Yes a strange way to start a blog titled ‘The 10-day cash machine‘, but to vent is to heal.

One good thing about being a client on the wrong side of bad service is you learn how NOT to do things.

Now technically the sacking probably happened a week or two ago when my old accountant got a termination letter from my new accountant.

My now sacked accountant (whose name I had to look up because I could not recall it) finally called this afternoon after I sent an urgent email asking why the transfer process hadn’t begun. Naturally he asked the obligatory ‘why?’ in a feeble tone.

My answer was…

‘Because we have no relationship, we only have a transaction’

He is a nice guy. The company are a good company. They have done no wrong BUT we have no- r-e-l-a-t-i-o-n-s-h-i-p. No connection.

How can this be after 10 years?

I don’t know them and they don’t know me. I don’t care about them and they don’t care about me. As the client it is not my job to care.

In ten years, I have not received a Xmas card, phone call to see how I was going, email to say ‘Hi’, invite to an anything.  The only reason I have not left earlier is because I never got around to it. I intended to a couple of times and never quite finished the job.

When was the last time you got an irresistible offer from an accountant? Never.

To be honest if you live in Palmerston North, Coombes Smith might have given you the ‘Cheese caked slam’ but they are the exception. So they don’t count.

My old accountants on the other hand (big one with a big name) did our accounts and sent us an invoice. That was all our relationship ever consisted of.

Bang, nice and clean, in and out. No love.

Wham Bam Thank You Mr Petrie

We were worth about $5k a year to them, so nothing special. $10k a year is considered a decent client but we were still $50k over the ten years and probably another $80k over the next ten years all going well.

Three years ago me and the old recently sacked) accountant had a conversation about their retention problem. Not sure where but it was not a client function. I unsuccessfully tried to convince him to send stuff to his clients. Educational stuff that might help his clients grow their business.

Grow Their Business…

There’s A Radical Idea!

Naturally I tried to sell him a series of marketing resources and interviews he could use (well I am a marketer and he was my accountant and needed help).

He could have sent this stuff to his clients on a regular basis to add value, connect and stay in touch.

He could have called a client he had been neglecting and said ‘Did you get the CD interview with Jeremy Moon I sent you last week?’  Heck what a great icebreaker. Pun intended.

That could have lead to a question like ‘While I have you on the phone what are your three biggest issues in business right now?’ Which could easily have lead to an offer to help solve those problems and advisory work.

Even if he did not like MY stuff (which was excellent by the way) he could have found something else and used my idea.

Did he do anything? Nope. Retention problem 3 years ago in 2009.. retention problem in 2012

‘Thank you for the feedback’ was his reply.

‘Feedback?’

No ‘Sorry that in ten years you feel there was no r-e-l-a-t-i-o-n-s-h-i-p’.

No ‘Thanks for your business over the last ten years – I bought a new Lexus with your fees.’

No ‘Yeah you are right we have a retention issue, I should have actually started to communicate with my clients by now’.

Never got invited to his office, never had a free consultation on any problem that might have extended into something bigger. Just…

10 Years Of Silence

I don’t feel angry at all, this is his problem, I feel sad. It’s a sad way to lose customers.  Neglect. Laziness. Lack of care. Leaving because there is no reason to stay. I feel no guilt, I feel no obligation to him or his firm. Nothing.

He was happy with the yearly transaction fee but too ‘busy’ to connect with the person.

This lack of attention to his clients has seen me and quite a few others walk. I said ‘leaving was an easy decision to make because we have no relationship’.

Ooouch.

That was not meant to be mean but it is the truth.

So as a subscriber to this marketing blog… ‘thank you’.

To attendees of the many seminars I have run… ‘thank you’.

To my clients past and present… ‘thank you’

It is easy to take people for granted. But not really forgivable if they are a subscriber or client. So here is the happy ending. Now I want to give you something.

Thank You CHRISTMAS GIFT

As a gift I have prepared a series of videos.

These 3 strategies help you get prospects requesting appointments. And I mean that.

Proof: A building client used the ‘10 Day Cash Machine’ last week and got 12 people calling to request appointments with him. An IT client got 9 meetings booked three weeks ago with ‘The 10 Day cash Machine’. No cold calling, no effort at all except sending two emails (I recommend three but they did not even do that properly and it still worked fine). This strategy is called the 10-day cash machine.

I use it all the time, this is Speed Marketing101. This strategy works BUT you have to use it i.e. if you watch the videos and laugh and think ‘gee that would work for me’ but don’t do anything then guess what results will happen?

This video series is not magic – you have to implement.

(97% of people who attend seminars do not implement. The only people who implement my concepts are people in my coaching groups. That is not a tricky statement to trick you into wanting to be coached by me, it is the truth. That is why presenters like me and anyone else can give away their best secrets fearlessly in seminars, because unless attendees are held accountable over time no one EVER implements – it’s an amazing but true phenomenon).

PS This is a side issue but the NZTE are providing a $5k grant if you want to join one of my coaching programmes – if you are interested let me know and I will give you the details.

Anyway the ’10 day cash machine is the real McCoy so put yourself in the minority and apply it.

Just click HERE then enter your email and you are away laughing.

Thanks again for being a subscriber – it is therapeutic for me to spew my guts.

Richard

PS Leave your comment at the bottom of the videos.

Imagine you are driving to an important meeting 5 minutes early.

Then all of a sudden the car starts to splutter. You coast to the side of the road as the car loses power.

Confused you call a mechanic to come and fix your car.

‘Do you know why the car lost power?’ The mechanic asks.

‘No idea’ you respond.

‘Good news sir’, he says. ‘You are just out of petrol – I can give you enough to get to a petrol pump’.

Now 10 minutes late for your big meeting you detour your journey at speed towards a petrol station when a police car pulls you over.

‘Do you know how fast you were going? The officer asks.

‘No idea’ you respond.

‘Well you were going 75 in a 50kph zone, that will be a $200 fine and 100 demerit points on your license, and I see you already have 200 demerit points so that will probably cost you your license too’.

Now you are 30 minutes late for the big meeting with a big fine and a big date in court.

You drive off slowly this time to fill the tank and the car starts to splutter again! As you call the mechanic again you know petrol cannot be the problem.

The mechanic arrives and immediately asks ‘Do you know why the car stopped this time?’

‘No idea’ you respond.

‘The car is overheating because you don’t have enough oil or water in the engine. Didn’t the indicators tell you the car was getting hot?’ He enquires as if you are stupid.

‘What indicators?’ you respond.

All Your Problems Come Down To ONE Thing

You are not stupid it is just that your car does NOT have any indicators.

No speedometer, no temperature gauge, no fuel gauge. No feedback of the key performance indicators of your car.

No indicators means no warning signals as you run out of petrol. No indicators means no warning that the car was over heating.  No indicators means you have no idea of you speed and so you drive too fast.

You have now missed your big meeting and a potentially huge sale but that is just the start of your problems.

You decide to sell this car with no indicators. But all prospective buyers want to know is ‘How many kilometers does the car have on the clock?’

 ‘No idea’ you respond.

Vital Feedback

Now let’s imagine you install a dashboard that showed your speed, petrol levels, engine temperature and mileage.

Instantly the car has become a safe asset and does not need to be sold.

Of course this is just a story to exaggerate my point. No one would have a car with no indicators. That is just silly.

But remember your sales and marketing is also a vehicle that drives revenue and profits. This is also an area the MUST be measured and tracked meticulously.

…Because you cannot control what you cannot measure.

A business without sales and marketing indicators can run into trouble as quickly as a car without a dashboard of indicators.

If I were to ask you what are your current performance indicators were telling you this week and your answer is ‘No idea’ then we both know why you are having so many problems.

Magic Numbers

The only time I Like math is when I am counting money.

But in 8 years of working with clients I get to see that the rich ones know their numbers inside out.

I often get asked questions of me that cannot be answered intelligently without the numbers. For example: “My newspaper ad works pretty good. The media rep is urging me to increase from quarter page to half page. Should I?”

My questions have to do with what ‘pretty good’ really is.

1. What is the cost per lead (CPL) from the ad? (Total cost divided by the number of lead your ad generated)

This is the money spent to get the prospect to raise their hand. So if you spend $100 a month and get 10 people call you or go to your website then your CPL is $10 from that media

2. What is the cost per sale (CPS) from the ad? (Total cost divided by the number of clients your marketing exercise        generated)

This is a truly critical number that tells you the cost of acquiring each new customer.

3.  What us the lifetime customer value (LCV) from the ad?

This allows you to measure the total value of each new client. This number also helps you get real about the cost of losing each client and helps you determine what you are will to invest to acquire and keep them.

2.  How do these values compare with other CPL, CPS and LCV from the other means you use to get customers?

That’s just he beginning, but if you can’t at least tell me those, I cannot tell you whether to increase, decrease of eliminate your yellow pages ad all together.

Once you know these numbers you then have a MA-CPS, a maximum allowable CPS and you work at getting as many new ways of bringing in customers as possible to perform at or below that number.

Hardly any business owner knows these numbers, although many think they do.

Just as a car with no indicators is trouble waiting to happen, so too is a business.

If you are buying ad media or investing in marketing without tracking the numbers on a dashboard then you aren’t managing your business.

You are guessing your business.

Richard

***

Imagine you had an idea so big that the mayor of London had to be sold on it first.

Sam Martin, just pitched Boris Jonson and he loved it.

London would be the first city in the world to have one.

Check this out. Sam is awesome.

Here is the sky cycle below…

Impossible? No it is simple.

Simple but not easy.

First you need to think like the God Father.

“Don Vito Corleone was a man to whom everybody came for help, and never were they disappointed. He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself.”

It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him. Only one thing was required. That you, you yourself, proclaim your friendship. And then, no matter how poor or powerless the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man’s troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way to a solution of that man’s woe.

Have you worked out the Gold Father secret to selling a million dollar burger yet? No. Let me give you another passage from the book.

Don Corleone was gentle, patient. “Why do you fear to give your first allegiance to me?” he said. “You go to the law courts and wait for months. You spend money on lawyers who know full well you are to be made a fool of. You accept judgment from a judge who sells himself like the worst whore in the streets. Years gone by, when you needed money, you went to the banks and paid ruinous interest, waited hat in hand like a beggar while they sniffed around, poked their noses up your very asshole to make sure you could pay them back.”

The Don paused, his voice became sterner. “But if you had come to me, my purse would have been yours. If you had come to me for justice those scum who ruined your daughter would be weeping bitter tears this day. If by some misfortune an honest man like yourself made enemies they would become my enemies”—the Don raised his arm, finger pointing at Bonasera—“and then, believe me, they would fear you.”

Now, I realize this is just a book, but take a second and put this into context for your business.

Let’s get back to the $1,000,000 burger.

When I ask how to sell a burger for a inflated price in seminars and the answers normally go like this.

1. Make it ORGANIC! (note to reader – raise the QUALITY)

New price = Eight Bucks

2. Add fancy toppings and a bucket of fries.

OK, Twelve Bucks – (Raising the amount of STUFF and Add-Ons – know anyone who does this?)

3. Ok what about selling in a swanky restaurant with White Linen napkins and someone to scrape the crumbs off the table-cloth every five minutes while Hayley Westenra sings the World Cup song?

Ninety Five Bucks? (Hmm, fancy Packaging or Exotic Locations for your burger – smart!)

I can go ON and ON – and I have live. What usually happens is that- somewhere between fifty and a hundred bucks – all the ‘marketing’ and ‘branding’ ideas stop changing the audience’s mind and we’re at a stand-still on selling this Big Ticket Burger!

Or are we… ?

Imagine – your client is IN THE DESERT!

Three days away from food… Knowing he has TWO DAYS without food to Live!

And this BURGER is his Lifeline! What’s the value THEN?

Would you pay a million dollars if eating the burger would save your life? Of course.

The Don was a problem solver of BIG problems. Problems where people were prepared to accept huge obligation.

That’s how you make the big bucks. Ask yourself this simple question…

“Who in my market has a major motivation and few perceived options where price is NOT a factor?”

Be creative because the problem might not be as easy as life or death.

It may be a need to avoid DEATH

Or it could be to remove FEAR.

How about the need for STATUS or PRESTIGE.

Here is the BIG point I want you to take away

WHO you sell to is far more important than WHAT you sell.

Capiche? I hope so.

The winner of eBay’s most expensive charity auction ever, who asked to remain anonymous, paid $2.6 million in 2010 for a lunch date with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, also known as the third-richest person in the world.

Who knows they probably ate burgers.

It’s not about the burgers.

Find a highly emotive group of buyers with few perceived options and money to solve the problem and you have the recipe to command premium prices that will make you rich.

Simple – but not easy.

“Who in my market has a major motivation and few perceived options where price is NOT a factor?”

Come up with a long list of answers and test each until you find a winner.

Don Richard Petrie

PS Want to be the smartest marketer in your industry? You can be on the fast track working with me and a small group of highly action oriented ambitious people for six months? Click HERE for Q&A details.

I am currently sitting in lobby (because of a wireless connection) of the Port Douglas Sheraton Hotel in Northern Queensland as penance.

The weather is 28 degrees and there is nothing to do all day.

Port Douglas is place I knew little about until Julia and I arrived here on Saturday morning at 12.30am.

The only thing I did know was that we had sent a few previous winners from my Speed Marketing mastermind coaching groups here.

Sam and Claire Hazledine, Andreas Becker and his wife, Steve and Carol Strain and I think Eryn Cutler and Jonothan Beckingsdale, maybe more I can’t remember.

People have often asked what was the secret to their success. Why did they do better?

My answer is that there is no secret, the answer is available to everyone.

1. Massive ACTION and implementation on what you learn
2. Putting yourself in the right ENVIRONMENT to succeed

The photos the winners took of Port Douglas was beautiful so we decided since I have not started a coaching group for over a year I nominated myself as the marketer of the year, and guess what… I won.

Here the view from my deck chair (I have moved).

Which is more important the ACTION or the ENVIRONMENT?

I believe that unless you are bone lazy that the environment drives the actions.

Roger Twose once told me that people earn +-10% of the five people you spend the most time with. When I worked out my five, he is probably right. We become who we hang out with most.

It is true of kids too. You can judge a kid by the quality of his/her friends.

Being 45 now and away from competitive sport I find it harder to keep the weight below 100kg. When I played professional sport it was easy. I would be training in the team environment four days a week and probably hitting the gym 4 days a week by myself.

Keeping weight down was so easy because you did not have to focus on pushing yourself hard, you just had to turn up. The action was automatic.

Once you were in the RIGHT environment success was guaranteed. Look at the average players who go to play rugby for Canterbury.

Now back to Port Douglas.

The wrong environment can sabotage even the best ACTION

Julia and I have played golf everyday (bar one) since we have been here.

Incidentally it is the only golf course I have played where there are crocodile warnings. In fact if your ball is within 2 meters of the water – you leave it. Apparently crocs can fly out of the water at you without warning.

This ball was not retrieved by me for obvious reasons.

Now in case you think I am exaggerating …on day one sitting 15 meters from the white tees on hole #10 was a three meter salt water croc.

Not a stuffed one but a really evil looking mother with one eye on the water and the other on lunch. I have a photo of it on Julia’s camera – but that camera is somewhere else right now. I will post the croc when I download. But for now just realise that playing on the back nine is a ‘looking over your should experience’.

Jesus wept.

Does not matter what my actions were my golf on the back nine (croc country) was terrible.

It’s like playing with a serial killer lurking behind you. Even when you don’t see him you know he is there watching, waiting.

Right ACTION wrong ENVIRONMENT.

The question you need to ask is ‘what is my environment like?’
Are you surrounded by people on the rise or by people telling you that you ‘can’t do it’, ‘the economy is tough’

I am starting a new coaching group really soon. Maybe you should put yourself in this environment.

You need a great product or service, and be prepared to work – hard for the next six months building something sustainable… A selling machine.

If you are interested watch this video HERE.

For some people good marketing will change your life. This is not an exaggeration. Good marketing equals more sales and higher margins.

I will only select people and businesses I think can be winners with my marketing.

It’s 3.37pm.

The drinks trolley is shaking its way past me.
Some kid is diving in the pool.
Julia is thinking about catching up with some newly made friends we meet in the Daintree Rain Forest yesterday. Fortunately I think they are rich – they take up my 5 person average way up.

Huh!

There is some silly girl (about 20 years old) walking past me with a cigarette in her hand. She probably hangs around with other smokers.

Environment rules our lives for better or worse.

Enjoy the sun.

Richard
PS Check THIS out.

The result a moving video of an overweight pre-teenager, Nathan, forcing himself to run down a lonely road in London, Ohio—is fantastic. Note that it’s filmed in a single, unedited take.

Once again the lesson here is ‘What are you really selling?”, certainly not shoes- that’s too hard.

Now selling ‘greatness’… that’s a lot more valuable to people – so a lot easier to sell.

Comprehendo?

Imagine if you stopped selling your core service and started selling what people really wanted?

Huh – there’s a thought!

(Watch the video then read the doc below if you want to discover how to apply this psych tactic)

#2 Most Powerful Selling Question

Richard

richard@speedmarketing.co.nz

1) tells a story
2) Engages us emotionally
3) sells without really selling

PLUS it is something you can do on a shoe string.
See the video below where Jeff and Anna ‘model’ this ad themselves.

Here’s Jeff and Anna’s version for the Speed marketing marketer of the year competition.

Then read this document below

Bullet # 13 The Secret of the Monkey’s Fist

(This strategy is probably responsible for making me and my clients more money than any other.)

Imagine you were driving down the road and saw a herd of purple cows in the paddock. You would stop, take photos and tell 100 people as fast as you could, ‘I saw a purple cow today’.

You would instantly become infected and become viral because you saw something remarkable.

In one sentence the strategy is… do something so remarkable that people feel they have to remark about you everywhere they go. This is your marketing.

In my coaching groups we challenge you to create a ‘Remarkable Client Experience’.
So remarkable that people are forced to talk about you to such an extent that it drives business to your door. Aaron from Swisher Hygiene is probably the most famous example.

There is not enough drama and theatre in peoples marketing.

Pike Place Fish Market – has achieved this remarkable status. So has Disneyland.

Here is a video for a new TV channel. They have also risen to the challenge.
Don’t just enjoy this video – ask yourself ‘How could I create something remarkable?’

NB Bear in mind it’s the video they wanted because a video can easily become viral, not the people at the event. Can you create a scene and collect a video that goes viral and promotes your business?