Thirty years ago, Arthur Cronos didn’t know he was inventing a new marketing approach. He was just trying to save some money. As the owner of Network Answering Service in San Francisco, he had been following the emergence of voicemail services. Cellphones were not yet invented, and phone companies did not yet offer voicemail services, but a few adventurous companies purchased the pricey voicemail machinery and began offering stand alone voicemail services to the public.
Cronos had just bought a small voicemail company, obtaining a machine and a hundred clients, because he thought he could sell this new service to small businesses in the Bay area. The previous owner had used newspaper display ads and a paid sales rep to take the calls, but Cronos feared to allow his existing sales reps to take these calls.
Because only six months earlier in his answering service, in a sales meeting, his sales reps were complaining that they were losing a lot of sales, and they wanted a cheaper answering service package to offer to callers. As an experiment, Cronos created a smaller package to test, and discovered that sales reps then sold exactly as many packages as before – no more, no less – but to his dismay, 80% of all sales now consisted of the new small package. In other words, new sales revenue shrunk drastically.
He quickly discarded the smaller live answering service package, and live answering service sales resumed as before, selling the higher-priced packages. Life had returned to normal.
Because of this experience, he feared to allow his sales reps to handle calls from people calling about these new super-cheap voicemail services. He imagined with foreboding how history could repeat, with sales reps downgrading each and every sale to the new low-dollar voicemail packages, and live answering service income dwindling away.
So he did something completely different.
In his new voicemail advertisements he provided a phone number that rang directly into the voicemail machine itself, where he created pre-recorded selling messages … press 1 to hear how to use voicemail for your business, press 2 to hear all the prices, press 3 to hear how to use voicemail with a pager. And if the caller had heard enough, the caller was given a separate number to call and sign up.
To his surprise, new voicemail sales went through the roof, while his live-answering sales were handled completely separately and remained healthy.
In retrospect, it made sense. According to many reports from the Direct Marketing Association in New York, the typical buyer purchases a product after 7 to 12 “touches,” and by sending the callers around and around inside the machine, the callers themselves were creating additional touches, and in effect selling themselves. Only those who were ready to buy took the next step and called the sign-up line. On the sign-up line, an employee just filled out a form, with little to no selling, and a new client was on board.
A few years later, the Internet came along.
As early webpages began to change into online selling, Cronos began to see the parallels between his voicemail machinery creating multiple touches and online methods like email follow-up marketing. Because the startling fact is that a website alone typically sells far below its potential.
The statistic is that the average website visitor comes to a website once, and then leaves, never to return. Anyone can prove this by looking at the favorites in their own browser. What one sees is that 99% of these websites have never been visited again – and these were the sites that were marked as favorites.
For Arthur Cronos, a simple key fact emerged –
The single most basic way to increase sales is to increase the number of times the prospect is touched.
And so was born his system of building “Automatic Selling Systems,” creating multi-touch automated systems that use lead-generation systems to feed prospects into a selling funnel where a multiple ongoing series of touches are generated. Used with a website, for example, it is not rare to increase the selling power by ten times.
Cronos, now CEO of Voltos Marketing Systems (http://voltos.com) and a nationally-recognized expert on SEO, Reputation-Building, and Lead-Generation, has finally published a detailed roadmap, a book called “Get Endless New Clients.”
The book shows how to build an automatic selling system for any business, with case studies from differing industries. Within its 300 page, and dozens of charts and diagrams, his unique approach to marketing knits together techniques from the past and from today, and shows any businessman how to systematically create a “selling engine.”
In November of 2014, “Get Endless New Clients” hit number one best-seller status in two Amazon categories, and is now available on Amazon in both print and kindle e-reader formats. For further details see: http://voltos.us/ENDLESS.