This is the basic concept behind how selling on Autopilot works

Entering your customer's mind...

Your customer thinks about a lot of different things:

• How to get more customers
• How to get the customers he already has to buy more
• How to relate to external regulatory requirements
• How he can impress the ones he reports to
• and even whether he has forgot anything to the list of things to buy on his way home

Unless there are some really special circumstances, he doesn't really think that much about your product or its functions at all.

Let's be completely honest to eachother: Are you really present in his world at all?

Good if you are. But if not, is that such an impossible situation?

Oh no.

There may not be plenty of opportunities, but still, there are a couple of small moments when he actually may pick up on what you're doing and how it could help him:

• When you make it probable that you can solve one of the problems that occupies his mind right before his eyes, like when you hit him with a direct mailing that clearly addresses his needs or when you actually meet at an event or in a one-on-one meeting and can demonstrate your abilities directly.
• When you've reached him on the phone and you will have a few seconds to make him understand that you may actually have a solution to his problem.
• When he actively searches for solutions over the Internet.

About getting, and keeping interest up

Everytime, you only have a few seconds to get attention. Whenever you've got it, you'll just have a tiny bit longer time to get his interest up... ...but as soon as possible, you have to waken his real desire... ...and when you know you have the desire fired up, then you actually have all the time it takes to properly tell just all the benefits the customer will get with going with you. But it will never lead to anything unless you ask him for what also YOU desire: Ask him to take action.

If you've ever looked into copywriting, you already knew this to be the basic formula with the helpful acronym AIDA – for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

It works.

So the action we want is: Customer buys, right?

Maybe.

But it doesn't have to be a buy.

In most business-to-business cases it very rarely is a buy if it's the very first encounter, and also in business-to-consumer cases it may very well be that the customer would ask for:

• more information
• that he wants to take a course (or send one of his co-workers to one)
• a meeting over the web or in real life
• a sample of your product or a free trial

No matter what it is, if you at first will only ask for something that will give you an e-mail address or a fax-number in return, it will have led you on the way to keep up the contact so you can build a relationship more long-term.

My own experience: Start asking for small Actions!

We tried to sell directly over the web in the company Cellip as soon as we got off the ground. It worked at least to some degree, and we got about 1% of the visitors to become customers directly. I really didn't like loosing the other 99% though. I couldn't believe they didn't see how excellent my product was, apparently to a degree that they just left!

Discovering automation and breaking up actions

That's when I thought I should start to offer something of high value to the customer that still had a low cost to us.

In my case, I didn't have much money to pay for what just could lead to purchases at all, so I decided that what I would be giving would be just plain information. I decided to do it in the form of an IP-telephony school (Cellip is now the largest provider of IP-telephony to Businesses in Sweden and naturally you should go there if you know Swedish and want to learn more about it ). And this IP-telephony school was implemented so it introduced the five major blocks you needed to know in one e-mail each over five days.

2000% jaw-breaking results on actions immediately

Directly, we got contact with 20% of our visitors instead of just 1% when they "only" had to leave us their e-mail address. Over course of the five days, we were up to 3% of the total amount of visitors who had then bought from us. This is normally called the conversion-factor.

And we still had the e-mailaddresses of those that didn't buy during those five days in our possession and every time we had something new to announce, we would always get quite a bunch of buyers from these "sleeping contacts". Over the course of six months, our conversion was up to between 5 and 7%!

But what about spam, didn't the non-buyers complain?

First of all, everyone had actually asked for the information. And I really did get a bunch of e-mails also from the ones that didn't buy, but they were not at all hostile. As a matter of fact they thanked me for the course itself. And quite naturally, our mutual respect made me never to spam the list with anything unnecessary or to send anything to it too often, and I would always let the subscriber unsubscribe whenever he so chose.

Is it only applicable over the web, then?

Nope. I've later discovered that this approach is not only useful when you have web-site visitors, but also if you need to cold call your prospects, but then you have to do a little bit differently that I will tell you more about in an upcoming e-mail if you decide to subscribe to my new e-mail course (well, this one, about putting your Sales on Auto-Pilot, duh! )

What is your own mindset about selling?

When you start to think about selling in a process like the structure I describe, you will notice that:

• You'll spend a lot less time per customer before you know whether they'll buy or not
• You will build a relationship with the customer over a longer period of time without you having to even remember to get back to him.
• A sales representative can have 150 accounts instead of 20. And he can run them more effectively so you don't really let competition in while you double your sales
• Suddenly you will have much more measurable data on e.g.:
• how many contacts you need to get one action
• when a customer comes into contact with you
• when a customer shows an interest for what you do (by clicking on a link, sending in a response-card, e-mail, fax or by calling you)
• You will get the chance to start and test different ways to sell and have measurable results that you can split-test in order to constantly improve
• You get many more contacts much faster which makes you see more quickly if a campaign is particularly successful and can do with a greater investment, or the opposite, if a campaign won't work and you can correct the error as soon as possible
• All in all, it leads you to be able to pick the lowest hanging fruit first which really increases cash-flow and profits and make them come quicker

You won't sell. Your customer will buy.

You can do this both if the phone or personal meetings are your primary way of interfacing with a customer, and the very best thing is that it can be made so easy for the customer, and so little intrusive, that the customer will really feel like he has bought something – not that he has been sold something he didn't desire.

This is what you should do next

If you're subscribed for my e-mail course on Selling on Auto-pilot, you will get your next e-mail already next business day, and there you will discover how you can start to calculate the effect it can have for you to automate your sales.

Sign up for the totally free course on how you sell on Autopilot here if you haven't already!

Are you impatient to get going?

If you want to hit the goal as fast as possible, I would be more than happy to let one of my consultants help you find the right process for you by creating a tailor-made action-plan to get you going directly.

You can do it all yourself based on the information you will get in the upcoming e-mails, but since we have done this before, it is a lot less time-consuming for you to do it according to our structured process with our help, since you won't have to set aside the time for anything else than regular checks and some workshops with the consultant that would be working with you. It means it will both be up and running sooner and you will still completely understand the process itself since you have been part of making it. All tailored for your business.

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