- A ‘Buyers Rush’ Is Created From Superior Marketing
Asked to identify the sources of power in a business, Dan Kennedy believes that a business will only start making big money when the owner’s mindset changes from being a ‘supplier of X’ to being a ‘marketer of X’.
In other words, it is not the supply of ‘X’ that is important but it is the marketing of ‘X’ that is critical to success.
Kennedy develops this belief further by saying that entrepreneurs will be more successful when they understand that they are in the ‘marketing business’, period.
In many ways that belief also grew stronger within me, before I ever read Dan Kennedy’s books, as I transitioned from being a banker to that of a business consultant. I started out thinking that I could supply leverage to my clients businesses through better planning and management information systems i.e. by improving the quality of their decision making by the provision of better information.
However, I quickly realised that, important as these services are, it’s a bit like ‘rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic’ – if you have no customers to leverage, then it doesn’t matter how good your planning and management information systems are.
Most of my customers wanted more customers, not more information. In fact, they often need both.
When I started as a business consultant, my goal was to make the biggest positive impact I could on my clients businesses. Indeed, by supplying improved management information to one of my established clients, I successfully managed to turn them around from significant losses to good profits.
But it was only when I started to offer business marketing consulting services that I managed to impact them in a much more meaningful way – in some cases to triple leads and double profits within short time frames.
That success was not because I’m particularly brilliant at marketing, it was just that my clients were hopeless at marketing and I had learnt some marketing skills from some of the best marketing minds on the planet. People like Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, Ann Sieg, Mark Hoverson, Chris Cardell, to name but a few.
My clients could make their product but they couldn’t market it and so they were forced to learn the same lesson that I did. In business you quickly learn that it is not necessarily the best product or service that wins but the best marketer.
It doesn’t seem fair but that’s just the way business is.
Which brings me to another of Kennedy’s ‘sources of power’. That is, the ability to enunciate clearly what it is you are about. I think he means being able to clearly explain your product or service and the benefits you bring to your market. To explain clearly what your competitive advantage is – what do you offer that your competitors do not?
Very often clarity can be lost within marketing. Indeed, with a lot of marketing it is difficult to clearly establish exactly what the advertiser is selling. Indeed, I’ve often struggled with this aspect of marketing my own services.
In consulting you cannot hold your service up for the customer to see and so I have had to rely on case studies and testimonials from existing and former clients.
And the best analogy that I can think of for my services is that, just as you tune a car to improve performance, I ‘tune’ businesses to improve the return on the investment already made in a business.
Businesses owners are sceptical and often tell me that ‘you know nothing about how my business works’. Whilst there is a grain of truth in that point of view – I cannot possibly be an expert in all their product and services – I have learnt that almost all businesses have similar ‘points of leverage’.
Just as a plumber may know where to ‘hit the pipe with his hammer’ in order to unblock it, I have learnt how to identify ‘points of leverage’ within a business. How just a small change in a headline can sometimes change responses by many times and therefore the return on your marketing budget.
In the past I analysed a businesses financial statements to determine its strength, but now I understand that often the biggest assets are not on the balance sheet. Things like a businesses ‘list’ of customers and the relationship they have with those customers, their reputation in the market place and their marketing systems, are often far more important than their physical assets.
I hope this explains in some small measure why my business consultancy services have changed from initially specialising in planning and management information/finance to business marketing consulting.
If your business needs some ‘tuning’ then why not contact me for a free initial consultation or join my free newsletter/private coaching club here:
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