How to Close More Sales During Election Season

Brandon Welch 0:00
The companies that stayed consistent, the companies that didn’t lay off all their staff, the companies that adapted quickly, are the ones that won in the moment, and now they slingshot it out of that to be like 40, 50% up of where they were. Now some of them are having to learn how to hold on to that, but I think in a microwave, every economic cycle is a way to do that. You

Caleb Agee 0:18
can grow your wealth in any season if you know how to do it the right way.

Brandon Welch 0:27
Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I’m joined by Caleb ag for President.

Caleb Agee 0:35
No, no,

Brandon Welch 0:37
you would make an awesome president.

Caleb Agee 0:39
Wow, but I would never run. I appreciate that.

Brandon Welch 0:43
You know what? Don’t be so sure. I think we would all have a list of people we might put in places, right in, yeah, as in the write in portion, you know, Donald Duck comes to mind. Yeah. See who would yours be? I mean, who,

Caleb Agee 0:57
who would I write in? Michael Scott.

Brandon Welch 0:59
Michael Scott for President? Yeah, yeah. In all practicality, I think Mike Rowe would be an awesome president. That’d be an interesting yeah, or Dave Ramsey would be a good default. So yeah, this is the place where we answer your real life marketing questions so you can grow your business, eliminate waste and advertising and achieve the big dream. And aren’t we all dreaming of peace and getting this season behind us. It is election season, whether we like it or not. Yeah,

we’re spinning up. It’s like 78 days at this point, something like that, till till the big day. And that always, like ever since I’ve been in marketing and small business, that always I’ve gone through seven election cycles, if you want to count the every two years for the Senate, and all the four years I’ve been to seven of them at this point, and it’s, it just gets things weird, right? Yeah. So we’re hearing a whole lot of, well, I’m just gonna wait and see, and we’ll, we’ll see what we do after the election. Let’s see how this election ends, and I’ll decide if I’m gonna buy our Yes, or if I’m gonna go with my bunker. I would make a bet that you know of the 6060, episodes that we’ve done, I don’t know what number we’re on, we’ve probably said pay an election year is coming up at least a dozen times. Yeah, by now we have and called it. I remember customers of mine back in right before the Obama transition, being like, well, let’s see what happens, you know. And then after, you know, everybody wants to pretend like things are going to change. And on a macro scale, on a you know,

slight fluctuation on the history meter, yes, yeah, but there will be exactly zero things a politician can do for you that you can’t do better for yourself. You are 1000 times more in control than they are. So I’m talking to the wise ones. We all have our preferences. We all have our pulls. We all have our convictions. That’s a great thing

Caleb Agee 2:51
to hold on to. Yeah, but we have a business reality right now.

Brandon Welch 2:55
We have a business reality, and we’re smarter than that. We don’t want to fall to the magnet and the we don’t want to fall in the swamp that the media is asking us to do. So what we’re going to do instead is we’re going to be confident leaders. We’re going to be competent leaders. We’re going to bring joy into the room instead of contributing to the poison. We’re going to lead with optimism. We’re going to keep our eye on the North Star, and no matter which way the wind blows our little boat, we’re going to adjust the sales to counteract for that. Yep. And we have two practical things that in the next two and a half months you need to be doing for your business if you wanna ride the waves a little smoother, yeah, and come out of it on top regardless, yes. Number one, you need to focus on ltos. What’s an LTO Brandon, what’s an LTO you might ask, LTO is a limited time offer, okay? You know me. You know this podcast. You know our brand of navigation and the business waters. We don’t talk a whole lot about ltos from a day to day perspective, yeah, usually making a special offer or a buy. Buy now type offer, it works less the longer and longer you do it. Yes, it works really good up front. People get addicted to that, and then before they know it, they’ve trained their market and their customer to only buy them when something’s on sale. Yeah,

Caleb Agee 4:18
now that was your surgeon general warning on the side of this package. Yes,

Brandon Welch 4:22
this may cause cancer. Yeah, actually, literally, this may cause business. This

Caleb Agee 4:26
may cause you are training your customer, because the moment they’ve seen you do it once, yes, they’re gonna hope that, if they’re paying attention, they’ll hope that you’re doing it again, and maybe wait for you to do it again.

Brandon Welch 4:38
So we are not going car dealer on you, and you shouldn’t do a car dealer unless you are a car dealer and then be a car dealer, bye, but in their own store card, yeah. And our car dealer friends already know this, and they don’t do yes, yeah, we got but, but there is a time and a place where an LTO specifically, in times where there’s a where there’s a different baseline. A reason to buy or not to buy, yeah. And there is a universal excuse, psychologically and emotionally, for people not to buy, and that’s in place. And until you offer them something that is, you know, on a scale bigger than that, reason not to buy, a reason to buy, yeah, they’re going to default to that until that, you know, works, work its way up. Right now, that’s the election and uncertainty at the

Caleb Agee 5:27
beginning. At the beginning of COVID, it was Yes COVID, until everybody started getting checks. And then they were, they were happy with

Brandon Welch 5:34
it by right? Yeah. And then yeah. And then prices went down, and then before they went sharply up and all that stuff. And not to contribute to the political chaos, but the pandemic was a really good lesson of that. The companies that stayed consistent, the companies that didn’t lay off all their staff, the companies that adapted quickly, are the ones that won in the moment, and now they slingshot it out of that to be like 40, 50% up, or where they were 2019, now some of them are having to learn how to hold on to that growth. But I think in a micro way, every economic cycle is a way to do that. Because fact is, most people are sheep,

Caleb Agee 6:11
yeah, well, Rich Dad, Poor Dad would tell you that you can, you can grow your wealth in any season if you know how to do it the right way.

Brandon Welch 6:18
There are buyers and sellers. Yeah, even look at major, major things like the housing market in the worst of times, you know, outside of the Great Depression. But since the Great Depression, housing values, especially in the Midwest here, like, really, only swung 5% ish, yeah. And if you’re, if you’re looking longer term, what does it they say the the poor think day to day, or, sorry, the poor think week to week. The you know, average think month to month. The rich think year to year, and the ultra wealthy think decade to decade. Dude, get on that decade cycle, right? Think about what you’re doing now to ride these big waves that in the in the lens of backing out over 2030, years, which is, you know, the life cycle of a leader inside of a business, right? This ain’t nothing, but a thing. Yeah, right now, because cash flow, we’d like to see it maintain, right? Yeah, not

Caleb Agee 7:12
red, yeah. Like, we like, uh, black on the on the P, L,

Brandon Welch 7:15
yeah. We’d like, we’d like to keep gathering acorns and all that stuff. We’d like to keep a reasonable amount of confidence in investing in our business. What we’re going to do is we’re going to make the reason to buy bigger than the reason not to buy, and that’s done with an LTO. So it’s really simple. We’ve got a handful of ideas for here, but you’re you’re creating a special window where you get this offer, if you buy it now, and if you Yep, don’t buy it now. Love you still. We’ll serve you later. But it’s not going to be at this price, this rate, or with this sort of value, yep, just shooting off the cuff here right end of the year. I think it’s pretty reasonable for people to expect price increases to go up. Like everything goes up every year or two, yep, especially if you’re in a materials based business. I’m talking to my builders. I’m talking to my manufacturing type clients. I’m talking to people who are dealers or certified like, I’m thinking, my car dealers,

Caleb Agee 8:19
some sort of MSRP or map pricing, yes, situation that’s dictated above you, yes, right? So you you know it’s going to go up, yep.

Brandon Welch 8:27
So hey, we just got noticed from our manufacturers, and this is probably true. Do not mean do not, quote, unquote, manufacture this. Don’t, don’t make this up. No, do not lie. Okay, if it is true, though, and in most industries, there’s some truth to it. Hey, we know that prices are going to be going up. We’re about to place our last order for the year. Or we’re about to, you know, have our last window to install this XYZ before our gutter prices go up, or our HVAC prices go up, or they discontinue this model. And what that means for you is it’s a really good time to buy, like, almost flip the script of, like, all the people sort of saving for the proverbial winner that’s coming after the big election, Doomsday. Yeah, flip that on and be like, yeah, you def Yeah. I agree with you. You should be getting ready. Yeah, that’s why you should buy it now, not later, right? You think it’s you think it’s high now, dang, wait until so and so gets in office, right? Yeah, yeah. So leveraging some sort of price increase, if it’s true, and just putting that in your messaging doesn’t have to be, you know, a buy this second closing tactic, but it can be, hey, in the next month, we’re going to remind you this is coming up. And if you want to take advantage of 2024 pricing, yeah,

Caleb Agee 9:44
yeah, in a similar fashion, you could, you could say, hey, you need to get this done before the end of the year. If you’re talking to maybe business owners or self employed people, you could talk about tax credits, write offs, things like that. You really want to make sure that, um. You’re emphasizing, hey, if you don’t do this before the calendar year is over, it doesn’t count for this this year you’re dealing

Brandon Welch 10:05
with any sort of product that can be a business expense. That’s great messaging. We’ve done this in a number of years with vehicle type businesses fleets and

Caleb Agee 10:15
fleets like that, yep.

Brandon Welch 10:18
Also, a lot of home improvement products qualify for some pretty significant energy tax credits. That’s right. So HVAC, windows, solar, probably even some roofing products do that. And if there’s any sort of Energy Star certification to your pro, you know your little rebate to come with it say, hey, yeah, buy now, and maybe combine. You’re gonna lock in this year’s pricing, and you know by February next year you’re going to get a kiss on your taxi. Yes, yeah. So

Caleb Agee 10:49
special financing is another good option. Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. A lot of people are really scared of financing right now because of mortgage rates, but people don’t realize actually, that some of the other financing options are relatively competitive. So we were talking to a boat dealer, friend of ours, the mortgage rates didn’t climb at as at a relative rate increase to consumer to the consumer loans that you would get for a boat or a car, right? And so I think everybody assumed, well, mortgages tripled in points, so a car loan is going to be triple what it was as well. That’s not true. And I think you could educate your customers like, Hey, we’ve got a special

Brandon Welch 11:32
in the case of something that’s not government regulated, ie consumer loans, ie boat loans or home improvement loans. You know, everybody listening probably knows this, but the you as the vendor decide what you’re willing to give up in margin in the sale. I have lots of people right now who are maybe raising prices a little bit so that they can offer with their financing partner, whether it’s a bank, or whether it’s like green sky or like Chase or some sort of consumer credit card that you offer your people, they’ll pay. Let’s say an average financing cost is five 6% to the to the business that they have to pay for the luxury of giving financing. Well, they might jack that up to 10% and say, hey, I’ll, I’ll give 10 to 15% of the sale away so they can offer a higher, more aggressive financing offer, like they’re essentially offsetting the emotional and psychological pain of high interest rates with saying 0% for six months. Yep, and I might have to give up 10% of my sale to do that, but if I just raise my prices 5% to compensate for what I would have been doing, that can work out, right? Yep, using messaging for that like, and I don’t like financing, just because I like saying financing. And right now we have, yeah, right now, you don’t have to pay for it today. Yep, now, I’m not a debt guy. I don’t like to put people in that position. Hopefully, everybody on this in this audience, because we are the good ones, right? We’re using that as a ramp up and not, like, you know, lock people into something we shouldn’t, right? Yeah, I don’t like over aggressively financing or no promoting or putting out around a brand, yeah, however, the person’s got the money in the money in the bank and they’re holding on to it because they want, you know, no agency they want, just like we said, is going to be president, give them, like, no payments for six months, or take that away interest, or you got six months to figure that out. Yeah? So, and same as cash offers tend to do that anyway right now, I think they’re especially effective, yeah,

Caleb Agee 13:37
um, what else? Yeah. So we’ve got, you could do a bundle or buy one, get one. Those are, I think, pretty simple, but it’s Hey, if you buy this, you can get this with it. We have window companies that do, like blinds and shades and window coverings. Yeah, brilliant. Like hey, if you buy Windows, we’ll throw in the,

Brandon Welch 13:58
you know, what high margin product do you have laying around that’s maybe normally an add on that? You know, I’m not, I’m not saying, give it a give it away completely. Get the higher end margin on the product that they want to buy the core product. A great example be Windows. Maybe, maybe say, Hey, if you buy this level of window, we’re going to throw in this level of blind, and that difference in what the blind cost you, because you’ve got a 70% markup in that, yeah, course, sort of, sort of just made it wash out. Not that you wouldn’t have rather had full cash for both of them. But right now that makes the that makes the sale move forward. Yeah, I’ve got some people doing free installation, and they may, they may raise their price of their core product to compensate for that free insulation, or they may eat it. You know, it’s, it’s not a total sin to accept a lower margin to get a little more volume in the in the lull here. Yeah, with that, what can you bundle? Can you bundle like a. Let’s say your average, you know, sale is six units of your product, but the average person could buy eight units. I don’t know why we keep using the window example, but yeah, it could probably apply to heating and air too. Like, hey, people just buy an air conditioner. Well, if you buy a heater too, we either give it free, or if you do it, if you do both, we’ll bundle it for this price, right?

Caleb Agee 15:20
Or you get our maintenance plan for a long for a year for free. Or you can, you know, add some value to the to the sale, so that they feel, yeah, maybe you want

Brandon Welch 15:29
to go ahead and get that entry door done while you’re at it. So we’ll do eight windows and an entry door for yada yada price, yep, that’s one that’s down the list here. But just naming a price for a bundle for a specific thing, taking all uncertainty and shopping out, people don’t give themselves the emotional and psychological permission to shop and think with possibility and future. What Ifs Yeah, when their brain is constricted by the logical poison that is being thrown at them and shoved down their throat by the news? Yep.

Caleb Agee 15:58
So you got to meet them at the T, the thinking side of things, because you’ve got to enter that’s, that’s all they have. Yeah, is it’s, they’re kind of in their primal brain. It’s like, this doesn’t make sense, and you gotta, you gotta enter there and say, Hey, yes, you could, you could afford this, because it’s this much. Yes, the black and white clarity is really helpful for people. Because also, if you have a, if you have an item that the price is abstract and maybe not completely well known, it’s really important that people don’t they just genuinely don’t know whether it’s $3,000 or $30,000 yep, I know you think that they know, but they don’t know. And if you were just to say it’s this much for this mini, that’s a that’s a great book. Takes

Brandon Welch 16:42
five steps out of the process. Yep, when the sky is blue and the birds are singing, we’re happy to walk into a store and look around. Just for the sake of looking around, we’re going to leave with something when it’s not when it’s dark and gray outside, I don’t stay inside. It’s the big bad wolf. Blow your house down, right? So we talked about bundling buy one, get one offers. Look around, see what you can do to throw in. Closely related to that is gift with purchase. Yep, hey, buy now we’ll throw in a Yeti. There are a lot of, like, consumer type, luxury type items. Yeti is one of them. I’ve seen them doing lots of specials. There’s, yeah, you can probably go get a pretty decent or discounted buy from, if you buy in certain quantities from these bigger Yeah, you know, name brand type things, yeah. Maybe go to Costco and buy the yesterday’s model of air pods. Or maybe, you know, go to your local barbecue store and buy, you know, they’ve got barbecue girls sitting around that haven’t sold for the summer, buy, you know, half a dozen of those and give them away for the next 10 people that buy. Half a dozen would be six, but offer it to the next half a dozen about every 10

Caleb Agee 17:49
people, only six, just chop them in half, yeah.

Brandon Welch 17:53
So limited time offers just while I’m at that, limited quantity, limited time, limited quantity, creates scarcity, right?

Caleb Agee 18:01
Make it a weird number. To make it a weird number,

Brandon Welch 18:03
we only have 13 left in stock, but if you put your name on one, you can have this with this right while supplies last, right? So gift with purchase could be literally anything. Could be you buy. We’re gonna send you on a cruise with your family. We’re gonna send you out to dinner or, you know, make it, make it something that you feel is relevant to your customer and like something that they’ve been kind of needing but wouldn’t have bought themselves. An emotional add on, logical add ons to buy, to gifts with purchase don’t tend to do as well. Yeah, emotional ones, in my experience, do pretty well.

Caleb Agee 18:35
So the thing it’s like, Hey, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have bought this for yourself, but it’s Christmas already. We’re gonna, we’re gonna get it for you. Another one that goes along with that gift with purchase would maybe be cash back with purchase, right? And immediate cash back offer. Those are, those are pretty clear, and here’s what

Brandon Welch 18:51
you’re gonna do. You’re gonna come in here, you’re gonna put your name on this thing. You’re gonna sign up for zero months, same as cash financing, and I’m gonna write you a check for $500 because you did it today and not next spring. What? Um? Side note, close the loophole. Tell them why you’re doing that as a business owner. Be transparent with them. Everybody would buy the story that, hey, America is a little bit chaotic right now. You know what that means? They’re not buying lawn mowers or barbecue grills like they used to. And I’m a businessman. I understand this comes and goes, But Christmas is coming up, and I’d like to be able to give my people their year end bonus. I promised them, like, just help. Tell them this. I

Caleb Agee 19:25
want to keep my salesman busy or whatever. Yeah, keep my

Brandon Welch 19:29
salesman busy sale. Like, literally, call it something like that. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make it easier for you to do something today, so I can continue to do doing something today. And just close that loophole. Don’t, don’t that just takes away the Yeah, right. I’m sure it is the best time to buy skepticism and clarify that, right? Yep. So, so we’ve talked about, you know, getting locking in this year’s pricing, getting it done before the end of the year for tax credits or write offs, special financing offers, bundling and buy one, get one. You. Let’s see gifts with purchase is what we just talked about. Last thing you had special training classes, courses or support, or join our club or get free access to our membership. I love that those

Caleb Agee 20:13
are great. Those are usually a high, high margin product, because it’s time or great one out of thin air, kind of, you could kind of make one a maintenance plan. Are really powerful for, like, home improvement products, yes, promise that you’ll put them on the top of the list, or have some sort of service type of guarantee, but just keep that going. I think, I think that’s really helpful for your customers, peace of mind, which they could use a little bit of right now, and it doesn’t cost you a whole lot

Brandon Welch 20:42
cool, so you can apply those to your business. Ultimately, we’re flipping the script saying, Oh no, no, you don’t want to wait till after the election. You want to do it before the election. Because if you wait till after, something bad is going to happen. Either you’re not going to be as good a deal, or it’s really going to be bad when so and so is Yes, right? So the other guys. Yeah. So all right, that’s number one. Do an LTO focus on those. Use your, use your past customer list. We’ve already talked about previous episodes, increasing your frequency with customers, your follow up. Yeah, call them with good news. Saying, Hey, I know I quoted you last week, but I got really good news. Our owners just did this, and you’ve

Caleb Agee 21:19
talked, you’ve talked to 100 customers this year that are dragging their feet because of these reasons, and this is the way to shake that tree. It’s

Brandon Welch 21:26
good news. Yeah, I’m calling with good news, and you’re the only one that gave them good news today, because all the other news sucked, right? If

Caleb Agee 21:31
you have a good idea for your LTO, we’d love to hear it. Send it in, email us at Maven Monday, at Frank and maven.com Yeah, um, I’m

Brandon Welch 21:39
in the mood to give out some snazzy mugs, okay, and some hardback just copies of me,

Caleb Agee 21:44
one of these, one of these giant Frank Maven mugs. Yeah, they’re these things. Are Haiti

Brandon Welch 21:48
elections coming up, folks, you’re gonna need them to defend yourself against the other gutters

Caleb Agee 21:52
and ammo everybody else about. Yeah, exactly.

Unknown Speaker 21:54
Okay, yeah,

Caleb Agee 21:56
so that’s really good. I think we’ll keep that LTO going. But then we wanted to also bring you back to that North Star we were talking about kind of at the beginning. We’re going to just wrap this up with that. Don’t forget about your tomorrow customer the I think they say, you know, even the most millionaires are made in recessions than at any other time, yes. And we’re not in a recession right now, but that’s what that’s the feeling, right? It’s the nobody’s buying. We’re

Brandon Welch 22:27
in an emotional recession, yeah, a consumerism concession recession, yeah.

Caleb Agee 22:30
And so the the people who buy, who invest in that recession, the people who choose to use what they have on hand to invest during that time are the ones who see the biggest gains right after the fact,

Brandon Welch 22:45
and plant planting in the fall, so that you have a good spring, right you

Caleb Agee 22:49
have a chance to buy right now. You’re investing in the minds of the customers. And guess what? Everybody else is stopping buying? Yeah, the market’s down. Your weak

Brandon Welch 23:01
and emotional competitors are going, Oh, we better. We better wait and see. So

Caleb Agee 23:05
hold off. Let Yeah, and what you need to do is say, No, this is my moment. I’m going to invest because come February, May, August, next year, I’m going to be riding high on everything I invested in. Yep, you were last year.

Brandon Welch 23:22
It you can laugh all the way to the bank because you were, you were buying today’s customer. Sorry, you’re buying tomorrow’s customer for a much cheaper discount. Then they’ll have to buy it later when the economy suddenly comes back and everybody’s frenzing and all 10 of your competitors go to advertise, because, quote, unquote, things are good now. It’s like they were going to be good all along. It was always going to come back. It’s America, yes, economy and elections be damned. It’s that’s what we’re going to do, right? Keep going, just always going to come back. So practically,

Caleb Agee 23:50
go ahead. That looks like broadcast medias most often. That’s where we find the most customers we can reach for the least amount of money on a daily basis. Yes, and that’s TV and radio. Still the cheapest option. Be

Brandon Welch 24:05
the one smiling, making them laugh, cry, get angry about something. Be the one that’s here today, here tomorrow, with a good feeling, and man, as soon as, as soon as this big bad wolf and the storm cloud clears, you’re the one that comes to their mind first, and you’ll win over a bigger percentage of them now, because you were the guy doing that and did never stop your snowball keeps building. That’s right. Last thought, so keep doing that. You you’ve you’ve heard us say that. Go look at all the past episodes about how to do tomorrow customers. Well, yep, and just, just do that. Keep doing it. Do it, even if it gets a little tighter than normal in the cash flow department. Last thought, look at the polls. At least 50% of your audience wants it to go one way. 50% of the customers in the world wanted to go one way. 50% wants it the other. The sky is falling. People. Half of them will be right. Half of them will go back to immediately, going, Heck, yeah, I’m buying right now. That’s half of your customers. Half of them will go. Bad in government, it’s, it’s going to be really bad, yeah. And then in a couple months, they’ll freaking forget

Caleb Agee 25:04
about it. Yep. They’ll go back to being, you know,

Brandon Welch 25:09
like they were the election before this, that whatever half switches, right? Yeah. So it’s that pendulum and but there’s, there’s more than enough consumers who will feel good about it, no matter what still in the market today or after November, yep. And just don’t stop winning. I’m over. You are secretly winning November, December and first quarter of next year’s customers while everybody else is sleeping. And that’s what we want you to do. That’s right. That’s what we have for you today. If you like this episode, please, dude, everybody needs to hear this. I think I’m not saying I’m the only guy saying this, but there’s a lot more people not saying it than saying it. Yeah. And if you got somebody who’s clinched up in a pretzel because of economic fear, send this to them, maybe they’ll have an idea that breaks them free. Maybe they won’t be totally convinced, but we’ll move them along to the to the next season of business. We will be back here every week answering your real life marketing questions. That’s right, because marketers who can’t teach you why

Caleb Agee 26:12
are just a fancy lie. Have a great week.