You never want to be stumped by questions about facts in your business.
When Dan does a day of consulting with you, the beginning of his quest is to find what you actually know about your business. Most people can’t even get past his question of “What does it cost you to make a sale?” “What’s your cost per lead?” “What’s your cost per sale from these different sources?” “What’s the differentiating value of the customer from source A vs. source B?
These are basic numbers you need to know in order to make smart marketing moves.
Only after seeing what you really know about your business will Dan dive into what you believe to be true about your business and your market place that may or may not be pure bullshit.
He’s only interested in your opinion to the extent that he knows and you know they’re opinions.
So if you tell him your market is cluttered, he wants to see proof of that. Think back to the Chiropractor who was in the hot seat at the beginning of the seminar that thought Dan’s client was in his way and Dan proceeded to show him that he was wrong.
Next, in a consultation, Dan will be on the quest for the “Who” is your perfect prospect more than anything else.
This is more important in his eyes than anything else he could ask about after getting to the truth with the previous inquiries. And once again here, he’s looking for specific data – They average client is a 27 year old skater, has 7 piercings, hates cats, and is a graphic artist – isn’t deep enough.
The reason you need to go deeper is because you’re looking for list biases. What states do they live in? This is a good one to know because if you’re doing direct mail, more times than not, there’s gonna be states you shouldn’t even mail to.
If don’t get any leads or sales from a certain state, what the hell would you want to mail them again for? You look at where the most action came from and pour more mail into that segment. Most people never even notice this so they’re trying to hit a target they can’t see.
Some guy may be going to dentists in every state, been mailing to em for 10 years and never noticed he hasn’t made one single sale to a person in Vermont. And if they don’t watch their stats they’re gonna wasting a ton of money continuing to mail to every dentist in that state. Screw Vermont!
You need to take the time to wade through your customer list yourself before you ever go hunting for lists to mail to. Before a sale or after a sale, you should be getting your
customers to fill out survey forms and tell you about themselves.
KENNEDY TIP: If on your survey you give your customers 5 income brackets to choose from, he always counts them one bracket down than what they noted. He believes this is a place the majority of people lie.
You want to know political bents, magazines they read, you’re hunting for a sore thumb bias that is true for 20-30% of your customer list. This bias will lead you to profitable media and lists you would’ve never looked into.
You ask every damn thing you can think of. Kennedy threw out the idea of sourcing a list based on finding out that hearing aid owners like to buy old TV show DVD’s – going to a DVD catalogue owner and asking them to give you a select of people from their list that match your perfect prospect profile.
The most valuable insights Dan has ever come across came by Dan sticking his nose in order forms, customer surveys and looking at actual customers in person. Dan looked into going into the “horse betting market” and found that by going to the trade show that the 800 or so people at the trade show massively favored print information products over the software that was advertised everywhere in the magazines. He would’ve never come to this conclusion had he not went to the trade show and seen how desolate the software booths were.
You’re always looking for biases you can work backwards.
Kennedy Mailing List Nugget: There’s almost no one who can make a profit mailing a list in its entirety. This is the single biggest mistake people make when going into direct mail.
He says that even if you found out that your list favors Entrepreneur magazine, there is no way in hell you’ll ever make money mailing Entrepreneur Magazine’s entire list. But hidden in this list of 300,000 people, there are 20,000 or so names that will be massively profitable for the right marketer.
One of the easiest break outs of a list like this would be geography. So if you’ve got 10,000 customers and none of your customers are from Utah, you don’t mail to Utah. If you find the majority of your list is married, throw out all the singles.
Kennedy does this in the speaking business, axing women with hyphenated names from his mailing list. This ends up being a lot of names (around 400). He’s proven to himself that he doesn’t prefer them as buyers. There are exceptions but you want to play the odds.
Next he’ll look at where you are and where do you want to be.
He gets to have a vision of what this business is gonna look like once the marketing gets on rails. He finds most people can’t answer this question.
They know they’d like more money, more customers, and a bigger business. That’s it. And there’s so much more to a vision than this and helps flesh it out.