The Single Most Reliable Business Development Opportunity

From the desk of Roy Furr, Monday, 3:13 pm

If it feels like you’ve hit a brick wall when it comes to business development, you may want to read this carefully. It’s not a long message, but it’s a reliable way to increase sales and grow and expand your business.

The first time I leveraged this opportunity, I created over $40,000 in new business almost overnight — in a company doing $10-15,000 daily. Not a huge bump, but big enough to get noticed. And to tell me this opportunity is worth paying attention to.

And the best thing about it is that it doesn’t require any special skills. It’s just a matter of “start doing here what already works over there.”

Let me explain.

In business development, it’s easy to relax into the path of least resistance. We get good at doing our thing, in our area.

If we do direct mail, we do direct mail. If we market online and through email, we market online and through email. If we’re in a telemarketing operation, we’re telemarketers.

Sure, we can get incremental improvements by getting better at what we do.

Make our current direct mail efforts better. Optimize our landing pages. Write better subject lines. Create a better telemarketing script.

But we’ll get to a point where it’s hard to get better… Maybe you’re there already.

Your direct mail works well. Your emails get opened, and read, and responded to. You close a high percentage of telemarketing calls.

So what next?

Here’s the business development secret — the most reliable way to take any one of these operations and increase sales significantly, even after they’ve been optimized.

Sell through a new channel!

If you’re in a direct mail company, try driving your customers online where you can follow up through email. If you rely on telemarketing, why not prime the pump with a first-class letter a few days before your call? If your only contact with customers is through email, why not surprise them with a personal letter in their mailbox inviting them to try your more complete solution? (That’s where I “created” the $40,000 opportunity I mentioned above.)

All you have to do is take the message that works well in one medium, and translate it to the next. The fundamental persuasive message doesn’t need to change for you to grab attention — just the way you present it!

It’ll work remarkably well, I promise.

There are a couple reasons this works:

1. It catches your prospect off-guard, getting enough attention for your message that your prospect may catch and digest some of it. (Which is perhaps the most important consideration in this 21st Century marketing environment.)
2. None of your competitors are using this new channel yet. You’d be surprised how many business people will never test a different selling channel because “nobody in the industry does it that way.” Dufus! (Not you or I… Just those other business people that have fallen prey to this thinking at one time or another.) That’s why this new approach is going to be so successful. BECAUSE nobody else is doing it.

So… If in today’s environment you want a reliable business development opportunity… Get out of the old, and into the new. Test a new channel for selling your product or service.

Even if nothing else has worked to increase sales, this could double your business.

To your success,

Roy

This entry is filed under Business, Copywriting, Marketing, Marketing Testing, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.