The One About Breakthrough DNA - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #59

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hey everybody, it's Dean Jackson. Welcome to the I Love Marketing Podcast. And today what we've got is an audio version of our Breakthrough DNA report, which you can download right now@ilove marketing.com so many people have been asking if we could have an audio version of the printed report. So that's what we're going to do today. Ready? Breakthrough DNA 8 profit activators you can trigger in your business, starting right now. Your business wants to be great. It has greatness in it. All businesses do. It's waiting to be shaped, nurtured and molded so it can deliver happiness, money and freedom to you, its owner. There's not a business category on the planet that doesn't have at least one great business doing well. No matter what the economy, the competition, or the market conditions, every business has the potential to be that great business. And in this report, you're going to learn how to trigger eight profit activators that will create a breakthrough for you. The breakthrough starts when you stop thinking of your business as one thing and divide your business into three core divisions, the before unit, the during unit, and the after unit. This whole framework and a lot of the things that we've been talking about on the I Love Marketing podcast, they're all based on this framework and context of the before, during, and after units. I have an overriding context or formula that I use for everything I do in looking at businesses. This basic context that we look at is looking at it in three parts as a before unit, as a during unit, and as an after unit. And that's the simplest, broadest context that we can apply. When you look at it, it gets deeper and deeper. But when you really look at your business in those terms, looking at it as three independent units, each with their own distinctly measurable monetary goals, their own impact areas, you've got the formula. What happens with a lot of is that they are able to triple their business just by making it three dimensional instead of just thinking about their business as this one thing that they do. If you really get this idea and you really get this concept of looking at your before unit as the unit of your business in charge of finding, identifying, educating and motivating people to come into your business for the first time, that's really what your before unit is about. If you look at your during unit as the unit of your business that delivers the experience that people have when they're doing business with you. Starting from if you Have a retail store the moment they walk into your store until the moment they walk out of your store. That would be your during unit experience as a real estate agent. The during unit could be the moment you start looking at houses with somebody until they close on the house that they've spent the first 30, 60, and 90 days in that house. And then the after unit is all about nurturing lifetime relationships, and it's about building a life relationship with all the people who already know you, like you, and trust you so that they do business with you again and so that you can orchestrate referrals. That's sort of the broad picture. And there are so many different ways to apply this. So many ways to diagnose where a business has the biggest opportunity. And when you look at it, what I find is business owners are usually focused on one of the three as their primary focus. Like sometimes people only focus on their current clients and trying to keep up with what comes at them every day. I find that with a lot of medical practices or people in that type of field where they just have their patient list and they just work with those people and they're kind of focused on the during. Those kinds of businesses are ones that say and are sort of proud about it. They say, well, I don't advertise, I don't do any marketing. It's almost like a badge of honor. That's how they feel about it, that they don't have to. But every time I hear it, it just makes me so sad to think that they're just limiting themselves in so many ways. The thing is, though, when you break something down to something that simple and you know that that's where you're looking now, it allows your creativity to really flourish within that context. We're talking about the before unit. And each level down that we go, we're getting more and more specific and more detailed in how we approach this. So underneath those three overriding contexts of before, during, and after, there are eight profit activators that go underneath those units of your business. And when you really get right down to it and you start kind of examining each one of these units, there are so many ways to apply these profit activators to any business. And I always use these as a diagnostic tool. If I'm doing a consultation, we'll have people come into the evil scheme hatchery here in Florida or in Toronto, and we'll put up on the whiteboard this visual map of the business mapping out the before, during, and after units. And it's really helpful for anybody to think about your business as a moving process, there's an excellent TV show called How It's Made on the Discovery Channel where they go through all of these manufacturing processes and they show assembly lines and how they make all these different things like screwdrivers or how they make jawbreakers. They just go around the country and they show manufacturing processes, narrating how they work and showing each of the simple steps in the process. It's amazing how complex these things are, but how simple and elegant it looks when you see all the stuff that went into engineering the process that makes these jawbreakers or whatever they're making. And that show, sort of mesmerizing. I watch it a lot. I stumbled on it I don't know how many years ago, but quite a while ago, when the show first came on, I stumbled on a marathon of the show, and I watched maybe three hours of it at one time. And when you watch that show, what I found for me is that it stimulated a part of my brain that was able to think in visual moving processes, and that transfers to how you think about every process of your business. There's something. Something that happens in your brain when you expose it to this type of thinking, and I would highly recommend this to anybody. You can go to YouTube and type in how it's made and see some episodes of the show that you can watch online. But I guarantee you, watching these processes unfold, you'll have a different perspective on your own business. And you'll start to imagine, if my business was an assembly line, if my business was a moving process, what are the raw materials that I need at one end, and what is the process that needs to happen to get through that entire assembly line? There may be 50 different processes that something goes through to come out the other end as a gumball or a screwdriver or a motorcycle helmet. And some of them involve people, Some of them are completely automated. Wherever you can in your business, it's a great idea to think about how you can automate the process of delivering your product or service. And thinking about it as a moving assembly line that you can narrate really brings clarity. So what I did with this whole how it's made idea is think about business underneath that before, during, and after context as a moving assembly line that you visualize as a living, moving process. What has to happen along the way? How is your business working? Could you explain to someone how your business works as if you're narrating an episode of how it's made, featuring your business that's an incredible thinking exercise for you. Let's break it down a little bit and focus on the profit activators in each of these units of your business. In the before unit, there are three profit activators that are completely adaptable to any business. Profit activator 1. Narrow your focus and select one target market at a time. So the first profit activator in the before unit is select a single target market. When I talk about the idea of target market selection, it makes everything fall into place underneath that one guiding idea. Who are you going to serve? You've seen the consequences of not following this at work. In lots of failed businesses. The big mistake that a lot of business owners make is trying to think about and capture the broadest possible audience for their business. Trying to be too much to too many people, trying to be one size fits all. Being broad versus narrow. Thinking about the forest and not thinking about the individual trees and not realizing that all of these individual trees have different needs. It's like being a pig farmer versus an albino pig farmer. Especially if you have product specifically geared for albino pig farmers. When Joe Polish first went into carpet cleaning, there were many people that purchased his carpet cleaning services for many different reasons. It could be high end clients with expensive carpets, it could be people with pets, it could be people with allergy problems, or it could be everyone in every sort of price range. And then Joe would be all things to all people and be living the whole master of none Sarah scenario. All of those different audiences, all the different reasons that people get their carpets clean represent all of the different motivators that people have. The triggers that start somebody on the path of getting their carpets cleaned. It could be somebody who gets new carpet. And six months from now, they're probably still pretty proud of their carpet and they want to keep it looking great. They have different motivation in the beginning than somebody who's got carpet that they've had for 10 years and they just want to kind of keep it presentable. It's like when somebody gets something new, like when you get a new car or you get new carpet, it's always, you know, oh, take your shoes off, you start treating it better. It's almost like they're saying, this time we're really going to take care of our carpet. And we use this with the real estate agents and their target markets. Somebody buying his or her first home versus somebody buying a move up home is a different target market. Somebody buying a luxury trophy home is a different target market. And somebody moving in from out of town is a different target market market. When you really start thinking about your business and you start looking at who are all of the different people that you could serve, who are all the different possibilities, when you start really identifying them, some of them are going to jump out as potentially the most profitable niche in your market. Often if people are just serving everybody they possibly can, they may find that the top 10 or 20% of the people they're working with are providing 80% of the profit and the other 80% are providing all of the headaches and none of the profit. Knowing your most profitable, easiest target audience gives you a complete freedom to focus all your efforts on a let's just get more of the most profitable customers approach to marketing. Let's use an example of a great photography business that I recently found out about. Now, most commercial photographers probably want to cast as wide a net as possible so that they can get as much business as they can. If you look at how they position their businesses, they're probably calling themselves something to do with their name. John Carter, photographer, specializing in commercial photography, weddings, portraits, events, parties, etc. You know, the idea being that John doesn't want to limit himself in any way. It seems natural if we make the pie bigger, the types of people we can serve, we just need to get a little piece of it and we should be okay. Contrast that with a commercial photographer in the UK who has narrowed their target market quite cleverly. They have a website called weshootbottles.com if you're a manufacturer or a marketer or something that comes in a bottle and you want to get the best possible photos of your product, would you trust it to just any commercial photographer who happens to list product photography on the long laundry list of things that they happen to photograph? Or would you rather trust your bottle in the hands of someone who focuses only on photographing bottles? Now, I can hear you already saying, but I don't want to limit myself to just shooting bottles, or I don't want to limit myself to one segment of the market. Perfect. I'm not suggesting that you limit yourself in any way. I'm suggesting that you pick one target market and make dominating that target market your absolute focus. Then when you're dominating that single target market, move on to a second target market and start dominating that one too. One target market at a time. So if you were a commercial photographer who's domina the bottle photography category, and you wanted to expand your business, what could you do next? How about weshootcans.com it doesn't matter what business you're in, there's always different varieties of people that you could work with, different people that you could focus on, people with different needs, different motivators, different hopes and dreams and fears. There's a lot of psychology in IT and anthropology where you're kind of getting to know and understand who your target market is. Is. It may not seem like you're doing any marketing per se yet, but you're laying the groundwork that makes each of the next steps fall into place. This one profit activator alone, if I sit down with someone and look at all of the possible different types of people they serve, it's always an eye opening experience for people and we're going to talk a lot about the real metrics and value of creating and choosing the right target market. If you start thinking about these profit activators as the blueprint or as the map of where you're headed, what you have available to you, this is a lifelong journey in your business and you're going to be addressing each of these areas of your business for as long as you're in business. You're going to be constantly improving, adapting, applying new technologies, new opportunities that come around under all of these. But this context is going to last you the next 20 years. In your business, the context is not going to change. Twenty years ago you had to select a single target market, and 20 years from now you're still going to have to select a single target market. So I'm very conscious of making sure that what we're talking about here are sort of bedrock things. These are things that are constant. These are the things that you can bank on being true years from now in your business. This is the framework that you can look at to develop the most lucrative business you can. I always look at these like the DNA cells of every business breakthrough. You can take these DNA cells and they're going to become very different. Functioning in a carpet cleaning business, in a real estate business, in a retail business, in a restaura, in a professional practice, in a manufacturing company, in a transportation company. Any type of business has these same DNA cells that are going to grow into the ideal scenario for whatever business you're applying them to. Profit activator number two. Use direct response offers to compel prospects to call you. The second profit activator is compelling your prospects to call you. This is where we start applying the direct response marketing principles that we've been talking in all of the I Love Marketing podcast episodes so far. It's the thing really that when someone says I love marketing, this is the thing they're talking about is compelling prospects to call you. There's nothing more exciting than transforming your life from being a manual labor prospector into an automated marketer. Now your business becomes easy, lucrative and fun. It becomes an elf business, as Joe likes to call it when you really start applying the direct response principles that we talk about. And there's a lot of different ways that you can compel prospects to actually go to your website, pick up the phone and call you, visit your store, or if you're an online business, if you're a brick and mortar business, if you're in any part of the world, it doesn't matter. Your focus has got to be compelling prospects to call you. And when we say call, it could be even if you've never used a telephone, they can call upon you over the Internet. They can call upon you through many different means of reaching you, be it physically or electronically or over the phone lines. So compel is the interesting word I remember Dan Kennedy would always talk about. Your advertising needs to be compelling. And compelling is like when you're driving by an auto accident and all the people in front of you are slowing down and people are screaming idiots, morons. They have to gawk at the car accident to see if anyone's hurt or dead or maimed or whatever. And it's kind of a morbid curiosity. People get angry because there's a big huge line and then the moment you drive by, you slow down and you become one of those same people that you're complaining about. It's compelling because you cannot not pay attention. If you want someone to respond to your advertising, to your marketing, to your website, you need to set it up so that it's very hard to resist. If you're selecting the right target market, meaning they've been identified as someone that's interested in what it is you're selling, then you want to be compelled selling. This is a simple headline as an example. It could be worth tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions to some of the people that are reading this right now. There are a lot of people who are price focused in the carpet cleaning business. And Joe Polish knew early on that if he was going to teach them how to use education based marketing, which we're going to touch on here in a minute, that he would also need to address the fact that they're so used to advertising press. There's a big difference between the lowest price and the best quality. So what do people really want? Do you want the best price or do you want the best quality? Or do you want a combination of both? So this headline that Joe created with Gary Halbert kind of covered both. Here's the headline. Free recorded message reveals how to have your carpets cleaned properly at the lowest possible price. Now that's a tricky headline for some people. What do you think are the most important words there as it comes to attracting the right type of clients and not being in the price game? You might think free recorded message or lowest price, but the key word is properly. Because let's say you're not the lowest price because the lowest price guy does a lousy job. But you clean people's carpets properly. And in order to clean them properly, you're not going to bait and switch people. You're going to go in and use proper chemistry, the right type of equipment, equipment that's clearly going to be more expensive than some idiot that's advertising $5.95 a room, just lying to people, misleading them with the price to get in, and then charge them what a real quality job should cost. So free recorded message reveals how to have your carpets cleaned properly at the lowest possible price that compels people to buy. And no matter what business you're in, if you're a web designer, how to have your website built properly or effectively at the lowest possible price. Or if you're in the auto repair repair business and you're a really high quality repair place, how to have your transmission fixed or replaced properly at the lowest possible price. So that's just an example. There's a lot of different ways to compel people and we'll go really deep with it. But I just wanted to give that as a context so that people understand an example of something as simple as words, how they can compel people. That formula is a winning formula and it can be applied in any number of ways. Ways. That's the thing about these profit activators and having a framework for marketing that can really adapt to whatever business you're in. This is what's so fascinating about marketing is that we're constantly seeking out and developing and pioneering new ways to apply what we already know to different businesses or compelling prospects to call. The big mistake that businesses often make is they think compelling prospects to call you means getting your name out there, getting people to know who your business is. And that's not it at all. Sometimes the very best thing you can do is put your own ego aside and focus only on what they really want, only on what your prospects really want. Without even any mention of you or your business up front. Robert Collier talks about entering the conversation that's already going on in your prospect's mind. And once you realize your target market, you're not going to try and convince people to do it. Something you're not going to get their attention by showing them how to do something that's already on their mind. They're already thinking about how to do this. When you put your selfish needs aside and you're able to focus just on them, that's when the real magic happens. That's when the real breakthroughs happen. And that's what we've been talking about. Any number of ways to do that with offering people consumer awareness guides or offering free reports or free recorded messages that all have a compelling title that really articulates what they really want in a way that they're compelled to call and get that information. They don't see that there. They don't see that there are any sales involved in that. They see that it's completely and exactly what they're looking for. So they feel safe to call. But all the while here you are now thinking like a chess master. And you know and world class marketers know that just taking the first step is going to set a sequence of events that within two or three more moves they're going to be meeting with you in your office, or you're going to be meeting with them in their home, or they're going to be in your store. But you didn't put the pressure on the ad itself or on the postcard or the sales letter or whatever media you're using. You don't put the pressure on your ad or postcard or email to make the full sale. You're just starting with the process of getting them to raise their hands. You're telling them to call so they identify themselves to you and then you can move on to the next step and the next step. Step. There's so much we can say about getting prospects to call you. If you listen to the first five episodes of the I Love Marketing podcast, you'll get incredible ideas you can use right away. The point is to stop using advertising that's about you and start using advertising and marketing that's about them. Profit activator number three. Patiently and systematically educate and motivate prospects to meet you when they're ready. The third profit activator is educate and motivate your prospects to meet you. This is really about lead conversion. This is where the real skill comes in. Knowing how to set things up so that people want to meet with you. The key is that you understand they will only meet with you when they're ready. Let's just use that example of saying how to get your carpets properly cleaned for the lowest possible price. And they're calling and they're listening to a free recorded message. Well, that free recorded message, or if they're going to get a free report, those things are all starting the process of educating and motivating your prospects to meet you. And that meet you is the part where the actual transaction is going to occur. Whether that's going to be to come into your retail store, or it's going to be to invite you into their house to give them a carpet audit, or it's going to be coming to your homebuyer workshop if you're a real estate agent, or any of those things, where you're going to get into a position where you can start your sales process. You can't just educate people and send them free reports and expect that they'll just line up to come in and see you. People need prompting. We're all basically shy and reluctant to start an interaction. And we've all been raised not to impose on people and not to make people go out of their way for us. But it goes both ways. That thinking makes us meek in the way that we talk to prospects. We say things like, if there's anything I can do for you, or if you have any questions, don't hesitate to give me a call. I'm more than happy to help. Now, we may be sincere in saying that, but it's a very weak proposition position. We're essentially asking our prospects to be the leader and initiate by asking you for something which you would be happy to provide. The problem is most people don't like asking for anything, but we're helpless against people offering us something because we equally don't like to reject people. It's a strange social dynamic. Often use an example of bringing you into my home and sitting you down in the living room and saying, you know, if there's anything you want to eat or drink, there's lots of stuff in the fridge. Just feel free to help yourself. I'll be in the other room. If you need anything, just holler. Again, I would be completely sincere in that offer, and I'd love it if you would feel comfortable enough to help yourself to something in the fridge. But I know that's not what you would do. You would feel uncomfortable imposing like that. It's the way we're raised now. Contrast that with me coming into the living room with a plate of freshly baked cookies, holding them right in front of you and saying, would you like a cup cookie? The truth is, it would be very difficult for you not to take a cookie under those circumstances, even if they weren't your favorite cookie. Because I've clearly gone out of my way to make these cookies for you and it would be rude to reject me. Understanding that dynamic helps you realize that people are silently begging to be led. They don't want to lead. They want someone to tell them what to do and make it easy for them to do it. We talk about the difference between marketing and sales. This is really where your marketing marketing is delivering people right to the during unit so that when you actually meet with them, they're already predisposed to wanting to do business with you. And just like in the headline, free recorded message reveals how to have your carpets cleaned properly at the lowest possible price. Now that could be a free video on this website reveals it could be a variety of different mechanisms that you deliver information to. But basically, basically once they would call that free recorded message, they would hear seven questions to ask a carpet cleaner before you invite them into your home. 6. Costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning. 8. Mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner how to avoid 4 Carpet Cleaning RIP offs the difference between value and price. All of those things will educate people on how to choose a carpet cleaner so that even if they never do business with your company, when they listen to your free recorded message, they will know what they didn't know they didn't know before calling so they can make an informed, intelligent decision. And now equipped with that information, they're a more confident buyer. And a more confident buyer is exactly the type of buyer that you want. You want them to have confidence with you and that's why you're providing that information. And since you are the one providing them with that information, who did they have the most rapport and trust with? They have it with you. Unless you are dealing with price shoppers. And the free recorded message would sift, sort and screen the price shoppers and it will present you with the ideal sorts of prospects. And the ideal prospects will love the fact that you presented them with that education because it helps them make a buying decision and they will do business with you. This applies to anyone. I don't care what business you're in, I'm yet to find someone who can sit and tell me, oh, you're better off not educating your prospects and clients. Unless of course, you're in a business like if you sell cigarettes, which I would never recommend anyone do. But let's assume that you probably don't want to educate them about how it's going to kill them. So if you're in a business that actually creates value and delivers something that's good and useful to people, then an educated prospect and client is the absolute best person. And it's the most ethical form of advertising and marketing. That's why it's so irritating when you hear people talk about how marketers, all they're trying to do is sell you something. Selling is not yelling. Where many parts of the auto industry have it wrong is they think that if you blast with a yellow big star burst in the newspaper or a TV or radio ad and you yell a huge low price, that's the most compelling thing that you can ever offer to people. And you've got an entire industry in many ways that screwed itself because their focus has always been on low price. Yell louder and louder and louder and they actually think that's marketing and selling. I guess you could put it under that umbrella, but that isn't what we would ever use. We actually teach people stuff that works. We want people that are pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and predisposed and actually happy and confident to seek out our services. Honestly, I don't know a more effective way to create the best prospects in an ethical manner than using these profit activators. I just want to give people the caveat that education isn't enough. A lot of times people start using free reports as their offer. They get the mechanics, they learn that, okay, I'm going to select my target market, I'm going to run a direct response ad offering a free report and I'm going to send them the free report. And then they don't really think through the motivate part of educate and motivate people to meet you. They think that educating is enough, that they'll send out the reports and then kind of sit back and think that people are going to call. I see this a lot in professional practices and in financial service types of things where people are offering educational things, they're sending out the free report, but there's no motivator, there's nothing to connect the dots that make it easy for people to want to meet you who are starting that process. So I really focus so much of my attention on crafting the way you can present something that makes it easy for people to want to come and meet you that it's the most natural, natural Step. That's where you've really got to think through the process of what are we going to offer as the tastiest cookies for your target market? So that three step process really makes up the before unit. We talk about the arithmetic, we talk about the math of this. And what you can really do with the before unit is you're setting up a money multiplying system. You're setting up something that every step in this process you can automate. You can use websites, you can use free recorded messages, you could use autoresponders, you can use direct mail, you could use all things that are completely leverageable that don't require your personal time on doing them. And you can completely delegate the process. The metric that you look at is how much money did I put in and how much did I get out? It's like how many appointments did I get from this that I'm able to turn into sales in my during unit? If you really think that educating someone just in and of itself is enough, then I'm sure everyone has probably been in a situation where they've spent a lot of time trying to educate a prospect. But then they never ask for the sale and then they were frustrated because they're like, why didn't the person buy? Well, you didn't ask or you didn't set it up in a way to where you have to take it to the next stage. It's kind of like really romancing the heck out of a person and then never asking for the date. You're not going to get where you want to go if you don't do the other things. Which is why we're fully equipped to share with you real life examples when we do our conference. This is the reason we're doing the two day conference. We know that the level of immersion will speed people's progress up in many cases by 10 years just by getting exposure to all the different ways and people. So those are some of the things that people will actually when they come to join us. If you do come and join us at the I Love Marketing conference or you watch the DVDs of the conference, you'll get an opportunity to meet people that have. Some are brand new to this and are just kicking butt and taking names and other people that have been successfully doing this as a result of us teaching them for over a decade or longer. So it's really cool. Profit activator number four. Present your unique service offer in a way that makes it easy to get started in the during unit. Now there are three More profit activators to look at. The during unit starts the moment you imagine the best thing that could happen for your business, the best thing that could happen to your carpet cleaning business or to your real estate business, or to any business, is that somebody were to come to you and say, listen, I'm going to go ahead and just deliver to you people who want to get their carpets clean and I'll just set up appointments for you. Would that be okay? And that's what the before unit is really all about. If you imagine that as a carpet cleaner, how different would your business be if all you had to do was start in your during unit and you just go appointment after appointment after appointment all day with people who are already pre motor who want to talk about getting their carpets cleaned or want to get a carpet audit. That's what your before unit can do. And this is where your during unit starts. Your during unit starts when you have your first meeting with somebody who's motivated to move forward and do whatever it is that your business does. So that means the first time they open up the door at your retail store, or they come into the home office of your professional practice, or they show up at your office to look at homes, or they invite you to their house if they're going to be sitting selling your house, that's where your during unit starts. So we talk a lot about how you can present to people the services that you offer in a way that makes it effortless for them to get started. A lot of times with something like a carpet audit or a pinpoint price analysis or a room by room review. If you're a realtor, then when you're talking with them about that, when you go to meet them and they've already been educated, they're already a little bit motivated, you go through and you either do your free room of cleaning and give them the carpet on it to show them all the different things that you can do. It makes it so much easier for them to say, yeah, let's go. So, for instance, putting it together with educating and motivating prospects to meet you, which is the last module, then we go in to present. Your unique service offer would be after using a consumer awareness guide, you could make an offer for a free room of carpet cleaning with a carpet on audit so you can go in and evaluate the condition of the carpet. And it's a way to uniquely package the presentation and the service so that it's new, better and different than any other thing that any other person has ever heard from a Carpet cleaner like Joe Polish teaches carpet cleaners to do something completely different because everyone was giving estimates and quotes. So he created a thing called a carpet audit. And we go in and present this very formulaic method and offer them a free room of carpet cleaning. So their there's no cost or obligation of any kind. They can just try the services. But he wouldn't just do the free room. He would always do it in conjunction with a carpet audit. Now during the carpet audit, he's there in the home and he's able to actually show them and educate them in person. It carries on the education. All of these stages kind of feed into each other, but it's very synergistic. The chain is only as strong as the weakest link. And if you do a great job of educating, but then you have a weak link presenting your unique service offer, it's not going to work as well. So all of the things that Joe and I are sharing with you here are really so that you have the strongest marketing chain humanly possible, so that you can obviously close everyone that's worth closing and only spend your time talking to people that are worth spending your time talking with. Where it's going to be a win win situation for you. Now, the other day I was meeting with a printer who's a very successful printer, but he's been hammered over the last couple of years with the economy and with prices. This whole business is in the commodity business. And I said, you know, if you want to get out of the commodity business, then start, you know, quit selling business cards and letterhead and printing and start asking Socratic questions of why are you coming to a printer? What is it that you want? You don't want business cards and letterhead. You want what you think business cards and letterhead are going to do for their business, which is going to get the them jobs. So sit down and say, what are you trying to accomplish? Let's do a printing audit and evaluate all of the things you're trying to use printing for. And by talking them through the process, you can charge them more money to do a printing audit. And then if they end up hiring you as a printer, you can apply that fee, that consulting fee towards printing and you're no longer viewed as a printer anymore. You're now viewed as an advisor that's serving people. For many years we've taught that selling is serving people. And if you set this up this way, that's exactly what you're going to be doing, serving people. The main thing to keep in mind is that nobody really cares about your process or your system or product as much as they care about the result. Like a mouse focused on cheese, all they want is for it to be over and. And they want what they want without getting burned. Now you can listen to episode 24 of the I Love Marketing podcast and we explain in the one with more cheese and less whiskers, all about this whole concept of using your marketing to make your mice feel comfortable. Profit activator number five, Deliver a dream come true experience designed for from your customer's perspective. I'm going to start this profit activator by suggesting you read the book Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard. It's really exactly what this product activator is about. It's probably 14 or 15 years old now, maybe even more. But the idea of visioning your business, visioning the experiences that people have, it's almost like theater in a way that you create an experience that's completely orchestrated, that when somebody goes through your process, they come out of it saying, that was the best carpet cleaning experience I've ever had, or that was the best chiropractic experience I've ever had, or that's the best real estate experience I've ever had. Ultimately, you're going to go through a whole process of mapping out that customer experience that will not only deliver that experience, but the end result of it will be that people will be so excited about it that they'll want to introduce the experience to their friends, to other people. So that you're orchestrating referrals in this during process, Even when you're presenting your unique service offer, we're planting the seeds that these referrals are going to happen because you know how all of this plays out. But you're going to be planting that experience, planting that seed, and they're going to want to refer people, so you start referring to that all the way through the process here. Imagine what it would do for your business if half the people that went through your process, that was went through your experience, referred somebody else to you before that transaction even ended. That's a powerful experience. If you do that and you orchestrate that right into the experience, even from the beginning, that your expectation is to deliver such an incredible experience that they'll want to refer their friends and family, you'll get many more referrals. Patty Lund is a dentist in Australia. And when people start as a new patient with him, he sets it up right from the very beginning that one of the expectations is that they're going to refer two new patients to him. When you start presenting that, you start bringing that right into the front, right to the beginning of the relationship in your during unit. Even when you're presenting your unique service offer, then you're delivering a world class experience. There are three types of experiences that a prospect that a client or a customer can have. And Joe Polish calls this process the happy client experience. And we're going to share it with everybody like we do on the I of marketing conference DVDs. But basically you've got three faces. You write a frowny face, you've got a neutral face, and you've got a happy face. So the first one is an unhappy customer, the second one would be a satisfied customer and the third one would be a happy client. I like to refer to clients versus customers. You know, a customer implies someone who buys something from you and a client implies someone you have a relationship with. Frankly, I'm not all that hung up on what you call them. What I'm really hung up on is that you actually make sure that out of the three experiences that they can have either unhappy, satisfied or happy, that they land in the happy category. Because if they're unhappy, they're not only not going to do business with you again, they're probably going to tell other people about how crappy you were. The second experience, which is what most business situations actually are, where they're sad, satisfied and you don't want satisfied, they'll pay you money. They may come back and do business with you again if you're the only person that they get something from. But they're not going to become raving fans, they're not going to go out of their way to tell other people about you when you wow them, when you say wow your customers, that means they end up with a smile on their face, they got more than what they expected. And the very best way to think of your customers client experience is to imagine what would be a dream come true from their perspective. When you begin with an attitude that you're going to create the ultimate experience for your client as if you were one of them, it really creates a powerful vision for you. One of the best client experience design exercises is to ask two simple questions. Question number one is what does everyone love about blank? And you can put your business category there. What does everyone love about your business category? Number two, what does everyone hate about. Insert your category here. So what does everyone love about new cars? Or what does everyone hate about buying a new car? And that process will help you clarify your thinking. But you can really take it to the next level by imagining what they would really love if they thought it was possible. This is your opportunity to imagine a dream scenario for your clients. Don't censor yourself by thinking, well, I can't do that, or that's impossible. Just let your mind go and then ask yourself, if I could do it, how would I do it? All of the interacting that you're going to do with your clients is going to give them less than what they expected, exactly what they expected, or more than what they expected. Why not give them something beyond what they even could imagine? If you want to nurture lifetime relationships and orchestrate referrals, it's only going to happen if you deliver world class service after the sale and during the sale and before so that they have a smile on their face and they tell other people about you. Profit activator number six Provide after sale service even after you've already been paid. When you provide after sale service, you're now going to be able to reap what you've sown in delivering a dream come true experience. It sounds kind of interesting when you really start to think about it. We're talking about the during unit right now, and I'm saying providing after sale service. People might initially think that that sounds more like the after unit. But I like to look at it like a timeline. I like to look at the experience that people have as the actual culmination of the transaction being the midpoint, the customer experience timeline and not the end. Like if you look at a carpet cleaning experience, you imagine that the experience is that when somebody gets a carpet audit, when you're doing their carpet cleaning right there, that can all happen in the same day. You're doing the audit, you're doing the cleaning right? Then you collect the check and off you go. That all happens in one day. But what if you start thinking about adding an element of an after sales service, which could be a follow up phone call or a pop buy or something the next day or within the next three days after that experience, just to check in on people, to maybe drop by and bring them something that's going to keep their carpets fresh, or a bottle of stain remover, something that's an added above and beyond expectation element is going to have a much bigger impact. Because in people's minds, everything that happens from the time you start presenting what it is you do and the time they pay you for it, you're doing all of that because you're getting, getting paid. But if you walked out there with the check. They've got no expectation that they're ever going to hear from you again. They don't know that they've just met somebody who's looking to build a lifetime relationship with them. Even if you said it, when you're presenting your unique service offer, nobody has ever followed through. Now what you're doing is that you're evidencing what your intention is, because everything that you do after you've already got the money, money is so much more impactful because you're not getting paid to do it. There's no expectation that you're going to do anything extra. And when you do it, it makes an incredible impact on people. That's where they're going to have the desire then to refer their friends. If you really think about it, when somebody gets their carpet cleaned, when are they going to be most likely to refer somebody to you? It's probably the next five or six people that come into the house, right? Because. Because they're going to say, oh, wow, your carpets look great. That's when it's happening. Or somebody who buys a house the first 30, 60, 90 days after they move into the house, that's where all their inner circle, all of their friends are going to be coming over to the house. Or when somebody buys a car, they drive it home, they show it off for the first time to everybody. So if you're integrated into that process, if you're ending your during unit, if you're ending your experience with people the minute they drive off the lot, or the minute you leave their house, or the minute. The minute they take the sold sign down and you give them the keys, if you're ending your experience with them right here, you've missed out on the best experiences that you have to get referrals and to make an incredible impact on your clients. How many companies actually treat people that way? As soon as they get the money, all of the attention just ceases to exist and they just disappear. And the sweet spot is when the euphoric feelings of joy and happiness are running through their minds. You have power if you know how to harness it and direct it. It's a timing issue. And as the saying goes, the difference between lettuce and garbage is timing. So you want to focus on the timing. Profit activator number seven, Nurture lifetime relationships and focus on lifetime value. Now the after unit is really where we start calculating the lifetime value of every client you do business with. I was using a benchmark of 20% annual yield from what I call your Relationship portfolio. All the people who know you like you, trust you, people who've done business with you, the people who you would recognize if you saw them at the grocery store, and the people who are your core customers, the people you've had that kind of an experience with. If you started looking at the lifetime value of somebody the moment you meet him or her, it will change everything about the way you think about your business. If your average sale is $150 and if they're going to be a client for the next five years, that immediately takes them up to $750. And if they just refer one person, that immediately doubles them and their lifetime value to $1,500. That's where the 20% annual yield is one time in five years. So you start thinking about it rather than that either one in five of the people that you do business with will refer somebody to you, or that everybody will refer someone within the next five years or they'll do another transaction with you. If that's where your after unit is really coming in. It's the least expensive portion of your marketing mix. It's the one where you can have the biggest impact with the least amount of money because they already know you. And in many cases you're the incumbent provider of whatever it is you do. You are their realtor, or you are their carpet cleaner, or you are their chiropractor. It's just a matter of keeping in touch with them and nurturing a lifetime relationship with them. And that's what profit activator number seven is all about. Nurturing lifetime relationships. And that means at the very least that the people that you have now that you don't just leave it at a one time transactional thing. See, it's far easier to get somebody who to is going come to your restaurant and had a good experience there to come back than it is to get somebody to try it for the first time. And that's true with any business relationship, especially if they'll be doing what you do more than once. There's been so much evidence to prove that it's five to six times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to get someone who's done business with you before to simply do business with you again. And if you just look at that five or six times more expensive, and you look at most businesses, they spend the vast majority of their effort on how to get new customers, new customers, new customers, and they neglect the ones that they've already got. Billions and billions of dollars are never generated Never realized simply because of the neglect or absence of an after unit in most businesses. So I look at anything you're doing in your after unit, especially in the nurturing of lifetime relationships, as first and foremost, really about repeat business insurance. It's what you're doing. You're making sure that when they have a need that they're going to use you again and not be tempted to try someone else just because you're not in contact with them or you lose touch with them. Repeat business is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many ways that you can increase the lifetime value of a loyal client. By talking about an ascension plan, where you've got a product line that somebody can use, other products that you have, where you're able to solve more of their problems or to offer a higher level of service for people, where you can deepen the relationship with them and they'll want to get closer to you. Where you're building out your entire catalog of products and services that you have available for people. If you're a chiropractor, or if you're a carpet cleaner, a real estate agent, or any of the businesses. There's just so many ways that you can increase the lifetime value of those people just by focusing on them. Just by communicating in even the barest minimum way with the people who already know you, like you, and trust you. By you thinking it through and knowing what lifetime value map is going to look like, it makes it easier for you to articulate it to them. Profit activator number 8 orchestrate referrals by giving your clients the opportunity. Opportunity to feel great. Now, the after unit is really about two things. Nurturing lifetime relationships and orchestrating referrals. I separate them because you're communicating in two different ways when you're communicating with people. To increase their personal lifetime value, to increase the way that you can add value to their life. Because whenever you're increasing their lifetime value, it's definitely going to be on the basis of how much extra value you're adding to their life. That's really where it all starts. By orchestrating referrals is about really doing things, saying things, and communicating in a way that make referrals happen on purpose. A lot of times people get referrals, but when you really look at it, the referrals that people get are mostly either passive referrals, meaning somebody calls you up and says, hey, my brother just got his car carpets clean and said I should give you a call to come and clean mine. So it's happening without you really doing anything to make it happen. Everyone gets those kind of referrals or they're reactive referrals where somebody calls up and says, hey, my brother John is thinking about getting his carpets cleaned, you should give him a call. Now you have to react to that referral and do something to make it happen. But where the real value is, where the real opportunity is. The only type of referral that you can control 100 is the orchestrated referral where you're asking for and getting a very specific type of referral. There's so many strategies with this. Literally we could do a full two day event just about orchestrating referrals and there's so much depth to this. But really just knowing what and how referrals happen, what to do to orchestrate that process so that your best clients are constantly on the lookout for how they can refer people to you. That's really what it's all about. The biggest adjustment in your thinking is realizing the real reason people refer is not as a favor to you, but they do it to make themselves feel good. Nobody is referring you as a favor to you. That's something that a lot of business owners struggle with. Most people are generally reluctant to ask for referrals because in their mind they're positioning it that somebody is doing that them a favor. When you have that mindset, it leads to reluctance because you don't want to be seen as begging for business or seen as weakness. Like you can't generate enough business on your own. But the reality of why people refer is that they do it because they want to feel good. The fact is, if you've ever had a great experience with someone, it's just natural human nature to want to tell people about it. I do it all the time and so do you. When it comes to books, when it comes to movies, when it comes to restaurants, businesses. If something's going to make someone laugh or smile or fill their belly with good food, provide something that's going to help them have a better whatever category you can think of. And I know of a company or a service or a person that can do it, I'm certainly going to refer that person because it's just the way we're wired. Even in my relationship with Joe Polish and other friends, you see that there's always this sense of trying to one up each other in a way where like if I introduce a book to Joe that he hasn't heard of and he reads it and it's great and he tells me, oh, that was a great book. Now I feel superior to him because of that. Have you ever recommended something to someone like a movie or a restaurant, and the next time you see him or her, the first thought on your mind is, I wonder if they saw that movie. What you're looking for, even on a subconscious level, is the acknowledgement that they saw the movie or they went to the restaurant and they they loved it. That's what you're really looking for. Just notice it the next time you're in that situation. Once you realize that people refer anything because it makes them feel good, it makes it easy for you to orchestrate situations that make it easy for them to refer you. The next step is to realize that all referrals happen as a result of conversation. No referral can happen until two people are in a conversation. Conversation. Your clients are in conversation all the time that are related to your business. But in order for that conversation to turn into a referral, three things have to happen. Number one, they have to notice that the conversation is about something related to your business. They have to notice that it's about real estate. They have to think about you. And number three, they have to introduce you into the conversation. Here's a perfect, perfect example of how this works. Earlier this year, I was having lunch with my friend Josh. He sat down, he looked a little like he was in pain. I asked about it and he told me that he had twisted his back the night before and it's been bothering him all day. I had just come from my massage therapist, so it was fresh on my mind. I took out my phone and I called to ask if she could fit Josh in. After lunch, I handed the phone to Josh. She was able to see him that day and he's been going to her as a client ever since. Now I feel great. I feel great because Josh feels better. I feel great because Jana has a new client and they both appreciate me for it. Those kinds of conversations are happening to your clients about something that applies to your business every day. And the money making idea is to be aware of what those high probability conversations are and to make sure that your clients know exactly what to do to introduce you into the conversation. Now, if you want to hear more about orchestrating referrals, check out episode number 28 of the I Love Marketing podcast@ilove marketing.com. so there you have it. Those are the eight profit activators that you can trigger in your business right now. And so here's what to do. Now you know, if this is your first introduction to the I Love Marketing podcast. You can go to ilovemarketing.com right now and download every episode of the I Love Marketing podcast. And you can subscribe on itunes right now. We've done over 50 hours of episodes where we spend an hour every week talking about one aspect of these eight profit activators and applying them to your business. You can go to ilovemarketing.com right now and download a 35 page report on the breakthrough DNA and you can download a word for word transcript of this exact audio program. In fact, this audio program has been a word for word reading of the 35 page report that you can download on ilovemarketing.com if you'd like to get even more depth on this, go more deeply into the eight profit activators. We have a DVD program which is entirely covering everything about the eight profit activators. And if you look on ilove marketing.com you'll see on the right hand sidebar there is a link to where you can find out about the DVDs of our live event that we did in Phoenix. And then number three, you can start working through the eight profits activators and building your own breakthrough blueprint right away. See, these breakthrough DNA cells are really the things that are going to manifest themselves in different ways. Whatever business you're in, you're still going to go through all of these eight profit activators and you're going to apply them differently in your business uniquely than anybody else. So this is the start of a great adventure in building an incredible business and I hope that you'll keep us posted on everything that you're doing, join us in the community and start sharing your results. Leaving comments on ilovemarketing.com telling your friends all about ilovemarketing.com or maybe joining one of the dozens of meetup groups all over the world that meet to discuss all the concepts that we talk about in the I Love Marketing Podcasts podcast. So I hope this isn't the end, but just the beginning and I look forward to building a great relationship with you.