Sep 28, 2008 Posted in Marketing Ideas

Funded Proposals – Hmmm…

Ok, if you’ve been following this blog or any of my materials or any length of time you know how I like to generate sales leads. In a nutshell, I like to offer something of value for free in exchange for the prospect’s contact information and permission to keep in touch. Often this is an info product or email course related to the product being promoted.

I like this method of list building for two reasons:

1. You can build a list fast and
2. You can build relationships with more prospects over time

The downside of this method of giving something for free is that you’ll often need to depend on free traffic generation techniques because there is no immediate revenue associated with each new prospect. That’s ok for me because I’m not a big fan of paying for traffic anyway.

Having said that, here is an idea that you may want to apply to your sales prospecting. I’ll call it a ‘funded proposal’. Instead of giving your offer away for free (and building a list of prospects) you are going to sell your offer (and build a list of buyers).

It works like this. Let’s say that you’re selling an MLM opportunity as your money-making product. You create a very informative information product that shows people how to market any MLM business. This is your offer and it is a very legit product with heaps of applicable strategies and tips. It doesn’t necessarily focus on your particular business but your ideas can be applied to any MLM opportunity. This way you’re casting the largest net possible.

After your offer has been created you’re going to sell it but not like a normal information product. You’re going to sell it at a low-ball price. Look at your competitors and what they are pricing for similar products and offer your new product at about half.

Let’s say you’ve decided on a price of $17 but the real value is $47 or so. Instead of creating a lead capture page (as we normally would do) create a very simple sales letter that emphasizes what a great deal your new product is. Make it very clear that your prospects would have to be insane to pass up such a deal at such a low price.

Once this is done, test it by buying some cheap pay per click traffic. After 300 visitors or so you should know if your site is converting or not. If it isn’t tweak it until it is. You should be at least breaking even on your PPC advertising.

What is the point of all of this and how does this apply to generating sales leads?

Simple. First you are creating a list of buyers which is more valuable than a list of tirekickers by at least a factor of ten. Second, as long as you are at least breaking even you can expand your advertising to infinity. Remember, you don’t need to make money on the initial product because the real money will always be in your big ticket item. This way you can continue to fund your advertising with the sale of your low-priced product. Finally, you can approach affiliate partners or joint venture partners because you now have revenue that you can share. If you’re offering something for free it is hard to offer 50% of that to any potential partners.

There is more to the funded proposal lead gen method than I have covered here but I’m sure you get the idea. The keys to making this work is to have a low-priced offer, to buy really cheap traffic and to have a big ticket item to offer on the back-end.

The exciting thing about this approach is that you will always be able to outspend your competitors while still generating free sales leads for your big ticket item. AND should you ever decide to sell your business you will get infinitely more for your list of buyers than you ever would from a list of prospects who have never paid you a dime.