The lesson that I learnt in Episode 10 of “The Apprentice (Season 5)” is …

There are Two Must-Have Steps to generating more sales …

First, Generate Massive targetted traffic
Second, Upsell like crazy!

In this episode, each team was to throw a grand opening event at Hair Cuttery salon. The team to make the most money would win.

1. “Gold Rush” did the following wrong this round:

The team spent a lot of time arranging the products on the shelf instead of brainstorming on the marketing and sales funnel processes.

This was the main cause of its failure in this task.  The priorities were just down-right wrong.

To make the matter worst, the project manager decide to spend 1 hour getting her hair done on the pretext of testing the product.  If testing is needed, this should be done before the launch.  The time wasted during this round was better spent on generation of traffic to their store.

Lesson at this point: Ensuring that your product is perfect is important.  However, you have to accept it that your product will never be perfect.  Instead just make sure that the product is good enough for the customers (overdelivering in some cases) and launch it.

The main effort should be working to generate targetting traffic to your store (or website) and then sell to them like crazy into your sales funnel.

1. “Synergy” did the following right this round:

In constrast, Synergy had a better strategy in this round.  They splitted into 2 groups.  One team focus on pre-selling to all their prospect the night before the launch.  They did this by going the venues which has their targetted audience and distributed their flyers.  The other team in the meantime stayed back at the store and arrange the products.

Lesson at this point: Pre-selling and building up anticipation to your product launch really helped to bring traffic to your store.  Can you think of how to do this for your own product/services?  Examples of how you could achieve this is to promote a teaser in forum, newsletter or in your articles.

Another point which Synergy did right was that after the hot targetted customers arrived at their store and were waiting in the queue for their haircut, they upsell them to related products. This brought in extra revenues.

Lesson at this point: Once the hot traffic arrived at your store, do an immediate upsell after your make your first sale.  If you don’t, you are leaving money on the table.  For example if you are selling a book, within the first few pages, lead your readers back to your website for further reports so that you can upsell them another related book or coaching program.  Using your imagination, you’ll see there are many potential ways to apply this.  You could increase your income by 20% to 100% via this approach.

At the end of this round, “Gold Rush” lost.  The results after this episode was “Gold Rush” - 3 and “Synergy” – 7

Above are the main lesson that I noted in this episode that is relevant to Marketers and Infopreneurs. Tuned in next week for my review of the next episode.

You can check out the pictures from this official site.

Related postings:

• My Compilation “The Apprentice” Lessons
• Lesson 1 – Creating Successful Buzz
• Lesson 2 – Location, Location, Location
• Lesson 3 – Have A Theme And A Plan B
• Lesson 4 – Keep It Simple, Silly!
• Lesson 5 – Listen To Your Team And Your Customer
• Lesson 6 – Command Respect
• Lesson 7 – Be Decisive!
• Lesson 8 - Pricing
• Lesson 9 - Capture That Hot Market

To Your Success,
Keith Choy

Tag: the apprentice, market capture, upsell, watch your back