Trust is one of the biggest factors for customers when make a purchasing decision. The old adage “people buy from people they like” is only a half-truth as people ACTUALLY “buy from people they trust” (liking is only a subset of trusting)

Adding a “risk-mitigator” like a free trial or money back guarantee might sound like the same thing, but their effect on sales is remarkably different. In the past we used to attach one or the other indiscriminately onto one our products or services and later only discovered they are far from the same thing.

Free Trials:

PROS

1. Free trials almost always convert prospects at the highest rate (prospect to trialer, not necessarily prospect to customer)
2. Being zero risk (except for time), free trials are ideal for cold-outreach
3. Free trials lessen a company’s dependence and need for exceptional salespeople
4. Great for acquiring top of funnel prospects (prospects who have only been exposed to your product recently and might be far from convinced at this stage)

CONS

1. Free trials means your product needs to sell for you rather than your salespeople. There aren’t many products or services which are good enough for this.
2. Top of funnel prospects (someone who is not on the fence but rather just been made aware of your product) attracted to a free trial might sometimes be better off being more educated first on the product.
3. Free trials will result in prospects with real interest and in chancers. This is not a big deal in a software based product where trials are essentially cost free but a very big deal in brick and mortar businesses which can incur significant costs with every trial.
4. Prospects in a free trial context seldomly consider the price of the future product. This can lead to poor conversion rates and the lack of opportunity to persuade prospects with price objections.
5. Trial = no commitment and therefore the first sign of dissatisfaction usually results in the discontinuation of the trial.

WHEN TO USE FREE TRIALS:

• When selling products with very simple onboarding
• When selling products with very high net promoter scores (NPS). Your product essentially needs to sell itself. No salesperson can be required to massage the facts or highlight some features.
• When selling lowish priced products. This is of course relative but free trials for the most part are most suitable for mass-market. High priced items historically typically fare poorly in free trials
• When selling a product whose value is evident almost immediately. Products on a free trial need to prove themselves almost immediately
• When selling products or services in industries where this is the norm. It is very hard for a SAAS based product to enter the market without a free trial when everyone else is doing it.
• When using cold outreach as a sales mechanism
• When there is no real brand authority or clear leader in your industry
• When it’s difficult for the customer to vet your company vs. a competitor or when selling a commodity

Money Back Guarantees (MBG):

PROS

1. MBGs are often enough to push the customer over the fence but not enough to get them onto it.
2. Typically only truly interested customers proceed with money back guarantees
3. A major mishap if often required for a customer to invoke their money back guarantee offer and therefore retention rates are usually very high.

CONS

1. MBG’s are usually not enough to get the customer interested in the first place
2. Customers automatically assume MBG’s to include a list of t’s and c’s (even if they don’t)
3. AMAZING/SCARY FACT :Usually result in almost no increase in sales ( although sales cycles can speed up)

WHEN TO SELL WITH MONEY BACK GUARANTEES (MBGs)

• When selling products in which the costing mechanics of free trials is not viable (if the cost of implementing a free trial is significant and if not enough free trials result in customers)
• When customers are convinced but are on the edge
• When you have some brand recognition
• When you are already one of the front runners

SUMMARY:

Although money-back guarantees in theory might seem like the same thing as free trials, the sales psychologies of each are totally different. MBGs are there to assist your sales team in closing deals whereas free trials are there to insure your sales team gets the deals in the first place. Stopping to offer MBG’s overnight usually has zero effect on sales numbers whereas stopping free trials is often crippling. Which do you offer?

If you ask any salesperson what they dislike most about their job, 10 out of 10 salespeople will undoubtedly answer “cold-calling”.The reality is that salespeople don’t hate cold calling, what they hate is the rejection that goes along with it. If every sales cold-call resulted in a sale, attitudes towards cold calling would of course change very quickly.

Over the years we’ve performed a whole host of cold-calling experiments in our attempt to develop a framework for the perfect cold-call. Below are our findings:

Scripting and the 3 Cold-Calling Tenets

We have found, that in order to be successful at cold calling (to get over a 10% closing rate), one needs to have a great script and follow some simple rules. The script and rules outlined have come from making tens of thousands of unsuccessful cold calls and far fewer successful cold calls over many years. Through constantly analysing and tweaking what worked and what didn’t we came up with the following script and 3 rules which we still use to this day.

The Script

When trying to build our ideal script we tried to understand what the differences were between calls that most of the time resulted in sales and calls that resulted in immediate rejections. We discovered that there were two distinct types of calls we were making:

1. Calls which we knew had a high probability of closing even before we made them (warm calls)
2. Calls which were met with instant rejection regardless of what offer was communicated (cold calls)

This led us to understand the clear distinction between warm calls and cold calls

Warm Call Definition: A warm call is a sales call which is likely to be valuable for the prospect to receive and therefore typically results in a high closing rate. That is a call which the prospect wants to receive.

Cold Call Definition: A cold call is a sales call whose outcome is likely to be valuable primarily for the salesperson and typically has little value for most prospects being called and therefore typically results in very low closing rates.

In order to understand more clearly what defined a warm call we analysed common traits in each of the warm calls we were making. What we discovered was that for a call to be classified as a warm call, if needed to tick 3 of the following boxes:

1) The reason why we felt our product would suit the prospect was immediately clear to the prospect

2) The reason why we chose to call the prospect at that particular point in time was immediately clear to the prospect

3) We immediately identified how we came to have the prospects number

The reason why it is important to understand what conditions resulted in warm calls was to enable us to try to replicate or introduce similar conditions to transform all our cold calls into neo-warm calls. Let’s look at two sales scenarios

Utopian Sales Scenario — Let’s start with an example of an impossibly simple sales situation (which results in a warm call):

Pretend you are a coffee roaster which sells organic fair-trade coffee beans which come into season every August .

Now imagine one of your customers, a health restaurant, has given you the number of one of his friends who too owns a restaurant. This owner is apparently always lamenting how pesticides have stripped the natural flavours from the ingredients which he uses in his restaurant. He has given you his number by chance, in August.

This is of course a dream sales condition and would naturally result in an obvious warm call for the following reasons:

1) Our product is an organic product and therefore the reason why we feel our product will suit the prospect is immediately clear to the prospect

2) Our product has come in season in August and therefore the reason why we chose to call the prospect at this point in time is immediately clear to the prospect

3) One of our customers referred us to the prospect

Now unfortunately we can’t expect to be lucky enough to find ourselves in this type of situation when it comes to real life prospecting. The good news however, is we can create remarkably similar conditions which resemble a utopian sales scenario in each and every sales call. Here’s how:

Real Life Sales Scenario — Lets take away the utopian sales conditions in the above example and imagine a situation which resembles reality far more closely.

Again, we’re a coffee roaster who sells organic fair-trade coffee but this time we don’t have a referral, our beans don’t only come in season in August and we aren’t aware that our prospect is peeved about farmers use of pesticides. In other words, a real life sales situation.

Below is an example of how we can take a real life scenario and make it mirror a utopian sales scenario to produce warm calls rather than cold calls regardless of the scenario.

Fulfilling condition (1) of a warm call:

Utopian Sales Scenario: We have been told that our prospect is an organic produce fanatic who despises pesticides.

Warm Call Adaption (for real life sales scenario): We call vegan and health restaurants because we can be fairly confident that their philosophy aligns with a core tenet of our product.

Key takeaway: Start with sufficient research before cold-calling your prospects to enable you to implicitly address the following unspoken concern: “Why are you calling ME in particular?”

The reason why we feel our product will suit the prospect is immediately clear to the prospect in our warm call adaption thus fulfilling condition (1) of a warm call.

Fulfilling condition (2) of a warm call:

Utopian Sales Scenario: Our product comes into season in August and we are calling in August. Fate right?

Warm Call Adaption (for real life sales scenario): We are offering free delivery in the prospect’s area for the month of August which is why we’re offering our product to him/her now (in August)

Key takeaway: Be able to implicitly address the following unspoken concern: “Why are you calling me NOW?”

The reason why we chose to call the prospect at this point in time is immediately clear to the prospect in our warm call adaption thus fulfilling condition (2) of a warm call

Fulfilling condition (3) of a warm call:

Utopian Sales Scenario: One of our customers has told us to call

Warm Call Adaption (for real life sales scenario): One of his customers gave us his details

Key takeaway: This is an incredibly important step and it’s often a good idea to lead with this step. They key point here is to implicitly address the following unspoken concern: “WHERE did you get my number from?” .

We immediately identified how we came to have the prospects number thus fulfilling condition (3) of a warm call

Side Note: The biggest reason why cold calls die a quick death is because the salesperson leaves this last question unanswered. The answer to this question is the “elephant in the room” when it comes to cold-calling. The quicker we can address where we got the prospects number from , the more open the prospect is to hearing us out.

Script Summary: Putting it all together:

Here’s how the script for the above situation would look

Step #1: Clearly mention how you got the prospects number

Step #2: Clearly mention why you are calling him/her in particular

Step #3: Clearly mention why you decide to call him/her now

The 3 Key Cold- Calling Tenets

After developing the above script and testing it on tons of prospects we thought we stumbled upon a golden sales ticket. When rolling it out to our salespeople we soon discovered that some salespeople were incredibly effective with the above script whilst others failed miserably. Now there is no doubt that some people are more inept at selling on the phone than others but that didn’t quite explain the massive discrepancy in performance. That’s when we discovered the key cold calling levers or tenets that together with a good script make or break cold calling. The best script in the world is only effective when the following cold calling rules are adhered to.

Rule #1: Speak to the right person/decision maker

The best cold call in the world is worthless if you don’t speak to the right person that can make the decision. It doesn’t matter if you are selling a product which costs $10,000 or $1. If you are trying to sell to a person that is not empowered to spend the companies money or make a decision it is impossible to be successful.

Rule #2: Have a clear low risk Call-to-Action (CTA)

You can’t expect someone who you have spoken with for the first time to buy something from you on the first interaction. You can however expect them to meet with a sales rep, trial a product or move to a latter sales step

Rule #3: Not everyone is your customer.

Even though you might have a diverse customer list selling to the “best-fit” customers on the phone is usually a good idea. Only once you have exhausted your lowest hanging fruits should you then move on to selling to the next level of prospect.

In Summary:

The above three rules combined with a script which enforces value for your prospect on every call is, from our experience, a great starting point for every company looking to grow their business through email, phone or any other cold outreach platform.

Cold-calling is one of the most hated sales prospecting approaches around and for this reason most of one’s competitors either do it poorly or don’t do it at all.

This then presents a huge opportunity for all companies, that can get it right, as there is almost no marketing approach which lends itself to scaling quite like cold calling (you just hire more people) and sales meetings created through cold outreach usually result in the best closing rates as it allows your sales team to often sell uncontested (without the customer vetting a number of suppliers at the same time)

If we can all ensure our future cold calling approach is valuable for the salesperson AND the prospect we will have a good chance to expand our businesses exponentially and leave the old days behind when selfish, me-first cold calls would inevitably result in low returns, it’s-a numbers-game, sales outreach.

Customers buy from you because you are the fastest, cheapest and have the best service or some combination of these right? That’s what most companies believe but it’s just not true.

Every business believes it is special; That it has a unique selling proposition (USP) which separates it from its competitors.We are even taught in start-up school that having a USP is an absolute prerequisite to launching a new business. It’s not that it’s not important to have a USP, it’s just that it makes literally zero difference when it comes to acquiring new customers and here’s why:

Below is a list of the 5 most commonly stated company USP’s

1. We have the best service
2. Our product is the best
3. We have the most features
4. We are the cheapest
5. We care the most

There’s a good chance that your business makes at least one of these claims. Choose the claim which is most suited to your business and then look how many of your competitors make the exact same claim!

You’ll see that in almost every industry there are a number of companies all saying “We are different because of X” but there are multiple companies all claiming the SAME X as a differentiating factor. How can this be?

The reality is that most companies incorrectly believe that have some component which makes them uniquely superior in some way. It’s called Illusory superiority. It’s also the reason that 80% of drivers believe they are better than the average driver. The math just doesn’t add up.

Given the above, most company owners are still adamant that they are the market leaders in one aspect or another. The point I’m trying to make is that even if you offer the best service in your industry, customer’s inherently won’t trust your claim, as it’s likely that 10 other companies are making the exact same claim.

Because prospects have never had the chance to experience your service or product customers land up buying from you because of how you sell to them rather than what you sell!

I believe there are 9 actual reasons people decide to buy from you company rather than your competitors, and almost none of them have to do with product. Here they are:

Reason #1: You sell better than your competitors

A great salesperson can make all the difference. A great salesperson can often outsell a poorer salesperson even when armed with a more expensive product with less features.

Reason #2: You are found first

One of the biggest things you can do to increase sales is be found first. Being the most visible item in a check-out aisle, being top of Google or calling a prospect back before your competitors, can often seal the deal, regardless of what you are selling.

Reason #3: You found them first

Inbound marketing is all the rage these days but outbound marketing is still incredibly effective. Sales meetings generated from outbound sales calls often have a better closing rate than meetings generated from inbound marketing. Outbound marketing usually results in a potential customer who isn’t currently looking for your type of product and therefore isn’t likely to be vetting your competition at the same time.

Reason #4: You are the cheapest on the block

This approach is not typically the greatest business model, but in every industry you will find customers who will seek out and opt for the company offering the lowest price (regardless of value offered). Every industry has this type of customer but be warned; these customers are typically the least loyal customers and will typically jump ship immediately upon finding cheaper pricing.

Reason #5: You were the most trustworthy option

People don’t buy from people they like, they buy from people they trust. Social proof, having a long list of successful testimonials or being a great teacher can all generate sufficient trust required to acquire new customers.

Reason #6: You were referred

Referred prospects are the best leads one can hope for. Being referred typically gives you an insurmountable edge which prevents the prospect from looking elsewhere

Reason #7: You have sufficient brand equity

Having a recognised brand mirrors the effect of a referral. It typically gives you an uncompetitive edge which seems to buy automatic trust and results in a higher perceived proposition.

Reason #8: The customer doesn’t know where else to look

In niche or monopolised industries, prospects typically go with whichever option seems most right and assumes not many alternatives exist. Think cell-phone contracts or your local hairdresser.

Reason #9: Your offer is significantly lower risk compared to your competitors

This is a great way to engender immediate trust without a referral or when lacking brand equity. Free trials, money-back guarantees, month-to-month contracts etc, are all often far more powerful than being cheap or having lots of features.

In Summary:

Having a business edge in the form of a better product or service is certainly a huge advantage when it comes to preventing churn and ensuring long term customers but it helps very little when trying to acquire new customers. I feel it is important to recognise that how one sells is as or more important than what one sells when it comes to building your business. In a nutshell, I believe the old adage of “Build it and they will come” should more accurately be expressed as “sell it better and they will come, build it and they will stay”

There are many great business models out there but for me you can’t beat an annuity type business. Finding a customer once and having them pay you every month or year seems like the only business worth being in. I see many small business owners delighted with getting a big deal, just to have to start again next month from zero. Not very fun. Annuity businesses however pose their own set of challenges,especially in the “scale-up” stage and of all these challenges, customer churn is probably the most pervasive

Churn is the slow killer or “enemy of scale” of any recurring revenue based business and unfortunately it is unavoidable. At one stage or other, a percentage of your customers will:

• Move to a competitor
• Close their business
• Emigrate
• Not value your product any more
• Cost-cut
• Etc.

Churn is slightly painful in the early years of a business, but potentially debilitating as a business matures. As a business owner, it can feel like you are on a customer treadmill, welcoming new customers just as quickly as you are waving farewell to old ones.

We approached churn, how I think most other companies approach it, by investing heavily in marketing and sales . The logic being, if you can keep feeding the business with more and more customers, churn becomes less and less significant.

The problem with this approach however, is that you can never outrun the effect of churn. You can delay the impact but never outrun it. This is why:

Most sales and marketing activities are independent of your current customer base whereas churn is a function of it. Let me explain:

Let’s say you have a customer base of 1000 customers who pay you a set amount each month. Now let’s assume that your current customer generation tactics (sales reps, online and offline marketing) bring in 30 new customers every month. You calculate that you have a churn rate of around 3% per month (i.e. you are losing +- 30 customers per month) which means your business is stagnating and not growing at all (30 customers are added each month and 30 customers are leaving you each month)

Most companies at this point (like we did) then turn to sales to increase their net numbers. Let’s assume that after much hard work the company figures out how to bring in 60 new customers per month, instead of at the current rate of 30. It seems like the problem is now fixed and the company starts to grow again. The problem with this approach is that your churn catches up to you again as your customer base continues to grow. In this example the growth ceases to exist when the customer base reaches 2000, as the 3% churn rate again equates to the 60 new customers added each month.

This cycle repeats again and again, until the company is no longer able to figure out how to keep adding additional customers each month. This typically happens far quicker than one can imagine as coming up with new sales approaches consistently becomes a near impossible task and eventually stagnation inevitably sets in.

So what is the solution? The ONLY solution to combat the nasty effects of churn is investing in a sales engine which too is a function of the number of customers in your customer base — Enter, negative churn. Negative Churn is an increase in revenue which occurs when the change in revenue within an installed base of customers is net positive from one period to the next ; or in English — Negative churn is the opposite of churn. i.e. Each month your CURRENT customers generate more revenue than they did the month before either by buying extra goods or services or by referring new customers to your business.

There are a number of ways to get your current customers to refer new ones but from my experience the best way (and most long lasting way) is to invest in product.

Investing in product means making sure your customers don’t only enjoy using your product but they can’t live without it. The successful outcome of investing in product is the creation of a remarkable product. i.e. a product worthy of remark — A product good enough that it makes customers go out of their way and tell their friends.

Striving for a remarkable product might seem airy fairy but it is the only way to truly grow over the long term AND it is 100% measurable. You will know you have achieved a sufficiently remarkable product when your customers referral rate equals or is greater than your products churn rate. So in the example above, an ideal minimum acquisition rate is achieved when you are adding 3% or more new customers purely from customer referrals. The side-benefit of investing in a remarkable product of course is that your churn rate is likely to go down in the process as well.

So the goal, once you reach critical mass in your business is to go through a paradigm shift and no longer separate product design and marketing but rather embrace the fact that the best form of marketing is actually product-design.

There are many examples of companies that have grown exponentially at the beginning by great marketing alone but almost no cases of companies who have continued this trajectory without having an amazing product.

Why niching works and why you can’t build a business without starting in a niche

There’s no such thing as true generalists, or if there is you won’t have heard of them. You’ll never find that the top carpenter is also the top electrician. Or that the number one ophthalmologist is also the best cardiologist in your city. There’s just not enough time and talent to go around, to be the best at more than one discipline (and if there was, we most likely wouldn’t trust them anyway).

A company however, can leverage many peoples’ talents and times to serve as large of an audience size as possible — the problem is, it doesn’t work.

People don’t buy from people (or companies) they like; they buy from people (or companies) they trust. Generalists are inherently untrustworthy. Specialists are seen to be the best at what they do, even if they aren’t.

First for Women Insurance, could offer insurance to males rather than just insure women (at a higher premium to make up for their higher risk profile) and effectively double the size of their market overnight — but they know doing that would eliminate their exclusionary edge and diminish their current audience rather than growing a new one.

It’s not product design limitations that prevent Apple from launching a lost-cost/high performance smart phone or Laptop. You can’t successfully sell to two completely different audiences and keep them both engaged.

Carving out you own niche doesn’t mean selling only one product or service. It means selling to only one audience (often by selling only one product). In order to attain the trust of an audience, you need to speak their language (and only their language). Tribes already believe what they believe. If your product or service can be seen to solve only their problem, you immediately gain a trust advantage.

Having a brand is the biggest edge when selling a product or service. Operating in a niche is the next best thing.

When I started my coffee business I went through almost 20 sales reps before almost giving up on the sales rep idea. The more business owners I spoke to, the more I heard the same challenge, “There are just no good sales guys out there”. Thankfully, I learned some lessons along the way and discovered (eventually) how to solve one of the biggest problems most small owners face . i.e. How to find GREAT sales people.

The two biggest reasons I feel business owners and myself were failing miserably when it came to finding great sales reps were:

1. Expectations around what a sales rep ACTUALLY should do is very wrong
2. Sales structures for sales people are usually very wrong

Let me unpack each one:

The expectations of a sales rep:

Forget the expression of hunters (sales reps who hunt for new business) and farmers (reps who farm existing business). Sales reps essentially fall into 1 of 3 categories.

Brilliant Closers — These are salespeople who are brilliant when it comes to closing leads which they have been given. (still very hard to find, but where we all should be aiming)

Terrible Closers — The majority of sales reps however unfortunately fall into this category. Given a number of leads, they will close a tiny percentage.

Golden Geese — These are the sales reps that most business owners/sale managers go looking for and measure their current people against. These are people who, after receiving training on your product, can find, nurture AND close new business. The emphasis on “can find”. The biggest problem of the myth of the golden goose, is that these sales reps exist BUT are one in a million and we are better off forgetting about them altogether.

I believe that searching for a Golden Goose is the total wrong approach for the following reasons:

1. They are almost impossible to find
2. You can for sure get short term benefit from a Golden Goose but you can’t build a business around one. The only way to build a sustainable scalable business is to create sales processes which “findable sales people” can slot into and this starts with a lead generation program, not a Golden Goose.

That brings me back to the three categories above (Brilliant closers, Terrible closers, Golden Geese). Successful salespeople need to be able to close, not prospect. Prospecting or lead generation needs to be your (or your marketing managers) main priority, not your sales reps’. Creating a reliable consistent lead generation machine is by no means an easy task but once in place, it will set your future salespeople and your business up for tremendous success.

A lead generation program ,which consistently brings in good quality leads, is NOT your salespersons’ problem. If we are ever going to find and hire successful salespeople then we need to accept this.

Once we cross this precipice, we can then start our journey to find our Brilliant Closers. In order to be successful at this we first need to have the right salary structure in place.

Sales Rep Salary Structure:

“Good sales people are driven by cold hard cash” is the biggest myth ever told after the Golden Goose Salesperson. The reality is good and great sales people are driven by many factors but ALL require security.

Expecting a good sales person to leave their current job and come to your company and potentially not be able to pay their bills because they haven’t earned enough commission will NEVER attract the right type of salesperson. Furthermore if a salesperson joins you on this basis you can be 100% assured that they aren’t the right type of person either. A salesperson needs to know that they will still be able to live if they don’t sell enough of your product. Expecting that the fear of not being able to keep afloat each month, if certain targets aren’t reached, will drive someone to perform at their best is both cruel and ineffective.

We have found that the best sales salary package incorporates a good basic and other rewards such as recognition, bonuses or prizes. Commission alone, counterintuitively, almost never results in a salesperson performing well. A salesperson mostly performs well because they are inherently a good salesperson, not because they could earn a bit extra commission this month.

But why would a salesperson then sell to their max if there is no clear carrot spurring them on? That makes no sense, right? Well, does you accountant do his/her best work whether or not he/her earns a commission? Does your operations manager check stock correctly without demanding payment. If you give your sales reps recognition when they have done well, give them the security that they need (good basic salary) AND they are the right person for the job, they will do their best work (we have seen this time and time again).

In Summary:

Finding great salespeople and building a consistent lead generating machine should be all small business owner’s biggest priority. Lead generation is the egg, the salesperson is the chicken. In order to attract and keep the chicken you need to be prepared to take the risk and provide food each month regardless of whether or not the chicken lays the required number of eggs.

As salespeople we have all been through some version of the following scenario:

We meet a prospect. The meeting goes well. We think it’s just a matter of time before the prospect will close and become a customer but all we get is…crickets! The prospect goes cold, for some reason we can’t even fathom! At this point, we are faced with 2 options:

1. We can either “harass” the prospect with “just checking in” emails, which go something like this:

Hi Future Customer

Hope you’ve been well! I just wanted to check in to see to see if you’ve received my mail about product y /service x that we discussed. Anyway looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Regards,

Desperate/Selfish salesperson

2. We can sit tight and not be pushy and hope the prospect comes back to us.

The problem with both these options is, more often than not, neither result in the desired end goal and even worse, option number one, even diminishes our chances as all the trust we have built up during the sales consultation is chipped away each time we send a selfish/nagging email.

So, what is the solution? Well, we have played around with this predicament for many years and discovered the following to work best — Introducing, Facebook Sniper Targeting (at least that’s what we call it)

Facebook advertising is super powerful at the moment and even more so when used in a creative and targeted way. Facebook allows you to target a whole range of audiences (either by interest group, customer list and many more) but there is an interesting potential if you some sneaky Facebook hacks which enable you to target a much smaller group of individuals and even one individual if you wish.

Facebook Audience Targeting

Facebook allows you to input a customer list or leads list of email addresses which will enable you to create an audience which you can then target inside of Facebook with Facebook ads. Most people use this function by inputting a whole leads list or customer list and targeting them with a generic relevant ad.

Example:

In our coffee company, Aquaspresso, we try to target leads who have expressed interest in the past in one of our coffee vending machines but haven’t bought yet. We’ll then use basic elements of relevancy in our ad to promote this specific model that they looked at, at a discounted rate. Below is an example of one of our ads:

Or something like this:

Now this works fairly effectively because:

• The audience that we are marketing to is already fairly engaged (as they were leads looking for these particular machines in the past)
• The ad has an element of relevancy as it advertises the particular machine the prospect was interested in creating a feeling that this ad was made “just for me” from the customers perspective.

Facebook Advertising on Steroids — Facebook Sniper Targeting:

Now we can take the principles of the above and take it one step further! Let’s go back to the example where we are hoping for ONE specific customer to convert. This time I’ll use an example we used in our digital marketing business, Digital Results. In this example we met with a client a few months ago who expressed interest in leaving his current digital agency to move to us. This particular prospect is in the security business. He had already mentioned that he felt his current digital agency was doing a poor job but for whatever reason hadn’t come back to us after the original meeting , which we felt went really well.

We then started serving him (and him alone) with the following ad:

We tried to be super specific without being too obvious. We even used his logo in our ad to catch his eye! We have removed his correct logo in this ad for privacy reasons.

You can’t get more relevant then that!

But Facebook doesn’t enable you to target only one user? Sniper Targeting Overview

That’s where our hack comes in. The smallest audience you can upload is an audience size of 30 people. Also, this audience size needs to be 30 people which Facebook can identify and find. So, if you upload an email list of 30 and Facebook can match only 20 of those email addresses to Facebook profiles then it will reject your list, so in most cases you need to upload a list of about 60 people.

You then need ensure you upload a list of only females or males which includes the one email address of the person you are targeting (the opposite to the one person that you are targeting). Lastly you need to choose the gender in the demographic filtering which matches the intended target. Here’s a step by step example below:

Facebook Sniper Targeting Setup Example:

Assumed the singular target is John Smith with email address john.smith@company.com

Step 1:

Upload a list of 60 females and John Smith into Facebooks custom list. So, your list will look something like the following

e-mail address 1: john.smith@company.com

e-mail address 2: women.number1@company.com

e-mail address 3: women.number2@company.com

e-mail address 4: women.number3@company.com

e-mail address 5: women.number4@company.com

.

.

.

e-mail address 61: women.number60@company.com

Step 2:

Include only males in your targeting list as John Smith is a male, thereby adhering to Facebook’s minimum list size of 30 and excluding everyone in the list who isn’t John Smith.. Ensure that you choose an age range which includes John’s age.

Step 3:

Upload your super targeted Facebook advert to catch John’s eye.

Step 4:

Monitor the reach in your Facebook analytics to see how many times John has seen your ad

Last Thoughts:

The above method is a great method to convert more hot leads into sales without being THAT pesty salesperson. Ideally this method should only be used for prospects with a large enough future value as it takes quite a bit of time to set such a thing up. If you found this article useful please show your appreciation in the form of claps!