PROMOTING YOUR SCHOOL AS A 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:

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.

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