The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [63]
Dream Affiliates
Dream affiliates are another excellent growth strategy. Is there a company that could partner with you to send you more business than you could handle? Jay Abraham taught me the strategy of affiliate marketing. Who sells to the exact buyer you want to reach but doesn’t sell your type of product or ser vice? Here’s an “affiliate strategy” that I used to get hundreds of clients all at once. Harv Eker (author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind) has training programs that are complementary to ours but not competitive. We cut a deal where we’d offer one of his programs as a bonus when people buy ours. Since most of our products are sold to business owners, Harv was only too happy to have us promote him to all our buyers. At the end of our seminars and Web seminars, right when we are going into our close, we put up three panels talking about Harv and how brilliant and valuable his programs are. We then build value around his programs, showing how much it would cost to buy them. Then, when we give our price, we tell them that if they buy our program, we’ll sell them Harv’s programs as a bonus.
This serves every one. He gets excellent exposure to an entirely new list of buyers and we get one of his programs as a bonus to induce more sales. Harv has promoted us to his database for a cut of the profits as well. So has Tom Hopkins, author of How to Master the Art of Selling, as have Brian Tracy, author of The Psychology of Achievement, and Jay Levinson, author of about 56 books, including all the Guerrilla Marketing books. These affiliates have helped us gain thousands of new buyers and millions of positive impressions on future prospects and all in record-breaking time. And we have done the same for them.
Affiliate marketing means you ride in on someone else’s well-established relationship. This is far less expensive than trying to acquire a customer on your own. Dream affiliates can increase your sales dramatically overnight; therefore, you can afford to share generously with them. We run radio ads every week to drive just 60 business owners to one of our ventures. When Jay Levinson wrote a strong endorsement letter to his list, we got 450 new leads in a single day.
When Jay Abraham first promoted me to his list, we sold $2.3 million worth of product within 30 days flat. The cost of selling that much product was one tenth the normal rate. Jay took a generous portion of the revenue and we both walked away very happy.
So can you go to a company that has ideal buyers for you and work out an arrangement where they will help you sell your products faster? All the major companies have relationships like this. Fly on United and get points for Hilton Hotels. I know a fledgling software company that convinced a well-established software company to give away a sample of its product as a bonus to all its buyers. The established software company was thrilled to be able to offer a $1,000 bonus and the fledgling software company got 1,000 new clients almost overnight.
There’s a company called www.Pro2ProNetwork.com that will set up appointments for chiropractors, dentists, optometrists, and financial advisers to go out in their community and meet with other professionals who might send them referrals. Chiropractors will meet with medical doctors and teach them about their work. They will also meet with attorneys who are dealing with accident victims and help those lawyers’ clients get the care that they might need. Financial advisers meet with accountants who might have wealthy clients, etc. The point is that affiliate marketing is a much faster way to grow than traditional advertising, direct mail, or other forms of driving cold leads. That said,