How much do you earn?

With the Utility Warehouse, there are two different ways to earn your money directly from signing up customers. There is a third way you can make money from being a distributor, but that does not directly involve signing up customers, it instead involves signing up new distributors, and then receiving a very small % of their customer’s monthly bill, so I won’t go into detail here.

The first way to earn money as a distributor is the sign up commission. This is paid for signing up a new customer. It is based on each service a customer signs up to, ranging from £2.50 for gas or electric to £20 for broadcall (a combined broadband & home phone package). As a distributor, it is in your, and your customer’s interests to get them to sign up to as many services as possible, as this will mean, assuming they signed up for landline, they will receive free phone calls on their landline. From my own research, through talking to other distributors, I’ve found that the average customer signs up for at least three services, and that the average signup commission is £20.

The second way you earn money as a distributor is through the small commission payment paid on each customer’s bill each month. Again, from my own research, talking to distributors, this is roughly equal to 5% of their monthly bill, with the average monthly bill being £100 (as most customers take three or more services).

When you combine these two income streams, you can see how it can quickly become very lucrative. You only need to sign up ten customers a week, and you’ll be adding £200 of residual income to your business each month. After doing this for a year, assuming you’ve averaged ten customers a week, you will have residual income in the region of £2,600. And along the way, you’ll have earned over £10,000 in sign up commission.

Marketing strategies

When you sign up as a distributor for the Utility Warehouse, they send you on a five hour course, designed to help you become a successful distributor. This course is very helpful at making you understand the services, how to sell them compliantly and how to generate your first few customers. However, once you’ve done what they tell you to do, I suspect many distributors run out of steam, having exhausted their list of contacts. So how do generate more contacts?

Door to door - you can if you want, simply go door to door selling. For some people this will work, and will work very successfully. Personally I wouldn’t want to go door to door selling. I once had a lady from Npower knock on my door to try and sell me cheaper gas and electricity, she wasn’t the best saleswoman, and unsurprisingly didn’t persuade me to switch. This was probably due to the fact that she didn’t know the prices of the gas and electricity she was trying to sell, had she known, I may have been more interested. If you are going to go door-to-door, make sure you know your product/service, don’t try and blag your way - in fact, this is a good lesson for any kind of selling.

Radio advertising - in your local area there must be a good local, commercial radio station that will broadcast to thousands of people daily, allowing you to reach your target audience for a small monthly fee. Actually, the monthly fee would probably be in the region of £2,000 knowing what I know about radio advertising (my fiancé is a radio presenter) and its costs. However, if it costs you £2,000 a month, but you are getting your message across to 50,000 on a regular basis, it might just work. You will need to monitor your leads generated, and see how many convert to see if your monthly revenue will exceed the monthly spend on radio promotions.

Newspaper advertising - every town has a local paper of some sort, bigger towns will no doubt be more expensive to advertise in, due to the fact that you will potentially reach a wider target market. You’ll need to work out how many new customers you will need to pay for the advertising to make it worthwhile. My opinion with newspaper advertising is that it could be a waste of time, because unless you have a large ad, that is very bold, it could just get lost in the clutter of all the other ads and articles.

Television advertising - in my opinion, the cost of this would be prohibitively expensive. I know from what my Fiancé gets paid to voice TV adverts that the money is big, we’re talking thousands of pounds just to create the advert, before you’ve even paid for the slots. Bearing in mind what you earn as a distributor is not very large, you would need a lot of new customers to justify paying for a TV ad campaign.

Leaflet drops - this can be a very cheap way to get your message seen by lots of potential customers. I’ve done some research into costings, and have found that leaflets can be produced for less than £10 / thousand, and that it can cost in the region of £35 / thousand to get them distributed. This means you can get your message across to one thousand potential customers for less than £50. At those sort of prices, you will only need to sign up a handful of customers to make your money back.

Networking - get yourself out there talking to people about what you do. There are many ways to do it, the most popular being organised networking meetings in your local town/city. To name but a few, there are BNI, BRE, Business for Breakfast, 4 Networking, Chamber of Commerce, Federation of Small Business, Institute of Directors, NRG and many other business forums that have weekly, fortnightly and monthly meetings, setup with the sole aim of facilitating business networking. I’ve found them useful in the past, this year alone I’ve picked up in the region of £10,000 worth of business by simply turning up and reeling off what I do. I’m no whiz at networking either, just a regular Joe.

Selling strategies

Ok, so you’ve got your marketing sorted, you’re generating lots of leads, now what? You need to convert them, otherwise all the hard work sorting out your marketing has been a waste of time. When you get your basic training as a distributor, you are given lots of good tips to help you close.

I’ve found in my career, that people buy from people. If you’re going to be a successful salesperson, you need to be a good people person. This is more true with Business To Consumer (B2C) selling than it is with Business To Business (B2B) selling. This is not to say that only social butterflies and lovelies need apply, it simply means you may have to change your outward personality to become really successful.

If you understand what type of person you are dealing with when trying to sell to someone, you can ease the sales process by empathising with them. To do this, you need to profile people. Generally, people fall into four social styles:

• Analytical
• Driver
• Amiable
• Expressive

You can probably picture people who would fit the profile for each of these styles.

To sell to a driver, you need to give them options - so that way they feel they made the decision, simple really.

To sell to an expressive, you have to make things fun, they get bored easily and are more interested in having fun, so its best to be upbeat and fun with these sorts.

To sell to an analytical, you need to know your figures, they will probably want to work it out for themselves as well, but don’t give them options! They will over analyse if you give them options and probably never make a decision.

To sell to an amiable, you will need to first get to know them and build rapport with them. Get their trust and they’ll buy from you, if you don’t get their trust or they don’t like you, they’ll probably sign up just to get rid of you, then cancel as soon as they get a chance!

So how does this all help? Well, if you can profile yourself, and you will be able to, you can see which social style you are, and role shift so that you match the style of the person you are selling to.

How do I profile people? Simple. Ask these two questions. Are they assertive or not? Do they display their emotions or not? The table below shows which style they are based on the answers to those two questions:

So, if someone was assertive and showed no emotion, you would profile them as a driver, if they were non-assertive but showed their emotions, you would profile them as an amiable. Its simple really, and it does help you to understand different personalities and therefore make you better at selling to people who are not like you.

Getting referrals

Anyone in business will tell you that the best business is business that comes by way of a referral. Its simple, you do a good job for client, you expect them to tell their friends/family/colleagues about you. It doesn’t always work this way, if you just expect this to happen, it will happen, but it doesn’t happen very quickly. What you should do is ask for referrals. At the end of each sale, once you’ve signed them up as a new customer, you should ask if they can think of some friends/family/colleagues who would benefit from talking to you about your services. This way, you should get a few names from each new customer and therefore get onto what is known as a referral train.

This is a guest post written by Tristan Crickett who is an independent mortgage broker based in Bristol.

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