The Exponential Effect of Combining 8020 Online and Offline Marketing

 

Adding 8020 online marketing and selling to your brick & mortar business has to simply be a part of any marketing and sales process.

Regardless of the business, making sales and providing real service are two of the most vital measurements of any 8020 business.

Yet, the vast majority of small business owners don’t adequately use their online presence (website, social media, Email marketing) to complement and enhance their offline marketing and sales process.

Implementing 8020 online business strategies and tactics is fun, highly leveraged and can be outrageously profitable.

In fact, adding 8020 online sales and marketing strategies, systems and tactics to your brick and mortar business is probably the easiest way to increase your cash flow fast without the aid of a mask and a gun.

Best of all, it is moral, ethical and the easiest way to ensure you never break the laws of God or man.

8020 online marketing helps and serves your prospects and customers while adding extra profits and cash to your bank account while at the same time bringing stability to your business.

Too many small business owners make the mistake of thinking they can make a fortune in their brick and mortar business selling products and services without integrating solid 8020 online marketing methods.

When you combine various elements of 8020 online and offline marketing and sales into your prospecting, sales, and follow-up process the potential to increase your profits and cash flow grows exponentially.

And that can be multiplied by increasing the amount of money each customer spends every time they purchase and increases the likelihood of them referring like-minded new prospects.

There are 3 main ways to increase sales and profits in any business:

  1. Acquire more new customers to buy from you.
  2. Increase the amount of money your customers spend each time they buy from you.
  3. Get your customers to buy from you more often.

Most businesses, small and large, spend the majority of their time, effort and money focused on number 1:  getting more customers.

But by implementing 8020 sales and marketing there is far more money to be made with far less time, effort and expense by focusing on numbers 2 & 3: increasing the amount of money your customers spend and getting them to buy more often.

Also, which I’ll share with you at a later time, when you really take time to build trusting relationships with the 20% that generate 80% of your sales, profits and cash flow, through education and exceptional service, you build a steady stream of high quality 8020 referrals.

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The Big Secret to Selling more.

The very first foundational principle of 80/20 marketing and selling is: Seek First to Understand…and I’ll add: with a Servitude Heart.

Until you completely understand what your market as a whole or individual customer wants you can’t help them.

Almost 100 years ago, Dale Carnegie taught us that selling and persuasion was as simple as finding out what people want and then give it to them.

Simple back then but so much today.  Why?

Because it is extremely difficult for most people to articulate what they want, so today you have to become a little bit counterintuitive in your methods, an expert at asking the right questions, of the right people, at the right time.

There are two questions everyone can answer accurately:

  1. What they don’t want, and…
  2. Questions about their past behaviors. 

When it comes to figuring out what their market wants, most business owners and sales people make the same costly mistake: They either assume they know or they simply ask people what they want and then sit back and think they’ll tell them and then wait for the money to roll in.

Henry Ford once said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’”.

And Steve Jobs said “A lot of times people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

So, if you want to know what your market wants, stop asking them…or at least you have stop asking them directly.

Being an 80/20 marketer and seller is a lot like being a doctor.  

There are five stages: Discovery, Diagnose, Prescribe, Create and Implement.

The first stage is the Discovery stage.

Think about the last time you visited your doctor’s office. When I check in the first question they ask me is “Have you traveled outside of the country in the last 6 months.”

That’s the beginning of getting to know me. 

Once I sit down with my doctor, he’ll start asking me questions about what are the symptoms that motivated me to come see him, when did they start, under what circumstances do they occur, how often, etc. etc..

As an 80/20 marketer or sales person, the better I know my market, their pain points, their motivation, what “language” do they speak… I’m not talking about English or Spanish or Croatian…, I’m talking about how to I speak to them so they understand and can wrap their head around what I’m saying. When I truly know them like a friend, the better I’m going to be able to help them get what they want.

I first learned this truth 30 years ago when I was selling cars.

It helped take me from a 10 car a month salesman to a 25-30 car a month salesman.

The most effective questions were the ones I asked about what they didn’t like about their current vehicle and how the way they used their vehicle in the past no longer was suitable today.

The salespeople I trained in this method and implemented it, also dramatically improved their sales.

So if you want to know what your market wants and get better at selling more, you have to become counterintuitive and find out what they don’t like and extrapolate from there.

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How to Use 80/20 in Your Marketing and Selling

The 80/20 Principle or Pareto’s Law, has become almost a platitude in today’s world, especially the marketing and selling part of business.

But… very few have a deep understanding of its tremendous power to leverage everything in your world. When you truly understand it, it becomes transformational at every level.

It will multiply your time, effort, people/relationships, free up your critical resources and exponentially increase your revenue, profits and cash flow, because it changes the way you think and thus act.

Over 20 years ago, just after I had purchased my new car & truck dealership, I hired Jay Abraham to be my marketing coach and I spent a year with a small group of other highly motivated entrepreneurs periodically traveling out to Los Angeles to be coached, prodded and grilled by Jay Abraham.

At about the same time I picked up a book by Richard Koch called “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Success by Achieving More With Less” and I began my journey into combining the 80/20 principle with what I was learning from Jay Abraham in my sales, marketing and business practices.

These two encounters turned out to be the most enlightening years of my business life.

One changed the way I thought about marketing and selling and the other changed the way I thought about the principle of Putting First Things First. And when I combined these two new paradigms, it took me closer to what I called Effortless Power…how to get more and better results with less time, effort and resources.

When you understand the 80/20 Principle you will see the world through a different lens.

You will see immediate opportunities for increasing your profits & cash flow by recognizing not only what is wildly important but also what is a waste of your time and efforts.

There are highly leveraged implications for your employees, vendors, suppliers and all other stakeholders as well.

You will view your talents and passions differently.

You see 80/20 is not just a handy rule-of-thumb. It is a principle of life.

In general:

  • 80% of your revenue, profits and cash flow comes from 20% of your customers, employees and/or products.
  • 80% of your problems come from 20% of your customers or employees.
  • 80% of your productivity comes from 20% or your time.
  • 80% of what you need to know comes from 20% of the book you are reading.
  • 20% of your customers, in any bucket, have the potential to spend 5x’s as much as they are right now.

And so on and so on…

From a purely marketing and selling stand-point, the real gains come from identifying and understanding that 80% of your marketing/advertising efforts only influence 20% of your sales and 80% of your current customer list produces 20% of your results.

If you are treating all customers the same, then that means that 20% of the customers who could be upsold to a higher level of service or product or who would purchase more often if asked with the proper messaging are being wasted.

When you identify the 20% of your ideal target audience that is likely to respond positively to your offer, you suddenly stop wasting money, time and effort on the wrong crowd and instead, you have five times more money and effort to expend on the right audience – the 20% that will produce 5x’s or more.

Here is How it Looks from Your Employee Side.

Let’s say you have a team of 10 sales people. The 80/20 principle says 2 of them are generating approximately 80% of your results and the other 8 are generating the remaining 20%.

Example: Your team of 10 generate $100,000.  The top two likely account for $80,000 or $40,000 average each, while the other 8 generate $20,000 or $2,500 average each. That means man-for-man, the top two are somewhere in the area of 16x’s more effective the than the other eight.  The top 20% generate four times the results with one fourth the people.

The unbelievable news? 20% of the top 20% [4%] produces 80% of the 80% [64%] and 20% of the 4% [.8%] generates 80% of the 64% [52%] of the results.  The leverage continues like this until you can’t measure anymore.

How does knowing this and who your top performers change the way you think about finding, hiring and keeping only the 20%’ers?

This is why I love 80/20.

When you improve the effectiveness of the most important 20%, 4% and then 1% of your business [i.e. marketing, salesmanship, operations, etc] your results improve exponentially.

When you have identified the 20%, then the 4% then ultimately the 1% to focus on, you gain more productive time, more profits and cash flow, more and better results from fewer customers and or employees and you do it all with little to no waste.

The Good News: It is not unusual to make only a few changes to see your profits increase by 20% then 30% the 50% or more in less than 90 days. All this  depends only on your willingness to change the way you think.

What if you could better predict your market, business, potential bottlenecks, problems and pain points?

What if when all of your competition were flying blind and with a certain sense of fear because market competitiveness was causing their profits and cash flow to dwindle and become inconsistent,  their costs to acquire customers kept creeping up and their returns from these customers kept going down and you, on the other hand, had the secret formula on how to identify the ideal customers and employees, the ideal products and services and you were making 1.5:1, 2:1 or even 4:1 more on every transaction.

If you could see your marketing and selling world around you in a totally different way – would you take it?

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What does a perfect business model look like?

The perfect business model that I want the market I cater to, has to be able to answer these 7 questions in the affirmative:

 1. Are they a member of your ideal 8020 target audience? Every business has customers or clients that can be broken out according to the 80/20 Principle.
20% of your customers are generating 80% of your profits. Because 8020 is fractal, we can break it down even further – 20% of the 20% = 4% are generating 80% of the 80% = 64% of your profits.

2. Are they the decision-maker? Do they have the ability to say yes?
Don’t waste your time making a presentation to an audience that can’t make the final decision.

3. Do they have the money?
If they can’t afford what you are selling. It makes no sense to present to them.

4. Is there a sense of urgency? Do they have an immediate and urgent problem that they need a solution to? Perry Marshall, in his book “80/20 Sales and Marketing”  refers to it as:  “Do they have a “bleeding neck”?

5. Do they want what you have to offer? Does your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) match what they want?
A unique selling proposition (USP) is your unique answer to these questions:
• What does your product or service do that your competitors doesn’t?
• Why should I buy from you instead of anybody else?
• What guarantee can you make that nobody else can make?

6. Is the timing right for your solution to their problem?
Whatever you sell needs to be in harmony with the natural and existing forces in their life right now.

7. Do they chase you instead of you having to chase them?

If you could have this, would you take it?

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Effortless Power: How to get more of what you want with less time and effort.

Effortless Power is the essence of 8020 marketing and persuasion.

Over 20 years ago, just after I had purchased my new car & truck dealership, I hired Jay Abraham to be my marketing coach and I spent a year with a small group of other highly motivated entrepreneurs periodically traveling out to Los Angeles to be coached, prodded and grilled by Jay Abraham.

Turned out to be one of the most enlightening years of my business life.

One of the statements he made to me in particular really struck home and stayed with me: He said  “It is better to talk to 10 people who want what you have to offer than 100 tire kickers.”

At about the same time I picked up a book by Richard Koch called “The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Success by Achieving More With Less” and I began my journey into combining the 80/20 principle with what I was learning from Jay Abraham in my sales, marketing and business practices.

80/20 marketing is about identifying these 6 essential elements and disqualifying anyone that doesn’t fit the profile.

If you want to get 80/20 results from your marketing and selling process, these 6 elements must be present in your lead generation efforts.

One: Are they a member of your ideal target audience? Every business has customers or clients that can be broken out according to the 80/20 Principle.

20% of your customers are generating 80% of your profits. And 4% are generating 64% of your profits.

Let’s say you have 1,000 customers generating an annual average revenue stream of $1,000 each. The 80/20 Principle states that 200 of those customers are generating in the area of $800,000 and the other 800 customers generate the other $200,000 and to make matters worse, you are likely actually losing money on a small percentage of those 800. We all instinctively understand that not all customers are equal, but only a rare few business owners have really put a pencil to it and determine who those customers are and what their true Lifetime Value is.

As a side note, this applies to your employees as well.

Two: Are they the decision-maker? Do they have the ability to say yes?
Don’t waste your time making a presentation to an audience that can’t make the final decision.

Three: Do they have the money?
If they can’t afford what you are selling. It makes no sense to present to them.

Four: Is there a sense of urgency? Do they have an immediate and urgent problem that they need a solution to? Perry Marshall, in his book “80/20 Sales and Marketing”  refers to it as:  “Do they have a “bleeding neck”?

Five: Do they want what you have to offer? Does your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) match what they want?
A unique selling proposition (USP) is your unique answer to these questions:
• What does your product or service do that your competitors doesn’t?
• Why should I buy from you instead of anybody else?
• What guarantee can you make that nobody else can make?

Six: Is the timing right for your solution to their problem?
Whatever you sell needs to be in harmony with the natural and existing forces in their life right now

You want to have a marketing system and strategy that feeds you quality leads so that you are time only with customers who meet all six of these elements.

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