Trailer Talk – What Does Yours Say?

Your livestock trailer can be a traveling billboard for your farm. Whether it’s a trailer, truck or van, you can use it to communicate a good message about your alpacas and your farm. Here are some tips to maximize the impact of a marketing message on your vehicle.

Consistent image. Make sure the graphics and text are consistent with your farm image elsewhere, such as on your website, print materials, and farm sign. Using the same colors, logo, photo, and contact information helps build your brand.

Keep it simple and easy to read. Unless you are painting a large livestock trailer, your vehicle signage will be better seen if clean and simple. You need your farm name, tagline if there’s plenty of room, phone number and website. Your logo or a great photo are options if space allows.

Go big. Make the font larger rather than smaller, keeping in mind the distance from which most people will be reading the signage, and the target age of most qualified alpaca buyers (probably glasses wearers).

Remember the back. Though signage on the side of your vehicle is a good idea, remember to also have it on the back. That’s where people will see it when they are stopped long enough to note your contact information. Lynne Johnson, owner of Sauk Creek Alpacas in Wisconsin, says this image on the back of her trailer has been the way some of her prospective buyers tell her they first found out about her farm and alpacas.

Keep it fresh. When your vehicle sign or paint job looks old and faded, onlookers may tend to wonder what else on your farm might need some attention. Replace your sign or repaint your vehicle graphics whenever they start to look worn out. Prospects are much more tolerant of a truck that looks farm-worn than signage that needs to be replaced.

Tip from a breeder – Before you invest in a magnetic sign for the back of your vehicle, make sure it will adhere to the tailgate. Evidently some are made of materials that are not compatible with magnetic signs.

As you put together all the methods you will use to attract prospective buyers to inquire about your alpacas, let good trailer signage do some of the talking for you.

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

Show Booth Sales Secrets

You only have 30 seconds. That’s your window of opportunity to capture the attention of passersby your show or event booth and draw them in so you can determine where they are in the alpaca buying process.

What are some things you can do to capture potential buyers’ attention in that brief time it takes them to pass by your booth? With the first eye contact you make, the communication you – not they – initiate will determine whether or not they stay and continue a conversation that could lead to a sale. How can you make the most of those first few seconds?

Be there. Shows and events are one of the primary ways prospective buyers learn about alpacas and meet breeders from whom they eventually buy. If you are not in your booth, you will not be one of those breeders. If you must be absent to show or volunteer, be sure someone knowledgeable and confident covers for you while you’re gone.

Initiate conversation. “If you build it, they will come,” might have worked in the movies, but it does not work to maximize lead generation from your show or event booth. Many more prospects will be drawn into your booth if you start a conversation with a question the second you lock eyes. Use an open question that generates a more detailed response. For instance, “What can I tell you about our alpacas?” generates a response that qualifies the passerby’s interest in buying far more quickly than asking, “How are you doing?” If you want to make the most of the first ten minutes with a prospect at your booth, start out with a good question and then keep on asking!

Use a qualifying guest book. Have a guest book page open and ready for each interested passerby to sign. Make sure it asks them to answer a few questions that will help you determine their level of interest and readiness to buy. Give prospects a reason to sign your book, such as your willingness to send them further information or a personal invitation to an upcoming farm event.

For more show booth sales tips and a sample guest book page, check page 50 – 55 of the book, 101 Ways to Market and Sell Your Alpacas. Need a copy? Click on the link below or call our office at 303-693-2306 today!

Read about more sales opportunities in my article on Memorable Marketing – Making the First Ten minutes Count in the Spring 2008 issue of Alpacas Magazine.

For your copy of 101 Ways to Market and Sell Your Alpacas, click here

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

Marketing Alpacas in a Challenging Economy

How do you successfully market your farm, sell alpacas and breedings, and provide exceptional customer care when the economy is stressed, your overhead is increasing, and the consumer confidence is shaky at best? Today’s economic indicators have many alpaca breeders wondering how to best get new customers, generate repeat business, and meet their sales goals. Alpaca business owners who emerge as leaders, despite marketplace challenges, practice five specific marketing directives. Here are three of them.

Go Back to Basics – Now is the time to sharpen your skills in generating inquiries, converting those inquiries to farm visits, and maintaining customers. When sales of alpacas and breedings are easier to get, some breeders let the basics slide and can still justify no change in approach. However, when sales are tougher to get, the most effective techniques are often the basic skills, such as thorough needs assessment, asking for the farm visit and the sale, and handling objections and complaints well. If your marketing methods generate qualified inquiries, but those calls, emails, and visits are not converted into the highest number of sales possible, training on proven selling basics may be the most cost-effective marketing move you can make.

Be Creative – The marketing methods you have practiced for years may not be as effective when prospect budgets are strained, competition is invading your market share, and economic conditions are out of your control. One way to rise to the challenge is to get creative about how you market, sell, and provide exceptional customer service. Think outside your farm and industry shows for places to find interested buyers. Where is your community can you get active as a way to generate inquires? What incentives can you offer existing customers to refer new prospects? What extra little things can you do to make farm visitors see more value in becoming your customer? The Progeny Predictor Charts developed and offered by a Virginia breeder are an example of a creative way to help prospects and customers perceive more value in the support they will receive by doing business with this farm.

Do What the Others Don’t Do – Competition can be fierce in a challenging economy. One of the best ways to lead the pack is to do things that set you apart as a leading provider of quality animals and exceptional customer services. For instance, one Colorado breeder joined with several other farms in offering and promoting a breeding selection service called Genetic Options.

Evaluate your website to assure it makes it easy for prospects to find you, inquire, and schedule farm visits or register for farm events. Make your farm team your marketing partners by training them in personalized but consistent delivery of key marketing messages about your farm and your alpacas. Follow-up with prospects and pay attention to customers like your farm’s existence depends upon it (and it might).

Succeeding in a challenging economy is far from impossible. Practicing these marketing directives will help you emerge as a leader, and your farm remain the alpaca and breeding services choice for your prospects and customers.

For more on these and the other two marketing directives to practice in a challenging economy, attend Julie’s seminar, How to Be Bullish on Marketing Alpacas in a Challenging Economy. To book this seminar for your next farm or affiliate even, visit http://www.juliewassom.com/alpacas%20seminars.htm or call 800-876-0260.

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

Selling Non-Herd Sire Males

How can you market and sell those males in your herd who will probably not become marketable herdsires, but who could be good fiber producers, companion animals, or projects such as performance class entries, 4-H projects, public relations animals, etc?

In working with breeders over the last several years, here are some of the ways I have seen them successfully move these male alpacas:

1. Include them at a reduced cost in a package with females or other herd sire males.
2. Use them as an incentive to buy additional breeding stock. “When you buy both

   these females, I will include these two males, as well.”

3. Host a “Male Sale” event on your farm or ranch. This will require broad exposure to attract multiple markets of purchasers.
4. Sell them at auction, either individually or as part of a pen for sale.
5. Market to the target audiences looking for fiber. This could be spinners, weavers, fiber artists, etc. Publications, retail outlets, associations, and other venues that serve these audiences are good sources for your advertising and publicity about these males for sale.

   For this target group, it may also be worth your while to keep the alpaca, but sell the fiber every year. One of my breeder clients has established a relationship with a fiber goods retail outlet in New York. They now wholesale fiber and yarn to this outlet. Some of that fiber comes from non–herd sire males on their ranch.

6. Market to the target audience looking for pet quality. These prospects will want them for 4-H projects, as companion animals, for therapeutic programs, etc. Though they may not be willing to pay top dollar, they are a source of sales and good homes for these males.

Though males may have the reputation of being harder to sell than females, there are markets for them. It is up to you to use a sales strategy that works for you. (Call me if you need help with this.) Then pursue those buyers, employ your sales strategy, and watch the male alpacas disappear from your farm or ranch.

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

What is the Altitude of Your Attitude?

It is said that we only use 12% of our brain power. Beyond that, I believe the height of your success depends significantly on the altitude of your attitude. What you think about tends to come about. If you think you are going to convert each qualified prospect inquiry into a sale, you start with a big advantage. Likewise, if you think it is going to be hard to convert them, you start with a severe disadvantage.

As you say goodbye to the challenges of the past and look ahead to the opportunities that lie ahead, first ask yourself, “What is my attitude? Is it high and positive or low and negative?”

If your attitude battery is low, think of these ideas as jumper cables you can use to give yourself the boost you need to jump-start your sales goal achievement in the new year.

Take an inventory of your strengths and how you can apply them. One of the very best ways to re-energize your professional approach to selling alpacas and breedings is to take a good look at the best of who you are and how you can apply it to converting prospects to farm visitors and eventually to customers. Whenever I ask breeders what their greatest sales strengths are, I get an array of answers ranging from talking directly with prospects to being passionate about their animals and the alpaca lifestyle to knowing how to help new breeders get started. Rarely do they say things that tell me how they apply those strengths, such as marketing to their primary target audience, asking for the sale, or following up consistently.

What are your strengths as a marketer and salesperson? Write down at least three of them. Then consider what motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, said, “It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you use that makes a difference.” Once you have noted your strengths, write down how you can actually apply them to increasing your qualified inquiries and sales.

For example, let’s say one of your strengths is being organized. How can you apply that to your follow-up system, so you consistently work the leads who have inquired but not yet visited your farm or purchased anything you have to sell? Doing good follow-up will impress your prospects and undoubtedly improve your opportunities to make sales.

Find a way to make people happy. Whether it is your prospects, customers, farm staff, or whomever, there is undoubtedly a way you can satisfy their desires. For example, if a prospective buyer is wondering how they can manage to finance the purchase of an alpaca and still get the tax advantages currently available, what could you do to help them find financing and get the assistance they need to gain the tax benefits they want? In other words, think about how you can make it easy for them to buy from you. In this case, you could make three sets of people happy. The prospect who gets the alpacas and tax savings they want, the tax professionals to whom you referred them, and YOU! Why you? Because you will have made a sale and gained a satisfied customer!

Smile. For years, I have said, “You can hear a smile on the telephone.” It says all kinds of good things about you. Before you pick up a ringing phone, take a deep breath and smile. Put a small mirror by your telephone and glance into it and smile before you begin to speak. It is absolutely impossible to sound grumpy when you are smiling. Try it!

When you talk to prospects and customers on your farm, smile a lot. It communicates that alpaca ownership is a really a happy way to live. People are attracted to that like a magnet. In addition to discussing quality breeding stock and the future of alpaca fiber, tell stories about all the funny and endearing things alpaca do.

The other day, I was telling a breeder the story of what a magical experience it was for my daughter and me to go sit amongst a herd of alpacas on a day when it was snowing lightly, and how they nestled all around us, curious and friendly and just happy to be there. So were we. Both the breeder and I were smiling and got teary just talking about it!

It’s all in how you look at it.  A positive attitude, along with well-practiced good sales skills, will help launch you forward toward your sales goals.

Julie Wassom is the owner of Grand Champion Marketing in Denver, Colorado, and is the author of The Alpaca Marketing Success Library of books, special reports, and other marketing resources, and the e-newsletter, Wassom’s Marketing Wisdom, available at www.juliewassom.com.

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

Ten Ways to Get the Most Marketing Bang for Your Buck

When you have invested in quality alpacas, breedings, a barn, fences, feed, vet care, etc., your marketing budget can be smaller than you had hoped. Here are ten ways you can make those dollars go further toward effectively marketing you and your farm and alpacas without breaking the bank.

1. Print only what you anticipate using in the near future. A barn full of outdated ranch brochures does not justify the printer’s volume discount.
2. Use a marketing action plan. If you are committed to a plan that includes tasks, timelines, and budgets, you will be less likely to spend marketing dollars in a hurried unplanned manner when a need for marketing tools pops up. Set a budget for marketing and stick to it! Then it will be much easier for you to resist tempting opportunities that do not fit into your marketing action plan. Learn to think – and say, “That looks interesting, but it does not fit into my marketing budget this year. Maybe next year…”
3. Think series versus single. Research shows that response to one ad or mailing is much lower than to a series of at least three. Multiple runs are often cheaper per placement than a single media buy or mailing.
4. Make time for follow-up. I like to say, “The fortune is in the follow-up.” Why? Because it’s much less costly to retain interested, qualified buyers than it is to go find and draw new ones.
5. Generate good publicity. The small amount of time and effort it takes to generate good local or national publicity pays big dividends in third party endorsement and the resulting farm visits. One Ohio breeder wrote and told me every article they get yields 25-30 farm visits.
6. Go to shows. Though a bigger budget item than many marketing activities, shows can give you a presence not much else can. To take full advantage, be sure you use a prospect-qualifying guest book, pass out at least ten business cards a day, and gain visibility as a show volunteer or committee member.
7. Get out into your community. Community involvement can yield LOTS of inquiries, referrals, and farm visits from qualified prospects for very few dollars. And many community activities are newsworthy, so let your local media know what you’re doing. There are diamonds in your own backyard. Mine them.
8. Put your name on it. On every AOBA brochure, article copy, or resource book (such as Marketing Alpacas – Tools for Getting Started, by yours truly) that you give out, use either a sticker or a stamp that has your farm name, phone number, and web address on it. Not only will you cost-effectively increase your exposure, you’ll create more recognition and image retention that leads to inquiries.
9. Hire a professional. Which is a better investment? Spending $500 on an ad that gets little or no response or spending $1,500 on help that generates multiple qualified inquiries? If you do not have the expertise you need to maximize the cost-effectiveness of your marketing efforts, your best ROI may be to hire someone who does.
10. Just do it! Set aside a time to do marketing just as you would schedule a time for a farm or ranch visit. Before you can get any bang at all for your marketing bucks, you have to take action.

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

Stop, Drop and Call – Adding Interest and Impact to Alpaca Ads | Part 2

Placing Ads for Maximum Impact

I like to say a good ad only makes “$ense” if it is placed well. When it is, it has the reach and frequency you need to get the response you anticipate and hope for. Use these tips to help you place ads to get the most image and inquiry bang for your buck.

Be selective. Whether you place an ad in print media, on television or radio, on the Internet or anywhere else, the rate of your response will be significantly impacted by how well you reach your target audience of prospective buyers. Before placing an ad anywhere, be sure you get a profile of that publication’s or station’s target audience, noting the volume of readers or viewers it reaches, and whether or not they fit the demographic of alpaca buyers you want. (See the 2005 AOBA Marketing Survey Report on the AOBA website for known demographics of alpaca owners.) For instance, an ad you run in your local rural cooperative publication may reach far more qualified buyers (and be less expensive) than the same ad in the nearby metropolitan paper or magazine.

Run your ad more than once. It takes at least three contacts before your prospects know you even exist. Not all these need to be advertisements, but one good ad usually will not draw as much response as will a run of three to five similar ads in the same medium. It can take even longer to gain prospect retention and action from ads on electronic media than it does from ads in print. For example, if you are committed to getting your money’s worth from a good print ad for an upcoming farm event, run it at least three times in the same publication in a relatively short period of time prior to the event.

Co-op with nearby breeders. You can maximize exposure and minimize expense by joining with other breeders to run ads more often.  I recently saw a tasteful ad featuring three neighboring ranches suggesting to readers that a visit to all three of them was a trip worth making. That kind of joint effort can be appealing to the prospect, cost-effective for the three ranches, and effective in generating action – in this case, ranch visits and the opportunity to make sales.

Whether your ad is a small black and white newspaper ad, an email blast, or a four-color ad for the Farm & Ranch Guide or Alpacas Magazine, using these techniques for design and placement can help you stand out in the crowd of 2,700 commercial messages most people take in daily. You’ll know they worked when you get an email or a call from a prospective buyer who says, “I saw your ad, and I’d like to know more.”

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

Stop, Drop and Call – Adding Interest and Impact to Alpaca Ads

When you are caught in a fire, your best response is to Stop, Drop and Roll. When you are advertising alpacas, you’ll get better response if you Stop, Drop and Call. Stop and take a hard look at your ad proof. Think in your prospect’s perspective. If you were a prospective buyer and saw your ad, would it make you want to stop, read, and respond? If not, change it before it goes to print. Drop any excess copy or busy graphics. For most ads, “less is more” is the rule for maximum impact. Include a strong Call-to-action, urging interested prospects to respond immediately.

Advertising is designed to inform and persuade. In the alpaca business, that means your ads should cause your prospects to take some action toward investigating or purchasing your alpacas or related services. But advertising is also a very expensive method of marketing. To get a good return on your investment in advertising, it needs to generate significant response from qualified prospective buyers for your alpacas, breeding services, and retail products.

So how do you design an ad that will capture attention, pull the prospect in, pique their interest, and create urgency to contact you about your alpacas? And once you have a good ad, how and where should you place it to get the most from it in terms of image awareness and inquiry generation for farm visits and alpaca sales?

Designing Ads that “Pop”
Keep it clean. Your ad should be designed to entice, not to tell it all in one small space. Ads with more white space and less copy or busy graphics are easier for your prospects to read. Use only two type-faces. More fonts can make the ad look jumbled and hard to read.  If an ad is not easy to read at first glance, your prospect will pass right over it. Lots of advertising labor and resources are lost just because the ad is too cluttered to be effective.

Keep it simple. Resist the temptation to tell the reader everything about you in one ad. Remember, the ad should inform the reader just enough to persuade them to contact you. Save the detailed education for your inquiry calls and farm visits.

Be creative. You only get a few seconds to capture your prospect’s attention with your ad, so the more creative (notice I did not say cluttered) it is, the better chance you have of holding them on your ad long enough to actually read it. Some of the most creative alpaca ads I have seen tell very little, but they stop me in my tracks and make me want to know more about this breeder, their alpacas, and their unique approach to the business. For example, who can pass by an ad with a close-up graphic of a book entitled, Stalls of Passion by Danielle Shear?

Make it sizzle. Beyond creative, make your ads stop and hold readers by employing some of these tips from industry graphic designer, Karen Saunders.

Use colorful or striking graphics. One large image will have more impact than many smaller items. Establish a center of attention with this graphic or a compelling photo.

In our copy, focus on the benefits of your alpacas and of doing business with you. Your prospective buyers will be asking the question, “What’s in it for me?”

Keep your text to the point. Break it up with a few well-structured bullet points that clearly identify your uniqueness. That’s all some people will read.

Be unique. Look at lots of other alpaca ads and reflect on how you can make your ad unique while still communicating the message you want. In a publication full of head-on and full body photos of alpacas, chances are good your prospects will stop like I did when they see an ad that features a close-up photo of the rear ends of a small group of dense-fibered alpacas with a headline that says, “We stand behind our quality.”

Use one theme per ad. If you are attempting to advertise your herdsires, your females for sale, and your upcoming event, it is better to run three or more different ads in a campaign that has one overall theme and a similar graphic background. More than one theme per ad can confuse your readers and cause them to move on.

Keep a consistent image. Be sure you have an identifiable image in each ad you place. Though the alpacas or services or products you’re promoting may be slightly different in each ad, design each one so that the overall image is recognizable as yours.

Pull ‘em in and Toss ‘em out! By this I mean that your ad must have either a headline or graphic that pulls readers in and makes them want to look further. Make it memorable, unusual, or provocative, using a few carefully chosen powerful words. It’s hard to resist wanting to know more about A Few Good Men, and I’m still wondering just how you Expose Yourself to Alpacas.

Near the bottom of your ad, include a call-to-action, which is text that tells the reader what to do next. Schedule your ranch visit today! is a call-to-action. We welcome you to visit our ranch is a nice statement, but it does not create urgency or “toss ’em out” of the ad and into action. To create even more urgency, a time-sensitive statement, such as, Breedings limited. Call today to schedule yours! can encourage your prospects to pick up the phone to call you even sooner.

Include your name and location. In the contact information at the bottom of your ad, give readers at least two ways to contact you. If your call-to-action says to call you, be sure your telephone number is listed and easy to spot. Because so many prospects investigate the alpaca industry on the internet, put your website address in your ad. If there is room, put your email address, as well.

I have had a number of prospective alpaca buyers tell me they want to see the name of the breeder- not just the farm or ranch name – and the geographical location on an ad before they will respond to it. That’s understandable for two reasons. One is that people buy from people. They want to know who you are. Second, some new breeders are only going to look at alpacas within a geographical radius that makes sense for them. Listing your city and/or state can put you in the running, while leaving it out can eliminate you even if you are within their reach.

Up next we will discuss Placing Ads for Maximum Impact!

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

Ask Julie | Low Cost Farm Promotion?

Question:What are some low-cost ways I can make my farm better known?

Answer: One of the most cost-efficeint ways to help prospective buyers and referral sources become aware of your farm and alpacas is to generate good publicity. Costs are mostly your time to learn how to best approach the press and to execute that effort well. Reporters will be most receptive if you contact them with information that meets three of their criteria for newsworthy information – unique, timely, and of interest to their audience. Most media outlets now prefer information be delivered to them online, so learn what information they want, to whom to send it, and what format they prefer.

Beth Osborne, from Alpaca Hacienda, who originally learned about alpacas from a magazine article, has proven that generating publicity can give you not only good exposure, but third party endorsement that can make your phone ring and your email buzz with inquiries. This one-page article appeared in the November issue of Oprah Magazine, in a column about living your best life. Good angle for the publication’s audience, great single photo, and appealing editorial copy. Kudos, Beth!

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com

Handling Prospect Objections – Three Steps to Success

When a prospect says, “No”, in response to a closing question, some breeders stop trying to convert that inquiry call to a farm visit or that visit into a sale. However, if you handle a prospect objection well, you can significantly increase your chances of turning that prospect into a customer. When you are trying to increase your sales, this approach to handling objections can make a huge difference in your conversion ratios.

 Wassom’s Triple A Formula for Handling Objections

Acknowledge the objection with empathy. Make a brief statement to let your prospect know you heard him or her. Start with phrases such as, I can understand, or I can appreciate. For example, when your prospect says, “I need to talk with my husband,” you can say, “I can appreciate how important it is to discuss this with your husband before you begin making farm visits.” This decreases anxiety and helps the prospect realize you understand her perspective.

Address the objection with benefits. Use your experience and expertise to make recommendations to the prospect, remembering to tell her what she and her husband will get versus simply what you offer. Keep your statements relative to the objection expressed. For the example above, you might continue with, “Let me send you some information to share with your husband. On it, I will highlight important considerations for the two of you to discuss based on our conversation today. Will this be helpful to you?” Asking that final trial closing question, “Will this be helpful to you?” does two things. It gains the prospect’s agreement to keep your farm and alpacas in the running, and it positions you as a helpful resource in this purchasing decision. Both are desirable in this buying process.

Ask for the commitment or permission to follow-up. Always complete this dialogue with a question that either converts this prospect on the spot or sets up an opportunity to reconnect with her to do so. To execute this step of the Triple A Formula for the example above, you could say, “How about if I give you a call on Friday to answer whatever questions come up in your discussion and to schedule a time for both you and your husband to visit our ranch? What is the best time to call you?” Important here is that you ASK, not just tell, and that you follow-up with a call when you said you would. During that call, you answer questions and, depending upon where the prospect is in the sales pipeline, ask to schedule the ranch visit, ask for the sales decision, or ask for permission to initiate follow-up to help them make a wise purchase.

Practice using this three-step Triple A Formula to answer other objections you get from inquiry callers and farm visitors. You will be amazed at not only how easily your prospects respond to this approach, but how effective it can be at converting those prospects to customers.

Julie Wassom
“The Speaker Whose Message Means Business”
Marketing and Sales Speaker/Consultant/Author
Call me: 303-693-2306
Fax me: 303-617-6422
E-me: julie@juliewassom.com
See me: www.juliewassom.com