Preneur Marketing Blog – Pete Williams | Author Entrepreneur

Question: How much better would your bottom line be if every cash customer spent an extra $10, $50 or $200 on each and every purchase they make with you?

My guess is a lot healthier. You’d be able to work a little easier, possibly even cut down your hours without effecting your current income, you could spend more time with the family (or on the golf course… my preference). You are lucky, as being a Bartercard member and using your trade dollars effectively, there are a number of ways this can easily be accomplished.

Obviously to get your customers to open their wallets that little bit extra and hand more of their hard-earned money over, you must entice and motivate them to do this with some additional offer and/or added value you are not currently offering. Unfortunately, they won’t do throw money at you simply because you are a nice guy – customers need to be motivated.

Below is the first of many effective and explosive ways you can motivate and entice your customers to spend more CASH on each and every purchase.

TRIGGER RAFFLES:

Trigger raffles are one of the most effective ways to provide your customers with the necessary motivation to have them begging you to take their money.

Trigger raffles are raffles where the customers’ entry in the raffle is TRIGGERED only after a particular cash value is spent. For example the customer receives an entry in the raffle when and only when they spend $50 on a single purchase.

How does this increase customer spending, you ask?
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Market Makers

Through their ‘actions’ these people make their market WHAT IT IS…

…By shaping the thoughts of the marketplace through contributing quality content continually.

… By actively creating relevant and stimulating conversations.

… By producing products and services to HELP their markets members fix their problems.

It’s these people that make the ‘market experience’ what it is – without them the marketplace would be a completely different landscape.

The contribution (and value) these people offer their marketplace is what shapes it.

The term MARKET MAKER also implies that they actually take action and implement something/anything…

.. as nothing is ‘MADE’ until action is taken.

The individuals we’re talking about MAKE something OF THEIR market; whatever that market is; new or old… They use their determination, to get through the dip (another Seth term) and find a way to extract some form of value; be it an income, a family/community, a {fill the gap}

Also, MARKET MAKERS are not always, nor ever need be, the biggest player (leader) in that space from a pure dollars and sense perspective. You only need 1000 rabid people in our influence to be wildly successful in your chosen niche – remember that.

[As a side note, there are some 'good friends' in this 30DC community that are 'market makers' in the Twitter space - and they don't have the biggest following, but are definitely shaping the way their 'followers' are using and thinking about Twitter]

In my opinion, it’s not just about leading the entire tribe, it’s about taking action and playing an active + positive role in your marketplace – AND MAKING IT WHAT IT IS.

The rest will follow.

So… what are you actively doing/contributing/creating to make your marketplace what it is ?

I’ve written a lot about David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done,” one of the best-selling productivity books of all times. In this video from FastCompany.tv, David joins Robert Scoble to talk about the future of work and how to make the most of productivity while minimizing stress. Allen also talks about his upcoming GTD Summit.

“A persons bank balance is directly proportional to how quickly he implements an idea” - Eben Pagan

I see it a lot in some of the “environments” I spend my time; people are so focused on “yelling at each other” to ensure the idea they crafted gets heard & their name is carved beside it, on the never-ending list of “good ideas not yet implemented” … and because of all this ytelling, nothing actually gets implemented.

See a bad idea poorly implemented, will ALWAYS produce better results than a great idea not implemented at all.

A lot of entrepreneurs, or should I say “would be” entrepreneurs spend all their time (and money) trying to come up with (or learn) that next big idea…

• You can have all the knowledge
• You can have the best ideas
• You can attend all the seminars
• You can own all the courses

BUT… if you don’t spend more time implementing than “thinking” you will get now where.

Let me be clear here… You can never learn too much, and you should always attend seminars (even if it’s solely for the networking) BUT you MUST always be spending exponentially more time on the implementation side of the coin.

One of the best stories I’ve been told, that illustrates this point, is from a mentor of mine Frank Kern, who walked out on one of the most powerful seminars he ever attend:

Here’s why.

And the decision to do that is why I released Mass Control (finally.)”

Since then, Franks “Mass Control Related” projects have generated over FOUR MILLION DOLLARS in revenue.

…And to think. It all happened because of that one thing he heard Eben say.

SO… are there any winning ideas you haven’t implemented yet, because you’re wanting to learn more?

The darnedest thing got me thinking on Christmas yesterday…

I noticed, Fleur’s mum cutting a small amount off the ends of the Christmas roast before putting it in a pan and roasting it…

Obviously this only heightened my curiosity so I asked the grandmother, “All of the ladies in your family certainly make excellent roasts, and everyone in the the family cuts the ends off the roast because that is the way they were taught. Please tell me, how does this make the roast better?”

She replied, “Make the roast better … I only did it because my pan was too short.”

OK… So you may have heard a variation this story before – It’s an oldie but a goody, and makes a very interesting point… and a good business lesson.

A lot is said in the personal development and NLP circles about the power of modeling - Identify people who produce outstanding results in a particular field of activity (i.e. cooking roasts), then model their behavioral patterns (i.e. cut the ends off) in order to produce those outstanding results for yourself.

The issue with modeling is that if you don’t understand the why behind the actions, you may be modeling something for the wrong reasons.

An example I used in my book to make a similar point is the ‘25 words or less’ contests that companies regularly ‘model’ .. and the instance of a book publisher running a competition that asks readers to do the following:

‘In 25 words or less, describe your favourite place to read in winter and why.’

This is an example of a business modeling a promotional tool without really understanding the why.

As I mentioned in my book, people act in line with their commitments… and it’s this ‘commitment + consistency’ principle that the “25 words or less” contests were built on.

The rationale behind this type of promotion, is that if you make people write down why they like you or your business, they will then subconsciously want to keep their word, so next time they have to choose they will select your product.

This principle means that people will feel a sense of obligation to you if they have told you they like your product or that they would find it useful. Once people make a commitment, especially in public, they will usually make an effort to stick to it.

So as you can see, the ‘In 25 words or less, describe your favorite place to read in winter and why.’ contest does nothing to elicit a ‘commitment and consistency’ outcome in their customers minds.

They’ve done the right thing by modeling a powerful technique, but by not understanding the WHY behind it, they have completely missed the mark. – just like Fleur and her roasts.

Now, as we go into 2009, I encourage you to take a moment, and look at everything your doing (read: modeling), and ask yourself the following question:

“What was the original WHY behind this ?”