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Prospective customers will not buy unless they feel good about you, your company and your product or service. Here are 4 simple ways you can stimulate their good feelings ...and motivate them to buy.

1. Personalize Your Marketing

Prospects are more likely to buy from you when they feel you are talking directly to them about their unique needs. Look for ways to make your sales message more specific to the needs of prospective customers.

For example, subdivide your targeted market into several more narrowly defined niche markets. Then customize your sales approach so it appeals to the specific interests of prospects in each niche market.

Tip: You can narrow the appeal of your web site without losing its ef- fectiveness with your broader market. Just create customized web pages for each niche market you target. Then add a link to each of these specialized pages on your home page.

2. Emphasize Good Feelings

Prospective customers usually base their buying decision on how they feel about your product or service. Get them excited about using it and they won't hesitate to buy.

One way to get them excited is to convert the benefits provided by your product or service into a vivid word picture. Put your prospect in the picture by dramatizing what it feels like to be enjoying those benefits.

For example: If you sell financial products, describe what it feels like to enjoy an affluent lifestyle without debt.

3. Confront Buyer Skepticism

A prospective customer will not buy if they have any doubt that you will deliver exactly what you promise. Here are 3 of the many ways you can confront and overcome skepticism in your customer's mind.

• Use testimonials. They prove you've already delivered satisfaction to other customers. To be effective, they should describe a specific result your customer got by using your product or service. For example, "In just 2 weeks I lost 9 pounds, felt years younger and still continued to enjoy my favorite foods".
• Provide specifics. Convert general statements into specific descriptions. Instead of "quick and easy", explain exactly how quick and how easy. Also, reduce round numbers like "15 pounds" into specific odd numbers like "13.7 pounds". It sounds more authentic.
• Tone down your claims. A bold claim creates doubt in your prospect's mind and jeopardizes the sale. Avoid using any claim that sounds exaggerated - even if it is true. Reduce any bold claim to a more believable statement.

4. Eliminate The Need To Make Decisions

Try to structure your selling process so prospective customers do not have to make decisions. Every decision they have to make interrupts the buying process. It diverts their attention away from the action of completing the sale.

This can be especially hazardous when customers have difficulty making a clear choice among several options. Some will avoid the risk of making a wrong choice by making NO choice ...and you lose a sale you already had.

That's why you should promote only one product or service each time you advertise. You can use separate promotions for each product or service. But limit your prospect's decision to only "Yes, I will buy" or "No, I will not buy". Don't risk losing them over a "Which One" decision.

Tip: Sometimes you can successfully combine 2 or more related products or services into a special combination offer. But limit your customer's decision to "Yes" or "No". Don't include an option to buy the items separately.

Prospective customers must feel good about you, your company and your product or service before they will buy. Start using these 4 simple tactics to stimulate their good feelings and motivate them to buy.

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Bob Leduc spent 20 years helping businesses like yours find new customers and increase sales. He just released a New Edition of his manual, How To Build Your Small Business Fast With Simple Postcards and several other publications to help small businesses grow and prosper. For more information: Email: BobLeduc@aol.com Subject: "Postcards" or call: 702-658-1707 After 10 AM Pacific Time/Las Vegas, NV

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Work smarter, not harder, by making small but significant shifts in the way you do business. Simple adjustments, clearheaded analysis and two minutes here and there may be all it takes to boost your bottom line. Carefully consider these options, and you should be able to implement at least one or two of them right away.

1. Drop your least profitable offerings and concentrate on your most profitable ones. Note that I said "profitable" - not those bringing in the most or least money overall. You can sort your products and services by their profitability if you analyze your expenses according to which sources of revenue they support. "Most small business owners lose sight of precisely where they are making money and where they're not," says David Shepherd, author of the book, Your Business or Your Life. By getting rid of the offerings that require the highest percentage of costs in order to deliver them, you can see immediate improvement in profits, says Shepherd.

2. Send "difficult" clients or those you simply don't like to your competitors. In a survey by David Maister, a consultant for top professional firms around the world, only 30-35 percent of respondents said they liked their clients; 50-60 percent said they tolerated their clients; and 5-20 percent didn't like them at all. "Why spend the majority of [your] life working on tolerable stuff for acceptable clients when, with some effort in (for example) client relations, marketing and selling, you can spend your days working on exciting things for interesting people?" asks Maister. You'll feel more enthusiastic about your work and get more done when you send unpleasant or troublesome clients to get their needs met elsewhere.

3. Pursue customers who can or will pay more. A consultant once told me that she'd come to the conclusion that people starting a small business simply wouldn't pay the fees she felt she should charge. I didn't agree, because I'd had clients ready to spend big on launching their new business. They were in their forties and fifties and either had a budget to spend from a company that was laying them off, or they were willing to raid the retirement fund they'd accumulated working for a large corporation. It would be possible to target others like them and make multiples of what she'd be earning from those just scraping by, but I think she just didn't believe what I was saying. Almost always, your existing market includes people who have more money or are willing to spend more of what they have for your stuff, and by marketing to people like them, you earn more for the same effort.

4. Reuse everything you create in different formats or for different purposes. If you've taught a seminar, turn your handouts into an article (that's how what you're reading came about). If you collected industry data to direct your marketing, sell your research to colleagues. If you regularly interview experts about what's new in the field, incorporate their insights into a product. And so on. "Do once, sell three times" is a shrewd money-making mantra.

5. Create an untiring army of sales reps through an affiliate program. Colleagues who don't have their own products or services, or whose offerings complement yours may be happy to promote your wares in exchange for a commission on the business that they refer. On the Internet, so-called affiliate programs make that process easy. You decide on the terms, find marketing partners who agree to them and give those partners a link to use that keeps track of leads or sales coming through that link. I use FusionQuest.com for my affiliate program because unlike most such services, they themselves take no commissions from sales coming through the program.

6. Cultivate and reward your referral partners. Two ordinary words work magic when it comes to nurturing relationships with people who regularly send you business: "Thank you." If they send you sales with a particularly high value, a gift, such as a book, a fruit basket or tickets to a show might be appropriate. How do you initiate such relationships in the first place? This can be as simple as inviting professionals out to lunch and asking them what they do so that you can refer business to them. Only an idiot would not reciprocate by turning the same question back to you.

7. Invest more to get customers who have a high lifetime value. Keep in mind that when done properly, marketing is not an expense but an investment. Correspondingly, you need to know how much you can afford to invest to acquire a customer. The smart way to think about this question is not in terms of an amount for your marketing budget that you think sounds reasonable but in relation to how much you can earn during the whole time someone remains your customer. For instance, spending $100 to lure each new customer may sound outrageous until you realize that each one spends $4,000-5,000 with you over the course of three years. With that profile, it might be smart to spend much more than $100 per customer to lure them into your fold.

Why slave away doing things the way you've always done them when you can earn more by using some of these strategies? Please let me know when you try any of these moves, with extraordinary results!

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Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 10 other books. She runs a private member site, MarketingforMore.com, which supports business owners who are growing their businesses. Learn how to avoid the most common pricing mistakes in her free report, "Charge More & Get It," available from http://www.marketingformore.com/survey.htm .