Oftentimes, succeeding in your particular business or specialty or niche, sometimes it can just boil down to knowing something that someone else, in this case, your competition, does not know.
So what we’re going to do today is just explore for about five minutes some different ways to look at how you are obtaining business, what your strategy is. So we’re going to show you for free what you can do to close more business and maintain a full pipeline of clients.
Now, the first thing that we’ve got to do there is to kind of define what winning is. What does winning mean for your business? You know, maybe you’re at a million dollars in sales and you want to get to two.
- You’re at seven and you want to get to 10.
- You’re at 15, you want to get to 25.
Whatever that is for you, it’s important to put that on paper and get an idea of what that means.
What does winning mean for your business? So that is going to involve evaluating your current strategy and what you’re doing.
Strategy, for the purposes of this discussion, is what we use to win profits.
It’s when you’re looking at that picture, it’s important to, first and foremost, identify who are you losing to? What are the forces that are working against you in that process?
There’s actually five. We’re going to get into that in the next video, on what those five forces are, but it’s important to get an idea and start to think about structurally, where are you losing? Who are you losing to?
And is there some kind of an advantage that you can gain?
Because sometimes a small advantage becomes very, very, very big over time.
Once we’ve thought about defining what winning is for you, question is, where do you want to go?
- Is it from $500,000 to 1M?
- Is it from 5M to 7M?
- Is it from 10M to 12M?
What is it? And whatever that process is, whatever that looks like to you, you’ve got to accept that getting there is not going to be achieved using the existing strategy that you have been using.
I’m going to start by suggesting a different strategy, a different way for how you look at your marketplace.
I want you to look at that a little bit differently. Bottom line, demographics and interests alone won’t cut it.
Let me give you an example here. The individuals in this group are all actively pursuing the purchase of multiple products or services all the time. You are, too. I am, too. I have been looking at a grill cover.
Now, that sounds really small. I’ve got this nice grill and I need a cover for it.
So it’s something there’s surprisingly, I guess, or not surprisingly, dozens of them on the market.
So that’s kind of in the side of my thinking here for probably a month. There’s also some home improvement stuff I want to do. I was looking at an upgraded siding. So things like that, constantly entertaining that. I have over three or four weeks maybe have dug into that, done a little bit of research, and so forth.
But I think you would agree that that probably describes you at least some of the time. I don’t know if you caught that, but actively pursuing, these people are all actively pursuing. What does that mean?
We’ve never lived in a more research-centric society than today, because everybody has access to pretty much everything right there in their pocket or on their desktop, wherever they’re at.
So for your company, what that really means is research. So when you’re doing your marketing, don’t make it company-centric, we this, our that, et cetera. Talk about their problem more than not, because people tend to start out researching problems before solutions. That’s just kind of the way a lot of the process, the way our brains work.
If I’ve got a problem, like a slow leak in my tire or a leak in my roof or whatever, I’m going to look at the causes and all the different things before I go and necessarily look for the solution to that.
So that whole process, that research, is really how you are forming a relationship with this person while they’re going through that buyer’s journey.
This allows you to be the one to educate them about the different solutions. There is going to be more on this in the third video about where all sales begin, but when somebody is doing this kind of research, they’re at least a lot more serious than someone who is in that seven percent that’s not part of your target market. But building a relationship before you sell is kind of sales 101.
This is how you do that digitally.
Those actively searching are the ones that tend to be that three percent of the market who are the actual buyers. Here’s another example for you. Out of all these individuals represented on the screen here, only the red are buying, actual buyers. So why are you marketing to all of them? That’s the approach that most are taking now.
They’re grouping people into demographics, by broad demographics, and the ability to target those is changing all the time, with Google and Facebook constantly changing the different targets that you can actually use with their system. This is a conversation for a little bit later video, but point is, is that only the red ones here are the buyers.
And so what everybody is doing is trying to get a demographic and target all of these people in the hopes to get the buyers. And so it’s a bit of a spray and pray approach.
And the hope here is that you don’t spend all of your money on the other colors in the slide here.
The ones in the red here, your greatest probability of profit, quickest path to profit, and really the best opportunity for your company’s resources, basically.
So here’s another way to look at it, is what you know is not your problem. It’s what you don’t know that you don’t know. Let me give you an example here. Here we’ve got what I know, right? I know how to do certain types of things, whatever you do in your business.
And here are the things that I know I don’t know. I know that I can’t drive a submarine, that I can’t fly a plane, that I am unwilling to do base jumping, et cetera. But over here in the gray, we’ve got the things that you don’t know you don’t know, and that’s what’s killing you.
So when I started the video, I asked you to be a little open-minded. You have to be able to be willing to find out what it is that you don’t know that you need to know, if that’s not too confusing. So in the next couple of videos, we’re going to show you some technologies that will allow you to uncover that that you don’t know that you don’t know.
So we’ll look at some of the previous screen here. I’m going to look here at the previous screen and see only the red. In other words, it’s going to filter out all those non-buyers.
So there’s a lot going on in the world today with technology, and we’re going to show you how to market to only the people that are demonstrating that actual buying behavior on all of their devices, on any platform online or offline. This technology exists, and it really is the marketing that you should be doing.
Here’s a simple little equation, profit equals price minus cost.
If you’re advertising to the haystack to look for the needles, it’s just going to cost more.
It’s going to have to be passed on in the form of a higher price.
And in this scenario, if your costs go up, then your profit has to go down. Advertising to everybody versus those who are just in market is really wasteful. If you don’t have a system or a method to identify those who have come into market with serious intention to buy, then you’re not going to be able to get a premium price.
The person or the brand that captures a prospect’s attention first is going to have what we call frame control, be able to control the perspective with which the person looks at the problem, and therefore, the solutions to said problem.
The competitor is going to define what the value is and set the buying criteria for that product or for that prospect. So as that person is forming a relationship, if you will, researching online, that first brand that captures their attention is going to have that frame control. And that’s where this becomes very, very, very useful.
We’ll get into that a little bit more in the next video, but a competitive advantage is going to equal a lower cost to you or a premium price. It’s possible to get both.
But as I mentioned before, you are competing against five different forces that we’ll break down for you in the next video.
This is not a formula. It’s a fact. :)
