You're catching on, Charlie. You'll have one by this time tomorrow.

His face lit up.

One last thing, I continued as we neared our destination. Have you ever had sales training, or do you use sales scripts in your business?

Once again Charlie looked a little sheepish.

Neither, Brad.

Well, do you measure your conversion rates?

Never have, Charlie mumbled.

Great, there's so much room for improvement to your conversion rates, and I'm going to teach you another 80 or so strategies you can pick from. This is going to be great.

Charlie Meets Adrian the Printer for a Very Powerful Lesson on Boosting His Number of Transactions

As we negotiated the traffic circles in the industrial area that was home to Adrian and his print shop, I was relentlessly stressing the importance of having a detailed database of everyone who comes into contact with one's business.

You'd be amazed at how many businesses can't even make a special offer to their customers because they simply don't know who they are. It's criminal, I lectured.

Upon arriving at Adrian's business, the first thing we were asked to do was to fill in our details, including date of birth, in a guest book. You see, Adrian doesn't miss a single chance at boosting his incredible database.

When Adrian first contacted Action International, he had a typical printer's mentality. Times are tough, he told us. But what do you expect with the economy the way it is? Within 10 seconds, I had gathered that Adrian regularly blamed circumstances out of his control for his own poor performance. I was determined to change that.

After investigating the state of his business, it became clear that he actually had quite a lot of customers, but many were one-timers and precious few did lots of 43