My last blog talked about confirmation questions. These are questions that open an interview. The next type of question we’ll look at is the New Information question.
This type of question enables you to get more details about the prospects required results.
In the confirmation question stage I asked the question; “You mentioned on the phone you were looking for 100 % grass fed beef, is that still the case?”
I can follow that up with a new information question such as:
“What’s happening in your current situation that you decided you wanted to talk to me about our beef?”
This gives the potential customer the opportunity to give you their reasons for wanting to talk to you. They might respond with something like ” Well we watched a documentary about how conventional beef is raised and we were shocked.”
Or, “A friend of ours recently had us over for a cook out and they served grass fed beef. We were impressed with the flavor and they told us some of the health benefits.”
These type questions are great for getting the information you need to find out what the potential customer’s reasons are for buying.
Many times you can start new information questions with who, what, when or where.
“What’s been happening…?”
“Could you…..?”
This is better than simply saying “tell me more.”
Asking questions should be natural and not feel to the prospect that it’s an interrogation. If that begins to happen then the prospect closes up and you can’t get a sale if you don’t know what result they are looking for.
That’s the old type of sales. The dog and pony show where you sit and recite all the features and benefits of your products. You wow them with how great your grass fed beef is and why they should buy it.
However, if the customer tells you what they want out of your grass fed beef and you can show them that it fits the bill…they sold themselves.
That’s a long term customer.
Depending on your sales ability, you can get a lot of sales and never get a long term customer. Pressure and talking up your products will get sales. But you should be looking for a long term relationship.
Long term relationships don’t start with one-sided conversations and pressure. They start with a two-sided conversation and agreement.
Use new information questions to help you find out what the customer requires to purchase from you.
You’ll find these customers buy again and again.
As the old saying goes:
Nobody likes to be sold, but everybody likes to buy.
Since the type of “selling” I embrace means not just ramming products down my potential customer’s throat, but more of a search to find where my products might fit for them, I must be an expert interviewer…very good at asking questions…the right kind of questions, to understand the situation. I want to help the prospect make an informed decision about purchasing my farm products.
Over the next few days I’m going to outline several types of questions that must be included in every interview. Each type of question has a distinct purpose. Each are designed to get the specific information you need to determine if a sale can be made.
They have somewhat of a sequence also. For instance one question I’ll be covering is the commitment question. You wouldn’t get very far starting your interview with a question asking for a commitment! The prospect is in no position to make much of a commitment at the beginning of an interview. Except maybe to listen and answer questions!
The first question we’ll cover:
Confirmation questions.
Confirmation questions are used to make sure you have accurate information or understand what type of problem they would like to solve by purchasing your farm products.
An example of one these type questions might be:
You mentioned on the phone you were looking for 100 % grass fed beef, is that still the case?
You mentioned you want to purchase more local foods when I spoke with you at the farmers market, is that correct?
Notice you are confirming what you already know and verifying it to be correct. The prospect could answer to the first question; “Oh no we were interested in pork” The other side of a confirmation question is it can expose inaccuracies in your information.
Imagine in the first scenario you take off telling them about grass fed beef and they want to hear about pork!
Use these type questions to establish that you are all on the same page in the beginning of the interview.
Some more ways to ask confirmation questions.
Are you still looking for ways to buy more local foods?
Is pesticide use a major concern for when buying produce?
You are trying to determine what is going right now with confirmation questions. They help frame the interview around the current situation that is of interest to the prospect.
Use confirmation questions to get the interview started on the right subject and based around where the prospect is focused. There is no need to discuss things that have no interest to the prospect.
This conveys that you realize their time is valuable and you have no desire to spend time interviewing them about products they don’t want to discuss.
Practice this and watch your ability to focus on what they want to hear help you acquire new customers
I have read some interesting blogs and articles lately. I was exposed to a thought that had never crossed my mind. Well maybe not a thought more like a common theme.
The theme is basically farmers talking about how customers really don’t want to buy local because if they did they the farmer would be getting more business or the business they did get wouldn’t seem so random.
They cite their own business or other farmers and food co-ops that are struggling.
It was a whole new thought to me as I have always believed customer perception is really all that matters. But I never made the connection that customers really didn’t want to buy local or direct from the farm.
My thought process has always been that there is a segment of people in my community that would buy local if they were properly exposed to the idea.
Coupled with the fact that there is a good bit of public media that is helping my cause by highlighting the loss of jobs, the suffering of many local communities, and the problems with modern agriculture and huge food companies. I figured I had a leg up on the situation when I decided to start selling direct off the farm.
The statistics I see tell me about 2 percent of America is buying local food. That is definitely a tiny portion of the population. So I know that buying local and especially direct off the farm does not have consumer acceptance.
It means I have to figure out how to locate the people on this growing edge of the 2 percent. I have to market to them and educate them as to why and how to buy off my farm.
That’s basically what I’ve done since I started selling direct off the farm. I have majored on finding this leading edge of the local, farm-fresh food, trend and marketing to them.
At the same time I have worked to develop systems that make it easier for those people to buy from my farm.
The result?
My business grows every day. I have a plan that brings customers and a plan to help keep them.
Blaming the customer for not buying from me is like the Cadillac dealership who proclaimed radio advertising doesn’t work. This dealership had advertised on the radio and had dismal results.
When the ad rep came out for a visit he told them that radio does work, but their offer wasn’t strong enough. The dealership disagreed.
So the ad rep said he would prove it if they would let him write the commercial. They agreed.
So the ad rep wrote the commercial:
Brand new Cadillac Sedan at XYZ dealership. Come get yours today only $500.
Of course the dealership threw a fit. “We can’t run that commercial we’d go broke! People would rush the dealership.”
To which the ad rep replied “It’s not that radio doesn’t work, your offer isn’t strong enough.”
How about your farm marketing?
Is your offer strong enough to induce people to do business with you?
I call other farmers from time to time about something they may have advertised. Everything from breeding stock to farm equipment and 9 times out of 10 I’m amazed at how they handle incoming calls.
A typical call goes something like this.
Caller: Hi I was calling about your ad for the hay baler.
Farmer: Yep still got it. (silence…..)
Caller: What can you tell me about it?
Farmer: Well it works pretty good. I bought a new one.
Caller: How much you asking for it?
Farmer: $1,000
Caller: OK thanks bye
Farmer: goodbye
The first thing to remember about a conversation on the phone or otherwise:
The one asking the questions is controlling the conversation.
When a person calls me about something I’m selling, (like farm fresh food) I let them start talking and state what they want and then I begin to ask questions so I can understand what they want and need from me.
It’s been called “needs based selling.”
There’s a whole lot more to the concept then what I’m going to share, but for my illustration here I’m trying to find what the prospects true needs, and wants are so I can determine if I can help them.
You do this by asking questions.
Notice I didn’t say by telling them all about your product or service. There is a time to do that, but first find out what they need to hear from you.
Let’s go back to the hay baler, the farmer and I.
Caller: Hi I was calling about your ad for the hay baler.
Farmer: Yes I still have it. It’s in great shape. How much hay are you planning to bale?
Caller: I don’t have much about 10 acres but I have a neighbor who is interested in having me bale his also.
Farmer: Well this baler would work well for you. I’ve had it since it was new and we only bale about 10 acres a year with it. The only reason I’m selling it is the boys are away in school so I bought a round baler. What are your thoughts so far?
Caller: Sounds like what I’m looking for. How much are you asking?
Farmer: I checked around and comparable balers are selling for $1,000 to $1500 so I’m asking $1,000 I sure it’s worth more towards the $1,500 range, but come out and see what you think it’s worth.
Caller: When is a good time to come out?
Farmer: I’m typically around most of the day although I’m not always easy to find. Do you want to set something up now so I know to be waiting?
Caller: Sure
Notice the commitment is to come look at the baler, not buy the baler. Try to get whatever commitment you can get from callers, even if it’s just permission to send them some information and follow up.
See the difference? The farmer is actively getting the caller involved and finding out what they want out of a hay baler.
When someone calls you about purchasing from your farm have it all thought out and write it down if you need to.
At least make a list of questions so you can get into a conversation with them instead of them asking questions and coming to conclusions without you being able to determine if you may be able to help them.
It’s hard enough to get prospective customers to reach out and contact you. Make the most of every call and watch your customer count go up!
Action Step: Sit down and think about the questions you can ask potential customers. They should be designed to help you understand their needs AND get a commitment from them.
The demand for local, organic, farm fresh meat and vegetables has been on the rise for the last several years.
This means that people are actively seeking out this type product. Many “marketing type” farmers have been enjoying increasing sales every year.
According to Finding Dulcinea, In Indiana, the number of small farms increased by almost 80 percent from 2002–2007. Greg Preston, director of the Indiana Agricultural Statistics Service, told the Indy Star, “We are getting a lot of newer farmers coming in that are smaller—going into direct marketing, specialty products, organics, locally grown, this type of stuff.”
My farm has been struggling to meet the demand since shortly after we started selling direct. That is in part because I come from 25 plus years of sales and marketing experience.
But it’s also because the market for local farm food is growing and I’m enjoying the fact that people are actively looking for farms like mine.
But I’ve been around enough new and emerging markets to know that won’t always be the case.
Take for instance the big mortgage boom up to about 2008. I owned a company that used mortgage lending as a way to grow our business. We used many different mortgage companies and brokers all over the United States.
There was a mortgage broker on every corner. Many of them were so busy that they wouldn’t even talk to us about working with them. They had more business than they could handle! New mortgage companies were starting up daily.
Why?
Because it’s pretty easy to take a client who has an 8 percent mortgage and put them into a new one at say 5.5 percent. I mean how much sales and marketing does it really require?
The broker simply says “Mr. Jones we can reduce your mortgage payment by $200 a month and give you a rate that’s 2.5 percent lower than what you had.”
So for marketing all they had to do was let people know they were open for business and give some teaser rates on the radio or internet and people flocked in to refinance.
But ever so slowly I started getting phone calls from those brokers who didn’t want to work with me a couple of years before. They were seeing a slow down in the refinance craze. They didn’t necessarily say that to me but I knew what was happening.
The demand was slowing and the competition was getting fierce.
Fast forward another year and many of those shops were out of business and gone forever.
Who was left?
The companies that had focused on running a lean and mean mortgage shop and had focused on developing long term marketing strategies. They did honest business and had a long term mindset.
How does this relate to small farms?
Because sooner or later the demand is going to slow down and the competition is going to get fierce.
Take the previous quote from Dulcinia. There was a eighty percent increase in small farms in Indiana from 2002 – 2007. That means there were a whole lot more farmers supplying the market in Indiana than previous.
Now if several of those farms were near you…you noticed it!
Farmer’s markets are increasing by leaps and bounds. Farmers are seeing prices come down to be able to move their goods as they face the Wal-Mart shopping mentality.
So called “farmers” are bringing in produce from the wholesale house and selling it as local. In my area if you go to the farmer’s market to sell pork or beef, you will be competing with all the butcher shops in the area.
CSA’s are exploding all over the U.S…..
Folks – times are changing.
Don’t get me wrong competition is a good thing,
BUT IT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU MARKET IF YOU’RE GOING TO STAY PROFITABLE AND KEEP THE DOORS OPEN.
Then add to that huge corporations are working night and day to fleece the consumer into believing that their food is really pretty much the same as what you can buy off a small farm.
Big agriculture is teaching their farmers how to relate to the public and present themselves as the only solution to the food shortage. They are talking about using Facebook and Twitter to reach out to their communities.
Grocery stores are featuring local farmers that supply them with produce.
Localharvest recently reported many CSA’s experience as high as a 40 percent turnover each year.
Losing that much business per year is unsustainable. If you have to replace that many customers per year you are swimming up stream on your way to broke.
I was talking to a farmer the other day who said he had a lady call him about grass-fed beef. By the time he got back to her (a couple of hours later) she had already found another farmer who had sold her a quarter of beef.
He got a rude awakening that he’s not the only guy in town with grass-fed beef!
In some ways small local farms supplying people with food is still in it’s infancy. But folks things are changing.
What’s your plan to stay on the cutting edge of this growth and rising competition?
Do you have system to get new customers?
What’s your response time when someone calls or emails you?
How easy is it to do business with you?
What’s your process for retaining customers and turning them into word of mouth advertisers?
Begin to find answers to these problems now before you end up losing out to the farm that does have it figured out!
The better you know your farm customers, the more clearly you can communicate with them…in their terms and on their level.
A stronger understanding of your customers will lead you to better anticipate what other products they may be interested in buying from you. The clearer you see your customer’s individual characteristics, the easier it is to find other people like them. This makes your marketing efforts more precise and less random, which saves you time and money.
Knowing your customers so well that you can sell to them over and over is the central theme of customer-focused marketing.
And, because you know them so well, you can find other customers just like them because you know what you’re looking for.
Anytime you communicate, whether it’s to a customer or prospect, you have to think about how it will be perceived and how it will be received. For instance, if you get a piece of SPAM mail in your email box, it could be the best deal of the century but chances are it’s going to the trash folder. AND, you might take the time to filter out messages from this sender in the future so you don’t even see them in your email box.
The message may have been great, but the method in which it was sent stunk!
You have to consider how effective and how efficient your marketing is. How many of your ideal prospects can you reach for the lowest possible cost to get the sale?
The only valid measure of a marketing campaign is how much money did it make you? Not how cute it was, or how many people liked the idea on Facebook, or all the farmers that told you how great it was, but HOW MUCH DID PEOPLE BUY?
And how much profit did you make after you paid all your overhead?
Customer-Focused marketing is designed to do one thing…make you the most net profit from your marketing efforts.
With this approach you can actually make more money with fewer customers.
In my last post, I listed data that you should be capturing from your customer base. I’ll assume you have a database of some sort on your computer to enter this information into so you can begin to segment your customer base.
Let’s look at a simple example from my farm. Every year we sell Hams at Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
I record into my database all the people who purchase and what they purchased e.g. butt portion, whole ham, also when they purchased.
At each holiday I have a list of customers that I can feel fairly certain they will want know about our holiday hams.
So I open up my database and sort these people out, and craft a letter or email to them so I can offer them a ham for the holidays.
Why not just send it out to all my customers? Because some of my customers don’t buy pork of any kind and never will. By sending a communication to them I risk offending them or at the least emphasizing the fact that it’s a mass mailing.
You don’t want communication to go out that isn’t personal.
Just imagine getting a letter trying to sell you a holiday ham and you don’t eat pork. You know right away your farmer doesn’t know you very well or the marketing mechanism is disconnected from the farmer’s knowledge.
Now imagine getting a letter that looks like this because you bought a ham at Easter:
Dear Joe,
Our holiday hams are going to be ready on October 3rd. Since you bought a whole ham last Easter, I wanted to let you know those same great hams are available for this holiday too!
This is targeted, personal, and gets a much better response than a mailing to all your customers.
How else could this knowledge recorded in our database help us?
What else might the customers who bought a ham purchase?
Maybe a holiday turkey?
So you could send out a letter like this:
Dear Joe,
Our holiday hams are going to be ready on October 3rd. Since you bought a whole ham last Easter, I wanted to let you know those same great hams are available for this holiday too! We also have a few turkeys left. These turkeys are 14-20 lbs and receive rave reviews from our customers….
Take your current customer base and analyze who they are, what their buying habits include, and figure out how to segment them into different groups and then individualize your offers to them.
As you continue to do this, a clear picture of who is likely to purchase from you emerges. Then you can narrow your focus to only the best prospects to go after.
This saves time and money. It also enables you to make more with less customers.
What does a buyer of farm products look like? I don’t mean their physical appearance. I mean how do you know who is a good candidate for your farm products? What traits do they posses? What characteristics indicate they may purchase from you?
It is a mistake to think everyone you meet is a good candidate. If you are paying for advertising or doing some type of marketing campaign, you need to have an idea of what your potential customer looks like.
This why it is critical to collect data from your current customers. The more you know about them the better you will become at recognizing potential customers.
The idea of target or niche marketing is to focus your efforts on selling products or services to a specific group in the marketplace.
If the only thing you know about your customers are they live around you, and they are male or female, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to target your market.
You should be capturing as much information about your customers as possible.
How?
Well start by asking questions!
I’m not talking about barraging them with a million questions every time you see them but a standard set of questions can help you put together a “best customer profile.” Then you could weave those questions into your conversation with your customers. You probably already know a lot about them…but is it stored so you can analyze it?
Let’s imagine you line up all your current customers.
You notice that the large majority of them are female. You also notice that your customers who purchase the largest amounts all wear sandals.
Then you realize that not only do they all wear sandals but they also have blond hair.
Using this imaginary example, you could reason that you have a good chance of getting new customers if you can find blonde haired women who wear sandals!
“…targeted marketing is the art and science of identifying, describing, locating, and contacting one or more groups of prime prospects for whatever you are selling.
In today’s marketplace, if you don’t know who, what, and where your true prospects are, or if you fail to go after them as individuals, you will lose ground to competitors who do.”Stan Rapp & Tom Collins – MaxiMarketing
So you need to know what your customers look like in order to find more for the least amount of effort and cost.
Criteria you should be tracking:
Beyond the obvious ones like name, address, contact information etc.
1. Age
2. Family Size
3. Social/Economic Status
4. Gender
5. What they purchase
6. Frequency of purchase
7. When they purchase – Holiday etc.
8. Amount of purchase
9. What they will not purchase – Vegetarian etc.
10. How they pay – Check, credit card, cash, payments
11. Do they shop at farmers markets
12. Anything else you can think of that will help you identify new customers and create offers to your current customers.
Reaching large numbers of people is not the key to building your business. It’s reaching an audience with a high concentration of people who have shown some behavior that indicates they are reasonably likely to purchase your farm products.
Next time we’ll talk about where to store this information and some ways to use it.
How do you find customers for your farm sales? Here’s a three-step system that helps you obtain customers, keep them, and increase the amount they purchase from you.
Customers are the life-blood of your farm. New customers are the most expensive to obtain.
I use a three step approach for all my customer acquisition. Actually these three steps underpin everything we do in the area of sales because every customer, or potential customer, is somewhere in this process.
The first thing we must do is:
Expose
People must be exposed to our business. This can be through an advertisement, a letter or postcard, a personal visit to your farm, they went to your website or any other way you let people know that you are in business and excepting new customers.
I won’t cover all these ways here. That can be another blog post! I perfected a prospecting tool that can expose a few hundred people a day to your farm business that costs practically nothing, and results in an average of 2-4 new customers each time you do it. We usually get fifteen or twenty people who are interested in what we are doing at the farm, but 2-4 of them will jump on board pretty quick. The rest will take some follow-up.
So expose people to your farm products- that’s the front end marketing you must do.
Involve
Second we must involve them in what we are doing. The easiest way I know of is to provide a free sample of your product. This can be something you simply give them or a dinner or cookout you host and provide the food for them to try from your farm.
We have current customers invite friends and family to a cookout at their house and we go fix the food. This can be step one, two and three all in one.
You could have a farm day with a cookout or simply let folks know you’ll have free samples for them to try as part of your day at the farm. The sky is the limit but you want to involve them in your farm products. In the case of produce and meats you want them to experience them. A wise gentleman told me once “Good sausage sells itself.”
Never give something away without a hook. What do I mean? People instinctively know there is no such thing as “free.” Many times they will be hesitant to take a free sample because it makes them feel obligated. I explain to them right up front what the hook is.
I offer free samples for filling out a form that gives me their contact information along with answering some questions about what they might be interested in from our farm.
I also tell them verbally “All I ask is you tell me what you think about our product. I’ll follow-up with you in a few days and get your thoughts.” They are happy to help and know exactly what’s expected of them so no surprises. I follow up with them and many times they invoke the third step themselves which is….
Upgrade
Once we have exposed and involved a person, we need to work to upgrade their thinking from seeing what our farm is about, or trying a free sample, to becoming a customer.
Many times they upgrade themselves once they try our products. All we need to do is iron out the details of what they want how to pay etc.
But what if when you call them they liked your product, but you can’t get the order? That simply tells you they are still in the involve stage and haven’t upgraded their thinking. So you keep them involved by contacting them from time to time with your newsletter, a phone call, email etc.
Even if they did buy something you should never stop working to upgrade their thinking to buying more of the same product or trying other products you offer. You do this by keeping them involved in your farm.
Every person you meet is somewhere in this three step process. If you look at your marketing from the angle of these three steps, you can always know where to go with your prospect or customer.
The best way to increase your farm income starting today is to sell more to your current customers.
Sounds pretty simple so how do you do it?
Find a quiet place to sit down and do some serious thinking. Make sure you have a pen and paper handy. Now ask yourself this question:
What can I offer my customers that would compliment what they are already buying? They have already spent money with me what else might they spend money on if I offered it?
Let’s say you sell produce using the CSA model. The first logical step would be to add more produce items to offer your current customers.
But what about thinking outside the box a bit? Would your customers buy farm fresh eggs? I bet many of them would. What about flowers or shrubs in the spring to add to their landscaping? This is called Line Extension. If you’re not doing this your missing an income opportunity.
Sit down and think about what your customers are already buying from you and what else they might buy if you offered it. Then test the waters. Ask some of your customers what they think of the idea or offer a small amount and see how it goes.
Many years ago a gas station owner was filling a customers tank (yea it was long time ago) and he noticed the customer was waiting for his tank to be filled and jingling change in his pocket. He thought “This guy has more money to spend, if only I had something else to sell him.”
So he started carrying a few items like snacks for the road, or a map, and look what we have today…practically anything you can think of at the local convenience store/gas station.
I’m not advocating try to be “all things to all people,” I’m saying what makes sense for you to add to your current products to capture more of your customers money? They will spend it somewhere why not with you?
Let’s face it most families buy food items other places than your farm. Get your pen and paper out and start writing down your ideas. Then test it to see how it goes.
Do some serious thinking and don’t dismiss any idea no matter how far out it may seem.
The most valuable resource you bring to your farm is your creativity.
Let that sink in.
If we as farmers are ever going to do more than scratch the surface of the local food movement, we have to come up with creative ways to continually induce more customers to buy direct off the farm.
No matter what your current level of income on your farm, creativity can make you capable of more.
You can’t use up creativity. The more you use the more you have.”- Maya Angelou
Getting testimonials from your current customers is one of the most powerful ways to build credibility and create trust/belief with potential customers.
I’ll start out with a confession. I watch late night infomercials. Actually they don’t even have to be late night with all the channels on TV now.
It’s not because I’m looking to buy something, it’s more about learning. The main thing you’ll see if you watch a good one is they use a ton of testimonials.
Want to know why?
Because they work!
Hearing other people tell about how they bought the product and what it did for them is an excellent way to elevate a viewer’s belief in the product. Even though deep down you may think they were paid to say the positive things they say, you can’t help but wonder at the same time if it would benefit you in the same way!
An infomercial is designed to constantly move you toward the close at the end. That’s when they have done everything in their power to raise your belief about the benefits of their product…hopefully enough so, that you’ll pick up the phone and buy their deluxe, triple guaranteed, gadget.
But let’s focus on the testimonial segment. Which by the way, they play all through the infomercial to elevate your belief. They carefully select, or craft, the testimonials to re-enforce all the benefits that the host is telling you that you’ll receive if you buy one.
So how can we use this to market our farm products?
You must collect testimonials every chance you get. That means you need a system to collect them and use them to make sales. I use several tactics to collect them from my customers.
Here’s one: Ask them!
I use a simple form that I mail them after they have had a chance to try my products. It’s important not to wait too long after a purchase. You want to get them while their “hot” and you want to make sure they are happy. If you send out the form and they have a problem, you can find out about it before they complain to all their friends.
This puts you in the position to correct it. Then they tell their friends they had a problem and you followed up and fixed it! In today’s world, that sets you apart from 90% of the businesses they deal with.
When was the last time you received a call from the grocery store asking if you liked everything? Or any business for that matter?
If you’re selling a quality product ninety-nine times out of a hundred they will tell you how great it was!
You can do this by phone also, but I like to have it in writing. You can also use email or both. Maybe try email and if they don’t respond to email then mail out the form. I’m finding people are responding better to mail these days because so few people use it anymore. People are constantly pulled here and there on the internet and you run the risk of your email getting buried or deleted or caught in their spam filter or whatever.
The form, which I’ll include a link for you to see here, needs to be designed to pull the testimonial from them. It also spells out how you will use their comments. This is key to getting customers to cooperate with you. If you are using snail mail be certain to include a self addressed stamped envelope – it drastically raises your response rate.
Here’s one I got a while back from a new customer using this form.
“I’ve used the bacon and the ground beef and both were OUTSTANDING! Now I’m REALLY excited about filling up the freezer! …I can tell you, with no stretch of the imagination, that grass fed meat agrees with my digestive system far better than with “grocery store” meat….Mmmmmm, sure am looking forward to those chickens!
Then she later emailed this…
Update – The chickens are a tremendous hit in our family…I enjoyed meeting you a couple of weeks ago, and I really appreciate your bringing the chickens to Pickerington.
Just want to mention, too, that as long as I’ve got a job, you’ve got my business” – Lynette Y. Streetsboro, Ohio
Now just imagine for a moment you’re talking to a prospective customer and you say “Here’s what some other folks are saying about our products“
You then pull out a stack of these type testimonials for them to look through.
You just used someone else to sell your product to them. That’s powerful!
Include testimonials in your brochures, website, informational package, anywhere you are presenting your products. This one tactic alone will bring in more business than most other forms of advertising and it costs practically nothing.
Video is another way to do this. Check out the video below. It’s from a tasting we did at a local business. (more on that later).
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My last blog talked about confirmation questions. These are questions that open an interview. The next type of question we’ll look at is the New Information question.
