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It is always important that you use the right terms when marketing your product to potential buyers. The right terminology may mean increased enquiries for your product and possibly more sales.

Failure to use these terms may leave potential customers undecided or going to the competition to satisfy their needs. Your competitors may be making more sales by using these terms intelligently while you are still stuck with dry unattractive terms in your promotional materials.

In using these attractive terms care must be taken not to overuse them or to display mere rhetoric with no matching action to back them. You ought to choose which terms to use and when the right mix of terms may be used together. Circumstances may also not allow you to use certain terms at certain times and sound discretion must be applied in their usage.

Apart from advertising copy and sales promotion materials the terms may be suitably used whenever talking to potential customers. You ought to speak with confidence and emphasis if they are to believe your claims regarding your products.

Here is a listing and brief descriptions of these terms:

FREE: Perhaps the first and foremost of these terms. You ought to give the customer something free to persuade him to buy your product and not those of your competition. It could be free advice, a free report or another product of lesser value. But the free offer must be tied to the buying of the product otherwise you may not make substantial sales.

MONEY: Mention money and everybody’s attention is caught. It could be “great Value for money” or a donation to a worthy cause or a sweepstake tied to the buying of the product. Find out a way of factoring the issue of money in your sales material if you want to make more sales.

NEW: If the product is new or if there are new facts or ingredients in the product then say so. It will create interest from potential buyers. Everyone loves new things and people are willing to abandon old unattractive products for new better ones. Some do it just to break the monotony.

SAVINGS/REDUCED PRICES/PRICES SLASHED/DISCOUNT: Customers want goods at lower prices and use the money saved for other needs. If you can demonstrate that the prices have been reduced whether by giving a discount or by selling at a lower price then you are likely to attract prospective customers.

QUALITY: You ought to tell your customers that your products are of a high quality to win their confidence. Mentioning a quality standard you have attained or showing a quality mark from a national or international standards body such as the International Standards Organisation (ISO) may easily demonstrate this

BUY NOW!: Don’t forget to mention this term at the end of your ad. Put it in a conspicuous place in a bold, big font size somewhere in your ad and it may work like magic. This term helps to inform the doubting prospect to take action now and not later.

LIMITED TIME OFFER: If you are giving away free goods with your product or are giving an irresistible offer it is best to make it for a short but reasonable time. This will cause whoever is interested in what you are offering to expedite his buying decision so that he does not miss it. This is where the use of this term comes in. The use of this term should be used after taking into consideration the type of offer you are giving whether it is attractive enough to prospective customers and the quantity of products in stock whether they will be sold in sufficient quantities within the time offer period.

MONEY BACK GUARANTEE: By giving your customers a 30 days money back guarantee and no questions asked if they are not satisfied with the product if they return it in a saleable condition, you are demonstrating a measure of credibility and reliability of the product. Do not fail to give this guarantee. You will definitely win over the doubting customer by giving him the guarantee.

TESTIMONIALS: Provide brief statements from satisfied customers who liked your product and include their names and location. This shows that your product is genuine and has been tried and tested to some customers’ satisfaction.

BENEFITS/GAIN: Explain to the customer the benefits he is going to get by using the product. We use products because of the utility we expect to derive from them and an explanation on what will be obtained from their use is important.

ADVANTAGES: Even if you do not mention this term, please explain the superiority of your products over you rivals’ products. What features are more outstanding? Is the quality much higher? Are the ingredients more and is the price lower?

ONLY: By specifying the uniqueness of your product you are very much likely to entice prospective customers to buy your products. This uniqueness may best be expressed by using the term “only” appropriately. This shows customers you have an edge over competitors, materials and products to delight their customers and stay ahead of the competition.

Please note that the use of these terms on their own will not make high sales without the presence of a valuable product and the right mix of factors such as a strong distribution network, attractive packaging and a strong brand name, an effective and efficient friendly customer service among a host of other factors.

The whole business must be geared towards providing better customer service and care and continually improve its marketing materials.

Mere usage of terms without ensuring that your products meet the highest safety standards and customer expectations will not do much to improve sales. The company must develop ways of measuring and meeting customer expectations if it is to gain and maintain a high market share.

About The Author

Abdallah Khamis Abdallah is a freelance copywriter and ghostwriter. To learn more about how you and

your business can benefit from viral and credibility marketing solutions visit his website at: http://www.qualitywritingsolutions.com.

Individual sales people, as well as sales managers and business owners, all share the same concern. How to sell more without burning everyone out, or paying too much for marketing.

That’s a dilemma that has certainly been solved, quite scientifically, and I’d like to share it with you now …

Executive Summary

Everyone knows that 95% of businesses fail within 5 years. Not so many people realize that even in the top 500 businesses in the world, within 2 years if history is any judge, more than 50% of them won’t be there!

So size is no guarantee of survival, let alone success. To survive, a business must continually grow its sales, and the only way it can do that is to remain relevant to the market, and retain the capacity to communicate its relevance in a meaningful way.

Whereas one of our previous reports covered this question from the business marketing perspective, this short report now looks at how the sales person should integrate his/her own activities in order to leverage the whole sales process!

It’s true that the notes provided in this report are necessarily simplistic - such a subject demands a book! But at least by reading you’ll see the steps that are required, and you’ll certainly be able to make positive changes that will result in a better understanding of what it takes to achieve your sales goals, together with some solid steps to get there.

You Need to Understand, Much More Precisely, What Parts of What You Do Actually Work

We have shown over and over again that in every business there is a Unique Selling Equation (USE) that provides a kind of secret recipe for success.

Via brainstorming, either in-house with your team, or perhaps even by sitting and analysing the return on each sales activities you engage in, you too can discover that predictive USE.

This automatically achieves 2 important agendas.

• Firstly most sales people find they save an enormous amount of time that they were previously spending on unproductive activities. It’s very important to literally dump activities that don’t “earn their keep”!
• Secondly, once you have an equation that gives a predictable result, you have complete control over sales levels.

Do the Important Things More Often

This might sound simple but in fact it actually describes a cycle:

Schedule it >>> Track it >>> Analyse it >>> Refine it >>> Schedule it, etc.

For this to work, it means that there must be a documented system and that system is inviolable. For instance if you have scheduled in a crucial activity like networking, you don’t go booking a client for that time!

Why? Because if you keep allowing clients to book over the top of scheduled selling activities, you’ll soon run out of clients! A client who doesn’t understand that is sabotaging your business, and that’s as bad as winning a client who doesn’t pay!

Sure, from time to time it’s a necessity, but only in an emergency, such as a client leaving the country and needing to see you NOW. Don’t allow your schedule to be upset because you’ll literally “ruin the recipe” for reaching your sales goals.

Do it Better

To be more effective you must, without doubt, commit to being a learner. In particular give your attention to:

1. Learning more effective ways to describe your product or service.

   This means getting inside the mind of your client and really understanding the true reasons he or she is buying from you. It also means understanding and using the exact same language as the client. To get a better handle on this, take a look at our free report “Why Better Marketing Strategies Add Up to More Customers Calling YOU”.

2. Learn to understand body language and other non-verbal communication from the client, so well that you can:

• Gain fabulous rapport even with tough clients
• Identify an objection coming even before the client is aware of it and “cut it off at the roots”
• Respond appropriately to more and more subtle buying signals
3. Dump “closing” and substitute “wrap-ups” instead.

   These are much more natural and respectful ways of completing the sales transaction. Trust me, people are sick to death of closes, which often didn’t work anyway. In addition many of them were quite offensive to the intelligence of the listener!

4. Learn how to replace cold calling by finding out how to get masses of interested and qualified clients calling YOU.

   There are so many strategies to achieve this, and I recommend the above report, as well as our article on intelligent networking, also available free from our web site, in order to achieve this step. It’s much easier than you think!

It Doesn’t Have to Cost a Fortune to Get This Knowledge!

Believe it or not, all of this and very much more is contained within what is the most up-to-date, and also the cheapest, book on intelligent selling that you could possibly consider buying. Hot off the presses is “How to Double Your Sales in 30 Days - and Keep Doubling Them”.

This incredible 127-page manual comes complete with assignments for your progress, case studies, trouble shooting, and even tracking pro-formas to get the quantification/systemisation part down pat.

If you want, you can even get on-line personalised help, not only from me but from a working party of peers. If you’re a business owner or sales manager, there’s even a special forum just for you to deal with issues relating to team management and development.

Take a look at the contents and see for yourself by visiting http://www.speedbusinessnetworking.com/speedbook.html/.

Please let me know what you think!

Christine Sutherland is the CEO of Speed Business Networking, a membership-based site dedicated to providing hands-on help to SME’s who are seeking a more immediate and responsive alternative to expensive consulting services.

Once upon a time, telemarketing was a relatively new thing. The idea of people calling you up at your home to try to sell you something was unheard of, but it quickly became very profitable. Suddenly, there were telemarketing companies popping up all over the place. It was no longer safe to answer your phone. People were starting to get annoyed, to put it mildly.

To the rescue came congress and the beginning of telemarketing laws as we know them today was just on the horizon.

Congress actually got into the act in 1991. What they did was pass an act that granted consumers certain rights to defend themselves against these annoying telemarketing calls, no offense to those in the industry. One of the things they did, which was actually a work of genius, was to write up what was called an anti telemarketing script for consumers to use when receiving a call they suspected was a telemarketer. In this script they would ask questions like, “Are you calling to sell me something?” “Can you tell me your full name?” “Can you tell me the company name?” “Do they have a do not call list?” “Can you put me on that list?” If they answer no to any of these questions then you can legally sue them.

Congress was finally going to take a proactive role against annoying telemarketing calls. In addition to the script, obviously there had to be laws put in place. Unfortunately, congress didn’t have control over the telephones. This was an FCC matter. So the best congress could do was to go to the FCC and ask them to solve this problem, giving the FCC their suggestion to set up a national database of telephone numbers of all consumers who wished not to be called by telemarketers.

However, the FCC had other ideas, which didn’t surprise anybody. After all, by reducing the number of calls made, this meant less money for the phone companies and certainly this was not in the FCC’s best interests as unhappy phone companies meant an unhappy FCC. Therefore, what the FCC proposed was, what they called a more “cost efficient” series of “company do not call lists”, which essentially put the burden of calling every company the consumer didn’t want to be bothered by, on the consumer himself. So either you had to call the company beforehand, which was pretty hard to do, or you had to wait for them to call you first. Yes, this was certainly a great solution that the FCC had, one that nobody but the telemarketers and the FCC liked.

However, it didn’t last long. Finally, ten years later, the FTC did what the FCC wouldn’t do. Because of the drop in long distance rates, calls from overseas from telemarketers started to become very common. Many of these were outright scams. This is when the FTC said, enough is enough and stepped in.

Basically, what the FTC did was make it so that some serious restrictions were put on calls coming in from automated machines. No longer could these machines be the whole call itself. At some point a real operator had to come on and if the consumer wished, he could ask the operator a number of questions and ultimately be put on a do not call list which would take care of calls for all companies, not just the one calling. If the company failed to do this, they were held accountable.

The law itself is pages long and there is no need to reprint it here. You can see this law online if you wish by going to the FTC web site. You can register there to be placed on the do not call list. Telemarketing companies have to pay a fee to get this list and if you are on it, they must not call you or be subject to heavy fines.

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Michael Russell
Your Independent guide to Telemarketing
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