Jumpstart Your Marketing Plan Featuring Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #432

The key driver of everything is your list of unconverted prospects. The better you are at getting in front of people, getting an audience of people who could be your next client. That's where we really want to focus our time and I'm going to show you how to think about that as a capital investment.

Hello, this is Joe Polish. Now real quick, before you listen to the podcast, which I hope you're going to love, just wanted to let you know I spent the entire last year on a sabbatical and I've got so many insights, so many things that would be super valuable and my first official coming back event, my first public appearance is going to be February 11th through the 13th in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. So if you are a high level entrepreneur and and you would like to attend in person, go to Joe Polish returns.com joepolishreturns.com check it out. Hope to see you there. Now enjoy the podcast.

You're a man who needs no introduction. The Marketing Buddha this is great. Thank you, Timothy. I'm going to take just a couple of minutes and set the stage for you about what the before unit, the during unit and the after unit is so you can kind of guide your framework here. And then I'm going to go down a path giving you the best way to identify where these are either growing or slowing your business. Right now I've got approximately 60,000 hours of time invested in thinking about the eight profit activators over the last 30 years. And once I got the framework, I've spent the last 25 years consciously fitting things into developing and advancing this thought of the before unit, the during unit, the after unit, and the eight profit activators and the entire body of work that we've got in all the hundreds of episodes of I love marketing support this. So you've got a whole resource to go deeper in the things that we identify today as the big opportunities for you. So to set the stage and kind of set you on a path of how to identify because every business is slightly different, but every business is universally impacted by these a profit activator. So I'm going to share a couple of overlays so that we can see what we're talking about now, the after unit of your business. Here's who we're talking about. We're talking about that in the last 12 months, let's even say just the last calendar year, you did some amount of business, unknowable amount of business. If we just looked at it, we know that you did some amount of revenue Even if it was zero. But whatever that amount of revenue you did, some portion of it came from people who already knew you, liked you, trusted you, and had done business with you before. Not all of your business comes from new people. And maybe it does. And if all of your business comes from new people, then we've got a huge opportunity because that means that you're not paying any attention to the people who've already done business with you and like you and trust you. So we want to focus on identifying for you how big is this opportunity. It'll help for you to at least make an estimated portion of how much of your business is coming from your after unit, from people that know you, like you and trust you already, who've already done business with you, and how much is coming from new people. The purpose of your after unit. The two profit activators that fit there are profit activator 7 and profit activator 8, which are about nurturing lifetime relationships with your clients and orchestrating referrals. So that's the after unit of the business. That's what we're going to when we focus on that, that's what we're going to be talking about. The during unit of your business is the part of your business that does what it is that you do. If you're a chiropractor, the during unit of your business is from the moment somebody comes into your office and says, can you help me with my sore back to the treatment that you give them. Maybe the treatment protocol, if it's going to be a six week protocol or a six week program that they're going to go through, all of that would be the during unit. Until people say, okay, I got it, I'm happy. Thank you so much for that. That now transitions people into your after unit. That's where we're, we look at what is the unit, the time, the timeline of your business that is actively involved in helping people right now. And we want to break your before unit into the middle two profit activators which are profit activator 5, which is create a dream come true experience for your clients, and profit activator 6, which is to provide after sale service. So when we get in and talk about your during unit, we're going to divide it in half. We like to have a transition into the after unit. So we count the end of the transactional part as the midpoint and we start to offer a provide after sale service where we're nurturing out into continuing this relationship even after it seems like you've been paid. Like if somebody comes into your office for a series of six treatments and they get paid and then everything's done, everybody shakes hands and they leave. They may be satisfied and they may be happy that they got the result, but it's going to make a bigger impact if you were to provide after sales service where now you're checking in with them or you're continuing to provide something extra for them or something that's going to enhance the experience that they had or enhance the results or the longevity of the result that they're going to get. And then in the before unit, this is the engine of your business that drives new business. This is the best way to think about each of these units of your business is to think of them as independent operating units. That we think about your before unit as a supplier to your during unit. Your during unit is the core. And almost everybody would love nothing more than just to be involved in the during unit of your business. Right? Every professional, every real estate agent, every chiropractor, every dentist, every surgeon, every attorney, every coach, every consultant would love nothing more if all they had to do was work with people who readily want their help. Most of the time, people get very busy in the during unit. And then only when it's not busy in the during unit do they then turn their attention to the before unit to say, oh yeah, what do we do? How I need to get new clients, so I better do some marketing, I better turn on some Facebook ads, or better do something. How much would you happily and cheerfully pay to have a new client? And that's what we're looking for with your before unit. The key driver of everything is your list of unconverted prospects. The better you are at getting in front of people, getting an audience of people who could be your next client. That's where we really want to focus our time. And I'm going to show you how to think about that as a capital investment versus as an expense. Now that we know that your after unit is about nurturing lifetime relationships with people and orchestrating referrals, one of the metrics that we want to know for your business is to look at it and say, what is your return on relationship? That's how we look at your after unit. Because you've got some number of people who know you, like you, trust you. Your whole business may be after unit oriented. If you're a financial advisor, you may have a business that is has the benefit of every single year. You're starting the year with a book of clients relationship portfolio that you have of assets under management that each year, as long as you keep doing a great job for people, you're going to continually grow the amount of of business that you're going to make. You may be on the other end a real estate agent that you work with somebody and once you find them a house this year, it may be 5, 10, or maybe never that you get to do another transaction with them. So your nurturing lifetime relationships with them is, isn't so much about getting being able to do more business with them personally, although it might be if they buy investment properties or you create another opportunity for them that way. But it certainly is in orchestrating referrals. If you manage that relationship, they may be able to refer you five or 10 people over the next 12, over the next five years. That would give you a return on relationship. So two ways for you to calculate it is all of the business that you do that comes from repeat and referral business divided by the number of people that you do gives you a return on relationship. The number of referrals that you get from the number of people that you have gives you a return on relationship. And these are a couple of ways for you to calculate and measure improvement on your after unit. Right. The whole idea, what we're really focusing on, what we really want to do is, is look at how can we move the needle by keeping our relationships with people so that we can, so that they will refer. Now when we look at it, this is one of the best things. If we look at our two opportunities that we have in the after unit, it's nurturing lifetime relationships. Which means maybe it's as simple as offering something new to the people who already know you, like you and trust you. I wrote a little email and sent out to my all my clients, the people that I already knew me like me and trust me. And I just sent a short email, I said, hi Alan, I'm going to work with a handful of people one on one next year. Would you like to work with me, Dean? And that started that jump, started a new division or a new line of our business that was just from a thought of how can I extend, how can I nurture a lifetime relationship with all the people that are coming to my breakthrough blueprint events and moving on and getting great results, but they want to get, keep going and get better, getting better results. How can I do that? Anything that you can do for people, how can you make their lives more convenient? That's what we're really looking for in your after unit. Now, as far as getting referrals, that's going to happen. You're going to get referrals. Hopefully, if you've been in business for. And sometime you're getting referrals because people know you, like you and trust you, and they want their friends to get. To get great help. But what's happening is that the referrals that you're getting are mostly what I call passive and reactive for referrals, meaning if you were to look at the last 10 referrals, if I just pick people randomly and said, tell me the story of the last referral that you got. That would hear tales of people saying, well, John called me and said that he was a friend of my client Jim, and that he wanted me to help him do whatever it is that I do. Oh, that's a passive Referral. And it's 80% of the referrals that you get. Just show up, say, hey, my friend John told me that you could help me. The other story that I would hear would be people saying, I got a call from my client Jim, who told me that he was talking with his friend John, who's going to be selling his house or just hurt his back or needs a massage or is going through a divorce or needs some help with his chakra, tweaking, whatever it is that can you. You should give him a call. So it's your client calling to give you a hot tip. They're telling their friend about you. They say, you should give them a call. I told them all about you. Now you've got to react to that and do something. You've got to now reach out and make something happen. But what I never heard, never hear stories of people orchestrating referrals. We don't want to turn them into salespeople. We don't want to say, now don't keep us a secret. Tell. Tell your friends about us, because that's what they do. Then you run into them at the grocery store six months from now, and they say, hey, did my friend Scott ever give you a call? I was talking with him. He was going to be selling his house. No, no, I never heard from him. Oh, man. I know he's gone now, but I tell people about you all the time. Have you ever heard somebody say that to you? I tell people about you all the time. But yet you've never seen anybody in your office because somebody. They told you. So what we want to do is we want to slightly tweak this and we want to train your clients to tell you when they've been in a conversation like that. So one of the tools that we do, that we do to use that is something called the world's most interesting postcard. And we send a programming card that will give people a quick note every month that will program them to remember when they hear certain conversations. So far, if you're playing along at home, we've got two winning strategies for you so far. Number one, you're going to send an email and offer something new to the people that you already have a relationship with, preferably at a higher price, at a more expanded cooperation or collaboration role that you can do. That would be the best thing that you could do for them. Why not continue? So often we start out in business helping people do the thing that you know how to do. And then as you continue to help more people do that, you evolve and you see what the next steps after that are. And so you look at that as the opportunity to continue growing and continue serving the same people rather than getting stuck at a skill level that you have already moved on from. It keeps you young and growing and moving on. Going to put on our during unit hat. Okay, during unit, we've got two profit activators to work with here. We're starting from the moment somebody says yes, I'd like to. I'd like you to help me. The experience that people go through. We want to imagine that as a guest experience timeline. We want to think about it from the moment somebody says yes till the moment that the transaction ends, or you're getting the result that the dream come true result that they want. And the midpoint of that now leading into the providing after sales service in profit activator 6. Now, the two things that we want to look at are, first of all, getting a really great outcome for people. That's the core of it all. We cannot scrimp on that. You got to get the result for people. But what we also have is an opportunity to get a strategic result from that. Not just the outcome, but to get a strategic outcome as well. So I'll use an example that we're all familiar with restaurants because it's a condensed customer experience, a condensed during unit. The during unit of a restaurant begins from the moment someone makes a reservation and ends the moment that somebody leaves after having paid the check. That's the during unit for most restaurants. Now, if we were to outline that in a timeline, that is, we're looking at what are the benchmarks along the way here that make up the experience. So if we look at it from the moment somebody makes the reservation, what next has to happen along that way? Where could it go right or wrong? Where are the opportunities for us to create a wow. Or create. Oh, and so when you look at it, that somebody arriving at the restaurant, what. That's the first opportunity that people have right now, when you look at it, I. One of the best episodes of I Love Marketing that goes really deep into this is an episode from the Wayback Machine, and it was with Anthony Melchiori from Hotel Impossible on the Discovery or on the Travel Channel. And I did this interview with him right before his show came out on. On the Discovery Channel. And it's one of the best episodes. That's deep tracks. There we go. Gina says episode 74. And I laid out this idea of the timeline, the experience timeline. You can lay out the moment, the sequential timeline of when people. How it works when people start with you and look for the benchmarks along the way. So in a restaurant experience, it could be the arriving at the. The restaurant, could be getting in, getting seated, get your order taken, the food comes out, you are happy with that. Maybe you have dessert or coffee or drinks, you get the check and you leave. That's the timeline of everything. Now, you want to fire on all cylinders and remove any friction from that. We want to make sure that people have an amazing experience. And maybe what happens if you look at a typical restaurant, the result that we get is, is Maybe they have 100 people come through the restaurant, they end up with $3,000 at the end of the night. And that's the during unit experience for that day. Now, what could we do if we look at this and see how can we increase the experience that we have for people now, if we look at it and we say, what if one thing that we could do is get contact information from people so that we've got the start of an after unit. Because how many restaurants even collect your contact information? Not very many, Right? How many times have you been to a restaurant, you sit down, you eat, you pay, you leave, and they never know who you are. You never hear from them again. You. You don't start any kind of a relationship with them. So what if you started thinking, okay, we know we're going to get 100 people coming through. What if we started a birthday club and we were to present that to people when the food is being prepared, where we look at the timeline and we say, when's the best time here? Well, this is. There's a little lull here from we get their order taken and then the food comes out. So we prepare the servers to come out when they're refilling the water. Your food's in, getting prepared right now, if you'd like to join our birthday club, we can celebrate with some birthday cake tonight. And you get a $20 gift card on your birthday and leave four cards for people to join the birthday club. Now, if you just do that for 100 people tonight, you've had the same experience. You get 100 people, you get the $3,000. Plus you may have 30, 40, 50 people who've joined your birthday club. And it's the start of your after unit that now you've banked future business there that who's going to come back? What are these birthday gift cards worth when you invite them to come back on their birthday and they bring six friends with them or they come back because you've been able to invite them to come, or you randomly say, hey, if you look at the weather and it's cold and rainy and you say, hey, the chef's preparing chili. If you want to stop by and pick some up to go home. As a takeout thing, you create all these opportunities. I could tell you so many different ways that you could do this in the thing. One of the best examples that you could do to observe it is to go to the Olive Garden. The Olive Garden is really one of the masterful examples of maximizing the during unit strategically. I mean, they've fine tuned everything to get you in and out as fast as possible. You've got the tablet there, you can pay, you can do, you know, if you can, Instead of getting 100 people in, you could get 120 people in efficiently. That's a great thing. But they also have the opportunity, and this was brilliant, is while you're there, you can. I don't know whether they're still doing it, but they were doing that. You could get five dollar entrees to go. So you're sitting here tonight, you're eating dinner, and while you're here, would you like to get another entree to go? That's an amazing outcome that you could create for something. So this kind of thinking about your during unit is really about thinking what would be the big opportunities that you could create there. Let me look in my notes because I want to cover a couple of things here. This guest experience timeline. One of the things that you want to look at is how high is high. When you're kind of looking in your during unit, you've got the opportunity to provide the service that you want to provide, to serve the clients that you want to serve. And it's largely based on your ability, you know, and a lot of times people make the mistake of basing their service on what they think people will pay. Or they've cornered themselves into a situation where they do online courses that are, you know, 400 or $500. And then they set a precedent of what a price is for something like this. I'm going to give you an example. There's a company called Richard Mille and they have amazing watches, high end watches. Their average price is $185,000 for watches. But Richard Mille, as an example of what his passion in the during unit is, is he wanted to create the best watch possible. That was his thing. He started it when he was 52. He'd loved watches forever, but his path was let's create the best engineered high performance. Like most of these expensive, beautiful, complicated engineering feats of watches there. The turbal on watches are very delicate and fragile. You can't, you know, they'll sometimes break if you sneeze wrong. They wanted these to be perfectly engineered and durable. And so his approach was let's build the best watch first and then let's figure out what it needs to cost. And what an amazing, interesting approach to take for you is what if you took your price tag off off of what you do and you said, what would be the most amazing service that we could provide? What's the best thing that I could do for somebody? And then what would that have to cost to make that work? And you'd be amazed at how, you know, when you let people make the decision, you're going to find that you're going to be in a sweet spot. Thought of nobody else offering the full solution for people, right? When you look at what Richard Mill found there was they were alone in the market at $180,000. There's lots of 50, 60, $70,000 watches. There's lots of million dollar watches that are one of a kind or these, you know, know, ornamental or decorative kind of art piece watches. But there's nothing in the $180,000 range. And he looked at it, what. Of course the guy who's got a $20 million yacht, of course he's going to have $180,000 watch. The guy that's got six, you know, supercars that he can only drive one at a time of, of course he's going to have a supercar that he can wear on his wrist. And they were, they sold $540 million of these watches in one year. And so that's an approach of looking at the market and seeing what could I do that could be a big breakthrough for my service? How can I really provide a dream come true for people? And what in my current timeline could be opportunities for me to take additional things and to take a multiplier mindset. You know, when you look at it, what if every time you did business with somebody, you started measuring what are the opportunities that I have to multiply this relationship, to multiply and turn this piece of business into more business and set it up as a metric for yourself. Some people want the highest level of anything that you offer. That's. And it's just your brave first little bit of courage to put that out there without a fear of being rejected. When you think, and you live with it and you think when you're coming from a place that is this really offering an amazing value to people, am I certain that this is going to create an amazing outcome for them? Don't be shy, right? Be enthusiastic, Present it out. Give them the opportunity. You don't need to try and sell it or convince people of it. When I shed, when I, when I showed you the email, the only email I sent out about working one on one with people was an email that said, hey, I'm going to start working with a handful of people one on one next year. Would you like to work with me? That's all. I didn't have to say, hey, get ready for the best opportunity you've ever had. It's limp. Supplies are limited and I'm not trying to convince people to do it. I'm trying to present the people who already know that it would be a good idea. The before unit. We don't want to start with the before unit. I've shown you these things, you know, all the breakthroughs that you have available in the after unit and the during unit. Before you even need to or want to start running ads or spending money or allocating money, we can use these things that we've talked about to create some excess capital that you can now invest in your before unit. Because the before unit is a capital investment that has an amazing roi, but it's less exciting when you take an expense based approach to it. And so often people come into the before unit in desperation. They come into it, they've got their last little bit of money on one credit card, for instance, and they're hoping they're going to run some ads and they're like, come on seven, hoping that they get the payoff before the credit card bill is due. And then when the they don't get a client right away, they're disappointed and they blame the leads. They say, oh, those leads are. Facebook ads don't work. Postcards don't work. Print ads don't work. No, that doesn't work. What you end up with is this failed opportunity of building an asset that you can nurture for a long period of time. So we want to begin with the end in mind there. The asset that we want to build is a pool of unconverted prospects that you've been nurturing for a number of, of months or years. The more seasoned, the more, the more experience they have with you, the better it is. The opportunity is to create this asset of your unconverted prospects that you are, you know, now that you can communicate with. There's two parts to your before unit that are two profit activators. Each part, number one, is to select a single target market and compel your prospects to raise their hand. So what we want to do is we want to identify people who could be your best prospect. That's where books come in, right? When we do, when we do books, there's one of my favorites. Read this if you want to take great photographs of places. So if you've got a course or you're a photographer or you are a photography store or you sell photography equipment, it would be a great pond for you to have a pond full of people who are interested in that topic. That's where the books come in. That. We're not looking to convince people to buy your cameras right now or convince people to take your course. We're looking to identify turn invisible prospects into visible prospects. That's what we're looking to do. And that's the most valuable thing that you can do in the first part of your before unit is to identify people. How can you identify the people that you want to be in relationship with once they raise their hand? Now you've got this pool of visible prospects and that's where things get exciting because now you can continue to educate and motivate. You can send three emails a week to people. If you observe. You watch what I do, you watch what Joe Polish does. We send three emails a week, every week to everybody in our world. We tell people about, hey, we're doing a meetup group, and here you are. I'm doing a lead conversion workshop and here you come. We're doing whatever it is because you're in our world and we're able to reach out to you. You are visible prospects in some way. You're in our world. You like us, you resonate with what we say. You find that it's valuable to come to these meetup groups. Maybe you've done business with us, maybe you haven't. At some point you probably will right there when the right opportunity comes along. But it doesn't matter. We're building equity with every interaction with you. Every time you provide value, every time you add value to somebody, it elevates the way that they think about you. And it's the gestation period could be any amount of time. It could be, it could be close, it could be later. Here's a great example. This is the way we think about it. Think about stocking your palms. Oh, I got to share, gotta share, gotta share. Share. Screen desktop, share. Here we go. Now this is one of my favorite videos here. This is a guy out fishing in a canal at night. No fishing pond, no fishing rod. They're going out there, driving down the canal, shining a light on the water, just shining a light and watch what's going to start happening here. Just going along, oh, here they come. The fish just start jumping in the boat. So you start thinking about, boy, what an amazing thing when you've got, when you're leading people in the direction that they want to go. Look at this. This is what it can feel like when you start building this list of people and all of a sudden you send a nine word email to people and they start flooding your inbox. If you've ever had an experience of what that looks like, that's what we're talking about here is the bigger that list that you have, the more fish are in your pond, the bigger that pool that you're fishing in, the bigger the opportunity of the number of people that are going to be available to jump in your boat. So you want to think about that, stocking your pond as a capital investment. We want to start thinking about what you're doing is you're stocking your pond with people who could potentially be your clients. And then you're driving the boat and shining the light, making offers. And when it's the right time for people, they'll jump in the boat. So my big, you know, big, big tip in terms of get it. What you can do in your before unit to focus on is building your list, thinking about it like making a capital investment. What we want to measure in your world is revenue per unconverted prospect. Because every year that you're you maybe made the investment this year. You made a capital investment to invest in 1,000 new leads on your list, or 2,000 or 5,000 or 10,000. That, that asset that, that you've developed is going to yield for years and years and years. So the true measure that you're looking at is, what is this? What is my revenue per unconverted prospect? And if you just do a quick math on that, that when you look at how much revenue you generated from your before unit in the last 12 months and you look at the number of people that you had in your unconverted prospect list and you get a number of what that is. If that number is $100 per unconverted prospect, you could, can you afford to pay $5 for new leads if you knew that every year, every person, every thousand people on your list was worth ten thousand dollars, a hundred thousand dollars, what is it? What could it be worth to you? Right? I think you could easily find that a thousand people could be a hundred thousand dollars. The 10,000 people could be a million dollars. You know, it's just, it's expanding out that way to think about what could you. How can you expand the relationship that you have with those people?

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