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HOW TO DEVELOP A MONEY-MAKING DEALER PROGRAM OVER THE INTERNET!Do any of these conditions apply to you?
A Little BackgroundThe Internet is the hottest communications medium ever created. Even its most optimistic supporters didn't predict its astonishing growth. Over 60,000,000 people worldwide now have access. Within 5 years it'll be over a billion, maybe two. Every smart business person is scrambling to discover how to benefit from this truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. People who are the prime sources of products and can sell these products through dealers ought to be scrambling fastest of all.How The Internet Benefits You When You're The Prime SourceAs anyone knows who's the prime source of any product -- whether that product is nutritional, informational, fitness, whatever -- you make money by recruiting dealers and profiting from a percentage of what they sell. The more dealers you've got, the more money you make. Problem is, up until now it's been both expensive and time-consuming to deal with dealers. It's expensive to create a dealer package, expensive to keep it up to date, and expensive to train your dealers.Because of these limitations, many companies simply recruit dealers and pretty much leave them on their own, which is no good to anyone. In this situation, the outcome's obvious: dealers founder and drop out, everybody loses. Well, with the Internet things are different. The Two Key Components Of Your Internet-Based Dealer Program For an Internet-based dealer program to work you must have two components: dealer-centered training materials and absolutely complete client-centered marketing communications into which the dealer need only insert his company i.d. and personal follow up information. Let's look at each component in turn. Dealer-Centered Training MaterialsRecruiting dealers is never enough. Training them to be successful is essential. By this standard most people with dealer programs fail. They don't the kinds of step-by-step instructions that dealers need to succeed. One reason they don't, of course, is the shear expense and bother of doing so. The old "sink or swim" methods employed by most companies (including virtually every network marketing company in existence) don't work, but from the company's standpoint they're less bother.Not least, when your distributor training materials are all paper-based, it's troublesome keeping them up to date. Whenever you want to say something new, you've got to go through all the expense and bother of updating, which automatically ages what you're already using. Bummer. On the Internet, you still have to keep materials up-to-date, but you don't have the draining expense. Now when you want to change something, assuming you've got your own domain or web site, you do it, whenever you want to do it. There's absolutely no excuse (like "we've got 10,000 copies of that stuff left") preventing you from taking immediate action. The real question becomes, then, what should be in your dealer materials? To be complete, dealer training materials should include step-by-step instructions on
Remember, what's great about the Internet is that everything your dealers need to know can be included in your dealer training package... which, remember, can be updated instantaneously as things develop. Note: The place where you post your dealer training materials should not be austere or forbidding, but rather a kind of cyber clubhouse. Here's where you should also post
Client-Centered Marketing CommunicationsThe other key component of your dealer program is the client-centered marketing communications, the materials that the buyers will see. These must obviously be made as enticing as possible. That means including
Note: provide your dealers with new offers from time to time. If you and your dealers are going to succeed in marketing, on and off the Web, you must succeed in the offer game. Offers must always be perceived as offering value that will, however, be gone soon; certain-to-be-gone value stimulates faster prospect response. However, if offers are perceived as old hat, or if they never change, they actually undercut your marketing effectiveness. BenefitsPeople buy because of benefits. They buy NOW because of offers. You must have both. Benefits are what people get from your company. Dealers are people who offer other people client-centered benefits. Thus, you must first brainstorm all the benefits that you offer. Then you must put them in priority order. Which is the most important benefit you offer, the second most important, etc?The key to benefits is to make them specific and credible. Here much marketing fails, usually because the "marketers" don't actually know much about the specific benefits their products deliver. I have now dealt with literally thousands of businesses in my consulting career, and I can assure you that one of the most astonishing things I find is how little people actually know about their own products, about the benefits these products deliver. To succeed in marketing, wherever you want to market, you must really know your product and must be ABSOLUTELY CLEAR on the benefits it delivers. Once you've got these benefits, hammer them home in a series of sentences beginning "You get..." "You" is the prospect. "Get" is what that prospect wants. The Internet is ideal for giving you the space you need to hit the prospect with every conceivable benefit. The idea, however, is not to throw just anything at the prospect, but to enable you to present every benefit about what you and your dealers are selling. If this takes two screens, three screens, so be it. So long as everything you provide is client-centered fact and not just fluffy hyperbole. Client-Centered TestimonialsYour prospects want to know what they get for acting NOW (that extra motivating offer)... they want to know all the benefits they get by using your product... and they want to know what benefits people just like them have gotten, or are currently getting, from USING the product.Everybody knows the effectiveness of word-of-mouth advertising. Businesses that offer value succeed to a significant degree because of satisfied people telling other people about the value they have gotten and which the new prospects will get by using the product in question. Client-centered testimonials will work for you because they use the words of real people, the benefits received by real people, to stimulate prompt purchase. Thus, testimonials must be composed of
Other Helpful Marketing Communications For Your DealerYour dealer marketing materials can be enhanced by also including
Complete Product DescriptionIn traditional marketing, you may well limit the details of what you say because of cost. Not to worry on the Internet. Here you should provide the most complete description imaginable of your product, including precisely what it is, what it does, and appropriate graphics. Be sure to include details on what makes your product superior. Consider a product comparison with other products offered by competitors, so long as you are scrupulous about factual reporting. You don't want to get into legal difficulties by distorting the picture! On the Internet, there is absolutely no reason why you cannot include every single fact about your product, so long as you make it clear that you're not just listing product features, but doing everything you can to present the benefits that derive from these features.Commonly Asked Questions & AnswersAs your product's prime source, you've probably heard every single possible question about it. And, over time, you've developed effective client-centered responses to these queries. Now's the moment to share this information with your dealers, by creating a "Commonly Asked Questions & Answers" communication that your dealers can present along with the rest of your material. Put questions in the order most frequently asked. Try to limit them to between 10-15.Tips For More Effective Product UseAgain, you should know how to use your product more effectively, to get the maximum value from it, to use it in new and better ways. Develop a marketing communication designed to stimulate a user's imagination. To keep this section fresh, keep asking users about how they used the product, and include their (fully attributed) responses.All The Dealer Should Do Is Add Her Dealer Number And Personal Follow-Up Information How long should it take a dealer signing up today to post all your materials on the Internet, ready to promote them and start making money? It should all happen today! To start, a dealer should have to do no more than add his company I.D. number and personal follow-up information, including phone, fax, e-mail, URL, fax-on-demand, street address, etc. If you're really client- centered, you'll do all this, giving your dealer, within the course of the business day she signs up, the complete package, even posting it to her web site. In other words, doing what's necessary to get the dealer off to a good start, being truly dealer-centered! Keep That Good Beginning GoingBy this point, you will have spent a good deal of time and money creating your dealer program and getting your dealers off to a good start. Don't blow it now! Keep things going by
Last WordsThe Internet has changed the World of Work forever. Now people like you, who have had the brains and determination to develop products and become their prime source, have the possibility to develop a worldwide dealer program, benefiting accordingly, while never having to leave your computer keyboard.All you've got to do to make it work is think through precisely what both your dealers and their prospects are going to need and want to know, and provide it for them. If you do this, using the Internet effectively every step of the way, you'll get rich. The Internet's continuing growth from millions of users to billions ensures it. |