Improve Your Sales With Market Research

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re thinking of rolling out a new product.

And because you think you’re pretty smart and that your opinion about things matters, you don’t take time to find out whether your market wants it or not because you just know…

You’re certain that you can rely on your vast experience, just guess, or maybe trust your intuition to guide you…

So you barrel forward, invest a ton of resources, money and time into your next great idea, and…

Nobody cares.

Believe me, there is a better way. It’s called research, and there are many ways it can be used, all of which will make you more money.

One of the coolest things about the Internet is that it has taken a lot of traditional research tools and made them so much easier and cheaper to use. That goes for primary research, where you “talk” directly to customers and potential customers, as well as secondary research, where you study other people’s primary research.

Here are ten things you can do with market research.

1. Understand what people think of you. Use research to gage you or your company’s reputation among your customers, prospects, bloggers and other opinion-setters, and anyone else who has influence on your future.

2. Know how consumers compare your offer to similar offers from competitors. Think it would boost your sales if you knew which parts of your product people thought were not as good as someone else’s?

3. Figure out what features will most appeal to your potential customers. This little gem tells you where to put your product development energy and which parts of your new service should be left out.

4. Determine what should go into creating the ideal offer to your market, including price, terms, benefits, format, delivery mechanisms, sizes, features, packaging, bonuses, sequence, and so on.

5. Use research to create the best messages to sell your products and your services so that you can get people’s attention and keep it all the way to the close.

6. Research can help you define your target market or niche. Are they men or women? Old or young? Small businesses or medium ones? Rich or super-rich? Industry? Job title? Hobbies? Experience? Getting these factors right – and many more – can make the difference between a hit and a flop.

7. Interestingly, you can use research to figure out what language appeals to your buyers. Moving toward or away? Fear versus greed? Pain or pleasure? You can identify which kinds of words work best.

8. Zero in on what products or services people want from you and are most willing to pay for. It can’t guarantee a slam-dunk, but it can get you much closer than if you guess. This simple use of research, which can be anything from a 1-question survey on your webpage to something much more elaborate, can save you a fortune in lost labor, and can identify opportunities you’d have never thought of without help.

9. Clarify what part of your marketing is making the greatest difference so you can use the good parts and improve the parts that aren’t helping.

10. Position your business perfectly in the minds of your prospects. Even great marketers often have trouble selling themselves. Research can tell you why your best customers ARE your best customers and what things about you they find most attractive. Then all you have to do is tell other people those same things and you’re golden.

There’s no limit on how you an use research to dig into the collective mind of your market. These ten are some of the most important ones, and they will make you money if you use them.

Let me know how you use research, or any other thoughts you’ve got below.

In the meantime. to get you going with some of this valuable research and apply it to how you market your business, I’ve just put together a brand new product you may want to go grab quickly.

It’s an easy to follow step-by-step method to create your brand and marketing message based on information you can easily get from your customers and prospects.

If been putting off creating your company or personal marketing message, this is the simplest way to do it now and go get it done. Your only other choice is to hire me or some other marketing consultant for $15,000-$25,000.

This new self-paced program will sell for $197, and for $197, it’s a real deal. But since it’s brand new, and I haven’t really started marketing it, the pre-publication price is $67, until May 9th.

Use this code: EXRMM508 to get the discount. I want to warn you, the sales letter isn’t much, but for 67 bucks? Go get the Marketing Money Magnet here and remember to use the discount code “EXRMM508.”

Or use this link: http://paullemberg.com/mmm

Remember to use the discount code EXRMM508 so that you only pay $67 until May 9th

Why would you do this to your business?

How many lifetime customers would you be willing to sacrifice so that you could trim your operations and maybe save a few bucks here and there?

If that question makes you sense to you, then you can safely skip the rest of this post…

But if it tickled a little thought in the back of your mind, read on.

Consider this: Since the start of the last worldwide recession many businesses have tightened their credit policies so that only the best-rated customers get payment terms. Everyone else has to pay cash.

Do you do anything like this? Sure, it makes sense to hold down “unnecessary costs” and avoid risky business. But have you bothered to figure out whether net profits are up as a result?

I’m willing to bet that at the end of the day, tight credit policies are costing tons of money in missed sales, and that the “saved” losses are dwarfed by the missed opportunity, the lost life-time value, simply because it’s harder to do business with you than with your competitors.

Losing repeat business… Forever

And that’s just one example of how companies push away perfectly good customers. There are tons of proven ways to lose sales by making it extra hard for customers to buy from you. Mostly these are just bad decisions people make to limit expenses, but they are almost always short sighted. They repel good customers, and not only for the all-important first sale, but for all the otherwise super-profitable recurring sales as well.

Once pushed away, those potential customers are pushed away forever. They never come back for that ever-more-valuable repeat business.

Here are some other ways business owners make it hard for customers to buy.

Limiting forms of payment.

I like to eat at a local place that serves a fabulous “Mediterranean Frittata” with a wild greens salad. But they only take cash. What a pain. It makes me think twice about meeting people there, and I never go with a big group. Who wants to peel off $300 in cash for breakfast? Of course they save anywhere from 1.9% to 3.5 discount on each diner, and that’s not nothing. But what about all the lost business?

The list of widely used payment options is not long. Online you can use credit and debit cards: Visa, Master Card, American Express and Discover, or PayPal, or electronic or e-Checks. Offline, you’ve got the cards, plus checks and cash. That’s pretty much it.

Why on earth would you not accept ALL of them? To save 1% on the transaction free?

Suppose someone doesn’t have a Visa or Master Card because they’ve gone over their limit and their bank has shut them down. But AMEX plays by different rules so they actually have plenty of spending power. But you’re wiling to lose the sale in order to keep 1% of extra margin.

By the way, 1% saved on nothing is nothing.

And 1.9% saved, even 3.5% saved on nothing is still nothing.

Online it’s even worse. At least offline the customer is already in the store, and has maybe consumed the purchase already, so they pay. Online, they just abandon the shopping cart. Many smaller businesses only accept PayPal and don’t take cards at all, which is just nuts. I estimate it cuts into their sales by 30-50%.

Wake up! You’ve spent all this energy getting shoppers to your store. Why not make it easy for them to give you their money?

Shipping and Handling

Another area doing business is made harder than it needs to be is shipping, and the mysterious “handling.” I’m not sure who people think they’re fooling when they add $28.00 to ship something everyone knows costs $4.95 to deliver. If I discover it before clicking the order button, I usually ditch the vendor, just out of spite.

Automated shopping cart systems make it easy to give customers a choice of shipping methods tailored to their needs and their budget.

Easy + Fast + Cheap = Repeat Business.

Or do what Zappos does and ship for free. More and more e-tailers are doing it and those who don’t will get left behind. Make it easy for people to get their stuff and they’ll want to get it from you. One of the reasons cited for Zappos incredible success (and $800 Million sale to Amazon) is free shipping, even on returns. And get this – choose the free shipping option and they still send it overnight. Now that’s easy.

You can’t always find what you want…

Make it easy for customers to find stuff. Online, give them search capability that actually finds things and make the search box PROMINENT on every page. And since shelf space is infinite, feature the same products on every appropriate category page.

Offline, organize your store to match how customers think about products. Use big readable signs, along with on-shelf labeling. Scatter specials around your store. Put them right in the traffic flow. Supermarkets are great sources of merchandizing inspiration, study what they do. And add staff to helpfully direct shoppers. Train them to ask, “How can I help you?” instead of “Can I help you?”

Grease the Wheels

What about handling the transaction itself? Offline this isn’t much of a problem, except in my local Ralphs. They’re great merchandisers but now they’re pushing automated checkout and the scanners don’t work very well. The machines bark rudely at you and the “place the item in the bag” system is clumsy and inefficient. Plus it’s impossible to pay for self-serve items from the “olive bar.”

But I was in the new Fresh and Easy the other day, and they’ve rethought the whole process. Every bad aspect in the Ralph’s system works beautifully here. Now I know it’s possible to get it right.

Online, checkout can be hard if you can’t find the checkout button or the “show my cart” button. Or what about losing your order information when you accidently hit the back button. And why can’t your shopping cart handle dashes in my phone number. What’s wrong with dashes? And why wouldn’t your system save things in my cart for a day, or even two? Get interrupted and have to start over again? How frustrating. How inconvenient. Amazon saves things in my cart… forever.

Did you know that 70% of all orders started in a shopping cart don’t complete? Put some thought into improving your process, and it could pay hugely.
Faxing in the Age of the Internet

This one is my absolute favorite. I tried to purchase an exotic version of anti-oxidant Glutathione from a company in New York. The only way is to print out their order form, write my order by

Sources of Friction

Here are a few other sources of friction you may wish to consider.

• Are you store open hours long enough, or early enough, or late enough?
• Do you have enough staff for the volume of shoppers?
• Is your customer service line responsive?
• Are your on-hold times out of whack?
• What about your toll-free phone numbers? Easy to find, prominently posted?
• Is your phone tree a button-pushing nightmare? “Please listen carefully because our menu has recently changed…” Don’t waste my time, just tell me what I need to know, and ALWAYS give me the option of talking to an operator. Outsource this if you don’t have your own.
• If you have online chat, make sure it’s available most of the time. People aren’t idiots, and when your chat is always closed, they know you’re scamming them with some “conversion tactic” you read in a blog post.

Think about your customer’s buying process. What steps do they have to go through to make a purchase. Where do they get hung up? Where is it harder than it needs to be. Find the sources of friction and reduce or remove them.

By the way the people running Amazon are the kings of this. They continually refine their ecommerce system to reduce friction and make the buying process easier and easier.

One-Click is perhaps the most friction-free method of buying anything anywhere, and it gets smarter and smarter over time.

What is you version of “one-click?” Figure that out and your sales could jump quite a bit.

PS, I’ve just published a brand new product you may want to go grab quickly. It’s an easy to follow step-by-step method to create your brand and marketing message based on information you can easily get from your customers and prospects. If you don’t yet have your marketing message nailed this is the simplest way to do it now and go get it done. Your only other choice is to hire a marketing consultant for $15,000.

The program will sell for $197 but the pre-publication price until May 8th is $67.

You have to use this code: EXRMM508 to get the discount. The sales letter isn’t much, but for 67 bucks? Go get the Marketing Money Magnet here and remember to use the discount code “EXRMM508.”

Or just use this link: http://paullemberg.com/mmm Remember to use the discount code EXRMM508 so that you only pay $67.

I can’t say why not, except perhaps we just don’t come across these things that much. In any case it means these folks aren’t getting much advice about marketing and positioning and such.

So when I got this question in my inbox the other day, I decided to spend a few minutes and answer it.

I’m pretty sure you can use the answer in your business, even if you sell some other kind of service because this simple marketing approach will work for just about any service business.

Take a look… (listen?…)

Would you like that?

Stupid question, right?

I hear it all the time…

How do I grow my business? How do I get more customers? How do I increase sales?

How do I add customers and increase revenue when I can’t pay my bills? How do I grow my business large enough to sell it? How do I keep my kids in school and pay my mortgage? How do I stay afloat and support my family?

How do I survive — in this economy?

I recently realized just how much entrepreneurs need help now more than ever.

That’s why I created this new video series: The 7 Master Keys to Rapid Business Profits. 7 short sessions to get you thinking about how to grow your business. Each one between five and ten minutes. You may be doing some of this stuff, but I bet you’re leaving something out.

And in times like these? I want all the edge that I can get.

So give yourself an edge.

I’m really excited to be doing this series, so leave me your comments and tell me what you think.

Click the video and get started now…

Click to watch Master Key #1

Even your momentary blood sugar or hormone levels can shift your context. It colors how you interpret every event both internal or external. Whether you see something as good/bad, happy/sad, opportunity/threat, friend/foe, partner/competitor, worth it/not worth it, investment/expense, nourishing/poisonous, etc., is all given by that mental framework.

So while “out there” the event is the same for all, your inside experience can be completely different because it exists in a different context. From the point of the individual, context is decisive.

From the perspective of persuasion and influence, whether personal or in business, shifting someone’s context can shift every single thing about their behavior. And lasting influence comes from your ability to get someone’s context to change.

I’ll be writing more about this over the coming weeks. If you want to know more, sign up for my newsletter. I’ll keep you posted.

It isn’t, and I can prove it.

Everyone knows someone who has a PhD or a monster-sized IQ and can’t earn a dime, because it’s not what you know but what you do with it.

So why don’t most people do MORE with what they know?

Because it’s too hard…

Or it’s too complicated…

Or they don’t have the time to get it right.

Which brings us back to making small, easy changes.

Here are a few more case studies of companies that took some very simple ideas and turned them into giant-sized profits.

Watch and profit, and leave your comments and questions on the blog below.

Implement something new every week. Some little tweak or upgrade or new marketing partner or even a new channel or change to your website… Those kinds of things, and sometimes perhaps, a change that’s a bit larger: something strategic, a change to how you sell or a change to your thinking…

Implement those as often as you can manage and you are guaranteed to grow…

That you had to learn a whole bunch of new things, with lots of skill building and learning curves, and lots of time getting it right…

That you had to have these broad, sweeping initiatives that involved lots of people and turning things upside down and so on…

And of course, lots of risk.

Check out my newest 4-1/2 minute video and find out what it really takes.

When you’re done, leave your thoughts on the blog below.

You know, I’m usually talking about how you can raise prices, but this time…

Frequently a “price cut” is the answer to  “How do we get more sales?”  By now you know that this is often disastrous for many businesses and all other alternatives should be pursued first.  See if one of these tactics can help you.

And one you’re done, do tell me what you think in the comments.

To your success,

PL

When you’re done watching this short (4 minutes) video, feel free to leave your comments and questions on the blog.