Today’s accelerator session has been different than normal, only because everybody here has been here to learn how to maximise their launch, whether that’s a product, a service or a business – in terms of generating the most sales from that launch or re-launch so it’s been slightly different. I think the 2 key takeaways from it really are – The first is pre-registration – when you launch any business, if you launch cold then you’ll get a return but if you can launch to a group of people that have shown interest, that have registered and you’ve had the ability to nurture then you are going to have a much stronger impact so pre-registration is absolutely essential, particularly online nowadays.
The second part is, once you have got those pre-registrations when you go and sell your product, launch your business or deliver it to the market place, the shorter the time frame the better. The behavioural strategy that we align it to is frantic selling and ultimately if you confine the selling type in a short period of time then psychologically people panic a little bit, there is a fear of missing out and expedientially all these things have an affect so you will end up selling probably twice as much in 48 hours of a launch than you would if you ran a 4 week launch period.
Examples of that are that we do a lot of work across Europe, and here in the UK, with health club chains and we do a lot of pre-sales; where they sell memberships before they open – I think the old fashioned method is that you run it for 3 months and sell what you can. We literally run the pre-registration model and then do a frantic couple of days close-out and we are selling those pre-sales, 3,000 – 4,000 members which is 30%, 40%, 50% more than they were doing before and actually spending less money and both of those elements are driven by pre-registration; get people to register, you take the risk and you can nurture them – “I’m interested” and psychologically that is a completion bias; you are more likely to complete something when you have started it and pre-registration is that first step to a purchase. So the second part is then when you go out and launch your product or service, you do it over a very short period of time to create that frantic selling opportunity. There are 4 or 5 other things you can do, but those 2 keys things alone will ensure you get the impact and sales returns off any launch, business, service or product.
