and the power to put every important marketing question to a vote by the only people whose ballot counts: customers and prospects.How do we put a marketing question to a vote? By testing one sales thrust against another, one price against another, one ad concept against another, one headline against another, one TV or radio commercial against another, one follow-up or up-sell overture against another. I could go on and on.The point is --- and this is not guesswork ---when you test one approach against another and carefully analyze and tabulate the results, you will be amazed that one approach always substantially out pulls all the others by a tremendous margin. You’ll also be amazed at how many more sales or how much larger the average orders you can realize from the same effort.The purpose of testing is to demand maximum performance from every marketing effort.If each of your field salespeople averages 15 calls a day, doesn’t it make sense to find the one sales pitch or package that lets them close twice as many sales and increases their average order by 40%-100% with the same amount of effort?You can easily achieve immediate increases in sales and profits merely by testing.Tomorrow, have your salesmen try different pitches, different hot-button focuses, different packages, differently specially priced offers, different bumps or upgrades, different follow-up offers, etc.Each day review the specific performance of each test approach, then analyze the data.If a specific new twist on your basic sales approach out-closes the old approach by 25-50%, doesn’t it make sense for every salesman to start using this new approach?Test every sales variable. Any positive or negative data can help you to dramatically manipulate the effectiveness of your sales efforts.But don’t stop at merely finding those approaches, offers, prices, or packages that outperform the others. Once you identify the most successful combination, ...
