E22: Don't Grow Your Network; Nurture It!

What if instead of growing your network, you should nurture it? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to getthelenses.com with that. Let's get started with today's episode. One of the questions that I'm often asked by my colleagues is how can we market our business? How can we market our business? And in particular, what they are asking is a variety of different questions. As part of that, let me give you a little bit of background before we dig into the lenses on my perspective on this and then we'll see where we can go with the lenses. One of the things that I've done over the years, I've been in business now for 20 years and, and admittedly I have tried what I think is pretty much every single possible method for growing a business. I've spent a lot of money hiring Internet marketing firms that were going to implement outbound marketing programs. I've hired people to do search engine optimization. I've even hired public relations or PR firms who got me major spots on national newspapers, magazines, television. I was on ABC News, I was on a TV show, on tlc, I was, I was on a reality show on USA Network. So I've done a lot to get my name out there. And in the process, I've spent a lot of money and a lot of time. And in each case, my goal was to expand my network, grow my network, increase the traffic to my website, to build my mailing list and to increase awareness of my brand and services. And what I've done is I've actually done a little bit of a, we'll call it a post mortem where I looked back and I looked at the amount of money I spent and the work that I did and the effort that was invested. And if I look at where my revenue comes from, and again, this is my business. Remember from past episodes I said, best practices are stupid, so don't necessarily use anything that I say as gospel. I'm only sharing my personal experience. And when I look at the work that I've booked over the past three years now, pretty much all of it, with the exception of just a couple of speeches, almost all of it was somehow generated from previous relationships. They were either past clients, audience members, bureaus, people that I've had a strong relationship with, or someone who followed up on a recommendation that they received from somebody that I've done work with in the past. And if I look Back over the past 20 years, I believe that about 80 to 90% of my revenue and my bookings were a result of my existing network. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised by this because one of the things that we know, if we look at the statistics that are out there, that the probability of selling to an existing customer is actually 60 to 70%. We have a 60 to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer, whereas the probability of selling to a new Prospect is only 5 to 20%. And of course, it depends on what you're selling and how you're selling and the nature of your relationships and the nature of your product. So take any of these statistics with a grain of salt. But here's the thing. It costs over six times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep existing ones. And what we tend to do you think about almost every single strategy that's used by, let's say, a phone company. This offer is available only to new customers. Well, okay, well, what about the people who've been loyal to you for 10, 15, 20 years? What are you doing there? We've been brainwashed to focus on growing our network with people who don't know us or have no prior connection to us. Are there times when it's valuable to attract new prospects? Of course, of course. And again, it depends on the nature of your business, what you offer. And if you're in the early stages of building your business, well, then clearly attracting new customers is going to be important. Or if you're in a volume business, well, then you need to get large numbers. So I'm talking to people who might be focused on a higher ticket item, something which deeper relationships might matter if you have a more established business, if you have a track record, maybe nurturing, not growing your network might be the name of the game. Typically, we treat most customers like transactions. We get the sale and we move on. But we miss the possibility that can come from either creating a repeat customer or a referral to a new customer. And look, I'm. I'm as guilty as everyone. In fact, I've been terrible at that. And what I've been trying to invest in over the past year or so is trying to rectify that situation. So for a moment, just think about the books that you've read. Think about the books you've read. How often did you buy a book because of an advertisement or even some PR campaign? My guess is most of the books you've read were due to a recommendation by someone that you know and trust. So my guess is if we look at most books that are purchased, few of them, especially if they're not like let's face it, I subscribe to Bookbub, which is a place where you can get low priced Digital Books, sometimes free $0.99, $1.99 $2.99 sort of the higher end. I'll buy things on a whim then because I figure, well, what's the worst that happens? I have invested a couple of bucks, but if I'm going to pay full retail, which I do quite often for books, it has to be on a book that I feel like I'm going to get some value from. And I'm not going to trust the reviews of people I don't know. I'm going to trust the reviews of people I know. And the same is true with most of our businesses. Someone who has a past relationship with you is going to be one of your best advocates. They're going to be the people who can speak most loudly about you to others. But more importantly, if you're in the type of business where you can do more deeper work for them, well now they're going to be your best customers. So just think about, for example, if you run a restaurant, one of the common methods you might use for attracting new customers might be offering deep discounts through Groupon or paying for an expensive listing on OpenTable. These are designed to attract those individuals not already familiar with your business. But what if instead of focusing on the people who don't know you, what if you considered giving your existing customers, your fans, your advocates, your an incentive to recommend your restaurant to others. Provide free appetizers to patrons who bring along new diners. Grant gift certificates to frequent referrals, create a wall of fame with pictures of customers who refer the most business. Or better yet, find ways of creating even more value for your customers. Regardless of whether or not they bring you new business, show your appreciation by buying them a bottle of wine on their birthday. They'll most likely repay the gratitude by excitingly share the experience with all of their friends. Now, over the years, I've invested heavily on my website. Each year there's another iteration of a website. Changing the copy, changing the design, changing the graphics. And although having website is critical, probably in hindsight, I might have been better off investing my money in creating a formal advocacy program where I strategically contact and cultivate relationships with former customers. And this is something that I've started to do and I'm seeing it paying dividends and I need to do more of it. But it's like, who are going to be your biggest fans? The people who already know you and have had success with you. I found sometimes that simply calling or writing a past client to say hello is enough. How are you doing? I know we all have challenges right now. I have my own challenges. I'm here if you ever need a sounding board. And in doing so, when a need arises, they might think of me or at least they'll be reminded of the work that I've done. And hopefully they'll recall the impact that I made whenever it was that we first did business together. The other thing which I also do, which I find very useful, is I'll introduce clients to each other so that if another company is struggling with a problem and I know one of my clients has already addressed that issue, I'll be like, hey, you know, Sally, I want you to meet Joe. Because, Sally, you have something so valuable to offer here and Joe is struggling with this issue. See if you can help him out. And that to me is a very simple way of again, nurturing your network. People that you know at different levels, getting to know you better through conversation with others. I think the key with, you know, all of this is not to view conversations as a sales conversation, but rather it is a conversation. It is a relationship building conversation. And if it goes nowhere, that is perfect because that's not the point of the conversation. The conversation is to create conversation. And this actually fits nicely into one of the lenses, which is lens number 18, which is the performance paradox. So let's just turn quickly to the lenses and talk about how they relate to this conversation. So the performance paradox says that paradoxically, sometimes the more you focus on a goal, the less likely you are to achieve that goal. So if your goal is to attract customers, what else could we focus on that's not about that result that it's not about that goal, but it might be something else. What can we do to serve? So to me, that's the flip side of it. Instead of asking, how can we sell to our customers or how can we market to our customers? Just change it to how can we serve our customers? One of the things I've known, we've done studies on this, we would have teams competing and one team would be measuring how much they sold. This was done in a retail store. How much did they sell? And that team would compete against another team and they didn't know that they were competing against each other. And that other team said they're going to be measuring how well they serve the customers. So if you have a customer who would be better served by going down the street to another retailer, you send them there. That's the way you serve customers. The other team, of course, was like feverishly, you know, trying to sell, trying to sell, sell, sell. And here's the thing which was interesting is that when things were done, the people who were focused on serving sold more than those who were focused on selling. And that's the performance paradox. Sometimes we need to recognize that shifting our focus away from the goal or the outcome can be a key towards achieving that outcome. So that's the performance paradox lens, which I think is a really interesting one. Anytime you are hyper goal focused, step back and ask yourself, what can I focus on that's more present moment that will help me move in the right direction without being so focused on it? And this sort of leads us a little bit to the original question which I posed, which was, how can we market our services better? Or how can we market our products better? And we might actually use what's going to seem like a bizarre lens. But number four, the eliminate lens instead of trying to market more. What if we stopped marketing? What if we stopped marketing? And to me, this is a really interesting perspective is okay, if we were not able to use social media, if we were not able to use email lists, if we were not able to use whatever other types of tools that we have out there, what would we do? And yes, we could build a list. And that's what a lot of people will tell you is go build a funnel. Go get more people into your funnel and build your funnel. But the challenge with that is you need to basically start from a blank sheet. Now, if you have customers, and again, this is all built on the belief that you already have a network of customers that you probably ignored. Well, instead of marketing, how can we serve them, how can we build a relationship with them? And that to me is a combination of the eliminate lens and lens number 15, which is the substitute lens. Because a lot of times when it comes to sales and marketing, what we're looking to do is attract more customers. But what if we instead of attracting more customers? Well, we can change some of those words. And these are important shifts. You know, we go from attracting more customers to maybe attracting fewer, yet more profitable customers. What if we were to instead of attract, we even changed the word attract to retain or serve. Okay, well, how can we serve our best customers? And maybe that moves us to one last lens that I'll talk about, which is the variations lens, which is 24 which is maybe when it comes to marketing, we use different strategies for different products, different services or different customers. Our best customers, the ones who might be most profitable, the ones who will get the most value from what we offer, which to me is always my measure is not what's gonna create the greatest value for me, but what's gonna create the greatest value for someone else. Because my belief is always if I create value for someone else, it will ultimately come back and create value for me and my business. So ask yourself, who are the customers that you can serve the best, that you can create the greatest amount of impact for? And then focus your deepest relationship building efforts on that. So I want you to think about where do you invest your marketing time and money? Do you go to networking events and hand out business cards? Do you create nice new shiny logos or your website? You're running Google Ads or Facebook ads or trying to do some kind of direct marketing campaigns to attract new customers. And maybe you've even tried cold calling. I'm not saying these aren't valuable, but I want you to just for a moment consider the possibility that your best customers, your long term customers are not going to come from those types of interactions, but rather they may come from your past relationships. Let's nurture our network. If you already have a nice following, don't always try to just focus on attracting new customers. Nurture the people who know you best. Or as the old song goes, love the ones you're with. So in this episode, we started off with the question, how can we market our business to attract new customers? And we then looked at it through a few different perspectives. One was the performance paradox lens which said, well, instead of trying to focus on the goal which is attracting more customers, what if we serve our customers, create value for them, knowing that in the process of creating value for them might ultimately create value for us. Talked about the eliminate lens. The eliminate lens is number four where he said, well, instead of trying to improve the way we market, let's eliminate marketing altogether. What would that be like? Well, if we weren't marketing, which means attracting new people, well, now we have to tap into the people who already know us and there's a lot of different strategies you could use for that. And then as part of this, we also talked about the substitute lens which is again just changing some words and the variations lens which says, well, maybe we use different strategies for different situations. How can we build a deeper relationship with the past customers where we can have the greatest impact? That to me is you think about that question versus how can we market to attract new customers? And they feel like they're night and day from my perspective. So as you can see, in just a matter of minutes, by using these lenses, you can take what you thought was the problem and flip it a little bit. So on this episode, you saw how we could take what is a relatively simple problem statement and change it a few different ways to get a few different perspectives by using the 25 lenses. It doesn't have to take a long time. And I think that's something I just want to instill, is that this can be done quickly and easily. And with that, we are at the end of this week's episode. To submit problems you want solved in this podcast, go to invisiblesolutionspodcast.com remember to download the lenses, go to getthelenses.com I look forward to being with you next week. And until then, happy problem solving. Don't.