Concentrate less on describing what your product or service does.
Think more about what problem it solves for your customers.
Sticking with creative
I love treating my clients well, and one of the ways I do that is by sending little gifts periodically just to say thanks. Gift baskets with coffee or chocolates are always popular, of course, but I also try to come up with products that—more than just being tasty—are useful and memorable.
That has lead me to one of my newest gift products: custom-made postage stamps.
After all, even in this digital age, just about everyone I know still needs stamps…and just about everyone I know in business is always short a stamp or two for mail-outs. So when an envelope arrives at a client’s doorstep with a full sheet of personalized stamps (authorized by Canada Post*) ready to use, I can almost hear their cheers right across town.
The feedback I’ve received on this product has been great, and that’s included plenty of interest in learning more about how it’s done. So here’s a summary in three easy steps.
1. Visit Canada Post’s Picture Postage website. It explains all the important technical and legal points that you need to know about.
2. Choose the digital image that you want to feature on your personalized stamp. Make sure it’s a photo you own and have the legal right to feature on a stamp. A company logo might be allowed, but exercise good judgment. Remember that your client is going to want to use the stamps on their own mailouts, so make sure that it doesn’t look as though you’re putting your brand on their correspondence. My approach has been to use photos from my personal collection, but decide what works best for you.
3. Review the finished product and send to your client. When your order ships to you from Canada Post, it features a full sheet of stamps, plus a card-sized reproduction. I forward this along with a short note to my client saying thanks for their ongoing business. I also find it helpful to mention that yes, indeed, these are real stamps and valid at domestic letter rates in Canada.
* American readers take note: there’s a similar service for custom US postage available right here.
Pricing is about more than just numbers
As a professional writer who is deeply entrenched in marketing, I have a lot of discussions with clients about pricing strategies.
Let’s face it, pricing is a delicate art. The last thing you want to do is let price drive decisions in the minds of customer on whether to buy your product or service.
The key is provide numbers that mean something of value to the people with whom you want to do business.
Trend-spotting author Jeremy Gutsche relates a great story about this in his book Exploiting Chaos. A few years ago while working for a leading Canadian credit card company, he and his group had an insight: “customers didn’t think about their rates as numbers, they thought about whether or not the rates were fair.”
Rather than advertise the lending rate on their card as a percentage, they switched to presenting it as “Prime +2,” which meant that their lending rate was just two percentage points higher than the prime rate set by the Bank of Canada.
Sales skyrocketed.
The truth about sales
Survey a group of customers and ask them: “what do you feel were the reasons behind your purchase?”
Next, ask the salespeople who sold to those customers “what do you feel were the reasons behind your successful closings?”
You’re unlikely to get much overlap in your answers.
What you sell and why people buy are two very different things.
How to send your sales skyrocketing (#1)
As part of the article writing services we offer at thinkit creative, here is a brand-new article we’ve prepared for Engage Selling Solutions, based on the sales presentations of Colleen Francis.
“How do I find great customers?” This is one of the most common questions asked in our poll, and it’s one that I hear often in my discussions with people during the sales training sessions I conduct. Indeed, there are steps you can take here, but first you really need to stop and ask yourself “who would I consider to be a great customer?” This is important. It’s too easy to pin all the blame on your customers for not behaving the way you want them to, when really it ought to come down to matters of choice and expectations on your part. More
