Last year, we created a Web Site Marketing System for dentists that we sell for $235 per month. With a lot of time and money invested in it, I wanted to make a big splash with the new service. I talked with the Surfing Guru about some of our marketing plans to sell it directly and he recommended a way to significantly increase the number of clients that we generated - automatically generate resellers.

Resellers Do All the Work For You… If You Can Find Them
Resellers are great because it’s almost like “free” sales. Resellers do take a percentage of revenue away from your business but they also add a significant amount that you probably wouldn’t have gotten anyway.

Some people aren’t big fans of resellers just because you could make more money by selling directly, but the problem is that that rarely happens. The way it worked for us is that with the majority of our reseller clients, we never would have gotten their business if it weren’t for the reseller.

To us, they are extremely valuable. Each client is worth roughly $4,000 over their lifetime (our initial estimates) and we’re more than willing to give someone else $1,500 to get $2,500. That’s $2,500 we never would have gotten in the first place and it takes very little work to get it because we don’t have to pay for the marketing or put in the time for doing the sales.

The problem that most people have is that it’s very tough to get good resellers. It can very difficult to find anyone who would be a good match and when they do sign up, having them actually make any sales.

Automatically Generating Resellers
I knew that I couldn’t just hope that someone would ask to be a reseller by requesting info on our site and I couldn’t realistically call people until I found good ones. So I did it the Lazy Business Owner way - I wrote one letter and then let someone else do the rest.

The Reseller Generation Letter
I created a formal letter with information about our program and tempted them with an offer to easily sell our new product to their clients. We could sell it for them or they could do it directly.

Dear [Contact Name]

Are you interested in earning an additional $5,000 - $20,000 or more almost instantly – with absolutely no effort, investment or risk?

Our firm markets a website and online marketing system product to the dental/orthodontic industry. You can find all the details with an interactive, 10 minute tour at [Tour URL]. Make sure to turn your speakers up to hear the audio.

Since our service does not compete in any way with your product – we can make you an extremely generous proposition.

It will not require you to lift a finger or spend a dime.

Rather than waste money on expensive advertising – we’d rather pay our “marketing partners” to introduce their customers to the benefits our website and online marketing system offers.

We have created a collection of marketing material: (website banners, emails, faxes, direct mail pieces and voice broadcast recordings) – subject totally to your approval, of course.

We will pay 100% of the cost of any printing, postage, faxing, etc to reach your customers with our material – and all the responses can be routed through you and submitted to us for immediate payment.

If this opportunity interests you – please call or e-mail me to discuss.

Best regards,
Jim
President
Address
Phone Number

P.S. I would be happy to discuss referring our customers to your company as well.

The Reseller List
I had one of our administrative assistants who we hire for different jobs like this, to scour the web for 1000 companies in the same industry but not directly competing with us. She collected their contact information and that was the first step. Once we had that, we created the letter for each one of them by doing a mail merge and sent them out.

Our New Resellers
Out of 1000 companies that we contacted, we had a lot of companies take the tour, and a few who expressed interest, but 9 solid contacts. 1 of those contacts was actually a dentist himself who was interested in the system. But from the 9 responses, we generated 6 resellers (companies who signed the form).

Some of them never did much and we haven’t heard from them lately but 2 of them are extremely active and 1 is occasionally active. In fact, those 2 hired us to do other work that more than covered the cost of our campaign. Even if no one sold a thing, we still got a positive return on our investment.

The Results
7 Months later and our major resellers are bringing in around $4,000 per month and that number only continues to rise each month. In fact, that was so successful for us and we got all the work that we wanted at that point that I haven’t even tried another reseller generation campaign since then.

And all it cost us was $785. That was what our administrative assistant charged us to generate the names, print and send the letters. It’s tough to judge the ROI since it continues to increase every month but I would say that in the long run, it’ll probably be the most successful campaign we ever do.

How Does this Apply to Other Businesses?
There are almost no businesses that I know of that can’t use a Reseller or Affiliate marketer to help promote themselves. If it’s a local service business, the Lazy Business option might be to find other local businesses to cross-sell. And it’s even easier for any type of national product business to find other related businesses and present them with an offer to market to their clients directly or have the affiliate resell for them.

No matter how it’s done, the Lazy Business Owner will create something once (the offer, the letter, and the process), have someone crank it up and send it out, and then wait to do the easy work - cashing the checks.