One Coach

This post is the first in a series of excerpts from OneCoach CEO John Assaraf’s interview with Rita Gunther McGrath, co-author of The Entrepreneurial Mindset, and MarketBusters: 40 Strategic Moves that Drive Exceptional Business Growth.

To be a market buster, you’ve got to demonstrate a major growth move. And there are obviously different ways to make these aggressive moves.

In order to make any move, you’ve got to be able to explain what you’re doing. If you can’t explain to somebody what your thought process is, then you’re limited to how much you can delegate, and that limits how fast your firm can grow. This falls under the broad umbrella of business strategy. Without a comprehensive strategy mapped out, then you will fall short of identifying your risks, challenges, and potential gains, and it will be difficult to explain your approach to any employees or prospective clients.

A starting point for any small-business owner is that you need to be alert to the changing environment around you. Small-business owners are very vulnerable in terms of resources. So, if you’re not faster, more nimble and more tuned in than the larger businesses, you don’t have the fat to fall back on like they do.

Another advantage of being nimble is that it’ll be easier for you to adapt your business model. What’s working today may not work next month – don’t get stuck in a rut. Your business should be a living breathing organism.

Part of this need to change stems from the fact that your customers will get used to you. Building rapport is one of the best things you can do in any business relationship, but that is quite distinct from your client getting used to you. You want to change, evolve, and always be able to offer your clients innovative methods and products – stay fresh.

Next in this series: Distinguish your business.

If this information was useful to you and your business, consider attending Mind, Marketing & Millions, the ultimate business-growth event, set for Oct. 23 - 26 in Los Angeles.

This is the fourth is a series of posts excerpted from a conference call between OneCoach CEO John Assaraf and Tony Rubleski, president of Mind Capture Group. See the first post in the series here.

Diversify or die! That’s the way of the marketing world today. You absolutely can not be reliant on one type of media. The strongest way to combat the thousands upon thousands of daily marketing messages is to be a media mix master. Start your approach with offline marketing and use that to get direct exposure and drive traffic to your Web site; a symbiosis.

And with any endeavor involving more than one step or element, you must have a plan in place – projections, ideal client, target audience, budget…the whole nine yards. If you don’t, you’ll crank through your marketing bucks as if you never had any in the first place. You have to have a marketing plan – that’s what drives business to your door.

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This content is excerpted from an interview that OneCoach CEO John Assaraf conducted with business consultant Mitch Axelrod, author of The New Game of Business. A previous excerpt from this interview, about when to give your product away for free, is here.

The game of business has permanently changed, says Mitch Axelrod.  Here are some of his new rules:

Don’t fall in love with your products and services.  Of course, you have to like and believe in what you sell.  But when you become overly enamored of what you produce and sell, you can easily become blinded to what the marketplace actually wants.

Instead, shift your attention to the people who buy your product or service.  They will tell you what they want and need, and they will help you improve your products and services to better serve those needs. 

Ultimately, your customers determine your success in the marketplace.  Passion is good.  Enthusiasm is good.  But never fall in love with your product or service at the expense of your customer base.

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When you are shopping for something, what’s the first question you ask yourself when considering a particular vendor or store? If you are like most consumers, the fundamental question, asked on reflex, is “Why should I do business with this person or business?”

Have you answered this unspoken question for your own customers and prospects? If so, does the answer make you stand out in your field, or are you simply part of the herd?

Every day, your customers and prospects are showered with advertisements, brochures, newsletters, Web sites, and other media that ask them to open their wallets. As a result of this barrage, buyers strive to tune out the noise by ignoring things that are the same.

Said another way, they commoditize the available choices. They identify the goods or services that, in their perception, are identical and differentiated only by price. Commoditizing makes everyone the same, part of the herd, and helps prevent “decision overload” by decreasing the number of choices from which to select.

Your challenge is to keep your business from being turned into just another sheep in the herd by your customers and prospects. How do you do that?

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This is the third in a series of posts excerpted from a conference call between OneCoach CEO John Assaraf and Tony Rubleski, president of Mind Capture Group, and author of the new book Mind Capture.

OK, so there are thousands of media marketing messages raining down on us every day. And believe it or not, some people think there’s one magic silver bullet to solve this marketing pain. 

Well it just doesn’t exist. You have to build a good marketing mix to really cut through all the clutter – one that’s logical, proven and tested to cut through and build your business. The only cure-all that exists here is completely believing in yourself and fully applying yourself. Your marketing mix needs to be logical, proven and battle-tested. That way, as Jay Abraham would talk about it, you can keep building the pillars of your Parthenon.

Together these pillars support your business, and here are a few to think about:

• publicity
• lead generation tools
• a referral strategy campaign
• direct marketing tools – Web site, e-mail marketing, your direct mail and offline programs

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This is the second in a series of posts excerpted from a conference call between OneCoach CEO John Assaraf and Tony Rubleski, president of Mind Capture Group. See the first post in this series here.

As the CEO of your own company, you are in sales and marketing, whether you like it or not. Thusly, there are many societal forces we must contend with in order to dominate the market. And whether you realize it or not, you are constantly engaged in the battle for mind capture and getting attention. Those who can persuade the most effectively, call it sales or influence, will win and pass their ideas or their innovations onward.

And so, one of the first things you need to keep in mind is that the marketplace is not just skeptical, it’s cynical. This is because we are overloaded with so much marketing noise, so much hype in the media that we are very jaded towards advertisements.

There are simply too many choices out there, and the number of choices is only going to increase. Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, illustrates the impending fierce competition of India and China, and the need to raise the bar immediately – a tremendous resource for a snapshot of today’s marketplace and where it’s going. The point is if you think it’s tough now, imagine when these super powers kick it into high gear.

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This is the first of a series of posts excerpted from a conference call between OneCoach CEO John Assaraf and Tony Rubleski, president of Mind Capture Group and author of Mind Capture: How to Generate New & Repeat Business in the Age of Advertising Overload.

You absolutely must get your company in the mindshare of the consumers and really understand how important that is. You need to be in the forefront of your prospect’s mind. Essentially, you want your prospect to wake up in the middle of the night with a question about your industry, and have your company name and information pop into their mind as the answer.

To accomplish this mind capture, you must stand out – one of the few ways to get people’s attention and win new business in a world of too many choices and demands placed on people’s time. This can be a daunting task with about 50,000 messages bombarding us every day. 

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Referrals are a great way to build your business, and there’s an art to generating more referrals. A previous guest on the OneCoach Expert Insight interview, Jill Lublin is CEO of the strategic consulting firm Promising Promotion, and author of the new book Get Noticed — Get Referrals, which shows you how to become more influential using an intuitive, people-oriented approach.

Jill shared with us her top 10 tips for getting noticed, and here they are:  
 
• Be yourself. Build on your assets and your uniqueness because they are really what people want. Clients and customers want you, your special viewpoint or approach; your unique insights or touch, not a weak imitation of someone else. Don’t just be a copycat; find your own voice. Get noticed in your own way; in the manner most natural and comfortable to you. Examine the approaches that others have taken and then follow what feels natural for you. Trust yourself and your instincts.

• Work your business around your life, so it fits in your life, supports your life, and reflects you. Too many people do the reverse, they work their lives around their businesses and it frequently doesn’t work out well. Read the rest of this entry »

Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 through 1987, coined a phrase that still holds true today: “All politics is local.”

In small business, the emphasis on the local community is equally important. Most entrepreneurs reading this post are small-business owners who serve a local or regional community base.

Readers will recognize that each member of our senior management team each has a deep passion for helping small businesses grow. And, at the risk of being overly repetitious, there are only three ways to grow a business:
a) get more profits from existing sales;
b) get more sales from existing customers; and
c) get more customers.

Excel in any one of these three basic paths, and your business will grow – excel in two or all three of these and you’ll experience exponential growth.

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You may have read a post here early last month that talked about when it makes sense to give your product away. In that post we were explaining the value of getting your message or product out to the masses of prospects who might value your core product or service.

And, in my previous post  I wrote about a couple of ways to boost the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers.  To refresh your memory, the LTV of a customer is defined as the total gross profit that you accumulate from a customer over their lifetime (based on the definition of lifetime you pick as noted above), less the original customer-acquisition cost and the subsequent marketing expenses over their lifetime. 

Both of those posts are central to my message today.  You may have heard us mention the value of acquiring a new customer at a loss.  This seems counter-intuitive, but it plays right into the psychology of marketing, and it leverages the LTV of your future customer. 

It is a basic fact in marketing that your current customers will be more likely to make an additional purchase from you than the likelihood of a purchase from a prospect.  I’ll give you an example from world of catalog marketing where, one of the measures of marketing campaigns is revenue per thousand catalogs mailed (Rev/M).  Using a generalized example, when a cataloger mails their “Christmas Wish Books” to prospects and to existing customers the difference is dramatic: 

Rev/M of catalogs mailed to current customers is $5,000/M catalogs mailed while Rev/M coming from catalogs mailed to prospects is $1,250/M.

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