Evaluate Your Customer

When a customer walks into your office, don’t sell them the first product that comes to mind. Sit them down and evaluate their needs, than sell them the products that meet their needs.

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Sales, marketing, loan officer, mortgage, leads, telemarketing, skills, training, communication, selling

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Evaluate Your Customer

When a customer walks into your office, don’t sell them the first product that comes to mind. Sit them down and evaluate their needs, than sell them the products that meet their needs.

I once worked with a guy in the banking industry, who was one of the best at explaining the benefits and features of our products, the only problem was, he was spending so much of his time explaining, but never selling anything.

He never sold anything because he never took the time to get to know what his customer’s needs were, therefore he was attempting to sell them things that they didn’t really need.

Nobody will buy things that they don’t need.

This is why it is so very important to evaluate your customer.

Start off by making your customer as comfortable as you possibly can, talk about non-business topics such as the weather, sports, or a current event.

Once you and your customer have built a good enough report, start to ask some questions so that you may evaluate your customer’s needs.

You can begin by finding out why your customer came into see you in the first place. Find out what products they already have. Find out if they already deal with one of your competitors. If so, find out all you can about the products and services they have with your competitor, so that you may compare products and fee’s. This is a perfect opportunity to let your customer know how much better your products and services are compared to your competitors.

Find out what it is they need and can afford, than sell them the products you believe to be ideal for their needs.

Once you have evaluated your customer, the chances of making a sale will be very good, because you will now be offering your customer something they need and can use, so they will most likely buy it.

The last thing a customer wants to hear about, is a bunch of stuff they don’t need. They have a reason for coming into see you, so find out what that reason is and do all you can to satisfy their needs.

Don’t waste your time trying to push off all of your products on them at once. This time can be better spent evaluating them.

Get to know your customer, evaluate their needs, than meet their needs with the appropriate products.

By evaluating your customer before you sell, you will find that the sales process will come much easier to you. Good luck.


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Evaluate Your Event To Accumulate Profit

If you are running workshops, seminars or conferences like Oslo , Norway based Ulrika Fredrikson you won't be doing it as a charitable act. Let's face it, even if you were a charity, you'd have to cover your costs somehow. Ulrika runs a combination of sponsored and paid-for events which improves the ticket price for delegates but increases the pressure on her to fill seats to satisfy the advertising benefit for her sponsors.

Whether your event cost $10 or $10,000 to stage,...

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online booking, event managment,booking mananger, booking, registration

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If you are running workshops, seminars or conferences like Oslo , Norway based Ulrika Fredrikson you won't be doing it as a charitable act. Let's face it, even if you were a charity, you'd have to cover your costs somehow. Ulrika runs a combination of sponsored and paid-for events which improves the ticket price for delegates but increases the pressure on her to fill seats to satisfy the advertising benefit for her sponsors.

Whether your event cost $10 or $10,000 to stage, you should, for business reasons, calculate your return on investment. This is not as straightforward as making sure that the gate money covers your costs, although that is, in itself, important. To be rigorous you will be drawing information about all of the positive and negative effects the event has had on your bank account, your reputation and your graying hair both now and in the future and you will be making it available to whomever needs to know in a form that is easy to digest.
Compiling event information

To properly compile all of your event information you might want to put some time aside to revisit all of the details about the design, development, running and follow-up activities associated with the event.

Financial Information

Put together the financial information and split it down into:

• planned expenditure

• unplanned expenditure

• direct income

• indirect but related income

Planned expenditure is everything that you predicted you would spend on the project from the first including purchases, rentals, staff hours and expenses. Unplanned expenditure is anything else over and above what you originally thought was required. You are splitting this out, not because it is in some way wrong to incur unplanned expenditure but because it is part of the learning and self-training process. When you next run an event you will have a better idea of the contingency costs you ought to be planning.

Direct income comes from ticket sales and any other sales like promotional items, books or products associated with the event. Indirect income covers any additional products or services that have been purchased since the event and the sale of which can be attributed to running the event. This is where the water starts to get a little muddy, as it is highly likely that some of your delegates will have been approached by your company many times in the past and it may become difficult to attribute a sales success to this event alone. By far the best thing to do here is to count the sale, or a proportion of it, say, a quarter and highlight it as being influenced by a combination of marketing tactics including the event.

Ulrika has been in the conferencing business for around ten years and she knows that almost 50% of follow-through sales for her own company and for her sponsors can take twelve months or more to reveal themselves. Her advice is to acknowledge this but not count it as part of this event's income.