The More Clients Blog

The Law of Reciprocity - - Persuasion Strategies - Pt. 5

One of the most persuasive things you can do in marketing your services is to give away something for free.

When a prospect receives something free from you, they feel obligated to reciprocate in some manner. This law of reciprocity should be at the heart of all your marketing.

Giving things away can be controversial, however.

If we give away something for free, doesn't that undermine its value? Not necessarily, if we do it right and see this as the first step in a chain of actions that can turn that prospect into a client.

Let's look at one thing every professional service business owner can give away to their prospects: Free Information.

The first thing to understand is that to blindly give away free articles, reports, recordings, even books, isn't going to to get you very far.

For instance, if you go to a web site and find links to a whole lot of articles, you may pick the ones that interest you, download and print them, and then click off that site, never to return.

In my experience, that doesn't work.

Instead, you need to set things up so that there can be reciprocity on the part of the web visitor. You actually want to ask for something in return for this free article - their name and email address.

This isn't a lot to ask, and they will value the free information a lot more because there was a reciprocal exchange. That simple act of giving their name and email address also qualifies them as a future prospect. (They've put up their hands and said: "I'm interested, keep marketing to me!")

Of course, those who request your article are also added to your email newsletter list. This leads to ongoing communication, more free information, and the opportunity to reciprocate by inquiring about your services or buying an online product.

You can use this same article in several other ways. You need to see this article as a valuable commodity that can stimulate reciprocity in the receiver. As you give, so shall you receive (but only if you do it right)!

When you meet someone in a networking or social situation and the topic of your business comes up, they might show interest in your services. Usually the most we do is talk a little about what we do and exchange cards. Unfortunately, this doesn't get you very far. (What do you do with all those cards you collect?)

When you have someone's attention and interest, they usually want more information. By giving your card, they may visit your web site, but why not be more proactive and offer to send them your article?

However, if you just send the article, don't expect this person to call you up the next day, salivating to buy your services. No, you have to offer the article as an opportunity for them to reciprocate.

Here's what to say: "I have an article I think you'll find very useful. It goes into more depth about how to market your services more effectively. Can I send it to you?"

Then use this article as an opportunity to follow-up: "Once you've read the article, I'd love to talk with you and find out more about your business and how the ideas it contains would apply to your marketing. Can I give you a call next week?"

In almost all cases they will be happy to receive the article, and will reciprocate by taking your follow-up call. If you do this in a low-key, non-threatening, conversational way, it's easier than you can imagine. (But you MUST make that promised follow-up!)

If you are generous enough to give something away for free, this builds good feelings and trust. Then reciprocity is natural.

If you understand the law of reciprocity and take advantage of it, you can leverage every contact you make with potential clients. If you don't take advantage of it, you leave the ball in the prospect's court, where they are unlikely to do anything with it.

Does this seem rather cold and calculating to you?

Even so, if you cannot get past the hurdle of trust, you may never have the opportunity to work with someone and make a difference in their lives. This isn't about tricking people into doing business with you; it's about paving the way to a relationship.

I promise that once you start using the law of reciprocity in your business, everything will get a whole lot easier.

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The More Clients bottom line: Start using articles as tools to stimulate reciprocity: on your web site, in networking, at talks, etc. But never give away anything without setting up the opportunity for the prospect to reciprocate. If you do that, your response will increase dramatically.

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What are you doing in your marketing that gets prospects to reciprocate? Please share on the More Clients Blog.

Law of The Great Offer - Persuasion Strategies - Pt. 4

Ultimately, why do we buy anything? Why do we plunk down our hard-earned cash for products or services?

We have to feel, at some level, that what is offered is a good, or even great deal. This applies to everything from grocery store products to high-end professional services.

If you watch TV, you've notice Billy Mays, the pitchman with the beard, blue shirt, loud voice, and big smile. He sells Oxi Clean and a plethora of other household products these days.

What he's selling is always positioned as a great offer.

For professional services, it's more complicated. You need to communicate in much more depth. Take Shai Agassi, featured on the cover of Wired Magazine this month. He's starting a company to build an interconnected grid of re-charging stations for electric cars. His first client is Israel.

Agassi has an extraordinarily complex service that will entail the investment of billions of dollars in countries around the world, yet, it still comes down to the same thing: Is it a great offer?

So let's look at the basic components of any great offer, whether large or small.

1. Target: Your offer needs to be targeted towards a very specific market. It can't be for everyone. And you need to know that market inside and out. It might be women homemakers or sophisticated government decision makers.

2. Problem. There needs to be some pain your clients are experiencing. For homemakers, it's the drudgery of cleaning. In the case of electric cars, the problem is keeping them charged no matter where you drive.

3. Outcome. You must have a well-defined outcome. If you buy this product or service, this is what you'll get, what you'll be left with, and how things will change. This needs to be measurable and predictable: Cleaner clothes, convenient and affordable recharging.

4. Package/Process. This is the design of your service. It's what the service looks like and how it works. Cleaning products are tangible with simple features and benefits. For services, you need to make the intangible tangible. Agassi's key concept is a battery that you can either charge or easily swap for a new one.

5. Price. What do you need to charge so that enough clients or customers will buy and make the business profitable for you? This usually entails some trial and error. Notice that all those Billy Mays products sell for $19.95 (must work!). For recharging cars, it needs to cost less than half the price of gasoline.

To persuade customers or clients, you need to have a complete concept or story that all adds up to a great offer. When you make each of those five criteria above as explicit and as clear as possible, you have the essence of persuasion.

Then you translate this into the appropriate medium for your buisness: presentations, web copy, white papers, perhaps even videos. You don't have to be a Billy Mays or Shai Agassi to pitch a great offer, but you need to apply exactly the same principles.

What's your great offer?

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The More Clients bottom line: Perhaps more than anything else, your persuasiveness hinges on your ability to construct and then to communicate a great offer. Investing the time and work into creating great offers pays large dividends.

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What offers have you made in your professional service business that have been very effective? Please share on the More Clients Blog.

Law of Limited Choice - Persuasion Strategies - Pt. 3

We live in a society where the choices seem to be unlimited. But when it comes to persuasion and having your prospects make a choice, it's often a better strategy to offer a limited choice.

Ever browse the supermarket aisle in search of a new product? When confronted with the choices, it can be daunting: Small, medium and large; no fat, low fat and regular fat; low sodium, regular sodium; flavored, unflavored... the list goes on.

The fact is, that when faced with an abundance of choices, we are actually less likely to make any choice at all. We get stuck in "paralysis by analysis." This is why it's so much easier to shop after we've chosen the brands and products we like; then we just pick those same ones every time without thinking.

If we can make the choices simpler for our customers and clients, we'll usually get a better overall response to our marketing. Let's look at a place where we're asking our prospects to choose - on our web sites.

How to Limit the Choices on a Web Site

If you look at your web site through the law of limited choice, you'll start to notice how a visitor confronts choice when browsing your site. This is especially true for someone coming to your site for the first time when they are not familiar with it.

Remember, you don't just want someone to visit your site and then leave. You want them to DO something. Ideally you want them to make the choice and take the action of giving you their name and email address. Nothing is more important, as it's the follow-up emails that build relationships and make sales, not the initial visit.

The limited choice you want to give is, "Visit this page to get a free article or report and in the process, sign up for my eZine."

That should be the very first link a visitor encounters on your site.

How many links do you have on your home page? It's not unusual to have half a dozen or more. And just like making a choice in the supermarket, your visitor becomes intimidated. "Where should I go first? I don't want to waste my time or make a mistake." The feelings of frustration and confusion grow.

And then your visitor clicks off your site, thinking, "Maybe I'll come back later when I have more time." But they rarely do. So by offering too many choices of where to go, you've lost a potential client - perhaps forever.

If you narrow your choices down to one or two, the first one being to get some valuable free information, a much larger percentage of visitors will click on that link. Then when they get to your "Free Stuff" page what do they see?

It's not unusual that they'll encounter a long list, from articles and reports to audio recordings and videos. Again, it's confusing. There's too much choice, and overwhelm is triggered. "What should I get first? I don't have that much time!"

On your "Free Stuff" page you need to narrow things down just like you did on your home page. Offer one (or at the most two) valuable things that they can get right now in exchange for their name and email address.

This is the "most wanted response" on your web site. To expect someone to buy something on a first visit is simply unrealistic (not to say that it never happens). But by giving them one simple choice for some valuable free information, a relatively high percentage of visitors will respond to your offer.

Examine the Choices You Offer

Where else do you give too many choices to your prospects? Where could you narrow down the choices? Here are a few that I've noticed in working with clients over the years.

1. Speaking Engagements - Giving several topics for talks when you approach an organization. Just give one. It makes the job easier for the program director. Also go into more depth about the topic and it will be much more persuasive than a list of several topics with brief descriptions.

2. Choice of Services - It's not unusual for Independent Professionals to list half a dozen or more services on their web sites - each with a brief outline about each service. As with the list of speaking topics, make the list shorter and go into much more depth about each of the services.

3. Options for Meetings - When we encounter a prospect who shows interest in our services, we are sometimes too eager to say we are "open anytime" in the hope of making an appointment. This not only smacks of desperation, if makes the choice hard for the prospect. Instead, offer just two available times. It makes the choice much easier.

Take a look at your marketing and where you are asking your prospects or clients to make a choice. Are you making it too complex, confusing, or difficult with too many options? How could you make it simpler and easier with fewer choices? Think, "Simplicity of choices equals better persuasion."

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The More Clients Bottom Line: Carefully think through the choices you offer to your prospects. Give them one to three choices, not five, six, or more. Make it simple for them to choose and they will actually take action instead of delaying action or never acting.

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Where could you simplify the choices you ask your clients to make? Please share on the More Clients Blog.

Law of Relatedness - Persuasion Strategies - Pt. 2

Last week we talked about how the Law of Social Proof acted to persuade others. When clients experience your services and tell their stories, prospects who hear (or read) these stories become more open to the value of your services.

The Law of Relatedness builds on this law.

It adds one important component. If those who tell their stories are like the people who hear the stories, the persuasion factor increases. And if the situation of those who tell their stories are similar to those who hear the stories, then the persuasion is even stronger.

The response you are looking for is: "I can relate to that!"

The more connection we feel to someone, to their story, their situation, to their problem, the more relatedness, the more effective the persuasion.

OK, so what are some ways to apply this in your business?

1. Make sure your testimonials are directly related to the concerns of your prospects. Work at getting stories that people can directly relate to. Ask those who write testimonials to talk about their original situation and how things changed once they started working with you.

2. When you write articles, either for publication in your eZine or newsletter, include case studies that prove your point. If you're writing about a management practice, for instance, talk about how a client dramatically increased their effectiveness by applying this practice. Give enough details so that the reader can completely relate your client's situation to their situation.

3. Have your clients interviewed and recorded. Use that recording as an "audio testimonial" to post on your web site or to forward to a potential client. You might do the interview yourself or hire someone to do the interview. In any case, do more than a canned sound bite. The listener will relate to the audio testimonial better if it's in the context of a natural conversation.

4. If you do an introductory event or teleclass, invite successful clients or customers to be at the event or on the call with you. At the appropriate time, interview them briefly about how they came to use your service, what their challenge was and how you helped them overcome their challenge and produce a higher level of results.

5. When you post testimonials or case studies on your web site, include pictures of your clients. It's easier to relate to a story if the words also come with a picture of the person who told the story. Never make your testimonials or case studies anonymous.

Ultimately, you want to do everything possible to help your prospects to relate to your existing clients. You must get the thought process going in this direction: "I'm very much like that person. They have a similar business and similar challenges. What they say makes sense; it's reasonable, and the results they've gotten are what I'm looking for. I'd like to know more."

By practicing the Law of Relatedness, when prospects ultimately respond to your marketing, they will be much more predisposed to doing business with you.

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The More Clients Bottom Line: Relatedness equals persuasiveness. Of course, this also applies to prospects relating to you. Being visible, telling your story, building trust and familiarity over the long term is also an application of this law of persuasion.

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What other ways have you applied the Law Relatedness in your marketing? Please share on the More Clients Blog.