In the early 1900s, Reverend Russell Conwell earned 5 million dollars by giving the same speech, titled “Acres of Diamonds,” more than 6,000 times to audiences across the country.

His speech told the story of a farmer who sold his farm so he could travel overseas searching for diamonds. After a lifetime of searching, he returned home penniless, having never found treasure.

In the meantime, the man who purchased the farm noticed a sparkle in the stream running through the property. He waded into the water and found – a diamond!

The farm was sitting on one of the world’s largest diamond mines, making the new owner rich beyond his wildest dreams.

The point of Conwell’s speech: You can find a fortune literally in your own backyard if you take the time to look for it.

The reverend concluded his talk by telling listeners: “Your diamonds are not in far distant mountains or yonder seas. They are in your own backyard if you but dig for them.”

Isn’t this so true of salespeople and business owners? We pursue new clients, day after day, when the real ones are right before us.

Lapsed clients, clients who have been neglected, those forgotten by businesses who only work with a few of their clients, leaving millions of dollars sitting there waiting. If only we were to approach them.

This lesson was taught in the early 1900s and is still true today.

So go and check out your diamonds. This story illustrates that every client you’ve ever had needs to hear from you and be part of your tribe, your business family.

I know a pizza company that believes you must dominate everything within 1 km or mile of your franchise. I mean, dominate it!

Every mailbox, sign, or business within a 1 km radius of the store must know about them.  They do this through mail promotions, in-store activity, events, promotions, and anything to get that top-of-mind awareness and move them into the 94% as quickly as possible.

With the advent of email and online marketing to your clients, it has never been easier in the history of marketing.

There is a great quote that I found about customer service, which I think is very true.“Customer service is the new marketing.”

As quoted earlier, keeping clients is much easier once you get them. It drives me mad when I work with clients through my consultancy service, and I discover that they have a database of several thousand, and they ignore them. It’s with an attitude of “They won’t buy from us.”

One sports organisation that we worked with had 7,000 lapsed clients. That’s 7,000 members they had not talked to in any fashion for years, yet they were still on the database, ready to be sold to.

Just ignored, that organisation came to us with a desperate request to build a membership program for their following year’s membership.

We suggested starting with all those lapsed clients on the database. The answer? Oh, they tried us and never came back. No kidding! Really!

Our theory was that you had to at least ask them and find out why they were not buying or what their problems were. Then you could provide a new solution so they might consider a proposal.

We ended up dropping the client. Sometimes, folk do not want to be helped. We also learned that this particular category was not ready for our type of selling. That happens, and in every sale and business experience, you have to accept that.

It’s worth remembering that often buying experiences, are based on how the customer feels they are being treated, spoken with, assisted, and helped.

Learn about the importance of looking inside your company for opportunities that might be staring you in the face.

Mike 

 

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