Jim Connolly Marketing

What you don’t know, will hurt your business

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Successful business owners think different

You, yes you dear reader, are just one step away from someone, who already has a trusted relationship with more of your prospective clients or customers TODAY, than you could hope to reach in the next 10 years! And because this person is already trusted by your prospects, they’ll feel positively toward you when the contact recommends you to all of them.

Yes, there are people in that position who will do that for you.

Yes, this is something that happens all the time.

Better still, it’s just one of many tactics that wealthy business owners use. Tactics that allow them to make massive numbers of sales, incredibly fast!

Why I’m sharing this with you

The thing is, you’re not researching who that contact is. You’re not using a proven strategy to get their life-changing endorsement, either. Even though that tactic can make you rich. I know because I’ve used it for decades with people just like you, and it works in every industry.

Don’t be too hard on yourself.

You’re not working this amazing tactic, because you don’t know about it.

And it’s just one of scores of other powerful tactics, that you don’t know about.

All of which you could be using.

Any of which can improve your life forever.

So, in 2023 you’ll simply carry on looking for more sales leads, paying for ads, networking (oh my word), building your list or trying to get more traffic, or whatever low leverage tactics you’ve cobbled together over the years.

Enough is enough

You don’t need leads, ads, networking groups or traffic.

You need clients. Lots of great clients. And that’s where your focus must be.

If you were one of my clients, you’d have access to the right advice and someone who will help you. So, you would already have used the tactic I just mentioned, and you’d be enjoying the rewards. Today, you’d be looking forward to 2023 with justified confidence and excitement.

You wouldn’t trust an amateur to style your hair. That’s why you go to a professional. Someone who will provide you with exactly what you need.

Now it’s time to quit treating the lifeblood of your business as a DIY job and go to a marketing professional. Someone who will provide you with exactly what you need.

Maximum or minimum can make you a fortune

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Business 2023

There are 2 business models, which have proven time and again to be extremely successful.

In today’s post, I’ll show you how both of them work, PLUS how to keep your current business model and open up a whole new marketplace!

The 2 models I’m referring to are:

  1. Focusing on the maximum you can deliver.
  2. Focusing on the minimum you can deliver.

Let’s start by looking at those 2 models.

The maximum model

The business owner who takes the first option, will focus on providing excellence. They’ll place a premium on exceptional customer service. They’ll set the highest possible standards and achieve them. They’ll need to unceasingly focus on delighting their customers at every opportunity.

There is a marketplace who are desperate to be treated this way. And they eagerly, willingly pay a premium. It’s an exceptionally profitable marketplace, too.

The minimum model

The business owner who takes the second option, will focus on cost efficiencies. They’ll consistently search for ways to lower their overhead. They’ll embrace automation and AI. They’ll know exactly what the minimum required is and then deliver on it.

There is a huge marketplace willing to pay for a stripped back product or service. We see them everywhere; no-frills airlines, feature phones, low price stores, etc.

The minimum model works. Really, really well.

Just don’t land somewhere in the middle

The problem comes if you fail to choose, and end up somewhere in the space between those 2 successful business models.

For example.

  • Better than the minimum quality, but not premium either.
  • Less expensive than the premium brands, but not inexpensive enough for the price-sensitive buyers.
  • Products or services that are absolutely fine, but not remarkable enough for people to tell their friends.

By failing to choose the maximum or minimum model, you land in the anonymous middle ground; where there’s very little interest and where it’s really, really hard to get noticed.

Middle ground businesses are why networking groups exist. They have to push for referrals, because their message doesn’t spread wide enough or often enough by itself. They’re stuck in a frustrating, unending and very expensive fight for attention.

Your highly lucrative, new income stream

Here’s something worth considering. Something that can help your business thrive, whilst still retaining your existing model.

What is it?

Develop an additional, new brand; dedicated exclusively to either the maximum or the minimum edge of your marketplace.

Think about that for a moment.

This gives you the safety net of your existing model. Plus, it provides you with all the amazing opportunities that come from serving one of those highly lucrative edges. It opens up a lot of potential, yet with relatively low risk.

Yes, it takes planning. But I’ve worked on this with many clients over the years, and the results can be spectacular. It will allow you to open up a whole new legion of prospective customers or clients. I’ve seen what’s possible and it’s definitely worth considering, as part of your business development plans.

How to avoid an ongoing cash flow crisis

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cash flow crisis, avoid cash-flow problem

A reader emailed me this morning, about his latest cash flow crisis. He asked me for some advice on how to overcome it. I promised I’d answer here, as it’s a very common problem for a lot of business owners right now.

My reader put his problem like this: “I need to sign-up 5 new customers by the end of December, to avoid another cash flow crisis”.

Here’s my advice, which is relevant to almost any business owner with an on-going cash flow problem.

The wrong focus blocks cash flow

In my reader’s case, if he does focus on getting those 5 new customers, there’s a reasonable chance he will make it happen. Or come pretty close to making it happen. I don’t have any details about his business. But I do know that in business, we tend to get what we focus on – good or bad.

So, whilst there’s a good chance that he will be motivated to get those 5 new customers, if he does get them, he will have also just planted the seeds of his next crisis! That’s because those 5 new customers will simply buy him some time until he’s in the same position again.

Here’s a far better way forward. It’s based around 2 adjustments that can radically improve your financial situation… and your life!

1. Fund your business correctly

Cash flow can be resolved relatively easily. But only after you understand that on-going cash flow problems are rooted in the way you feel, think and act regarding money. When you overcome this block, the cash starts to flow like never before.

Your accountant will be able to explain how successful business owners fund their businesses correctly. If you don’t have an accountant, ask your financial adviser or business banking manager. It’s extremely straightforward.

2. Set exciting, compelling sales targets

Always, always set motivating targets that correspond with a thriving business. The kind of epic targets that will lead you to a massively better quality of life. Never set targets that merely help you to scrape by.

Here’s why the right type of targets are critically important for you and your business.

  • Targets that inspire you to thrive are exceptionally motivating. They also cause you to make decisions based on what you want. They bring energy, ideas and confidence. Confidence that encourages others to buy from you, hire you and believe in you. These combine to dramatically improve your results. And fast!
  • Targets that are about surviving your latest cash flow crisis are motivated by fear. And even if you hit the target, you’re still in a precarious situation. You just scraped over the line. And you’re left waiting for the next cash flow crisis, because your underlying problem remains. So, you end up with anxiety and stress, regardless of whether you hit the target or miss the target. That’s a self-defeating loop, which makes it impossible to build a successful business.

In short, a poorly funded business, focused on trying to stay afloat, is guided by fearful, short-term thinking. It has an extremely limited horizon.

The answer is to resource your business correctly. And set exciting targets that motivate you to build a financially powerful company.

Scale your business for success

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Scale business success

What’s the best way to scale your business for success? 

Here are my thoughts.

But first, I have a very quick question for you.

What do the following all have in common?

  • Kindness.
  • Honesty.
  • Caring.

The answer is that they’re attributes that are valued, extremely highly, by everyone. We are attracted to people who are kind, honest and caring. And given the opportunity, we prefer to do business with people (and brands), who are kind, honest and caring, too.

Now. Hold that thought.

Scaling your business to success

One of the BIG buzzwords right now, is ‘scaling’. Business owners are being told that it’s a cornerstone of commercial success. And that the best way to scale their business, is to automate pretty-much everything.

For example.

  • To let AI chatbots handle first-line customer service enquiries.
  • To have call trees handle incoming phone calls – especially customer service calls.
  • To automate their social media accounts.
  • To create impersonal, email / forum-based, drip-fed versions of their services.

In short: To cut back on the human touch as much as possible, whenever possible and wherever possible.

The huge limitation with that approach is clear. Automation software is…. well… software. And as such, is incapable of the human characteristics of kindness, honesty and caring.

The reason for the growth in automation-based scaling, is that it promises a lot and is extremely simple. It requires almost no effort. And it’s sold by the gurus pushing it, as a magic way to cut your overhead back to the bone, both in time and money.

Here’s the snag with automated scaling

As more business owners embrace automation-based scaling, prices and fees in their industries are being driven down and down. It’s a race to the bottom for those who’ve bought in.

Paradoxically, it’s also a race, which no one actually wants to win. This is why we hear these same business owners complaining about attracting fee-sensitive clients and how hard they find it to stand out and get noticed.

They’re discovering that it’s extremely difficult to build a successful business, with the most fee-sensitive clients, wafer thin profits and a customer base who will drop you in an instant, for a lower priced competitor.

That’s a toxic mix.

Another way to scale… that actually works

While some business owners embrace the race to the bottom, where the winner is the cheapest provider, others have identified a far more profitable way to scale.

It’s a different race. A race to profitability and success. A race, where the winners attract the best clients, work on the best projects and earn the best fees.

You see, it turns out that kindness, honesty and caring, scale. In fact, they scale to infinity. People tell their friends about remarkable service. So, the word spreads. And they remain loyal to providers, who go the extra mile to look after their needs. So, they keep their clients for way, way longer too.

Yes, the cheapest prospective clients in your marketplace will always shop for the bottom dollar provider.

That’s perfectly fine.

Because every marketplace has a large and massively profitable niche, who eagerly pay a premium fee for a premium quality service. People hate automation and only opt for it as a last resort.

And even the bargain basement crowd seldom remain with an impersonal service for long. They often realize their cost-cutting error, once they’ve tasted the frustration and expense, of suffering with a problem, which can’t be resolved by automation software and requires a person. And there’s no person available.

So my friend, I suggest you scale your business for kindness, honesty and caring. It’s an excellent foundation on which to build a sustainable, valuable business.

Business success is a decision

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risk reversal, risk reduction, marketing, risky

Photo | Pexels.com

At it’s core, business success is a decision. A decision from which everything else flows.

I was originally prompted to write this, after taking my friend to his chiropractor. As we arrived, I asked him if he was sure he had the correct appointment time, because the place wasn’t open. “Oh, it is open”, he replied. “It always looks like it’s closed”. There were no lights visible from outside, the door was closed and the ‘open’ sign was tiny. It looked to all the world (and every prospective client) as if it was closed.

I was introduced to the chiropractor and as always when I meet a business owner, I asked him how business was. He explained that business was slow. Hardly surprising. He’s paying a premium rent for a high street location. But he’s losing the vast majority of the passing trade he’s paying for… because they simply pass by unaware he’s even open!

Like the chiropractor in that example, most small business owners are genuinely unaware of the marketing mistakes, which are needlessly losing them a fortune. They wrongly assume their poor results are due to a lack of demand, a quiet period or aggressive competition. Instead of the reality: They never made the decision to succeed in their business.

What is the ‘business success decision’?

It’s the decision to do the right things, correctly.

Poorly performing businesses are not provided with the expert help they need, in order to grow and thrive in a competitive marketplace.

Instead, the business owner chooses to dabble.

Why?

  • Much of the time, the reason is fear. Their fear of investing in professional help is GREATER than their fear of failure. That’s what happens when a non-entrepreneur starts a business. They’re guided by fear from day one.
  • Sometimes the business owner lowered their expectations after years of sluggish growth, so slow growth or no growth is now acceptable to them.
  • Other times, they have no idea what effective marketing looks like or what it does, so they suffer in ignorance.
  • And in some cases they are so used to dabbling with their marketing, that they have a mental block about getting expert help.

A mental block?

Yes.

They insist on using experts to style their hair. However, they will watch their business stagnate because they insist on treating it as a DIY project.

Business success is a decision we make, to provide our business with the expert help it needs.

If your website is a sales generating machine, if your contact forms are a regular source of high quality enquiries, if your newsletter is a gold mine, if the profile of your business is rising like a star, if you’re attracting attention from all the right people and if your business is thriving… you’re good to go.

I hope that’s where you are right now.

If not, remember that business success is a decision. A decision to do the right things, correctly.

How to create marketing that works

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Marketing that sells

I have a very effective marketing idea to share with you today. I’m going to show you how to create marketing, which people will value and that’s powerful enough to inspire them to hire you or buy from you. It’s based on the work I do with some of my clients and includes a brief case study, which you can learn from.

So, let’s get started.

Receiving attention or paying attention?

It starts with understanding that there’s a huge difference between someone receiving your message and someone paying attention to it.

For example, TV viewers are sent targeted marketing messages (commercials) during TV shows. What do most of us do? We fast forward through them or if watching the show in real-time, we go and make a coffee. Just because they send their messages, doesn’t mean we are paying attention.

For your marketing to work, you need to get a great message in front of the right people. In order to get this correct, here’s the key question we need to ask ourselves:

If I stopped my email marketing campaign or I stopped publishing my blog posts, newsletter etc, would people really MISS them?

As a quick look at the marketing you receive every day confirms, for most people the honest answer to that question is NO! We get bombarded with dull, uninspiring sales messages all day and see them as an intrusion, rather than something of value.

Of course, for that tiny minority of small businesses who DO produce marketing, which people genuinely value and would miss if it were to stop, the sky is the limit.

I’m going to share the process required to make this work for your business later in this post.

First, we need to understand why there’s so much dull and ineffective marketing out there.

Dull is cheap. Dull is fast. Dull is easy!

It’s cheap, fast and easy to create a dull marketing message and push it to a lot of people. As a result, there’s no barrier to entry today.

Things were very different 15 years ago. Back then, if a small business owner wanted to send a mail shot to 50,000 people, she’d have to spend some serious money.

  • She’d have to cover the cost of the mailing list.
  • Then she would need to pay for all that paper and the printing.
  • Next she would need to pay a company to get the letters folded and inserted into the 50,000 envelopes.
  • Then there’s the huge postage costs for those 50,000 pieces of mail.

All in all, it would cost many thousands. She would need to think long and hard about the value of what she put into those envelopes. Get it wrong and she would pay a hefty price.

Today, everything has changed

That same business owner today, can hit 50,000 people using cheap email software and her laptop. It costs just a little of her time. If it fails, maybe tomorrow’s one will work.

In short, it’s never been cheaper or easier to push dull, uninspired, poorly thought out, selfish marketing out the door.

So, that’s exactly what millions of people are doing. This is why there’s so much junk in your email inbox and on your social networking accounts.

How to get it right

There is an alternative approach I want to share with you, so people welcome your marketing, share it and hire you or buy from you. It requires that you take the exact opposite approach, to 99% of the marketing you see out there. 

It’s about shifting the focus of your marketing, so that it’s primarily of benefit to the people who receive it and secondarily of benefit to you.

It’s about producing content (audio, video, articles, blog posts, newsletters, social networking updates etc), which provide independent value to those who receive it. This means they get genuinely valuable or useful information from it, independent of them needing to spend a penny with you.

An example of how this works, based on one of my clients

Imagine you are a dog owner and after a trip to the vet, you subscribe to their dog owner’s newsletter. It gives you useful tips and ideas, to help you keep your dog healthy, fit and happy. At the bottom of each email are their contact details, so you can call them when you need a vet.

You find this free information so valuable and interesting, that you send it to 10 of your dog-owning friends.

  • They subscribe and then do the same.
  • Then these new subscribers share it too, and on and on it goes.
  • The amazingly valuable, highly-targeted readership just keeps on growing!

Soon, my client was talking to hundreds, then thousands of dog owners and positioned themselves in their marketplace, as THE place to take your dog for all its veterinary needs.

Their newsletter was eagerly anticipated by it’s readers. Yes, people wanted to hear from them and valued what they had to share.

Compare that vet’s approach to the typical marketing messages we see.

  • That vet doesn’t need to run expensive radio ads.
  • They have no need to waste time on Facebook. They own the communication channel with their prospective clients (by using email)!
  • They have no need to buy mailing lists.
  • They don’t need to waste valuable hours at networking events.
  • They certainly don’t need to pester people on social networks or ask strangers for recommendations on Linkedin.
  • They don’t need to invest in anything, other than the creativity required to produce a genuinely valuable newsletter, with useful content.

That example shows how a business can grow a massively powerful marketing asset, by sharing real value, rather than pushing unwanted messages. If you want to thrive in today’s exceptionally volatile economy, this is the kind of marketing you need.

The kind of marketing that increases in value every day.

The kind of marketing that requires zero advertising spend.

The kind of marketing that connects you with prospects in a way they actually look forward to and share with their friends.

In fact, the exact kind of marketing I have been creating for my clients, since the mid 1990’s. It works. And it works in every economy.