Every week I receive offers, or opportunities as most of the people tell me, to sell their product to my massive mailing list. They fluff their feathers and tell me what a great product they have, give me clicks on how to find out more information about their product – usually a click to a hyped up sales letter.
I kindly write them a response email – no, but thank you. One out of three respond to this email – but, but, but, why not? I can earn X dollars just by doing nothing (I never could get their thinking about the “do nothing part”). One out of fifty actually send me their product, many times an ebook only, or their “fr*e*e ebook – just a sales job in disguise -- and can’t understand it when I’m not willing to spend hours of my time reading on a computer screen (or heavens forbid printing out the 100 or so pages) getting a kink in my neck or pain in my click finger. Only to really find five pages of “real” information hidden in the content some where.
It is rare, and I mean really rare, that I receive a proposal, get a good product as a “check it out / let me prove it is an excellent product I would want to recommend.”
What these people fail to understand is:
1. Customer care is important to any good business person. If I would recommend any product, without experiencing it myself and finding it to be true to its word, my mailing list would disappear. A list that took me years to build trust with can and often does disappear, overnight even, when abused.
2. That there is work involved in all this process. I have to read all the material, evaluate it for its effectiveness, write up a recommendation, and post it on my website or in my newsletter. (Knock, knock guys and gals – where is the “do nothing in this?”)
3. Even after all this if I’m making $5 for each sale with possible sales only reaching $200, it isn’t a good deal. Not for me, not for anyone. My time is worth more than that. I received one such offer just this morning. Earn 55% on the product sale. The item was only $19.99, and the market for the topic was over saturated – meaning little to no sales. Or the one I received yesterday, 10% of $199 product that included three CDs and a printed book of 300 plus pages plus an audio tape. And all I had to do first was buy the product. And the unlaughable part past the purchase was after spending several weeks going through the material, I also get the opportunity to write the review on it, sign up through their affiliate program and then wait for their check to come in the mail after it goes over $100 (in my estimate that would have been every six months). I wrote back and asked the question, “Where, what country, are you located?” No response. But through research, I found them in India. Would I have ever probably seen a check in my mailbox? I doubt it.
I suggest that these people get off their ass(ets) and put a customer care plan together. Not just for them. And not try to market it solely from a financial angle. Anyone with common sense in their business knows that protecting customers has to be of concern.
In the future, if anyone wants to send me a proposal they will need to:
1. Write me and tell me about the product and offer it gratis if I think its worth pursuing.
2. Think of how important it is to save the integrity of my mailing list. In other words, “how is it going to affect my mailing list?”
3. Give a decent revenue percentage for the amount of work that we need to do in order to sell it.
Another case in point is a client I’m doing some web work for. She uses a software package, likes it, becomes an affiliate, has the information posted up on her website, posts a paragraph next to it, and then takes a wait and see position. And guess what, nothing sells.
This doesn’t work people! Knock, knock, anyone in there. If you are going to agree to sell someone else’s product, you have to do more work than that. And is the ROI – return on investment (include your time in with this people) worth it.
Hey folks, this is common business sense.
Well, I’m off my high horse now and coming back down to earth. I just had to say my piece on all this once and for all. Personally, I have just gone to deleting all of these wonderful opportunities now – unfortunate actually because some good ones are probably slipping through. Today, I’ve grown up a little in this process though and come to compromise.
When someone gives me their wonderful offer AND meets all these other requirements, they have at least 3 minutes of my attention.
The question this morning for you is, how much do you care about your customers. Not just intellectually. But what are you doing as part of your customer care? What is your customer care policy? Is it posted on your website? In your printed documentation?
Oh, I am on my own case with this one and taking notice on my own advice today. I don’t have one on my website. I don’t have one written down. I don’t have one that’s printed in my documentation. However, I will have one by the end of this week. In the meantime, I have to do some thinking about the subject and decide on where to start out on this journey. I encourage you to do the same. It does make a difference in how people trust you. It will make a difference how people will do business with you.
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