Leave Them in the Dust!: How to Out-Sell and Out-Market Every Executive Education or Training Provider That You Compete Against No Matter How Large or Small You Are!

By DC Faure

I don't know of a single Executive Education business or training organisation who would not get some type of improvement by using the strategies in this book.
Contrary to media coverage, growing your Executive Education business or any type of training business for that matter is not down to magic or superhuman business acumen.
It has everything to do with understanding the way your customers think, out-thinking your competitors and combining a stream of innovative courses, services and messages into an unbeatable value proposition. This book gives you the ammunition to rapidly boost your competitive advantage, leading to increased bookings for courses and development programmes virtually overnight.
This book shows you:
How to take control of your results
Why you should rely on your intuition to understand your industry
12 ways to write winning headlines and subject lines
Why emails must be under 30 seconds long
How to get more clicks from SEO without increasing your rankings
Slash your Pay per Click costs and get more quality prospects
The type of content marketing that works
Why you won't need to create content from scratch
The lead generation system that outperforms your website by 1600%
How to choose your markets and make growth easy
billion strategy levers
6 Rapid Business Multipliers you can apply right away
The Significance of A/B Split Testing for breakthrough performance
Why you need more than marketing skills to succeed - 5 management tools for you
Where to target your efforts in social media marketing
Plus much more..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781499096927

DC Faure

DC Faure is a Chartered Marketer with 15 years experience strategising and implementing performance growth in senior marketing positions within the education and training industry. At the age of 25, DC was a founding partner and marketing director of one of the UK's very first e-learning companies. It was formed during the height of the dot com boom and the company achieved rapid growth. By the time he was 30, DC was leading a team of 40 sales, marketing and customer service people. Revenues hit £1m+ ($1.5m+) revenues per year - not bad from a Princes Youth Trust business loan of just £5000 ($7500)! His company attracted the attentions of a Venture Capitalist based in Atlanta but was eventually sold to a Times 100 Fast Track company. There was also a philanthropic aspect to the business. During this time, DC employed over 100 young long term unemployed people to train them in sales, IT management and operations. DC was also a founding partner of a Learndirect and Pitman Training franchise. When he joined full time, he took his successful 'A Board' street pavement sign advert and expanded it into radio, newspaper and Internet adverts to generate in excess of £3m of revenues. DC left to join a world leading business school. He is currently heading up the marketing function for Open Executive Programmes. The school portfolio of programmes is amongst the biggest in the world and is a hugely competitive industry - up against professional institutions, a plethora of business schools and thousands of training providers. Under his marketing leadership, yearly revenues has grown faster than the prevailing market growth rate of the Executive Education industry. He was also instrumental in helping to establish a brand new integrated sales & marketing division - perhaps the first of its type in Europe for Business Schools operating within the Executive Education industry DC owns a Masters degree in Marketing Management and a Postgraduate Diploma in Marketing. He is also a full member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. DC Faure-Wilson is the founder and CEO of Growtal (www.growtal.com) - A powerful 'done for you' customer growth system that drives profitable customers and clients into your executive education, B2B training and consulting businesses.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by DC Faure.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2015906354

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4990-9691-0

             Softcover     978-1-4990-9690-3

             eBook         978-1-4990-9692-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 01/15/2016

Xlibris

800-056-3182

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

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Contents

HOW THIS BOOK WORKS

GROWING FAST AND SLOW

Transform Your Marketing Operations Overnight with Direct Response

Chapter 1 How to Draw Thousands of Customers into Your Training Enterprise—Stack the Cards in Your Favour

A Quick Pictorial Guide to Marketing Strategy

What to Do When Things Go Wrong and All Things Fail

Three Ways to Pile on Daily Growth

Billion-Pound Strategy Levers

Strategy Lever 1: Improve Productivity

Strategy Lever 2: Sales Growth

Strategy Lever 3: Market Penetration

Strategy Lever 4: Market Development

Growth Accelerator Buttons

Accelerator Button 1: Productivity

Accelerator Button 2: Sell Higher-Margin Courses and Products.

Accelerator Button 3: Operate in Growth Sectors.

Accelerator Button 4: Slash Discounts.

Accelerator Button 5: Always Be Testing Your Prices.

Accelerator Button 6: Strip Costs – Lower Your Breakeven Point.

Where to Cut Costs

Bigger market share means bigger profits.

A Clear-Cut Example of Market Development

The Training Industry Is Riven with Non-User Customers

Customer Advocacy Model

Ladder of Intimacy: Product Development Strategy

Fixing the Steps on Your Ladder of Intimacy

Case Study: Ladder of Intimacy for B2B Training Enterprise

Case Study: Back-End Sales, Executive Education

The Silly Strategy: Diversification

Acquisition and Licencing

Chapter 2 100-Day Action Plans—Implementing Growth

A Plan That Will Never Fail You as Long as You Do Not Fail It

Kick-Starting Your Next 12 Months

Your Growth Calendar

First 100 Days: Giving Your Assets a Massive Squeeze—Productivity Improvements

Boost Your Best Marketing Activities

Second 100 Days: Leveraging Your Marketing Successes—Market Penetration

Take a Deep Dive into a Sea of Ideal Customers

Case Study: The £3 Million A-Board Street Sign

Third 100 Days: Build Business Muscle

Never Risk the Farm: Using BCG to Manage Your Growth

Fourth 100 Days: Ten Times More Leverage with Market Development

The Court of Final Appeal Is Your Own Market

Market/Segment size

Market Growth Rate: The No-Brainer Way to Grow!

Case Study: Some Executive Education Businesses Get Lucky

Assess Market Profitability as Part of Your Research Project

Porter’s Five Forces Analysis

Market Development Strategy in Practice

Case Study: The Millennium Award Winner Who Had the World at His Feet

Case Study: A Project Management Consultant

Chapter 3 Discover What Your Customers Want and Give It to Them

Market Research Powers Your Message DNA Platform

How to Find Out What Your Customer Really, Really Want!

People Compare Features

Categorising Customer Features

Profiling Customers

Feature-Advantage-Benefit Examples from Other Industries

Jump-Start Market Research: Email Survey

CHAPTER 4 Keep Customers Riveted with Your Message DNA Platform

Winning Hearts and Minds: Make It Hard for Prospects and Customers to Say No

The Folly of Being a ‘Me Too’ Business

Creating Your Message DNA Platform

A Customer Hack to Spice up Your Adverts & Pitches

The Components behind Your Message DNA Platform

Chapter 5 Message DNA Platform—Content Marketing in Action

Getting Started with Content Marketing

Your Message DNA Platform and Fresh New Content

Write and Video a Case Study for Each Element of Your Customer’s Decisive Buying Criteria

The Four Steps in Creating Powerful Case Studies

Creating Your Competitor Report: Buyer’s Guide

Crafting a Future Developments Report

Vivid Unique Selling Propositions

CHAPTER 6 How to Make Your Offline Marketing Promotions Pay

Winning Adverts, Brochures, Banners, Sales Letters, Even Postcards

12 Distinctive Headlines (and Email Subject Lines)*

Example of Wants and Needs

A Quick Way to Breathe Life into Your Marketing Pieces

Citing facts makes your marketing promotions interesting.

Structuring Your Brochure, Large Adverts, Web Pages, Sales Letters

The AIDCA formula

CHAPTER 7 The Most Powerful Ways to Sell Millions of £’s or $’s Worth of Courses and Executive Education Services

Respond Quickly and Double Your Sales: A U.S. Experiment

Earn the Right to a Conversation and Convert 66% of Leads into Appointments

Transactional Sales: Front-End Product, Fact-Find Form

Increase Customer Communications and You Naturally Boost Sales

How to Get Extraordinary Performance from ‘Ordinary’ Sales Staff

Case Study: Sales Recruitment for a Busy Training Company

Recruiting Sales Superstars into Your Team

Sell on Value and Pay Your People Accordingly

The Alliance between Sales and Marketing Is Crucial

Sales Can Never Lead Marketing

Marketing and Sales Fusion

Sales Alchemy Tools

Time-Tested Sales Tactics

Customer Lifecycle

Reactivating Your Dead Customers

CHAPTER 8 Leave Them in the Dust! 1600% More Prospects Overnight

A Lead Generation System That Will Never Fail You

The Abject Poverty of Websites

Case Study 1: 1600% Uplift in Prospects

Case Study 2: 1,500 Leads in 24 Hours

Case Study 3: From £15,000 to £5,000 PPC Cost

Lead Generation–Customer Acquisition System

Components of a Lead Capture Page

CHAPTER 9 Testing Your Way to More Sales

A/B Split Testing: The Art of Rapid Growth That Never Fails!

Let the thousands decide what the millions will do!

Piling the Odds in Your Favour

Testing My Way to 1600% Performance Boost

How to Test and Discover Your Greatest Winning Sales Combination

What to Test

Price-Testing Case Study: The Little Training Company and the Big Business School

What to Test Guide

Conversion Tips You’d Be Crazy to Ignore

School kid Errors

Chapter 10 Email Marketing—Getting Them Out of Their Inbox and into Your Sales Funnel

How to Boost Your Email Marketing Performance

Email Marketing Strategy

Immediate Email Marketing Metrics to Track

Business Metrics to Track Directly from Email Marketing

The Three Secrets of Email Design

Winning Email Techniques

Email Killers: Six of the Worst-Offending Things That You Can Do

Fingers Hovering over the Delete Button

Customers Bombarded By Life

Oodles of Profit in Your Customer Mailing Lists

The Best Cold Business-to-Business Mailing lists

Building Your In-House Prospect Email List

Spam Complaints: Anger Management

The Day My Major Email Campaign Unravelled before My Eyes

Email Solus Adverts

Email Newsletter Advertising

What to Expect during Your Email Campaign

A Troubleshooting Guide to Low-Responding Campaigns

Chapter 11 How to Multiply Course Sales with a Pay-Per-Click Lead Generation System

Buy Profit, Not Traffic

How to Win with Google Adwords

A Spectacular Pay-Per-Click Transformation Strategy

£50,000 Revenue from One Key Phrase

Case Study: 1100% More Leads through PPC

The Deconstruction of a 1100% Campaign: A Stark Example

This Was a Chance Discovery That Led to Spectacular Gains

Keyword Research: Inside Your Customer’s Mind

Ethically Steal Customers with Keyword Research Tools

Mechanics of a Successful PPC Advert

A Smarter Way to Bid for Keywords

Why Do Specific Lead Capture Pages Matter to You?

Website Sign-Up Forms: The Ultimate Marketing Sniper

Winning PPC Adverts

Bland is Boring

Case Study: Examples of Me-Too PPC Adverts

Here’s How a Smart Training Enterprise Can Steal Clicks

How to Create a Winning Headline

Testing a Winning Advert

Here’s How to Decide a Winner on a PPC Experiment

What a Winning Advert Looks Like

The Biggest Danger of A/B Split Testing and What to Do about It

CHAPTER 12 How to Get More Clicks from Search Engines

How Prospects Find You

The Theory behind Search Engine and PPC Keyword Research

Case Study: Searching High and Low for Car Insurance

The Motivated Buyer

The Two Things Your Website Must Do Better than Anyone Else

Quick Tip: A Bulletproof Method

Deeper-Lasting Search Engine Concepts

Why Outsource SEO Campaigns?

The Insanity of Focusing Your Marketing Solely on SEO

Known SEO Hazards

SEO Strategy: The More You Focus, the Bigger Your Response

You Must Be Indexed to Get Found

Why Your Competitor’s Website Always Rank Better than You

5 Golden SEO Rules for Customer Attraction

Content Is King

How to Focus on the Right Keywords

Three SEO Questions That You Must Ask

Mapping Keywords to Content

Working SEO in Your Favour

The Astonishing Power of Internal Linking

Realise That SEO Campaigning Is Natural Marketing

Link Boom with External Websites

Chapter 13 Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social Media Segmentation and Profiling

Boosting Your Social Media Presence

Converting Social Media Audiences into Customers

Business Metrics

Social Media Metrics

Key Performance Indicators

Social Media Measuring Tools

Chapter 14 Massively Increase Your Website Performance with Google Analytics

You Never Have to Second-Guess Your Website Visitors Again

Website Performance Benchmarks

The Universal Goal of Website Improvement

Google Analytics Dashboard

Visitor Behavioural Insights Are What You Really Need

FICTIONAL CASE STORY: Learning Technologies Company

Behavioural Metrics

You Must Take Action. If You Don’t, Then Throw This Book Away

CHAPTER 15 Taking Action, Making Effective Decisions and Engaging in Marketing Politics

Stakeholder Management

Stakeholder Mapping Model, Adopted from Johnson and Scholes

A Simple Performance Review

The Eisenhower Matrix Urgency/Importance Decision Model

Conflict Management Tool

Business Metrics: Using the Balance Scorecard to Measure Your Success

Situational Leadership: How to Lead Your Boss, Colleagues, Project Team, Suppliers or Department

A Leadership Style for Any Situation

I want to dedicate this book to my mum. I miss you xxx. I also want to thank my dad and brother for making this book happen.

Also an extra special thanks to my wife and son for your patience and understanding. I use the time that I should have spent with you to write this book. I owe you

To everyone I’ve worked with past and present, I’ve learnt something from you all, so thank you for helping me to become a better, more accomplished marketing leader.

HOW THIS BOOK WORKS

Did you know that there are time-tested sales & marketing strategies that always seem to work well? Let’s face it, selling development programmes, courses, coaching and consulting assignments is a tough gig. With tens of thousands of training providers, business schools, professional institutes and universities all fighting for their space, it is hard to get noticed.

To my knowledge, this book is the first to be written on sales & marketing within the executive education & training industry. It draws inspiration from the author’s experience in the wider training industry. The concepts revealed in this book, work equally well – regardless of whether you are selling consulting, coaching, class based courses, eLearning or blended programmes.

Each chapter pinpoints the exact unique combination of methods you need to grow. Each chapter stands alone as a source of breakthrough knowledge in its own right. But they are even more powerful when you start to combine several techniques revealed throughout this book. There should be a stunning gem in each chapter that you read.

This book gives you a powerful understanding of your own growth potential. Each strategy, tactic or method uncorks new sources of contribution, profit and sales. From strategy levers that you can pull to time-tested tactics such as lead generation via SEO, email marketing and landing page optimisation. But that’s not all. Other books solely focus on marketing techniques; this book goes one step further.

Marketing people struggle to get their ideas accepted by the business. It’s unfortunate that despite marketing being a core function of all executive education, training and coaching providers, it is viewed cynically by the wider business, and so people with sales & marketing responsibility are left frustrated when their great idea or stunning business case gets turned down. In chapter 15, I’m going to give you a set of management tools to smooth your path so that your marketing projects and new campaigns see the light of day.

Good luck and thank you for reading.

If you need to get hold of me with feedback, please email [e-mail].

GROWING FAST AND SLOW

Can you really prime your business for rapid performance improvement? The answer is yes, through smarter marketing. Conversely you can take control of your growth – and adjust whether you grow fast or slow. To do this, you must identify and pull the strategic marketing levers to help you negotiate growth.

There are some marketing channels like pay per click where you can experience a 20% improvement in as little as 20 minutes.

Email marketing is another channel where you can witness almost instantaneous results. Same goes for your web pages. Simplifying them for mobile devices and desktops will see your results soar.

The trick is knowing what to do that appeals to your most likely customers. And this is where this book comes into its own.

Let me give you some examples of the success I’ve had in boosting marketing performance of executive education and training enterprises. I:

• Increased website lead generation for an IT training company by 266% by ensuring unique selling points matched prospect needs

• Boost web page response from 1.5% to 33% (2100% increase) by setting up special lead capture pages

• Slashed lead acquisition costs by 66% through better targeting and campaign setup. Again, this did not cost a penny extra in expenditure.

• Lifted enrolments for a local training and education company from 30 bookings to a high point of 90 per week simply by rolling out proven flyers, print and radio adverts to new channels.

• Implemented a consultative selling process that led to revenues of £24,000 during first month of trading for a start-up training franchise.

• Engineered on average £10 worth of bookings for £1 spent on Google Adwords and £6.80 worth of bookings for £1 spent on Yahoo (1000% and 680% return on investment by introducing a new lead capture system, which will be a common theme throughout this book).

This book is simply transformational. Morphing mediocre marketing into good, poor into excellent, inconsistent results into reliable revenue streams, this book cuts away at all the fluffy marketing endemic in executive education and training businesses worldwide.

Marketing is an investment; and as a marketer, a director or a business owner, you cannot afford to waste money on ineffectual marketing that fail to grow your business.

Let me explain. Executive education businesses and training enterprises, are oblivious to the deep-rooted failure of their marketing systems to persuade prospects/customers/clients to take action.

And most of them, ie those who make revenues up to $19 million per year, make the fatal mistake of not benchmarking key metrics to drive performance. The larger executive education businesses, ie those making $20 million of revenue per year, still fail to track key metrics and so are underperforming, throwing easy money away.

There is almost a complacency mind-set amongst marketing teams and leaders who think their specialist skill or brand strength is enough to convert prospects into full-paying clients.

Now, that may be true for the very strongest brands like Harvard Business School, but there is certainly room for improvement. Often, there is an epidemic of smugness amongst growing enterprises that feel that as their business is rising upwards, they are on the fast track to permanent success. This is rarely the case.

Yet marketers and directors fail to realise that they may be growing slower than market growth rates, and competitors are piling on market share quicker than they can ever hope to achieve. Down the line, they become despondent as customers leave them in droves. Let this not be you!

Transform Your Marketing Operations Overnight with Direct Response

Be honest: have you ever spent money on a website or an email advert and left feeling totally disappointed with the lack of results that you got? Well, you’re not alone!

Every year, millions of pounds are spent (in the UK alone) on graphically impressive websites, adverts, campaigns, brochures and emails that end up doing nothing significant in terms of generating extra sales or even covering the money spent on them.

Each marketing campaign should provide your business with as many prospects and clients as you can handle.

Sadly, most marketing ‘assets’ are doing nothing or, even worse, putting people off from booking with you.

Many establishments have no idea how their websites, adverts, sales letters or brochures are performing for them.

This is a BIG MISTAKE.

Growing your marketing operations is a scientific process. There is no guesswork involved. Yet what I have seen from some of the largest and most prestigious establishments is a lack of marketing fundamentals that when done right can rapidly increase enquiries, brochure downloads, bookings, consulting and custom programme fees.

Follow the principles outlined in this book, there is a strong chance that marketing gains to your business will exceed 20% literally overnight for some strategies or 12 months for deeper change.

The emphasis is on engineering improvements across your sales and marketing process, leading to more awareness, enquiries, appointments and, when done right, revenues.

I’ve made subtle changes that resulted in 6400% boost in conversions without increasing the marketing budget. You can achieve these results as well.

Be in total control of your marketing results.

I will show you, through a process of systematic improvement, how to guarantee bigger response to your advertisements, emails, banners, classified advertising, postcards, sales pitches, direct mails and any other marketing method or channel that you use.

There is no theory here. Every figure I cite, every improvement in sales and profits, is an actual result obtained by real businesses.

Chapter 1

How to Draw Thousands of Customers into

Your Training Enterprise—Stack the Cards

in Your Favour

A Quick Pictorial Guide to Marketing Strategy

What to Do When Things Go Wrong and All Things Fail

mkt1.jpg

This cartoon neatly sums up your marketing strategy in good times and bad times. The top row of four boxes is what typically executive education and training enterprises face before things get really desperate, and they have to face up to thinking more strategically rather than relying on marketing tactics and outdated courses.

The second row of four boxes focuses on a world-class solution that develops new market segments based on behaviours and needs, courses and related products and services that your customers want and your competitors cannot match (for now). Customers come back to you, and profits rise. It’s not rocket science, but the message is, if everything fails in your marketing, then you must re-examine your marketing strategy by starting with your customer segment. Later