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Promoting your School or Business
By Tom Callos
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but the basics, I believe,
are always worth a good review.
There are two distinct parts of our business:
1. Sales
2. Service
Sales cover the initial contact with a potential client and then
everything else that transpires up until the time they invest in
your business (give you money).
Service is what keeps your clients buying and/or paying.
If you don’t get enough prospects in your business (people
to sell something to), that’s one kind of challenge. If you
can get people to buy once, but you can’t get them to buy
again (or continue paying), that’s another kind of challenge.
This report is about sales (and sales is so closely linked to service
that you might as well think about both while you’re reading).
To make more sales you have to reach more (qualified) people and
ask them to buy. You have to reach people with a message that interests
them. You need to have a message that does two things:
1. Shows/tells the client how your service or product will meet
their needs (whatever those needs might be).
2. Sells the –many –benefits of your service or product.
It’s always about needs and benefits. You make customers/clients/students
when you have something that meets their needs and when they understand,
on a visceral level, the benefits they will receive from your services.
On reaching more people (Sales):
To reach people that will buy your service or product, you need
get them to see or hear your business’s “buy me” request.
They have to see your ad, your sign, your article, your column,
your demo, your whatever, or they have to hear your “buy me” request
from the TV, the radio, word-of-mouth, or directly from the mouth
of you or someone who works on your behalf.
To get your word out, your “buy me” request, you need
to invest time in planning and implementing a promotion and advertising
campaign. How much time? That depends on your role in your business;
however, it’s a conservative estimate to say that at least
one-quarter of your time as a businessperson should be invested
in promotion. Some people will triple that effort, but if you’re
not currently investing one-quarter of your work time in productive
promotions, then start there.
What to do with that time:
• Make contact with your local Newspaper(s). Know who the City
Editor is and know the writers in every department that relates to
your business (even in the smallest way). Know their contact info,
know them by first name, send them interesting story ideas and press
releases once a month –forever.
• Know your local radio stations. A radio station is a newspaper
for the ears. They need interesting stories, they will spread info
that’s good for the community, they will help you promote your
business if you make them deals they cannot refuse. Know every station
manager, know every DJ, every Talk-Radio host, and know what they
want to hear and how they like to hear it. Send them interesting stories,
promotions, and press releases every month or so –for the rest
of your business’s life.
• Know the Chamber of Commerce and know EVERY special event,
fair, parade, fund-raiser, telethon, and any and all events that take
place in your community. Build a calendar with all local events (big
and small) on it. Know who runs them and what their goals are. Help
them reach their goals and they’ll help you reach yours.
• Know every school principal and every teacher you can in your
community. Love them if they blow you off. Love them if they ignore
you. Love them if they hate you. Find a message, a campaign, a need
to fill, and anything else you can to get principals and teachers
to know you’re a good person doing good work in your community.
Help them meet their needs and they will help you meet yours (reaching
people to ask them to buy your service or product).
• Know the people in your community that make things (good, healthy,
public service things) happen. Help them achieve their goals and they
will help you achieve yours.
• Use your power of influence with your students and their families
to do good things in your community. Are their kids in the hospitals
that need emotional support? Provide it by way of visits, demos, and
motivational chats. Is there a waterway or field in your community
that’s dirty with trash? Get off your behind and clean it. You
can mobilize 100 people to do a clean-up job in 30 minutes that would
take a smaller group a week. Start a “Kind Acts” program
and be the catalyst for thousands of kind acts. Get your local Mayor
to keep a kind acts journal for a day. Get every principal to do the
same. Talk them into teaching the program by example. Are their children
in your community who are being bullied? Start a mentoring program
and get your students to teach bully-management techniques. Help a
family in need once a month all year long. There is always something
to do in your community, become known as one of the few who will get
up and do something about it. Do this like a master and you will reach
more people –and in a meaningful, heartfelt way.
• Know your customers better. Don’t just “sell” someone,
get to know them –and then help them meet their personal needs.
Keep your thumb on their pulse, stay in tune with them. If you can
have a powerful impact on your students lives, if you can get them
to have a better attitude, if you can get them to take action on their
goals, you will have loyal, happy customers. Happy customers advertise
for you.
• Convince your students to take their martial arts home with
them. Get them to take it to school and work too. If you can get a
child to act out the ideas you’re teaching them in your school–at
home, if you can get them to be more polite, more thoughtful, more
organized, cleaner, and more motivated, then you’re implementing
your most powerful sales tools. If you can get your adult clients
to better manage their anger, if you can help them release their stress,
stay focused, and FEEL better, you’re scoring big sales points.
Here are seven things to do:
1. Get every Tom Peters, Jay Abraham,
and Jay Conrad Levinson book on sales and management. Read them
forwards and backwards.
2. Buy subscriptions to at least one
sales and management magazine and read it cover-to-cover every month.
3. Have a year-at-a-glance calendar of
promotional activities on a wall in your office and in your day-planner.
4. Perform 10 ACTS OF MARKETING every
working day of the month.
5. Read the newspaper every day (if you
can’t pull out at least one marketing idea or contact, get
down and give me 100!).
6. Ask 20 of your peers (in the industry)
for input on “Things I can do for/in/and with my business
that are newsworthy.” To get the news to feature you, you
have to do something newsworthy. Explore this idea and make a list
of ideas, then each week or month, take action on one of those ideas.
Fix something, save something, clean something, help someone, DO
SOMETHING NEWSWORTHY.
7. Get yourself into a position (as often
as you can) to personally ask 100 people a week to buy your service.
That means you have to speak to people, individually and in groups,
every week. In one year you will have asked 5200 people, personally
and face-to-face, to buy your service or product. If you sell just
5% of those people, you will have gained 260 students. If 260 students
each invested $100 a month in your business for 12 months, it would
represent $312,000. You see, it IS worth your time and energy.
Tom Callos
www.tomcallos.com
www.ultimateblackbelttest.com
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