People are always asking me how to get more business. They typically express their needs in one of four ways:
- “I need more [new] business.”
- “I need more repeat customers [or clients].”
- “I need more referrals [from existing customers].”
- “I need better profits.”
If any of the above statements resonates with you, then I'd advise you to start more conversations. At its heart, business is all about relationships. Needing more business is thus the same as needing more relationships, and relationships start with conversations.
The subject of today's post is a simple conversation starter: stickers.
I borrowed this idea from one of my first business mentors, Dr. Scot Chrisman. Dr. Scot, as friends knew him, put a bumper sticker on his laptop. He never had a formal office and would set up shop at a Panera for hours at a time.
That Panera in West Knoxville was a gathering place for professionals and, from what he had learned from a manager, one of the busiest Paneras in the country.
Dr. Scot was a student of Dan Kennedy, Jay Abraham, John Carlton, Gary Halbert, and some of the other big personalities in marketing. Somewhere along the way, Dr. Scot had developed a taste for the outrageous. Why? The most basic premise of effective branding is standing out, not fitting in. How will your brand stand out unless you're prepared to cause a scene? At the very least, you have to be prepared to mar your sleek, beautiful laptop with a bumper sticker.
Every time Dr. Scot cracked open his laptop, he displayed an advertisement that read, "Need more business?"
Here's the thing: just about everybody would like to have more business. Dr. Scot knew this. The sticker was just an invitation to begin identifying him with the solution to the problem.
The sticker was a conversation starter.
Once someone has walked over and asked about your sticker, ask a few open-ended about the person's business:
- What's a big problem you're facing right now?
- How much business do you think you're losing in missed opportunities?
- Can you afford to keep doing the same thing?
- What would you like to see happen?
- How much is that worth to you?
- What's your budget?
After 10 or 30 or 45 minutes of airing their dirty business laundry to you, people will be so invested in you that they'll walk away thinking you're 1) a great person; and 2) you're more than capable of helping them.
Then, you follow up and figure out ways to help them without blowing their budgets, and if it isn't a good fit, you refer to someone else who may be able to help.
To sum it all up, you need more conversations if you need more business, and stickers are really cheap conversation starters.
We've put together three different designs for you to use. You can either use the StickerMule templates (and get $10 off!) or download the high-res PDF or PNG files yourself and print them however you like.
Here are a few more sticker ideas:
- Need a better website?
- Want a mobile app?
- Need really good photography?
- Want people to tell you how awesome your website is?
- Want your web content to be memorable?
- Ask me how your business can grow.
Use the designs above or make your own - then slap that baby on your pretty laptop, and consider yourself businessified.