simple way to meet face to face online without the need to install software, join a social network or add contacts
View Channel
While this how it has always been done, there are a couple of inherent problems with this model, particularly when it comes to acquiring a fairly new product or service with little history or buyer success to point to as proof of promised results.
Recently I had a chance to visit for a bit with one of those folks – Doc Searls. Doc is senior editor for 
Wednesday, May 23rd at 11am CT (
The fact is most books or courses on business models take this into consideration by suggesting trial and error scenarios and market hypothesizes prior to launch.
