Jay Abraham Club

Continuing with my summary of Jay Abraham�s Mastermind Marketing System, this week’s contents talks about some questions every entreprenuer should ask himself of his business. This is part 8 of a 12-part series.

If you can’t paint a clear an accurate picture of where you want to go, you can’t get there.

There are a lot of different avenues to the same outcome. Define what success means to you, what you want and what you do not want. Ask yourselves these questions:

Continue reading » Critical Questions for the Successful Entrepreneur

You probably know about the power of endorsements. And also how risk reversals can be used to reduce the risk for the prospective client. How about combining them both together? This is what Jay Abraham did in the latest email he sent out.

Continue reading » The Passion Test by Chris and Janet Attwood

This is part 4 of a 12-part comprehensive summary of Mastermind Marketing System.

A Trick Question

How many ways are there to grow your business?

Not 1000, not 100, not 10. There are only three things you need to focus on:

Continue reading » The Three Most Powerful Ways to Increase Business – Increasing Your Number of Clients

In a normal risk reversal offer, you provide a product or service to your client and give them a money back guarantee. This usually comes with a time frame of 30 days, 60 days or even up to a year.

While it beats going around without a risk reversal offer, there may still be a heavy commitment (depending on the price) required from your prospective client.

A more advanced way of doing a risk reversal offer is to offer your product or service with no money down required with billing only after x number of days. This is likely to give you higher sales than the normal risk reversal but may also attract some freebie seekers.

An improvement to that method is to take a initial token charge of say a dollar to qualify the prospect. The remaining amount can then be charged to the card after x number of days.

I would like to share with you a case study of the “one dollar risk reversal” in action.

Dr Marc Dussault of Jay Abraham Asia Pacific is conducting a series of Business Mastery Secrets weekend seminars in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.

Now, what Marc has done is that he has offered to let anyone attend the 2-day seminar for just an initial payment of one dollar.

So, anyone can attend the full 2 days, and if they decide the seminar is not worth the price of admission, they can even get their $1 back. On the other hand, if they think the seminar is well worth the money, they do not have to do anything and they will be billed the remaining amount for the seminar seven days after the event.

This gives people a chance to actually go through the entire seminar and make a judgement for themselves rather than relying on any sales pitch.

You might ask, “What about those freebie seekers? People who signup with no intention of ever paying no matter how good the seminar is?“

Yes, there are going to be a few freebie seekers. But think about it. By using this approach, there will be an marked increase in the number of signups. Why worry about not collecting money for that 5 refunds when you are going to get 100 more signups?

In Marc’s case, there are a couple of other things to bear in mind:

1) There is an added incentive for Marc to make sure that the seminar delivers or even overdelivers on the value to minimise on the number of refunds. One way of doing it is to add on bonuses to the original offer.

This goes for any risk reversal that you are going to employ. Your product or service must be what you said it is. Underpromise and overdeliver.

2) There will be people who pay the $1 and do not show up. As Marc’s venue has a capacity of only about 300 people, this might deprive other people of a seat. For example, if 150 people take up the one dollar offer and only 75 turn up, he would have wasted 75 seats.

He could take a slight risk and accept registrations for more than 300 people. But what happens if all of them turn up?

Having said that, this is still a strategy you can use when you have excess capacity.

Personally, I would prefer using the one dollar strategy for product sales rather than seminars. For a product, the onus is on the buyer to send back the item for a refund. For a seminar like what Marc is doing, there could be many distractions that prevents the buyer from turning up on that day.

Here’s a marketing question from Nikolas:

What’s the best way to present solution to a problem not a problem . How can I present method which guarantee results like better muscle tone, bether breathing, better health so that they can believe this. certainly is the best soultion to them, they see the result, but they dont believe and they quit. So, how can I make them to believe, to respond better, to appreciate the method, to recommend me to someone,…

Hi Nikolas,

There are two simple methods that you can use.

1) Include testimonials from satisfied clients in your marketing materials (sales copy). These testimonials should include the full name and even photos so that readers know that they are real. Have you been asking your existing clients for testimonials?

2) Use risk reversal when you present your solution. One way is by using a unconditional 90 day (or some other time frame) money-back guarantee. E.g.

“Practice our methods for x months, and if you do not get a better muscle tone, better breathing and better health, I want you to tell me and I will gladly refund your entire purchase price on the spot, no questions asked and no hard feelings either.

If after reading about our methods, you think that it will not work for you, just tell me and I will also refund your entire purchase price, no questions asked. You need not even prove to me that you tried out our methods.”

Here’s an example of a sales letter that uses this risk reversal method effectively. Notice how they made the guarantee more sincere by adding an “on the other hand” clause right after it.

An important note. Conditional guarantees can backfire and should not be used as the only guarantee. They should be used in addition to an unconditional one. E.g.

“Practice our methods for x months, and if you do not get a better muscle tone, better breathing and better health, I want you to tell me and I will gladly refund your entire purchase price on the spot, no questions asked and no hard feelings either.

If after reading about our methods, you think that it will not work for you, just tell me and I will also refund your entire purchase price, no questions asked. You need not even prove to me that you tried out our methods.”

And if you can show me proof that you have tried out our methods diligently for x months, and your health has not gotten better, we will even send you a cheque of $50 to thank you for giving us a try.”

Something like that.

Conditional guarantees, if used correctly, can be very powerful. Of course, the parameters must be measurable.

And if your service/product is expensive, one other thing that you can do to reduce the risk further for them is to allow them to pay by monthly installments instead of one lump sum.

Back when Jay Abraham was promoting his super summit, he actually gave away a series of free reports. Needless to say, I downloaded and read them. One of the strategies that he taught was that of risk reversal.

In any transaction between two parties, one side is always taking more of the risk. If you, as the product or service provider, can remove most or all of the risk from your prospects, then you would have a much greater chance of them becoming your clients. One method that you can employ is that of a money back guarantee. A low percentage of people might abuse the offer but that’s ok. Why should you worry about losing 1-2% of revenue when your baseline revenue can be multiplied 200-300% just by offering that money back guarantee?

One thing you need to take note though; your product or service must live up to it’s claims! Otherwise you will get a high percentage of refunds. I tested out this strategy on some items that I was selling in auction sites. Sales improved significantly and I had no problems with refunds.

Some site updates. I have put up a contact form on the site. One thing that I have learnt is to never put your email address directly on any web site. Some bots surf the net frequently to collect email address. If they find yours, then you can be sure you will start getting a lot of spam.

After thinking for a while, I decided to use my trusted Aweber to implement this. I was already using Aweber for most of my newsletter and subscribers database. Using it for my contact form would make tracking of queries a whole lot easier and save me lots of time. It will also allow me to follow up with these prospective clients from time to time. Anyway, my basic subscription to Aweber allows for unlimited campaigns at no extra cost so why not make the most out of it?

I will discuss about the use of autoresponders and follow-ups in more details at a later date. For now, just remember that when you are building a business, you would want to automate or outsource most of the menial tasks and use your time on business growing activities.

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