We’ve all been there before. Straight feenin’ for something even before it hits the shelves/store/website/etc.
99% of the time in these scenarios it wasn’t sold to you, it was marketed. Obviously, there are several triggers to why we buy what we want - convenience, status, etc.
(Reading Time - 7 Minutes)
General Marketing Tips
- The core essence of marketing is how much you are willing to acquire a customer. How well you compete comes down to how much you can afford to pay.
- Great marketers think backwards, which means starting with economics.
- The core question people ask when they pay money is: “What problem can you solve that nobody else can solve?”
- The number 1 function of your website is to collect an email address from your visitor before he/she/her/him/a non-binary person leaves.
Taking Your Biz To The Next Level
- At any given time, there are only 3-4 things you need to focus on to get your business to the next level
- A super-deluxe version of your product at 4x the price
- An unmet need that nobody in your market is dealing with, and pent-up demand.
- If you perform a service, sell a product that teaches ‘em how to do it. If you sell a how-to product, perform the service
- If you sell a service, add a physical product. If you sell a physical product, add a service.
- If you’ve tapped out your existing market, take your skills into a new market.
- Repackage your product or combine it with other products to create more dimensions of value.
- If you sell something on a one-time basis, turn it into repeat purchases with a membership.
Becoming Famous
- The fastest, easiest way to become famous is to pick a side that you’re passionate about and start advocating.
- If you want to get love and adoration from raving fans you almost certainly need to be willing to be reviled by others.
- There’s nothing more powerful than selling against an enemy.
- The best way to get respect from your tribe is when your opposition cannot help but respect you.
- Triggering panic on the opposite side is the fastest way to raise your profile.
- The vocal minority dominates the apathetic majority.
- You can achieve rapid attention and stardom by triggering panic in the top 1% of your opposition.
3 questions to send your prospect and customer list
- The WHAT question: “What’s your single most important questions about ____?
- The WHY question: “Why would it make a difference in your life to get a good answer for this problem or find a solution for your need?
- The HOW DIFFICULT question: “How difficult has it been for you to find a good answer for the above to date.
Ad Strategy
- The expanding universe theory of market domination says you build out your advertising strategy in this order; paid search engine traffic first, then email and affiliates, then social media, then offline media.
- If you’re a small company, you must concentrate your advertising dollars.
- You must hold your dollars accountable for results.
- Countless startups have gone to early graves because they tried to get their name out there.
Perfectionism
- Whenever you find yourself obsessing over everything you’re making a mistake.
- As for perfection: 80/20 inherently means that “good enough is good enough”. When you embrace 80/20 there’s always going to be some unfinished detail. Sometimes this will bother you.
- There will always be something in your success formula that demands perfection
- (On the converse) Be encouraged to know that you can become successful and even famous by achieving perfection in one tiny corner of your world
Your Customer Base And How They Spend Their Money
- A lot of people assume their customers are all roughly equal.
- A handy rule of thumb: 80/20 says that 20% of the people will spend 4 times the money.
- It also says that 4% of the people will spend 16 times the money. Memorize this.
- This means you can add a $290 product and a $2900 product and you’ll probably double your sales.
- Many businesses do not have product offerings spanning a 100:1 range, so they’re missing all kinds of opportunities to sell to their existing customers.
- Sell results, not procedures.
- Sell complete packages that simply and elegantly solve the total problem with as little fuss as possible.
Power Guarantees
- Your ability to take the risk of guaranteeing the product has everything to do with disqualifying customers who do not fit.
- It makes them chase you instead of you chasing them. It’s takeaway selling.
- Customers who want only the cheapest possible solution right this minute are usually terrible customers.
Spending Your Time
- The typical $100,000 per year person spends the vast majority of their time doing trivial $10-per-hour tasks, a decent amount of time doing $100 per hour jobs, and occasionally and somewhat accidentally executing highly productive, $1,000 per hour tasks.
- If you strongly influence sales in your company, $10,000 per hour opportunities are everywhere around you.
- Tragically, so many million dollar ideas don’t see the light of day because one person is so bogged down in $10 and $100-per-hour jobs that they just never finish.
- Most people will never hire an assistant to do things for them.
- A surprising number of sales reps won’t even buy a book about sales and learn how to improve themselves.
- Every solo entrepreneur is sorely tempted to do everything himself.
- You can hire virtual assistants online, often overseas for $5 per hour or less.
- The only way you may ever achieve the awesome thing you really want to accomplish in your life is by getting rid of the busy work.
- Divide everything you do into $10, $100 and $1,000 per hour tasks.
Make $1,000 per hour doing what you love
- It’s not actually that hard to be worth $100 per hour. For the most part, you simply need to get competent in-demand skills. But to consistently be worth $1,000 or $10,000 you must be excellent.
80/20 Hiring And Outsourcing
- Everyone who makes more than $60K a year should have a personal assistant
- Your PA can do just about anything for you and easily save you 10 hours per week.
- You’ll probably have to try out a few people before you get a good match.
- Your PA must be extremely trustworthy and respect confidentiality. He or she can’t be emotionally dependent or need to involve themselves in your personal dramas.
- Most people’s “Quantum Leaps” in business are closely associated with making these kinds of changes - not just marketing breakthroughs but breakthroughs in delegation
Fire the Bottom 10 %
- Jack Welch at GE got rid of the bottom 10% of employees every year, you should do the same and get rid of the bottom 10% of your customers.
- The best paying customers are also usually the ones that treat you with the most respect.
- Save your resources and energy, and fire a shitty customer.
- Keeping a bad employee costs you more money to have them on board than it’ll cost to pay their severance or unemployment.
- Nobody benefits when you subsidize incompetence and sloppy standards
7 Segments of Prospects
- Not interested
- Mildly interested
- Interested...hopefully soon
- Interested right now
- Extremely interested
- Fascinated and transfixed
- Insanely obsessed and addicted
- The real profits come as you cultivate people at levels 5, 6, and 7. They’re much easier and less expensive to sell to.
80/20 Market Research
- The most painful mistake any entrepreneur or salesperson makes is jumping into a swimming pool that has no water in it: namely, trying to sell something that nobody wants to buy.
- One of the cardinal rules of marketing is: Never go into a market unless you can write a page of your customer’s diary and be so accurate that they wonder: “Hey were you spying on me last night?
- Before you dive into the pool, before you develop a product, before you create a brand, build a website, hire employees, or print 5,000 brochures, you need to find out if people want what you’ve got. You also need to get to a point where you can write a page of their diary.
Bullseye Social Media Technique
- If you could advertise on only ONE keyword phrase online, what would that keyword be? If you had to describe your business using only ONE search phrase, what would it be?
- What you’re looking for is that one critical need that might distinguish YOU as different and better than every other competitor.
- Once done gathering the 20% of content that seems longest, most engaged, and/or most passionate.
- This provides your first clue regarding market gaps and what the most responsive customers are likely to desire because hyper-responsive customers are MUCH more likely to engage in social media as such.
Living A 80/20 Life
- Everywhere you go, every business you walk into, you think of ways to improve their traffic, their conversion, their economics.
- Apply 80/20 in every way you can, and create wealth in such a way that the world is a better place because you have lived.
- 80/20 taken to a ridiculous extreme is mercenary. No one likes living in a Darwinian world.
- The place you earn in the top 5% is an opportunity to be generous to the bottom 20%