From the Business Marketing Advice Mailbag:

Hi Issamar,

We’re a small start-up. We’ve created an award-winning new hands-on educational product for the K-12 science classroom. The (product) is highly effective and very well received by students, teachers, and parents. We’ve been blessed with a lot of raving fans!

. . . → Read More: How You Can Cost-Effectively Reach, Educate, and Sell More]]>

From the Business Marketing Advice Mailbag:

Hi Issamar,

We’re a small start-up. We’ve created an award-winning new hands-on educational product for the K-12 science classroom. The (product) is highly effective and very well received by students, teachers, and parents. We’ve been blessed with a lot of raving fans!

But most school systems are in a financial shambles right now. So, we have developed some successful partnerships with local companies/organizations/utilities that buy the (product) (off-the-shelf and custom versions) and donate them to their “partner” schools. They’ve seen great results. This not only lets them wear the good corporate citizen halo by providing the school with much needed materials, but also benefits the company by improving the skills/knowledge of their future workforce.

It’s an exciting win-win but it’s not the sort of thing that is top of mind for most companies yet. Any suggestions on how we can cost-effectively reach, educate, and sell to more of these targets?

My Response:

Let’s try to analyze the information that I have gotten from you in your email.

1) You have a product that is a perfect fit for schools, and that has people excited about it.

2) The entity that you consider your ideal client is schools.

3) Since schools have, as of yet, not ponied up the cash to buy them, you have created an alternate way for schools to get it by partnering up with corporations to pay for the products that are then donated to schools.

First of All… Kudos on that approach!

By doing so, you have found alternate ways into your target market and are still getting paid to deliver the product.

Here are some of my thoughts and ideas you can work with:

• Once you are in a school, get good testimonials from the principal and school staff. (a good way to get this done properly is to provide them with a custom written testimonial template that they can use as is or modify as they feel comfortable– the more “work” you do for them, the easier time you will have getting the testimonials themselves.)
• Create an “as used in” page with a list of the many schools using the product… the social proof helps. Alot!
• Sending a targeted mailpiece (not email, the kind of mail that a guy in a blue shirt and a can of pepper spray delivers…) to area principals and educators, and then follow up with them.
• Depending on the way the books are used, you may find that you can give out the books to schools for free and only charge upon re-orders… your model seems like one that I could toy with for hours and come up with alternate forms of getting income from that you may not have realized.
• Getting a “Ford” or “Disney” sponsored book published nationwide… could you get 6 companies to pay you a fee to be on the cover of every single book nationwide for the year 2011?
• Consider public libraries, after school tutoring programs, and custom versions (Tutor Time branded version for a tutoring franchise, McDonald’s version for McDonald’s…)

And two more questions for you to ponder:

1) Do you know who your competition is? (There isn’t any is not the right answer, no matter what business you are in.) How are they getting business? What can you do/are you doing better then they are?

2) Who already has your target clients as a buying audience?

If every day you buy lunch at the same restaurant, and a new restaurant opens up across the street, you now have a problem.  You might be considering trying the new restaurant across the street, . . . → Read More: How to make it super easy for people to buy from you]]> Every time two people do business, one of them is taking a risk.  What does it mean?  Think about it this way.

If every day you buy lunch at the same restaurant, and a new restaurant opens up across the street, you now have a problem.  You might be considering trying the new restaurant across the street, but this is the problem.  You already know every time you go to this familiar restaurant, what you’re paying, and what you’re getting.  You feel it’s a worthy exchange.  You gave something, you received something, you made a deal, and you’re happy about what you paid or you wouldn’t have returned again and again.

Now this new restaurant that just opened across the street “calls to you.”  You go in there, pay money, buy lunch–but it doesn’t taste very good.  You just wasted your lunch hour.  The change was not worth the risk so you returned to the place you’ve always gone to, pick up your usual lunch, and go back to work.

But, if the new restaurant is a pizza place that says, “Come try our food.  If you don’t like it after the first bite, we’ll give you your money back.”  What happens?  A lot of people that wouldn’t have tried it say, “The pizza is about the same price.  I think I’ll try it.  What’s the worst that can happen?  I’ll just get my money back, and won’t be any worse for the wear, and I’ll try something new that maybe will be good or better than what I usually eat.”

This is called risk reversal–whenever you do business with somebody, if you can take any risk off them and put it on yourself, many more people will take you up on the offer.

How can you reduce the “risk” that your customer takes when doing business with you- and make them more comfortable doing it?