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Today, there are more than 23 million businesses in America; 90 of every 100 have fewer than ten employees. By 2012, more than 60 million Americans will work from small shops, independent offices or their homes.
Just like their bigger brethren, these 'micro' enterprises must generate sales to grow or even survive. But, with limited staff and resources, they spend most days taking care of business rather than building business. They need help. More importantly, they know it.
On any given day, there are more than 40,000 related searches for 'small business marketing help' on Google, MSN and Craig's List.
More significantly, in a recent Working Solo (magazine) survey, 26 per cent of all SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) owners said Marketing/Sales (Sales Development) was the single activity they would most like to delegate.
Our Solution
To meet the need (and to make money), we developed a business providing unique, low workload, low cost marketing and sales development services to 'micro' businesses.
Our program and services are all based on the simple principle of alignment.
How It Works
Regardless of the size of the transaction, with everything stripped away, the sales process ultimately involves only two people - the buyer and the seller.
What completes a sale most quickly is the seller's ability to align his offer with the buyer's particular need or want.
The fact is: Alignment is, perhaps, the most overlooked key to the successful sale of goods and services.
Example: Imagine you own a small business as do I. Both our businesses are the best in our respective industries. We both decide to expand into the biggest and richest market in the country - Orange County, California.
Within months, you make a fortune and I go broke. Why?
The answer is alignment. You sell pool cleaning supplies. I sell snow removal equipment. You have alignment with a warm weather market and I don't.
In every aspect, aligning the sales offer to the interests of a prospect is the fastest and easiest way to make a sale.
A Second Consideration
Even where alignment may be employed, most marketing/sales efforts fail because they are too complex and/or time consuming.
Conversely, a simple system can achieve superior results because it is easy to do and easily repeatable.
Example: A McDonald's french fry tastes the same in Maine as in Mexico not because McDonald's hires talented chefs in every market but because Micky D's has a simple fool-proof system so anyone anywhere can cook tasty french fries the same way every time.
The Key Element
And most importantly, whether a business is selling a product or a service to one person or a million, the pivotal element in the entire sales process and the key to sales success is the sales message - what you say (and/or show) to those who don't yet share your vision.
The Smart People Agree. Recently, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton (Business) School independently confirmed our experiences with their own comprehensive study of small business marketing.
The study was underwritten by Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Colgate-Palmolive and a host of other big companies. They collectively invested more than a million dollars so that Wharton could track the marketing experiences of several dozen small businesses in a range of industries.
These subject-businesses were monitored and their marketing programs were tracked and measured for seven years. The final report totaled more than 2,500 pages yet reached only three incontrovertible conclusions:
One: There is no correlation between dollars invested and sales gained as a result.
Two: The sales message drives all sales.
Three: Sales will increase (often exponentially) with repetition of a successful sales message.
Simple conclusion - verified by a million dollars worth of research by some very smart people: If you develop the right sales message, deliver it often and as cheaply as possible, make adjustments as needed and continually repeat the process, you will achieve significant sales results.
Summary
At the same time, we streamlined our Alignment Marketing services so they could be delivered at a price that any business or enterprise could afford. And, we backed the program with a full refund guarantee.
Plain and simple, our Alignment Marketing program meets a need with a superior solution.
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