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Virtual Insider June 15, 2004 Issue 6 by JERPAT
Patty Benton,
Editor © 2005 JERPAT All statements made in this newsletter are not legal advisement or endorsement of a product. All information provided in this newsletter is strictly opinions and suggestions of the Virtual Insider writers. JERPAT Virtual Assistants and the writers for Virtual Insider cannot be held liable.
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by Patty Benton jerpatvas@comcast.net Dear Readers, I would like to start by apologizing for the lack of newsletter last month. Unfortunately, we had a death in the family and had to leave town at the last minute. I thank all of you who knew that sent kind words and encouragement. This has been a busy month for me with my business having a growth spurt, my daughter doing potty training, and finding out I was pregnant. This month we will be focusing on marketing, as we all continue to strive to grow our businesses. We have a wonderful article written for us by Dale Noles of Virtual Accuracy on Cold Calling. If you are like me, I hear that term and I get chills, but Dale has been wonderful in supporting me and convincing me it is an important part of growing my business. Dale and his wife, Becki, can testify how cold calling has grown their business tremendously in just a few months. You can catch this article in the “Spotlight Feature.” I am looking for readers who want to gain some “free advertisement” for their business. There are several ways you can get this free advertisement. You can send in a comment or suggestion (we love those), send an email request for our Featured Reader column, or refer someone to sign up (see the advertisement section for more details). You guys have been wonderful at recommending our newsletter to others, and our subscription base has grown quite rapidly over the last 6 months, so thank you!!! Enjoy this month’s articles and be sure to write in with your questions and suggestions! God bless, Patty Please send newsletter questions, comments and ideas by sending an email to newsletter@jerpat.org.
JERPAT Virtual Assitants Owned and Operated by Patty Benton www.moretime4u.org and www.virtualvacoach.com No news this month.
Legaltypist Owned and Operated by Andrea Cannavina No news this month.
ePro Virtual Services, Inc. Owned and Operated by Vivi Gonzalez No news this month.
Ennen's Computer Services Owned and Operated by Diana Ennen Virtual Word Publishing is pleased to announce the addition of WAHMJewelry. A new marketing tool, a bracelet with the name of your business on it, and other custom designed jewelry. We wanted something to spice up the business a little and nothing does it better than jewelry. Also, cell phone holder necklaces in leather or Chinese Silk. Check it out at www.virtualwordpublishing.com.
Spotlight Feature Cold Beginnings on Cold Callingby Dale Noles “Cold Calling.” Those two little words strike fear and anxiety in most people. One might wonder why that it is the case. Is it related to speaking with someone that they do not know? Potentially. Is it “phone-a-phobia”? Not likely. You would probably spend countless hours on the phone with an old friend or your mother. Why then does cold calling make your heart beat fast and your hands sweat? The problem can stem from the fear of rejection. Growing up, if you ever dated anyone, you probably experienced anxiety over asking someone out on a date for fear that they would say no. Well, this is not high school. This is the real world. You can live your entire life and never face the fear of asking someone out, but if you want to survive in business, cold calls must be made! 1. Knowing Your Target Market To get started with cold calling, your first step is getting familiar with who you want your clients to be. What does that mean? Determine the professionals or types of individuals your product and or service appeals to. Who wants what you have? This is your market. Then take it a step further and determine within that market, who the specific professionals or types of individuals are and why they will most likely to buy from you. This becomes your target market. It sounds much harder than it really is, but keep your focus and you will do fine. 2. Knowing Your Services and Relating Their Core Benefits The next step to consider is familiarizing yourself with your business. At first glance, this step seems easy, but it isn’t as easy as you might think. You have to think outside of the box. What do you want to offer to your target market? If your target market is Real Estate Professionals (REPs) do you want to handle their direct mailings, entering and updating listings, produce flyers and sell sheets or handle transaction coordination? 3. Top Five Features of Services You need to assume that your target market doesn’t know anything about the virtual assistance industry, which may be the case. You have to consider your client’s needs and address them head on. Why do they need a virtual assistant? So you can save them time, so what? Why should they care? They will care because you care enough about what they want not just what they need. Think about what your client can do with the time that you can provide them with. 4. Planning Your Script Every successful cold caller needs to have a script. Why? When you make cold calls, you control the direction of the call. You need to get your point across quickly and clearly. You have about ten seconds to gain their interest. You want to be sure to include your name, your company’s name, what you do, why you have what they need and any objections that you can think of. Be sure that your message is upbeat. Use words that you are comfortable with. Make it sound conversational. This is not the time to try out five-dollar words. 5. Practice This is key to making a good presentation. After you have written your script, review it. Does it flow? Are you tripping over words? If you are, you need to revise it. Remember to continue to practice until you feel comfortable with the script. 6. Role Playing Find a partner that you are comfortable with and ask them to be a role-playing partner. Ask them to get into the mindset of your target market. Start by pretending to make the actual call from the pickup through the close. Ask your partner to come up with objections. Use what you wrote to overcome the objections. If you come across an objection that you do not know how to get around, rewrite the script to incorporate the objection as a selling point in the script. The best objection is one that is answered before it is asked! That tells the other person on the phone that you understand what they want, not just what they need. 7. Test the Water Pick up the phone and start calling your target market. If you don’t call, you should not expect to do much business, this rings true in most every business with a few exceptions. Stick to your script. Measure your results. How far did you get on your script before you were stopped? Does it flow naturally? Do you sound intelligent? Are you covering all the objections? 8. Re-Examine After about twenty calls, you will know if you need to rewrite any part of your script. Look at your measured results and see where the objections come and determine how to overcome them before they are asked. It may be necessary to rewrite the script completely and go through the steps again. You may need to change your script a few times until you find the one that works for you. 9. Perfect Your Techniques Once you have found a script that works, memorize it. Memorize all the objections and how to overcome them. You should be affluent with your script. The person you are calling should not be able to tell that you had a script to begin with. Keep your script close by, in case your brain has a meltdown. The last thing you want it to say is…ah…um…ah. 10. Negative or Positive Cold calling is a numbers game, the more people that you talk to, the greater your chances are of reaching someone who is interested in what you have. Expect to hear, NO! It is inevitable. Someone will say it. Expect to hear, YES! It is inevitable. Someone will say it. If someone decides that they want to buy from you, be prepared to sell them what they want. A good rule of thumb is to expect a three percent return for your efforts. Think of a negative response as one more “No” out of the way and one more “Yes” is coming soon. With all of that said, you are well on your way to great business success. You may have heard the saying, “Use the right tool for the right job.” Cold calling is a phenomenal tool and like any tool if you do not use it, your job is harder to do. Keep your chin up and your ear to the receiver and you will do fine.
Dale Noles is the President of Virtual Accuracy’s virtual assistance practice. His areas of expertise include complex database creation, marketing and website design. For more information visit http://www.VirtualAccuracy.com. Virtual Accuracy is the publisher of "The Accuracy Report", chock-full of marketing, publicity and technology tips and other useful information you can use today. To sign up visit http://www.virtualaccuracy.com/page/archive.html.
Virtual Insider’s Feature by Patty Benton jerpatvas@comcast.net Marketing Tips Marketing is one of the most important pieces of your business plan. Without marketing, people will not be able to find what your business is about and all your wonderful services. So how do you market? What’s the most important thing you can do to market? Though I am definitely not an expert, I have learned through running my own business the importance of marketing, what has worked for me, and what has not worked for me. Below are a few things I have learned through trial and error that will hopefully help you. 1. Set clear marketing goals for yourself. When I first started my business, I just randomly sent out letters. I sent out one letter, and moved on to the next list of names I had researched. 2. Follow up your marketing. If you send a letter via mail, don’t stop with just one. Marketing experts advise you to send 6 pieces of advertisement before “giving up” on the recipient. 3. Decide who you want to market to. Are you a realtor who wants to market to homeowners, reminding them of your services? Are you a VA who works with realtors? What is your target market? Once you decide, focus your marketing efforts on your target market. Forget letting every Joe Brown know about your business. Focus on weeding out those who would best benefit from your services, and spend your marketing dollars on them. 4. If you have an advertising budget, research where you are spending your dollars. Who does that magazine or newsletter reach? Make sure it is your target market. 5. Track your advertising pieces. Give each marketing piece as special code your target market needs to use to redeem your “offered” special. This way you know where each “potential” client heard of you. If you advertise in a newsletter for 6 months, and never get one bite, then you probably don’t want to renew. But if you got 10 new clients, it’s a safe bet that this is a great place to advertise. 6. Follow up. Follow up is a VERY important piece that many of us fall short on (me included). You get a “maybe” or “when I need your services, I’ll call” people. Those are warm leads. They have shown interest, so don’t let them forget you. Set up a drip email campaign and send them information that they would find useful. This keeps you in their mind, without you becoming annoying. Another great thing, pick up the phone every so often and call them up. Show interest in their business, and they will remember you. These are just a few important things that each business owner needs to remember when creating their marketing plan. Look for future issues on marketing, and be sure to read all the articles included.
Patty Benton is the owner of JERPAT Virtual Assistants and JERPAT Web Design, www.moretime4u.org, which provides affordable administrative and web design support to coaches, small businesses, religious organizations, and realtors. Additionally, Patty is a coach for new entrepreneurs interested in venturing into the virtual assistance industry. She has developed a program that is affordable for all. Visit her coaching site at www.virtualvacoach.com for program details and great business resources. If you would like to receive Patty's articles and other tips in your mailbox every month, you can sign up at www.mortime4u.org/home.html. © 2005 JERPAT Virtual Assistants You have permission to reprint this article electronically or in print, as long as the text and byline remain unedited. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated.
by Diana Ennen DeeEnnen@aol.com Marketing your business is essential to its success. You can have the greatest service or the best product, but if you don't market it and let others know about it, then it's doubtful that you'll be very successful. When considering your marketing, you first want to take into account who your clients are, and what your clients might be looking to you to do. To do this, you need to do the following: 1. Know Your Client's Business: The first step is to know your clients. Do some research so you can have a clear understanding of what you clients' business is and what they do. What does this business hope to achieve? What are its needs and how can you meet those needs? What can you do that will allow that client to perform better in business? By knowing your client and finding answers to these questions, you can become an immediate asset to their firm. 2. Offering Clients a Convenience: One of the main conveniences you can offer is that of time. Clients realize that their time is valuable. Anything that will allow your potential clients more freedom with their time is an immediate plus. But you need to be able to show them this in your marketing. Take for example a virtual assisting business— When you market to potential clients letting them know that you will do their correspondence typing, answer their e-mail, run their office while they are out of town, etc., they realize they will have the time they need to do the work that often so desperately needs done. They will have the time to draft that pleading or finalize the proposal. For the realtor, when you do their marketing they can see how they would be allowed the freedom to be out there selling. 3. Solving clients’ problems: If you can find a way to solve a client's problems, then you are able to make your business a valuable asset to them. For example, let's say they are having problems with their website and keeping it up and running and not crashing. If you happen to see that, send that letter outlining your ability to solve just that situation, and can come in and solve that problem, you are making yourself a valuable commodity to this business. They have a problem they need fixed. You have a solution you can solve that problem. They are eager to talk to you immediately to get their site up and running and not miss out on any more missed revenue from their site being down. 4. Proving Clients with Something Better Than What They Have: In your marketing efforts, make sure to mention anything that might be of interest to your clients that they could utilize that they might not have and you do! As an example. As a virtual assistant, you might have Voxwire capabilities. This allows you to do web conferencing. You can offer your clients the convenience of having meetings, classes online, etc. These are essential key points to remember in marketing to obtain clients. Now, it's also important once you get those clients to keep those clients. To do this, you just provide the best possible service always!!
Diana Ennen is the co-author of Up Close and Virtual: A Practical Guide to Starting Your Own Virtual Assistant Business and Words From Home: How To Start and Operate a Home-Based Word Processing Business. She also operates the Virtual Word Publishing website (www.virtualwordpublishing.com), which is geared toward helping others start their own VA business by providing the necessary tips, articles, links, a directory, etc. She is the president of Ennen's Computer Services and can be reached at DeeEnnen@aol.com. In order to use this article in other publications you MUST include this text box.
by Andrea Cannavina Andrea@Legaltypist.com
Marketing is so much more than simply having a professional-looking brochure handy if someone should request it. “Is a brochure required in today’s internet economy?” seems to be a valid question in and of itself. While increased access to the internet made the creation and subsequent explosion of internet-based businesses possible, having a web presence, in my opinion, cannot replace the need for standard printed materials. If you want to be perceived as a professional, you no longer need to have an office in some prominent building downtown, but certainly business cards, brochures and other informative documentation goes a long way to establishing your credibility with potential customers and isn’t that what real marketing is all about?
Don’t get me wrong, your website and how it is worded, its layout and navigation are extremely important from a marketing perspective, especially since you are not limited by size constraints or printing costs. In many instances, your site will provide the initial contact for prospective customers and that is what makes it the most important weapon in your marketing arsenal. It should not be the only weapon, however. (Getting people to find your site is a topic for another time, as entire volumes are written with regard to proper keyword selection and other website optimization procedures.) In any event, once a potential customer has found your site, you really only have a few seconds or minutes for them to decide if you are the answer to their search. Therefore, a bold link in a different color taking readers to a page which lists your services, or a list of what you can do somewhere within the first screen shot is always a good idea.
When deciding on language for your site, it is important that you put yourself in the place of potential customers and go through your site with an objective eye. Often I find that people forget that they know a great deal more about their industry than those seeking their services, and their site language is overly technical or, even worse, extremely vague. If a potential customer is reading your site, they are seeking information – about you, your services and how the relationship itself will work. It is important to give them what they are looking for or they will move on down the list dismissing you and your company in the process.
Some argue that a potential client is always free to request further information, but in our instant decision-making world, such a position simply is not realistic. The information on your site should be easy to read and understand and should provide enough of an outline of who, what and how you do what you do so that a potential customer wants to take the extra effort to bring the relationship to the next level by contacting you.
Further, many people feel that once a site is done, it is done forever -- nothing could be further from the truth. Your site should evolve with you as you grow as a business.
Andrea Cannavina is the President of Legaltypist, Inc., www.legaltypist.com, a company which provides secretarial outsourcing and off site transcription to sole practitioners and small-mid sized law firms located throughout North America. Andrea is the Coordinator of the AskAPro section of the Virtual Business Group (www.virtualbizgroup.com), and serves on the By Laws Committee of the International Virtual Assistants Association (www.ivaa.org). To contact Andrea directly, please e-mail her at Andrea@Legaltypist.com, or visit her website at www.legaltypist.com. In order to use this article in other publications you MUST include this text box.
What’s Coming Next Month In the next issue of Virtual Insider we will be addressing the all important issue of “Taking Care of Yourself”. Please be sure to send your questions and ideas on this topic to newsletter@jerpat.org.
Additional Newsletter Information If you would like to subscribe to our newsletter, please visit us at www.moretime4u.org/home.html.
All statements made in this newsletter are not legal advisement or endorsement of a product. All information provided in this newsletter is strictly opinions and suggestions of the Virtual Insider writers. JERPAT Virtual Assistants and the writers for Virtual Insider cannot be held liable.
JERPAT Virtual Assistants always welcomes article suggestions from our readers, although we cannot promise to print everything submitted. Because of our publishing schedule, we are not able to announce time-sensitive events; however, if there is an upcoming conference or newsworthy event please be sure to submit it, and we will do our best to validate and publish the event WHEN POSSIBLE. While we often mention commercial products, publications, and web sites, JERPAT Virtual Assistants and affiliates does not accept or reprint unsolicited advertising copy. Send your article suggestions to the editor at jerpatvas@comcast.net.
Contact: Patty Benton 303.766.3051 9 am-5 pm MST Monday-Friday
© 2005 JERPAT No part of this newsletter may be reproduced unless specified in the authors byline. Please respect all guidelines provided by our writers. If there are no guidelines provided for a section of this newsletter you would like to reproduce, please send print request to jerpatvas@comcast.net.
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