He didn’t expect to make $12 million in 4 days…

He didn’t expect to make $12 million in 4 days.

His info-publishing business was already thriving, doing close to $4 million in sales a year.

When he was approached with an idea to increase sales he thought it was reasonable. Maybe it could bring in some good numbers.

But $12 million in four days?

That wasn’t even on his radar.

They put the promo together, sent it to their list, and sat back in disbelief as $12 million in sales flooded in over the next four to five days.

It was a watershed moment and changed the way they sold products forever.

Nearly 20 years later another (very famous) online info-marketing company found themselves in a similar position.

They did the exact same thing.

Adding close to $12 million in about a week.

Then washed, rinsed & repeated generated somewhere in the neighborhood of $26 million in sales total over just a couple of months because of it.

This event ALSO changed the way this marketer approached their business.

What did these two marketers suddenly do that they weren’t doing before? And can you do it too?

For starters let’s look at what these two info-marketer’s got RIGHT. Because they both already refined their customer acquisitions campaigns.

And had generated large lists of buyers of what I would consider “front end” products – products with a lower price point within the overall market that are sold to subsidize your media costs to get to a Breakeven ROI.

This concept of front-end products is specifically designed to help you subsidize major media costs which are easily the #1 hard cost of any direct response marketing business.

So  these info-marketers were very good at lead generation and very good at getting new customers.

What were they missing?

Simple, their primary sales model was cross-selling NOT upselling.

They generated customers for a product at a price point between $49-$299 then worked hard to sell them similar products at similar price points. In order to succeed like this they had to be very good at media-management, getting customers, etc.

And both were making several million a year in sales with this model.

The breakthrough was adding upsell products – something simple, something fundamental. But in every business I’ve come across you’ll find some fundamental lacking – often more than one fundamental – and its usually costing them millions in lost sales.

When these two marketers each added a $997 or higher-price product to their business and promoted it to their customer base – revenue exploded.

And after the initial windfall you can track the change in their promotional activities as they started generating new high-price product campaigns on an almost monthly basis. One continues generating new products every 6 weeks to sell to their customers, and continues cross-selling in between major product launches.

And the other keeps running new back end product campaigns. And both are now well beyond $20 or $30 million in sales – in good years at least one of them is flirting with the $100 million mark.

You might be tempted to run out and start adding back-end products to your business right now.

Obviously, that’s where the immediate profit is.

Before you do though, consider that in order to generate these windfalls both of these marketers had already built up their lead generation and customer acquisition systems.

Getting large volumes of new customers is the hardest part of any direct response marketing business -online or off – and if you ignore that fact you’ll never generate those big paydays.

But once you crack that nut – generating windfall profits on the backend becomes easier & easier.

One danger for most info-marketers is that they get such a large windfall once or twice with a high-end product, or new product launch that they chase that success for years and see it as the ONLY way to make money with their business.

And treat any method of generating new customers that does not bring in an immediate windfall profit as almost not worth doing.

That’s a mistake. And one of the reasons so many of the marketing “gurus” are in a position where they need to keep re-launching the same products over and over again to generate customers & sales.  And rely almost exclusively on affiliate arrangements to sell their products.

Essentially, they have one way to get new customers.

But those entrepreneurs who choose to attack new customer acquisition combined with a strong upsell product marketing strategy are the ones who build larger, more sustainable businesses.

In late 2008 I was reading through the Annual Report of Investtools, another direct response financial publisher, who had just reported a $91 million QUARTER and purchased the online brokerage service Think or Swim -  I was struck by the fact that this HALF A BILLION marketer listed no-less than SEVEN customer acquisition channels as the source of their customers.

This one-two combination of broad, rigorous customer acquisition strategies combined with a smart back-end sales strategy is the key to direct response product sales businesses.

Entrepreneurs who understand this and focus on this are the ones who succeed on a large scale.

These are the entrepreneurs I continue to be excited to work with.