While the poorest performance was here in the USA, due primarily to the lack of credit and the continuing fear that the economy could worsen.  Past Coffee News sales in the USA was fueled by rising home values, easy credit in the form of low cost equity loans and credit cards.  But, falling home values and credit tightening have all but cut off demand from those who need to borrow start up money to buy franchises.  We expect to see credit to become more available in the fourth quarter of this year.

The recent introduction of the Coffee News financing program has helped to increase our sales in recent months.  We sold 27 franchises in July and 12 in August.  While this is good news, the “great news” is demand for franchises is at an all time high driven by the higher unemployment numbers.  Applications are way above normal for us due in part to a quadrupling of our advertising budget this year and the fact we are one of the best low cost franchises to start.  Buyers just need help with financing and be willing to make a commitment to self employment.

The key to our growth at this point will be improvements in small business financing opportunities and improvement in consumer confidence.  Obviously, these are areas over which we have no control. Regardless, we believe the Coffee News franchise is well postured to weather the economic conditions to provide quality support to all publishers.   We are told that our franchise system is one of the best!

I received an email from a current advertiser in which she states that she has not received any response from her ad.  On the other hand, I have had people tell me how much they like her ad and what a great idea the business is (they run errands, etc).

I invited her to participate in a vendor expo,in which she seemed very excited about, but then didn’t return any calls or emails and didn’t do it.  I have invited her to a professional group that I belong to, but she hasn’t come and also invited her to join the Chamber, but again, she choose not to. She has stated that she sees this ad as a tax deduction and nothing more and at the end of her 6 months she wants out.

I replied saying that I am sorry to hear that she is disappointed and suggested (again) some ad changes, that she has agreed to try.  Is there anything else that I can do?  Any and all help is appreciated.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy with this kind of victim mentality. If your advertiser wants to stop advertising with you it means you have done a poor job of educating the advertiser, and you have  done a poor job of creating value…..even if it’s apparent value.

Your job as a Coffee News owner is not to sell advertising….it’s to create relations and to educate. You are an educator. Teach the people advertising. Teach the people marketing. Give them stuff. Give them a monthly marketing class for free. They will beg you to advertise.

Turn what you do around.

Dear Friend of Coffee News. Here’s introductory information on the Coffee News opportunity in South Africa.

Here’s most of the information that you will need today.

If you need more information then please use the contact form.

The cash flow scenario is not included and is available when you contact Coffee News South Africa.

Many people want to know what Coffee News looks like. This is what it looks like. Printed on both sides. Click to enlarge it.

Below the sample  copy of Coffee News please find a video on Coffee News and various documents that you can read on the Coffee News opportunity.

Coffee News Video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rrU6kcQZ4A

Download now or preview on posterous

3FOLD BROCHURE.pdf (734 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

BASICS_OF_A_COFFEE_NEWS.doc (31 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

cafe_flipchart.pdf (493 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

Coffee News Basics.doc (29 KB)

Download now or preview on posterous

CN Manual Intro For New Enq.doc (86 KB)

Posted via email from The Fisherman’s Secret

Image by be OH be via Flickr

Allow me to recap:

You know that Coffee News is a small business opportunity allowing work from home moms, dads and others to publish a weekly one-page newspaper. This newspaper is distributed to local or community restaurants. The content consists of ‘news to amuse’ and takes less than 8 minutes to read. On the left, right, front and back page edges of the paper are 32 business-card sized ads where local businesses promote their business.

Currently more than 8 million people read this newspaper across the world every week. This is a significant publication with a reach stretching 52 countries.

My questions:

Are we utilizing the true power of Coffee News?

Why not add value to this amazing publication?

This is my suggestion:

1. Create a reason for readers to subscribe to an online newsletter via a blog
2. In addition to the paper version publish a shortened e-version with different news.
3. Create Google Adwords like ads for the local advertisers and publish it on the edges of the e-newsletter.

Just think about the opportunity:

• We have a captive audience having fun getting a Coffee News newsletter weekly.
• We have small business advertisers who get more exposure
• Coffee News marketing agencies can add more value to their sales pack.

What are the negatives?

Let me know what you think…..

Image by Sailing "Footprints: Real to Reel" (Ronn ashore) via Flickr

Today I read this request, from a small business person, on cold calling. And I thought that you may be able to help.

I was wondering if some of you could help me out. When you have to go out cold calling what do you say to get the best results? I guess what are some of your lines? I have trouble sometimes not getting to make contact with a decision maker and only hand off information to a receptionist behind the desk. I am not sure if the focus should be on going in to get an appt with a specific decision maker on advertising or if you just go in and try to start selling them on coffee news. Just need some help with boosting sales.

I had a look at the request and though I may be able to help with the last part of the request, therefore I did not address the issue of getting past the gatekeeper.

Here’s my proposal on how to handle the cold call when you got trough to the main Mac:

Cold calling is like asking for the kiss on the first date.

There’s nothing wrong with asking for a kiss on your first date as long as you can handle the smacks you’ll get.

Mostly these smacks are 90 people saying no and 10 saying yes.

It become pretty painful at the end of the day as you feel personally injured because of all the nos.

But you know that.

My point is that when we expect the sale or appointment (the kiss) when we cold call (ask for the kiss) we miss the point.

By the way: Most Coffee News ads also expect the kiss on the first date and we will have to change our approach to ensure more success for our advertisers. But that’s another related story.

Getting back to your question:

What should you say when you cold call?

Here’s what I do:
————————————————————————————————————————————
Say you call and the potential advertisers answers you then start
"Hi Jane here I am from Coffee News.
I am sorry…. did I interrupt you?…………….(give it some time)
I am calling because I want to share a FREE small business marketing book with you called "Learn Why Jean Daum’s 17 Marketing Secrets Rocked The Small Business World"

Would that interest you?
————————————————————————————————————————————-

This approach means that you are not selling anything

You are pre-selling…..

You are giving and the floor is open for easy discussion

You can now ask for the contact details to send the free ebook

(You can have an ebook or a hard copy)

Then you should try and get an appointment

If you don’t get the appointment you have the email address and hope the free ebook will do the selling for you.

If you have an appointment see that as the bonus.

This is what I do:

1) Set up a blog with free tips

2) Make my cold call and offer the free book

3) Get the email address, name and phone number

4) See if I can get an appointment

5) Add the email address to the blog/newsletter

6) As soon as the email is added to the blog newsletter an autoresponder dispatch ebook

7) Once a week I publish more tips on my blog that gets emailed to all my subscribers

8) Now I can cultivate them and after some time of cultivating they will give me the kiss because they now no and trust me.

You’ll notice that the process is not focused on selling but on designing a system to create trusting relationships.

I have written many articles on the subject but this one may be the most relevant as it covers cold calling.

I am at this moment creating such an ebook for the South African small business people like the Coffee News Marketing agencies. If you want a copy subscribe to our free tips newsletter (see top right for the subscription box).

Regards

Johan Horak

Let’s consider the new process (see diagram):

1. You have identified the target population you want to attract to your business.
2. You have designed a two step advertisement that invites people to your website to get the free report. (See Get Your FREE Report in the green box). Your ad is designed to attract people who are interested in your product but not ready to spend money yet. Instead of allowing them to pass-by you give them an opportunity to make  a small commitment that will not cost them money. They have to give you their name and email address in order to get the free gift. 
3. As soon as they give you their contact details you can cultivate them in your cultivation pool; you can now send them regular free tips giving them advice on your product/service until they are ready to take out the money and buy.

In order to use the cultivation pool you need to:

1. Agree that all people reading your ads are not ready to spend money today and that they must be brought into your cultivation pool.
2. Design all your promotional material so that it invites potential clients to your cultivation pool.
3. Create a blog/newsletter/auto-responder but you can also do it manually with a fax or answer machine.
4. Create free gifts, free reports and e-tips that you can publish on your blog from where it can be sent to your clients and potential clients.

May you cultivate those people who want to do business with you but who are not ready today. Because if you do they will not end up with your opposition.

Regards

Johan Horak

P.S. Coffee News South Africa local marketers provide a fully inclusive marketing solution for small businesses. Contact us today if  you want to take control of your marketing efforts using these ideas. Not only will we help you with the design of two step ads we will also create your cultivation pool and teach you how to use it.

P.P.S. Do you like cold calling? If you do then you are one of a few. If you don’t like cold calling then read how the cultivating pool (two step marketing) can help you become more effective when you cold calling.

Let’s look at the traditional advertising cycle and see how it relates to a fishing net.

The traditional-advertising cycle used by most small businesses follow the same cycle. Basically they pay for an advert without thinking about the mentality of their potential customer.

Today I will discuss the traditional advertising cycle and then, in a follow up post, I will look at a multi-step-marketing cycle as an alternative to the outdated traditional advertising cycle.

Diagram: You get 10 000 people called the target population, only a 1000 read the advertisement, 100 like what you have advertised and become a wanter. Only 10 decide to buy but when it get’s to taking out the money only one have the guts to actually to take out the purse and pay for it. Every time during these stages the potential client is returned to the target population. Never is there a place were relationships are cultivated. In the next post I will look at the cultivation cycle then I will just focus on the cultivation cycle.

I believe that traditional small-business advertisers make a fundamental mistake because they assume there’s only three (to four) advertising stages.

Let’s consider the traditional advertising stages:

1. Out there is a mass of people (population) and some of them (target population) may be interested in the product being advertised. Let’s assume that only 10% of the target population see the advert. (The other skip the ad because it was not well structured to draw them in).
2. Then we get the wanters; those who read the advertisement. They want the product. They may not want it today but they want it. This stage is over looked by traditional advertisers. These wanters may want to buy today, others may want what is advertised but may not have the money today or need some time before they spend the money. Other wanters are at this moment gathering info on your product. Traditional small business advertisers ignored this stage and allow these people to become part of the general population again.
3. A small percentage of the ‘wanters’ will take out their purse and buy what’s on offer and then they become a ‘payer’. They give you money. The other may not yet trust the offer and become a expensive non-entity.
4. I have also included a stage that I call “Post Payer.” This stage is also not considered during traditional marketing. It’s included here to show you that in traditional advertising the ‘post payer’ also becomes part of the general population.

Every time traditional business people advertise using this model they recreate the fishing experience.

They spend expensive money to attract the same people over and over again. They attract people that they are willing drop through the holes again. These holes allow potential paying clients, who read their ad, to get away. It’s like putting bait out and hoping to catch many fishes with a large eyed net.

Our initial net was caste to 10 000 people but we only caught one. This gives the advertiser 0.01% success.

When you plan on catching fish with the correct net and various cultivating tanks you will be able to increase your success rate by 1000 times.

Well, maybe only a 100 times.

But I will take a 100 times anytime.

Because:

Let’s assume you are small business person advertising;

• You have an advertising budget of 1000 per month
• You measure your response and get a 100 new clients every month
• Then for the same amount you’ll get 1000 new clients with the new marketing proposal.

Do you agree?

Have fun

Image by Stitch via Flickr

So many people tell me that the hardest part of selling is encountering negativity and refusal.  So I want to share with you one of Stephan Schiffman’s “rules” for selling success from Make It Happen Before Lunch.  Here’s the rule – are you ready?  EXPECT negative initial responses!

Here’s a framework for thinking about that.  In Schiffman’s words, “Any time you suggest something new to someone you don’t know well yet, there’s going to be some initial resistance.  In your first call, set the goal of getting that negative response out in the open – not avoiding it!”

“In the initial call, you are not selling yourself, or selling Coffee News, or selling your services.  You’re selling an appointment.  You’re making the appointment the topic of conversation.” Bill Buckley President Coffee News USA.

This reminds me of expecting the kiss on the first date. If you go out to your appointment expecting to get the sale from someone you have never met you must prepare for the negative initial response.

When you go to an appointment to sell your services you should have different walk-away-success measures. Selling the service is not always possible at the first meeting. I prefer to use the first meeting to introduce myself and the product I am selling, the next objective is to get the person to like and trust me. And if you are a great salesperson you may get the order today.

But that’s not possible for all of us at the first meeting and here’s the procedure I propose:

• Get the appointment and confirm it before you leave your office.
• Introduce yourself and listen
• Introduce your services and try and show your product.
• Try and (a) close the sale
• If you cannot close the sale ask if you can continue with the education
• If the person agree get their (b) email address and add them to your online blog newsletter.

From (a) and (b) you’ll notice that we have two walk-away-success measures. If we get the deal then it means a success. But if we don’t get the deal then at least we have the email address and can follow up………until we have the deal.

Instead of getting 5 sales out of a hundred, we now have 5 sales out of a hundred and 95 emails out of a hundred.

Now you can use a blog/newsletter, like the one I am using to send you this educational stuff, to cultivate long-term relationships. And when they need your services you’ll  be the first one that comes to mind.

Regards

Why Did We Opt For A Professional Affiliate Solution?

We wanted:

• To be able to automatically associate purchasing of a Coffee News license with the referrer. JAM will do that.
• A tool that can generate various automated referral tools for you and I will discuss them below.

Marketing Tools For The Coffee News Affiliate Program:

We have included a variety of marketing tools that you use. These should make it easy for you to go out and generate more business for you.

• Coffee News Affiliate Banner Ads
  As you may know; banner advertising is one of the most common ways of advertising online. Normally, this comes in a small graphical image format that advertises products or services. Website visitors can click on to go to a web site using your tracking code. To utilize this marketing tool we have created some banners for you upload it to our own Coffee News Affiliate Program. This will make it available for you in the affiliate members area to just copy and paste the HTML banner code onto your respective web pages. By doing this, our affiliate program would have dynamically generated your affiliate URL to be built in to the HTML banner code, giving you the proper credit for any referral that clicks on that banner from your site.

[Note:  Banner ads are impressive  but they don’t have the same conversion as Text Ads]

• Coffee News Affiliate Text Links Text Link ads are similar to regular HTML links that you click on. With our affiliate program, you can use text links that have your affiliate’s URL, so that you can copy and paste it onto any HTML document you want. This also includes Word and Acrobat (pdf) documents and links as part of your email signature.

• Coffee News Affiliate Text Ads

Text Ads are small HTML table boxes that advertise your products and services. If you’re familiar with Google’s AdSense, this is the same thing. Text ads give you the ability to publish text ads describing Coffee News.

[Text Ads has the highest conversion rates, no wonder Google use Text ads extensively]

• Coffee News Affiliate Hover Ads

Hover Ads are the new replacements for pop-up ads. These are ads that "hover" on top of your web page to grab the visitor’s attention before they browse the rest of the site. You can copy and paste the hover ad codes onto your website to advertise your Coffee News affiliate.

• Coffee News Affiliate Email Ads

Coffee News Affiliate Program allows you place email ads/articles promoting Coffee News, or send a promotion to your own respective mailing lists. These articles are populated with your own affiliate link.

• Coffee News Affiliate Tell-A-Friend

We have a built-in Tell-A-Friend option that is enabled. This is accessible through the members’ area, and allows you to send a quick note to 10 of your friends about the program.

• Coffee News Affiliate Offline Marketing Option

You also have access to an Offline Marketing Module that you can utilize for promoting Coffee News outside the Internet. This generally works by giving you an offline code that you can print on promotional  offers. When Coffee News operators redeem these offers to Coffee News SA HQ, we enter them to give the proper affiliate his / her commission.

Conclusion

As you can see, Coffee News Affiliate Program allows you to have multiple marketing tools to promote Coffee News. Leverage them consistently, and you’ll start building a nice income.

And you are invited to join this free affiliate program that will pay R5000 ($500 US) for each successful sale of a South African Coffee News license.  

Regards

Johan Horak

Do you think someone else can benefit from Coffee News? Why not register for the Coffee News Affiliate Program and send them a quick note with your affiliate link and get them to visit CoffeeNews-4u.com?  When they do and decide to buy a  license, you’ll make some easy cash, up to R5000 ($500).

Credit To JAM’s Ryan Roxas