Question #2 of my interview with Sales Guru and Dr. Seuss fan Dan Tudor:

Ron: If you were a new, small business owner with under $3000 marketing budget and limited time to send in the first year of business, what would you do to generate sales quickly?

For Retail?
Dan: I would have 2500 full color postcard-sized flyers printed. I would hire a couple of high school aged kids to put one on every door around my store, or in a targeted desired neighborhood. On the card, I’d offer them 50% off any one item in the store if they came in by a certain date (with appropriate limits, depending upon what you were selling…that wouldn’t work if you just opened a car dealership,
obviously!) I’ve seen this type of thing work, and it can be done for around $1000.

For Services?
Dan: Same thing, but with a percentage off whatever the service is. Again, the benefit to this type of advertising is that it is inexpensive, effective, and measurable based on the coupons coming back in as they are redeemed. I’ve seen it work for both services and retail.

Good Advice for those businesses getting started on a limited budget, or even for those that just want more customers from around the neighborhood.

Question 1: Buzz and Word of Mouth create interest, but do not close the sale. What do you think the most important elements of landing the deal are once someone has called or emailed asking for more information?

Dan Tudor: In my experience, the first vital element in landing the deal is asking effective trial close questions – assuming you’ve established need, and they understand what your product or service could mean for their business. Not enough sales people take this step, and it ends up costing them the sale. The second vital element would be asking for the sale. That sounds like an obvious answer, but many, many sales professionals don’t do it. They’ll let the customer “think about it” or they agree to “get back to them in a week or two.”

Sales professionals need to be constantly asking for the sale. Over and over again, and not apologize for it. I think it demonstrates a belief in what they’re selling, personally.

Dan’s advice works well for getting your blog noticed too. Ask for interviews from people.

Dan Tudor recently did a group of interviews that were fun, informative and with great people. Somehow I ended up in the mix with Seth Godin, Sam I am, and Jeffrey Gitomer. Not bad.

I thought that some of his advice might be great on this blog as well, because Buzz can create interest, but you still have to close the sale.

I will mention that I have not met Dan in person, and there is a good chance he is looney. He interviewed a Dr. Seuss character recently, and in my request I mentioned I would not do that, and he got very defensive.

Ron: I will not be interviewing any fictional characters or pet rocks, but I think it would be interesting to get some real “closing the sales” kind of stuff up. We have a lot of small business readers.

Dan: Ron, don’t slam fictional characters. They are quite entertaining.

Later in the interview see how he replies to my question about his “Deer in the headlights” look.

We also have reason to believe he posed as the complete cast of full house recently when commenting on a post. Read the interview that follows and see what you think of him.

For those of you wondering why I have not done a fresh post in several days, blogger has been having trouble and yesterday I lost a long post that did not go through. I guess I am getting what I pay for, and in over a year I do not have many complaints.

Lets see if this goes through and then I may try another one.

Dan did a nice job building up to one of the best and most important sales interviews of the decade…

Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing Challenge #19 – From the upcoming book, Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing

Call/Email a Person You Respect
Difficulty: Simple
Time: Quick
Cost: Minimal
Technology Required: Simple

Think about someone you would like to meet. It should be someone you respect and someone that would be beneficial for you to get to know. In this challenge we suggest you stretch and think of someone that is not easy but not too difficult to get to know.

Contact this person and let them know why you would like to meet them. Briefly tell them about yourself and propose getting together for coffee or lunch.

If there is any way that you can benefit them, let them know. If not, you could propose that they act as a mentor to you in your career or for your business. Some influential people enjoy acting as mentors to people that are working hard to grow and succeed.

I know several people that have famous mentors and they leverage the name and relationships to create more buzz for themselves and for their mentors.

What is the Annoyance Factor and what is yours?

The annoyance factor is the % of people that are less than happy with your product or service but not so unhappy as to complain.

Complaining is good. When you get a complaint, if you are smart, you address the issue, fix the problem and make that complainer into a fan again.

Happy people are good. They tell people about you, promote you, buy more products and services from you, etc. Happy people are advocates for your business.

Then there are the people that fall in between. You might think you have a lot of happy customers, but what you may really have is a lot of people that are annoyed, but not so much that they will go to the trouble of changing.

Cell phone companies are a good example. I had T-Mobile and had horrible service. I had to call from my driveway to get a connection. I was annoyed. I complained to everyone, but not to T-mobile because they were not going to build a tower just for me. Yet it took a full year before I switched services, because getting out of the contract seemed a hassle. I was within their annoyance factor from the beginning to the end of the relationship, waiting for an opportunity to leave.

Today I went to McDonalds after a meeting. I just wanted a quick bite. The menu in one place said medium fries were $1. In another spot, a piece of tape was over the word medium.

They charged me $1.40. I asked why, and they said they were in the process of changing it. The menu did not state the change, and I was annoyed. No, I am not going to stand in a McDonalds and argue about 40 cents, but I really did not want fries yet I said to myself, it is just $1 more, so I got them. Then they were $1.40. Then I wished I’d not got them because my “It’s only a dollar more” became a lie and I was overpaying for something that was not good for me anyway.

That brings me to software. Think about the user interface with the annoyance factor in mind. Most people will find ways around software quirks. They learn to get around the little problems. But is your software really good, or just not really bad enough to generate complaints? If a large percent of your users are existing in the annoyance area, you are sitting on a time bomb. Any seemingly minor hiccup could trigger widespread desertion that could put you out of business.

To determine your annoyance factor, do a customer survey and ask some specific questions in relation to satisfaction. Here are some sample customer service questions.

• Would you strongly recommend us to someone if you knew they could benefit from our type of product or service?
• Has our product or service not met your expectations in any way?
• How would you rate our product or service? (Great Value, I got what I expected, Needs improvement. ) (A scale of 1-7 will give you better data.)
• Have you ever received less than fantastic customer service from one of our employees?

More questions like this, with clear guides to what makes someone fall into the “Advocate/Happy” category, the “I hate you” category and the “just waiting to find someone better” category will help you identify your annoyance factor and start working on a strategy.

The more you can move people up to happy and out of the annoyance realm, the more successful your organization will be.

We frequently talk to people about blogging and they think it is hard to create all that good content.

Think about that show, America’s Funniest Home Videos. People everywhere are creating content for it. All they do is create a wrapper and publish the best.

This is how you blog as well. You create the blog, give it a purpose, a focus, and you add color commentary and let other people help out with the content.

Dan Tudor is doing that a lot this last few weeks – see Seth Godin’s comments on blogging as part of the interview Dan is doing.

Rumor has it that Bob Saget and Dan Tudor are really the same person.