Career Articles & Advice

Home-Based Marketing and Sales Success - A Creative Solution
By Alan H. Jordan

You’re in business. You’ve invested money in a home-based business like Creative Memories, Watkins or Kaire International. You like what you’re doing. You’ve bought product, and you’re sponsoring parties. The only problem is that you’re not making enough money. Why? You’ve exhausted your natural market. That is you’ve already contacted all of your friends and family, and those who are interested have bought. Very simply put, you need: (1) a way to motivate your current customer base to buy a lot more; or (2) a wide variety of additional prospects, or (3) ideally, both.

You’ve read articles on generating referrals, but you want more. You want a way to get people that you don’t know to come to your parties. Let’s say you’re a Creative Memories representative. Your goal is to get more folks to your parties and help them to scrapbook. How’s this for a creative solution? Locate a product or service that complements your current business, a product or service that gives you a new reason to contact people, a product or service that can provide additional revenue streams. “Easier said than done,” you say. True, you’ll need to do some research. I suggest that you seek out these characteristics.

• A newsworthy product or service - something about which articles are being written every day, such as literacy or creative ways to help children to do better in school. - This enables you to get publicity, and that means that people whom you’ve never spoken with will come to a meeting. (Hint: Emotional issues are often newsworthy.)
• A complementary characteristic - For example, mothers who scrapbook are often interested in helping their children to read better.
• Joint marketing via workshop potential - A product or service that will motivate venues such as restaurants to help you by telling people about workshops that are held in their establishment. If the product is newsworthy, many restaurants will put up a poster announcing the workshop you’re holding in their establishment. They may also put a small insert into the Guest Check presenters that patrons use when they pay their bill with a credit card or cash. (You keep the sales, they keep the food/drink revenue. It’s a good marriage.) Hint: If you can get people in the door during a normally slow time of day, the venue will be much more open to helping you succeed.
• Nominal entry costs - you need to get more out of your current investment, investing a lot of money in another product is almost certain to undermine your current focus. Ideally, this would include free marketing materials and support.

Now that you’ve done your homework, and you’ve found the right product or service, here are step-by-step suggestions for your success:

1. Find a manager or owner of a venue who will work with you to hold a workshop. Provide them with the marketing materials that will help them help you. If you eat out regularly, simply approach the owners or managers of establishments where you are a regular.
2. Prepare a press release (you may be able to adapt one that is provided by the company with the new product.) Be sure to stress the issue that is being addressed, not the product that is being sold. Before you send out the press release, ask the venue’s manager for his or her opinion. They are likely to suggest one or two ways to improve it, and it will get them involved in your mutual success. What business owner does not want free positive publicity? Now, send it out.
3. Follow up with the press to see if they want to do an article on you, based on the press release.
4. Contact your current customers and invite them to a workshop where the problem will be addressed (e.g. helping young children learn to read) and a solution will be presented. Tell them about the article that you expect to be published. Invite them to meet you at the venue. Briefly explain the synergy between your current product and the additional one.
5. During the presentation, offer the solution you’ve suggested. At the very end, also hand out your traditional product literature.
6. Reiterate the value of the solutions you offer, and ask for referrals. You can do this easily, by asking people to suggest others who might want to attend a follow-up meeting in the venue.
7. After the meeting, show the venue manager that you’ve received a list of people to invite to your next workshop there, and ask for his or help in getting more people into the establishment.

A word of caution: Make certain that you can explain the synergism between your current product and new line in fifteen seconds or less. If you select your product or service wisely and are enthused by the synergy with your existing product or service, you will energize your current customer base, and attract many new customers.

Alan Jordan is a principal of LB Creative, LLC’s Advanta Press, which helps businesses to increase sales. He is the author of six business books and several children’s books including The Monster on Top of the Bed which may be viewed as a streaming video or downloaded to an iPod http://www.LetsBeCreative.org after registering (free.)

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