FBO: Show Your Viewers the Money!

Monday, September 29th 2008 by Shanel Yang

[For “FBO: Go Where Your Biggest Viewers Hang Out,” click here.]

This part of the “FBO” or “For Bloggers Only” series is actually NOT JUST for bloggers, but FOR ALL entrepreneurs, employees, and nonprofit organizations seeking to raise funds to support their goals.

If you want millions of viewers, readers, customers, clients, members, etc., then you’ll want to follow along as we go through, one by one, the rainmaking secrets provided by Jeffrey J. Fox in his book How to Become a Rainmaker: The Rules for Getting and Keeping Customers and Clients.
SHOW YOUR VIEWERS THE MONEY!

A. FOX’S TIP NO. 6 FOR ALL RAINMAKERS

Fox’s Tip No. 6 for how to become a great salesperson, or rainmaker, is another pithy catch-phrase: “Show them the money!” As he explains in his book:

Customers buy for only two reasons: to feel good or to solve a problem. Going out to dinner, buying scuba equipment, or getting a new puppy fall into the “feel good” category. The prevailing purchase motivation for organizations is to solve a problem. The solution to the problem can always be expressed in financial terms—in dollars and cents. If a company invests $100,00 in advertising, they expect that advertising to generate $500,000 in sales. When a motor manufacturer replaces a cheap $0.08 rubber O-ring with a $0.10 Viton O-ring, they expect to save $0.30 per O-ring with reduced warranty claims. A tree surgeon uses a $900 saw because it cuts five times faster than a cheaper saw, saving him $50 a day in reduced labor costs.

Rainmakers don’t sell fasteners or valves or washing machines or double-paned windows or tax audits or irrigation systems or training programs or golf clubs. Rainmakers sell money! They sell reduced downtime, fewer repairs, better gas mileage, higher deposit interest, increased output, decreased energy usage, more wheat per acre, more yardage per swing.

Rainmakers help the customer see the money. Rainmakers turn benefits into dollars. The plumber who generates the most revenue doesn’t charge $50 for a service all, he sells as clean, dry basement for $100, saving the customers thousand-dollar carpet.

The lock salesperson doesn’t sell locks, he sells security for valuables. The pool salesman doesn’t just sell recreation, he sells an increase in home value.

The number one salesperson for a company that made cough medicine never sold a single bottle of cough medicine. He was by far the leading salesperson, but he never sold a cough drop.

The company made products for people with colds, sore throats, hay fever, and sinus conditions. The company made throat lozenges, cough drops, gargles, and sprays. The company trained its sales force on how the product worked, all about the product chemistry, and why their products were the best. The company’s success depended on how many cases of cough medicine and gargle it sold. That meant the company’s success depended on the demand for the product; the number of people with colds.

The company made its product available to the public by selling to pharmacies, to drugstore owners. In order to make its products more appealing to the drugstore owner than the competitors’ medicine, the salespersons’ company offered an incentive: For every five cases of products purchased the druggist could either get one case of product for free (to resell at retail prices) or a cash check for the equivalent purchase price of one case. (The free case or check were both worth $25.)

The sales person realized that his customers were not people with colds. His customers were the drugstore owners. (People with colds were the druggists’ customers.) So despite all the technical product training, unlike his colleagues, the number one salesperson never talked about the products’ formulas, strength, or soothing aspects.

The number one salesperson talked to the drugstore owners about money.

The salesperson explained the five-case purchase incentive, asking the drugstore owners if they would prefer the free product or the money (in a bank check). Almost always, the drugstore owners would opt for the money.

The salesperson didn’t sell cures for coughs, he sold a rebate check of $25 for every five cases of product purchased. After the drugstore owner agreed to take the money, the salesperson would ask, “How much money would you like?” Getting more money meant buying more product, and that’s what many pharmacists did.

The number one sales person sold money! All the other salespeople regaled druggists with facts on cough suppressant chemicals and breath-free passages. They were far-distant followers in the contest.

Always show the customer the money. Always dollarize. … Quantify the customer’s return on his investment in your product. Calculate the financial consequences to the customer—the cost of going without your solution.

Rainmakers don’t sell products; they sell the dollarized value the customer gets from the products.

Rainmakers sell money.

B. APPLYING FOX’S TIP NO. 6 TO BLOGGERS

If you want to become an A-list blogger, apply Fox’s Tip No. 6 above to your blogging business by showing your viewers/readers the dollarized value! Of what? Of their investment of time and effort into viewing/reading your blog! And, if yours is a self help blog like mine, then add to that the investment of actually following the advice on your blog. If you are selling any books, consulting services, or anything else through your blog, then dollarize the value of those things, too!

For example, I dollarized the value of new bloggers following the advice of this FBO series in “Why Should Millions View Your Blog?” Can you dollarize the value of your viewers/readers viewing/reading your blog? If your blog falls into the “feel good” category, then you might not need to. Here are some examples of feel good blogs:

1. icanhascheezburger
2. Boing Boing
3. dooce

While none of these might make you happy, they clearly make millions of other people very happy—happy enough to keep going back and spreading the world—ergo, making their creators very rich and presumably also very happy!

If yours isn’t a feel good blog, how can you dollarize the value your viewers/readers put into it? For example, I wrote a post called “How I Paid Off $50,000 of Debt in One Year” and detailed in it the dollar amount cost savings of changing specific lifestyle habits. Similarly, I detailed the dollarized value of being frugal and becoming an entrepreneur in “How Dad Turned $50 into $1.2 Million.”

There are also entire blogs dedicated to helping you save/invest money that also provide useful dollarized value info along with their helpful advice. My favorites are:

1. Get Rich Slowly
2. The Simple Dollar
3. Millionaire Mommy Next Door

Let’s not forget that time is money, too! So, even if you can’t dollarize your advice per se, you can at least quantify it in terms of time—as in total number of hours saved by following your advice. And, such advice doesn’t even have to be innovative! However, if you quantify even the most obvious advice for your readers, it makes it more useful to them and, hopefully, more persuasive.

For example, in “The Pros and Cons of TV,” I not only discuss the pros and cons of TV, but I also point out that Americans spend on average 4 hours watching TV per day, which amounts to 14,600 hours over 10 years—or a grand total of one and a half years straight if you stack all those hours on top of each other! Does that help you make a better informed decision about the true “cost” of that particular leisure activity? It helped me decide! Although I’d heard all the negatives of watching TV before, seeing those numbers staring at me in black and white finally woke me up to the fact that I’d lost probably more than 6 years to zoning out in front of the TV in my 42 years of life! (Though I didn’t start watching TV till my family could afford one when I was six or seven years old, I certainly watched way more than my fair share of the 4-hours-per-day average because I was a real TV hound—even before MTV, but that certainly did it for me and my sisters! Then, the TV was on almost all the time anyone was home and tuned to MTV almost nonstop for years!)

CONCLUSION

Whatever you are “selling,” put it in terms of time or money saved or earned, and you will be 50% - 100% more effective! How’s that for quantifying the benefit? : )

If you would like your own copy of Rainmaker someday, here’s what it looks like.

[For “FBO: Keep Your Promises—No Excuses, No Exceptions,” click here.]

[For entire “FBO” or “For Bloggers Only” series, click here.]

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