It's Not That Complicated

If you offer a service or sell a product, you’d better be sure your potential customers know what it is. More importantly, they need to know what it does for them, but almost as important is to keep your offer simple.

One of the problems many new business people (and some long-established ones) suffer from is lack of focus. Not a lack of focus on building their business, but more often a lack of clarity about what that business is. Too many set themselves such a wide remit, scared of missing out on a job they could do, that no one actually knows what they’re best at.

When we talk to people, individually or in a crowd, they will often only remember one or two key things we say. So when we’re promoting our business, we’d better be sure those one or two things are the things our business is based upon: the benefits we can offer our customers. Trying to be all things to all people means too many people won’t have a clue what we offer, and there’s a danger we’ll come across as experts at nothing in particular.

Bigger companies tend to be better at this. Even if the company has a hundred products and services, they often promote each of those as a brand, or divide them into groups under a series of ‘umbrella’ brand names. But look at it this way: consumers buying a Mars bar don’t even care that the Mars Corporation makes Snickers and Bountys as well, and the Mars Corporation rarely bothers to remind us, because it doesn’t matter to a Mars bar buyer.

Likewise, if you’re trying to sell me a specific product, telling me you can also offer something else, even something quite similar, is just a distraction. Telling me about another half dozen products you also offer will just bury your original message under a pile of irrelevance. Things might be different after I’ve bought your first product, but sell me a watch first, for example, then show me the rings…

Most business is simple: we provide a product or a service to someone who wants it. Making the process more complicated just makes it more confusing, and confused customers rarely buy.

Roy

Recurring Themes

There are a few recurring themes in marketing, especially of the Internet persuasion:

'The money's in the list', is one

'Lifetime customer value', is another.

This weekend, one particular theme din't so much recur as beat a tattoo on the heads of those present at Steve Foley's Econfex Entrepreneur Conference.

It was, 'You don't know what you don't know', and boy, is it true!

We hadn't even planned to go to Heathrow this weekend, but when Steve gave us a call and invited us personally, it would have been impolite to say no.

Plus, something told us we should say 'yes' anyway.

With no idea what we might learn that we hadn't heard before, we expected the main benefit to be networking. In a sense, it was, but there's the kind of networking that might lead to something someday (which is still very worthwhile), and there's the kind that gives you such an instant payback you can't help wondering about 'destiny'...

Meanwhile, we learned loads from David Kyte, Simon Coulson, Simon Zutshi, Vanish Patel, Glenn Armstrong, Peter Burnett and others. Mostly things we didn't know we didn't know.

Profiting from networking, like a lot of success-related skills, is largely down to mindset, so we were clearly ready for something, even if we had no idea what it was. 'Something' duly arrived; something else we didn't know we didn't know.

One day I might tell you what!

Networking. Sometimes it's like marketing on steroids.

Roy