Jim's Marketing Blog

Marketing tips and ideas to help you grow your business

How to convert attention into paying customers

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marketing foundations, touchpoints

So, you want to get your products or services noticed? Of course you do. You work hard, your business is excellent and more people need to know about what you do.

However, before you start working on how to get noticed, you’ll need to put some foundations in place. Otherwise, you’ll blow a ton of money, waste your time and miss out on some potentially great opportunities.

With this in mind, consider the following.

  • Do you have an accurate way to measure the number of prospective customers or clients who notice you?
  • Have you determined the number of people you need to notice you, in order for your business to flourish?
  • Are you able to accurately track whether you are getting noticed by the right people, or just a poorly targeted mix?
  • When people notice you for the first time, do your *touchpoints build an image of trust? *Touchpoints are the places where a new customer encounters you, such as your website, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, your office, your store, your advertising, etc.
  • Will new prospective customers find your marketing message compelling enough, to motivate them to come back for more, to contact you or to place an order?
  • And have you made it extremely easy and intuitive, for them to recommend you to their friends and contacts?
  • Do you have a robust strategy to obtain their permission to stay in touch with them?
  • Are your systems (online and offline) regularly tested, to ensure they’re working, or are you losing prospective customers or important data, without even knowing it?

Those are just some of the things you need to look at.

The key is to make sure you don’t simply get noticed, but that you get noticed by the right people. And that when these prospective customers notice you, you’re ready for them. Anything else and you’re leaving money on the table.

Your competitors are lazy and unprofessional

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marketing blogs, competitor research

When was the last time you researched your competitors?

It has never been easier for you to research the marketing you are competing against, than it is today. In minutes, you can tell if someone is serious competition to your business or simply a dabbler.

For example.

  • You can read their website and tell instantly if it looks professional or not.
  • Their site will also show you the range of services they offer and the guarantees they provide.
  • In some cases, you can see what they charge.
  • You can also check their social media footprint and see if they are using it to broadcast or connect. You can tell a huge amount about the culture of a business by looking at what they think is appropriate to share on social networks.

Over the past 26 years, I’ve worked with thousands of business owners. One of the things I see over and over again, is a tendency to underestimate the service offered by their competitors. This is a potentially fatal mistake.

Here are 2 of the main reasons why this happens.

1. Caught-up in their own hard work and dedication

They work so hard on their own businesses and care so passionately about their own clients, that they can’t imagine their competitors being equally committed. This is a total fallacy. The vast majority of business owners work their tail off and try extremely hard to keep their clients happy.

We need to avoid underestimating our competitors at all costs. It’s a mindset that causes us to ease off the gas. To coast. And in doing so, we make it way too easy for a hard-working competitor to eat our lunch!

2. Biased reporting

There are a lot of people out there, who tend to tell us what they think we want to hear. Others will tell us what they want us to believe.

Let me expand on that a little.

If you attract a new client, who was fired by one of your competitors for being a late payer / impossible to work with, they’ll seldom admit it. Instead, they’ll often say they left because the service was lousy. Similarly, when you hire people who previously worked for one of your competitors, they’ll often trash-talk about them.

Many business owners use the same suppliers as their competitors. If you ask a supplier how your competition are doing, you’ll often get negative reports. Don’t take too much notice. Those who are unprofessional enough to share news about their customers with you, are unprofessional enough to give fake feedback.

In short, take your competitors seriously. If you’re going to assume anything, assume they’re working hard and targeting your clients.

That will keep you focused on developing your business.

It’s also a really smart move, as we navigate the most uncertain economy in history.

What on earth are they thinking?

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feast famine cycle, what is, feast famine problem

I’ve been doing some thinking this morning.

  • I wonder why thousands of accountants pay, to use the exact same newsletter and marketing materials as their competitors… then complain because their look-alike firms attract fee sensitive client enquiries.
  • I wonder why marketing professionals join networking groups, desperately looking for leads, when they’re supposed to know how to attract the very best clients.
  • I wonder why most business owners have no idea who the top 5 or 10 people in their industry are, yet they can name the judges on a TV talent show.
  • I wonder why business owners say the reason their customers don’t recommend them, is that ‘their customers’ just aren’t that type, even though it’s provably incorrect.

Here’s one possible answer

Much like web designers who have ugly websites and communications companies who use bland messaging, I believe there’s too little thought given to the consequences. These situations occur when decisions are made (and avoided) with too little consideration of the effects they will have.

On a surface level, the decisions mentioned here are easy to make. So easy, they’re almost non-decisions.

For example.

  • Maybe the accountants with bought-in newsletters see them as a tiny financial investment, thus of equally little risk. They’re not thinking enough about the consequences of trying to grow their practice, with a cookie cutter approach.
  • Maybe the marketing person in the networking group hopes no one will notice the irony of their membership. And if their business is already struggling, they may not even care about the medium-term impact it will have on their reputation.
  • Maybe the business owners who are less informed about the top contacts in their marketplace, than the judges on a TV show, just want to chill after a hard day at work. They may not necessarily care that much, about the influential people in their niche.
  • And maybe the business owners who would rather assume their clients ‘just don’t recommend service providers’, aren’t ready yet to face the reality that they’re not referable.

Here’s the thing. Our results are always telling us something. It’s our job to listen. To take heed. And then to take action. That’s always sound advice, but never more so than today.

Failure

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failure

One of the great paradoxes in business (and life), is that the only way to succeed more often, is to increase your so-called failure rate.

The challenge here, is that many business owners have not yet figured this out. They avoid taking action on their ideas, unless they are convinced, in advance, the idea will work out exactly how they want it to. That’s an exceptionally high bar to set. So they tend to leave most of their ideas on the drawing board. Then kick themselves later, when they see someone else succeed with the same idea.

Broadly, there are only 3 potential outcomes after you take action on a business idea. And you can benefit massively from all of them.

  1. It might work out just how you wanted, right out the box! A quick win. An instant hit.
  2. It might work later, after you make some adjustments. By putting an idea into action, you attract feedback. Feedback allows you to tweak and improve. And improvements lead to success.
  3. It might flop. If it does, you get to learn from it and invest that learning into future opportunities. These failure lessons help you build an invaluable reservoir of feedback, which leads to better and better decision making. This is how ongoing, accelerated progress is made. (It’s also how we learned to ride a bike, despite wobbling and falling off at the beginning).

When you truly understand the value of feedback, it becomes a lot easier to take action with your ideas and insights. That’s because you will have eliminated any lingering, irrational fear of failure.

Failure is feedback. And feedback is your friend.

Those who try to eliminate the possibility of failing, only eliminate the possibility of success.

The common factor behind self-made millionaires

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In every industry, during every economy, there are businesses that thrive. There’s no mystery as to why this happens. In fact, we can choose to become one of them. And that’s what today’s message is all about.

I’m very specifically referring to the business owners who:

  • Have the courage to do things their way. As Warren Buffett says, the best investors sell when everyone else is buying, and buy when everyone else is selling.
  • Have the courage to turn away the wrong kind of projects and clients. They know that no business can thrive without a strong client base or customer base.
  • Have the courage to develop innovative, new products or services.
  • Have the courage to refuse to do average work. They know that people judge them based on the quality of their work. So they set the bar high and increase their value.
  • Have the courage to set deadlines and deliver as promised. They’ve figured out that this is one of the best ways to earn the trust of their clients.
  • Have the courage to charge 100% or 500% more than the industry average.
  • Have the courage to focus on what they want. They’ve learned that we tend to move in the direction of what we focus on. So they refuse to focus on what they fear.
  • Have the courage to lead. When everyone else is waiting for someone to take action, these business owners lead by example.

Time and again, I find that the most common factor behind successful business owners and entrepreneurs, is courage.

The role of courage in business success

Fact: A courageous business owner will always outperform a fearful one. This holds true, no matter how smart the fearful business owner is.

For instance, many of the most fearful and least successful business owners I have met or studied, were very highly educated. However, as former US president Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The world is full of educated derelicts“. They were great at detail. Wonderful with research, yet lousy when it came to leaving their comfort zones. They lacked the courageous mindset of an entrepreneur.

Smart and courageous

Conversely, Apple was co-founded by a courageous university drop-out. And Steve Jobs was not alone. Dell founder Michael Dell never graduated. Nor did Henry Ford, Wendy’s CEO or Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. (Ellison is worth an estimated $54 Billion, around 10 times more than Sir Richard Branson). Smart people for sure. That goes without saying.

My point is that their lack of academic qualifications had no negative impact on their success, and that gaining academic qualifications is no guarantee of success.

In the 25 years since starting my business, I’ve worked with thousands of business owners. I’ve found that nothing can stop a smart, courageous business owner from succeeding. And that nothing can stop a smart, fearful business owner from being average… at best.

The good news is that courage is NOT the absence of fear.

Courage is a choice we make.

Courage is how we choose to respond when faced with the risk that comes with every genuine opportunity. It’s how we choose to respond when faced with the current uncertainty.

And we can choose to start acting with courage, whenever we wish.

Closing the sale

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marketing competitor, competition

When I started out in sales and marketing, it was all about closing the sale.

In fact, good salespeople were often referred to as good closers.

Decades later, I still see sales recruiters asking for candidates who have a proven record of closing.

Here’s why we need to be extremely careful before adopting the closing mindset, or any of the countless closing tricks and techniques.

Closed for business?

The challenge with the closing mindset, is that it positions the prospective customer as little more than a barrier. A hurdle between you and the sale. An obstacle to be overcome. Little wonder so many closing techniques are based on psychological tricks.

The use of long, uncomfortable silences at key points in the sales process, for example, is used to put pressure on the prospective client. So is refusing to accept a “no” from them, by asking what they need additional clarity on, each time they clearly just want out.

In a nutshell, the focus is on outmanoeuvring your opponent. It’s them against you. A confrontation.

Here’s a very different approach, along with why I strongly recommend you use it.

Opening relationships

I built my reputation in sales by adopting the polar opposite approach. Instead of focusing on closing, I focused on opening.

Opening relationships, to be exact.

I found (and still find) the idea of closing to be self-defeating. I discovered that you can achieve a great deal more, by opening relationships with people. This means taking time to listen to them. And then learning about their challenges and what they want / need. If our marketing is targeted correctly, we’re automatically only speaking with people who are our ideal profile of client.

When handled correctly, and preceded with effective marketing, this means there’s no need to close anything (or close on anyone).

The whole process becomes a naturally-flowing conversation, where we seek to help people overcome a challenge, with the products or services we provide.

It’s a beautiful, fulfilling way to do business.

It also means refusing to sell anything to anyone, if we believe it’s not what they need.

Too passive?

This approach may sound passive, but consider your friends. Consider the people you like. The people you trust. The people you love to have around you. Are they aggressive towards you? Confrontational? No! That’s because we prefer those who respect us and are open and honest with us.

We like people who are open and honest.

We buy from people who are open and honest.

We trust people who are open and honest.

We recommend people who are open and honest.

In short, the more open we are, the more opportunities we’re open to.