By Bob Serling

In the past two months, I've been sending you a lot of surveys about various products and services we were considering offering.

A number of people wrote to ask:

a) Why so many surveys

b) What happened to all the products and services you were surveying about?

So here are the answers — plus information on why you should be using and benefitting from surveys in your business. AND a couple announcements about some great new training materials I'll be sending your way at no charge. And this is not a direct or hidden sales pitch, just information you'll find very beneficial to your business.

So let's get started...

Why all the surveys?

Surveys serve two important purposes. Many people understand the first purpose, but completely miss the second, which means they're forfeiting sales they could otherwise be making.

So the first purpose of a survey is to measure the level of interest in a given product or service. And when doing this, I always prefer to conduct the survey about a specific product or service, and just one product or service at a time.

I've found that open ended surveys, or surveys attempting to gauge interest in multiple products or services, produce feedback that's far less reliable than a tightly focused survey.

The second purpose of a survey is to get feedback on your prospects' and customers' thinking that you may not have considered. We usually get a number of emails from people saying something like, "I'd be very interested in that product if it also included...". When you start to get multiple requests for the same feature to be added, you know you've struck marketing gold and you should add that feature.

In addition, some of your readers will suggest new products or services they'd like to see you offer. Some of these will be outside the range of what you want to offer, but others can be absolute gems.

For example, when surveying my list about five years ago for a course on product development, I received emails from a number of people suggesting I do a course on licensing marketing campaigns instead. That led to a very profitable three year run of Million Dollar Licensing and a number of mentoring programs on licensing. And I'll be very candid in admitting that I probably would not have come up with this idea on my own — so using a survey was instrumental in creating a product line that generated over $2 million for my business.

What happened to all the products and services you were surveying about?

Over the past few months, we've sent out surveys on 8 different products and services. But very few — just 3, got the green light.

This has resulted in a few people being disappointed and a number of people sending us emails wondering why we didn't offer all the products and services we surveyed about. The answer is actually simple:

Customers vote with their credit cards

So if a survey doesn't meet the threshold of response we feel would make a product or service a slam dunk, we kill it immediately and focus our efforts on what our prospects and customers have enthusiastically voted for.

This does two things. First, we feel its of immense service to our customers to seriously consider their input and primarily offer those products and services they have the strongest interest in.

Second, it saves us valuable time and effort we'd put into creating a product or service that wouldn't be nearly as profitable as those with much higher demand. After all, time used cannot be recovered and it makes no sense to waste your valuable time on products or services your list has already given the thumbs down to.

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