Tag Archive for Ecotopia

The Clean and Green Club, February 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: February 2021

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Two Magic Upsell Phrases that Open Clients’ Wallets 

It happened again this week: I completed an assignment for a new client, and pretty much immediately, I had three more assignments and another three potentially in the pipeline down the road.

This isn’t an accident. It’s a strategy that combines wanting to be of genuine service, having my strategic thinking powers recognized, and knowing that it’s far easier to get more work from a happy client (especially while they’re still glowing over the work you just did for them) than from a new prospect.

Here’s the cover letter I sent when I turned in the first job. Can you spot the phrase that led directly to more work?

Hi, [client’s first name] — see what you think.
I’ve upped the marketing quotient, demonstrated the benefits more clearly, smoothed out the language, reorganized some sections, made it a LOT more personal, and avoided making any absolute claims yet without using “weasel words.” (For instance, rather than say that after completing a particular module, they won’t make the mistake anymore, as your original states, I say that they will understand how to do it right–you don’t want to be liable for their forgetfulness or bad habits). I’ve also fixed some minor grammatical issues and gotten rid of inappropriate capitalization (particularly for words like preposition and module). Note that I don’t speak French and have not made any attempt to examine the French portions. Since I was rewriting and reorganizing so much, I didn’t turn on Track Changes.

The letter uses “I”, “my”, and “me” more than I typically do, but I decided that in this case, talking in your own voice as the friendly expert and not some faceless corporation was a good thing in your draft, something I wanted to maintain as it creates personal rapport. I did add lots more “you” language as well.

Please be sure to read the embedded comments. I will probably need to make some minor adjustments once you’ve addressed them.

You might also give some thought to naming the product. (I can help with that, too.)

We are coming in under budget ($600 before any reworking). I would strongly recommend that you also have me prepare a response once someone has used your freebies, that you could send either by email or LinkedIn Messaging. Hire a temp to get the names into the spreadsheet (and once that’s done, spend a few minutes a day keeping it updated), but you want to be responding *quickly*. Leads age and lose interest very quickly. This first batch, you’ll send off all at once–but after that, you probably want to be following up within 48 hours.

Did you spot it? In the last paragraph, I say, “I would strongly recommend that you also have me prepare…” That paragraph identified two problems and then pointed him to solutions: hiring me for one and a data entry temp for the other. If you guessed, “(I can help with that, too.)” in the previous paragraph, you’re also on the right track. These are magic phrases—but only once I’ve established my expertise, as I do in the first two paragraphs where I explain what I did to fix his draft, and why. Notice that I didn’t go on about my credentials. I simply fixed the irritants.

My favorite upsell phrase is some variant on “I couldn’t help noticing _______________ [problem statement]. Would you like me to fix that for you?”

It’s useful not just for copywriters and marketers but for website coders, graphic artists, health professionals, even hair salons—pretty much any service business and many product businesses as well.

This kind of framing makes it amazingly easy for the client to say yes. I’ve found that nearly all responses fall into:

  • Yes, please!
  • Yeah, I know. I’ve already hired someone to fix it
  • Not right now, but could you help me with this other thing?

Two of those three likely responses lead immediately to more work. And even if you get the second response, you’re establishing yourself as someone who looks out for your clients’ interests and are likely to get other assignments. Using this strategy, I’ve turned several clients who came in for a small job in the few hundreds into mid-five-figure lifetime value. One eventually hired me to ghostwrite two books!

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Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.

For his Western Mass Business Show, radio host Ira Bryck asked Shel to put together a panel. Shel reached into the activism world to pull in State Senator Jo Comerford (who was elected after a decades-long career at MoveOn and elsewhere) and to the green business world for Raj Pabari, a 16-year-old entrepreneur who has started multiple companies and has 16 employees.

Watch video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kdego4U3jSM&feature=youtu.be

  • Guests: Shel Horowitz, Going Beyond Sustainability, expert on/consultant to social entrepreneurship businesses and author of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

  • Jo Comerford, Massachusetts State Senator and 30-year professional activist

  • Raj Pabari, 16-year-old CEO of Off Grid Technologies (a social enterprise and green business making device charges that can take many power sources)

Takeaways:

…Read More

View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

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Ecotopia

Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

This imagined eco-country was very much ahead of its time. I thought it would be interesting to look back, almost 50 years later, and see what the book got right, where it was off the mark, and what influence it may have had. (I’m not going to discuss the plot.)

The environmental movement was just edging into wider public consciousness, starting with the first Earth Day in April, 1970. The homesteading/back-to-the-land movement was firmly established and was already supporting magazines like The Mother Earth News—but it was the fringe province of young hippies. The US was still enmeshed in Vietnam. The book would have been mostly or fully written before the Arab oil embargo that skyrocketed oil prices and began to make conservation mainstream. And the successful German resistance to nuclear power plant construction at Wyhl, which birthed the safe energy movement worldwide, wouldn’t begin in earnest until February, 1975 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany#Early_years ).

  • The largely post-industrial Ecotopian society has made huge progress in cleaning its air and water, reimagining energy systems, and making itself a much more livable place. Callenbach barely mentions conservation, however—and that’s where much of the progress in the real world took place. The actual US (along with many other parts of the world) has also made huge strides on pollution and green energy, but it still has far to go. We no longer have urban rivers catching fire (see https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/the-cuyahoga-river-caught-fire-it-inspired-a-movement/ ), but we still have major industrial disasters, many of them related to fossil and nuclear power (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingston_Fossil_Plant_coal_fly_ash_slurry_spill , as one of many examples).
  • Along with the de-industrialization came a reduction of the work week to 20 hours, thus doubling the number of available jobs while freeing time for leisure pursuits such as arts, sports, and science (which in turn can stimulate any economy). Callenbach is far ahead of us here. We would do well to implement something similar so we can achieve full employment and stimulate an economy that’s in tough shape. This would need a pretty big infusion of government money; the private sector can’t just double its labor cost.
  • At a time when the US love affair with good natural food hadn’t really started yet, Ecotopia eats well. Farm-to-table is the norm, and people appreciate fresh food. The ecotopian ideal has certainly filtered into the general population. Farmers markets, CSA farms, massive natural foods supermarkets (and decent natural foods sections of mainstream supermarkets) are normal now. But while the natural foods movement has grown enormously, most food consumed in the US is still grown using chemiculture, at industrial scale, far away from where it will be eaten, with sacrifices in soil quality, taste, water pollution, putting other animals and plants at risk, and nutrition. Yet the Ecotopian food sensibility is very meat-oriented, with wild game supplanting feedlots. Callenbach doesn’t build a very accommodating society for vegetarians, vegans, gluten-free, or other special diets.
  • Private cars and petroleum-based plastics have been essentially eliminated, though plant-based plastics are common. People have no problem getting around via trains and minivans (and for short distances, walking and biking), even in isolated rural areas—or using tools like videoconferencing to avoid the need to travel. This is another area where the US could emulate Ecotopia, or at least Europe.
  • Feminism is a given. The book has several strong female characters and a carefree attitude about sexuality; nonmonogamy is widely practiced and accepted. Ecotopia’s president is female, when only Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, and Israel had ever elected a female leader in the modern era. The US is a lot less sexist than it was in the early 1970s and just elected a female Vice-President of color. Ecotopia would be a good model for us—but in today’s US, same-sex relationships are widely seen as normal, and gender identity is open to question. The near-total invisibility of gays and lesbians in Ecotopia is surprising.
  • Cultural diversity, however, is not dealt with well. Ethnic communities have separated from the mainstream and form little “mini-city” Bantustans in the suburban rings around major cities. The population centers are uncomfortably homogeneous. Having lived both in some of the most and least diverse communities in the US, I think diversity is a strength.

I could keep making comparisons for a long time, but let me stop there. It’s an interesting read, a lens on what some of us thought that better world could look like.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

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