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I like the New Year. It brings to mind that the possibility is endless, and for many of us, this is a good time to start something new or different in our lives.

What I know for sure is that there is a lot of effort to go around. As we live longer, as parents and grandparents live longer, we are creating endless opportunities and the need for senior-related services.

The key is to create a proper and realistic business and marketing plans that generate the client and the results. Key to the senior market, not surprisingly, their adult children.

If you have been in the senior market for any amount of time, you know that families often contact senior service providers when they are in crisis due to acute illness or other events that signal the need for service and support.

Finally, this is a very good year for the life of your dreams, become an entrepreneur, and serves the greatest generation of all time. Take the course that realistically, slow but steady and consistent action, and you will succeed! We need more senior service providers who really know their stuff. We need a senior service providers are educated, efficient, and reliable. Best wishes for continued success in 2008!

This newsletter is full of opportunities staring you in the face. If you don’t believe
me, write and tell me so–and by doing that you’d be proving me right.

That would make you a proactive marketer: spotting a marketing opportunity in an
everyday activity.

For instance: Something most of us do every day is read the paper, and though they
may not seem like business issues at first glance, editorials or news items offer one
of those marketing opportunities. How does that merger, government legislation,
tax increase, tornado–or whatever–affect your business, your industry, your
clients? Take a position on the subject, and write a letter to the editor to tell them.
Include your company name in the body of the letter. Readers often give more
credence to opinions of business leaders, and it gets your name out there.

Act immediately. After reading the paper, set aside some time to respond. Then go
over your response carefully. (It’s easy to fire off a letter, but you might regret
sending something not fully thought out.)

Your letters may not be used every time, but when one is, it goes a long way to
building your image as an expert.

Another marketing opportunity arises when you see an article that might be of
interest to one of your clients. Clip and send it to them with a note. Even if they’ve
already seen it, your client will appreciate the gesture. It shows you take them and
their business seriously.

Neil Rackham turned the world of high-ticket salesmanship on its ear. By observing over 35,000 actual sales calls, he scientifically isolated & identified the specific behaviors exhibited by successful salespeople. He called it SPIN selling.

Situation, Problem, Implication, Need Pay-off.

It should come as no surprise that one of the things that he discovered was that successful salesmanship means asking a lot of questions, before presenting products. This is just common sense. What would you think of your Doctor if he told you, “Here take these Zoloft tablets, by the way, what seems to be bothering you?” Probably not very much, so don’t “show up & throw up”, ask questions.

So far, so good, but what kind of a questioning process most often resulted in a positive result?

Here’s what he discovered.

At the beginning of the sales cycle, good questions about the buyer’s situation were well received, provided these questions were perceived by the buyer to be relevant, and to illicit information that was not easily obtained elsewhere. The best situation questions were those that built on the seller’s research. For example, “Many of the homes in this area have sump pumps, do you have one too?” Neil characterized these “situation” questions as being of a fact-finding nature (who, where, when, what, how, yes/no). They serve to give the salesperson a frame of reference for the client’s specific setting. The client appreciates being treated as an individual, but quickly becomes impatient with too many of these “situation” questions.

The successful salesperson maintains the customer’s interest by following on with questions that seek to identify or better understand a problem that exists within the prospective clients situation. For example “Do you find it worrisome when you travel, wondering whether the power might go out causing the sump pump to stop working when you’re away?” Again this shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, right? No problem, no sale. But Rackham soon discovered that getting a customer to admit to a problem & then address it in a sales presentation was rarely enough to win the sale.