Be Different or be dead

March 25, 2024

13 Proven Ways to Have Insanely Audacious Marketing

13 Proven Ways to Have Insanely Audacious Marketing.

Audacious marketing will get you A BILLION IN SALES.

Trust me. It worked for me.

These thirteen Breakaway Moves lit up the marketing landscape and delivered delirious results.

#1. Be the ONLY ones who do what you do — You must be different from your competitors in a way that matters to your customers—The WHO.

And STOP using CLAPTRAP words like “best”, “better” and “Number 1” to describe your so-called Unique Selling Proposition—USP.
They are absolutely USELESS. They mean NOTHING. They satisfy your narcissistic view of YOU.

If you’re not “the ONLY one who does what you do”, you’re FAKING it and have nothing special to offer at all.

#2. Focus on the WHO—not mass markets—and what they CRAVE — Epic marketers choose a FEW select group of customers to serve, and excel at discovering & delivering what they DESIRE—not need.

#3. Implement initiatives to build relationships with customers, STOP flogging products and services — Sustainable marketing is all about creating trust with people with the long term in sight. An incessant desire to push products AT customers will turn them off early. There goes your revenue stream!

#4. Focus on customer LOYALTY rather than acquisition — Consistent revenue growth comes from maintaining a loyal base of customers. Growing them by satisfying what they CRAVE, and having them as an amazing source of reviews and referrals. Invest in today’s customers.

Have faith they will deliver you the growth you need.

#5. Reframe the importance of the competition: Create Barriers to customer EXIT rather than erecting barriers to competitive entry — This is a cultural component of audacious marketing. Where do you place your attention? Keeping competitors out or keeping customers from leaving. Re-read Point #4.

#6. Reserve your Special Marketing Deals for loyal customers. Don’t use them as a customer acquisition tool. NEVER! — If you lure me to you by giving me a special offer, what makes you think I won’t leave you for a better one?
And do you really think your loyal customers won’t find out you’re treating them unfairly?

Give your head a shake! Invest in the people who have given you their money for the past 5 years.
Don’t try to get the “promiscuous ones” who will leave you in a heartbeat for someone else for a better deal.

#7. Adopt a Premium Pricing Strategy by ADDING value — Simple audacious pricing principle: epic value commands premium prices; mediocre value produces “herd” pricing with commodity status and resultant low margins.
Where would you like to play? The real question is “What value can I add to sustain HIGH prices?” and not “What can I do to lower prices to compete?”.

#8. Find out how people “FEEL” about the value you are delivering — Start a new marketing cult: research and discover how people FEEL about what you are delivering to them.
Market research is flawed. It deals with mass homogeneous groups of individuals (rather than individuals) and seeks to discover what they NEED (rather than how they feel).

People buy on how they FEEL. Why not invest research dollars to FEELINGS?

#9. STOP bundling products and services and discounting prices! — Re-read Point #7. Adding products together and discounting the overall price is competing on price in disguise.

If you must bundle, combine product elements to generate VALUE greater than the sum of their parts and charge a premium price for it.
The end game is to create VALUE PACKAGES that have sufficient “juice” among target customers to generate more revenue and greater stickiness to prevent customer exit. Re-read Point #5.

#10. Create value for people that satisfies what the CRAVE, not need — Shift away from needs-based marketing NOW!
Competition in the “need space” is intense and plentiful, and prices are always under pressure (with margin-squeezing the result).

On the other hand, there are very few—if any—organizations that play in the CRAVINGS space, where the objective is to discover what people desire, covet and lust for. The CRAVINGS space is exceedingly attractive for enhancing customer loyalty with personalized solutions with a high FEELINGS FACTOR—re-read Point #8—and charging higher prices as a result.

#11. Increase customer share not market share — Re-read Point #4. Audacious marketing’s prime directive is to increase the amount of business you do with your EXISTING customers, not increasing the number of customers you have.
If you have 40% of Customer A’s business, for example, your objective is to increase your share of their overall spend in your product and service category to a higher level.

Do you know what your Customer Share is the WHO Groups—re-read Point #2—you have chosen to serve?

You must track this type of performance data, set targets and continue to measure the results of your growth efforts.

#12. Have a direct Line of Sight between your marketing strategy and the Strategic Game Plan of your organization — Dysfunction results when people in an organization are not in sync with its business plan. The plan isn’t clear, or it hasn’t been explained at a granular level as to what it means to the various functions in the organization—marketing, sales, service, finance.

Audacious marketing teams make it a priority to translate the organization’s business strategy into what it means SPECIFICALLY to the marketing team. What new actions and priorities must the marketing team take on to serve the new direction of the company and what do they need to STOP? How should scarce marketing resources be redeployed?

#13. Implement Internal Report Cards to measure marketing performance inside the organization — Marketing has internal customers, particularly Sales. The question is how well does the marketing team meet the needs of the sales force?
Does sales have all the marketing strategy details they need to effectively execute their role in the strategy? Do they have a direct Line of Sight to the marketing plan? Re-read Point #12.

The vehicle I used to measure marketing’s inside performance was the “Internal Report Card” which Sales and other departments completed regularly. The Report Card asked the recipient how well the marketing team performed (Poor, Fair, Average, Good, Excellent ratings) in areas like: responsiveness, relevance of information they provide, quality of competitive information, product and service information.

The Internal Report Card worked. It helped improve marketing’s performance and the execution of the organization’s strategy.

Audacious marketing took a startup to A BILLION IN SALES. Its growth potential is unimaginable.

If you are driven to grow your business, these 13 proven steps will get you there.

Cheers,
Roy

Check out My 100 Podcast Shows that will make your business and your career incredibly successful.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION will share the specific Moves I made to achieve jaw-dropping growth in an insanely competitive internet business.

”The Audacious Un-heard-of Ways I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES” is the latest in my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

• Posted 3.25.24 at 01:30 am by Roy Osing
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March 18, 2024

3 Simple Steps To Build an Ironclad “Serving” Strategy

3 Simple Steps To Build an Ironclad “Serving” Strategy.

Everyone tries to develop a Customer Service Strategy, which completely misses the point.
It’s not about “servicing” customers; it’s about “SERVING” them in a relevant & compelling way.

For all you “formula-ites”, here’s the strategic context that defines the importance of a Customer Serving Strategy:

Business Growth = Customer Retention = Serving Customers

So, how do you build a Serving Strategy?

Here are 3 simple steps that I used to help take us from a startup to A BILLION IN SALES:

Step #1. Deliver your Core Service Flawlessly 24X7X365. — Core Service consists of the primary product or service of your business, without which you wouldn’t have a business.

Core Service is WHAT you produce, like computers, automobiles and communications services.

The objective is to MEET the expectations of your customers by consistently providing them with what you promised them.

Consequences: meet their expectations and you get a ‘C’ on your Serving Report Card; fail to live up to your promise to deliver a working product or service on time as promised and you get an ‘F’ on your Report Card.

The ‘C’ doesn’t get you any loyalty at all because customers EXPECT a product or service to work as promised. The ‘F’, on the other hand, gets you foul language on reviews, a condemnation story to friends and loss of business.

The basic platform on the journey to an effective Customer Serving Strategy is to deliver your Core Service flawlessly EVERY TIME, because if you don’t you will never reap the benefits of Steps 2 and 3.

Step #2. Provide “gasp-worthy” experiences. — Assuming you have architected the appropriate Core Service delivery system to satisfy your customer obligations, you are now entitled to earn the rights of a gasp-worthy experience provider — customer loyalty.

Unlike Core Service which is WHAT the customer gets, The Serving Experience is how they FEEL when they get it.

It’s the Experience that enables stronger loyalty; it’s the return on the investment made “taking their breath away”, “dazzling them”
and “blowing them away” during the time the customer engages with you.

”Magical Moments” are created when the customer’s expectations are NOT met; when they get what they DON’T expect.

They are made when the customer is left speechless and SURPRISED by the way they’ve been treated.

These are a few dustings I sprinkled to build a culture of delivering Magical Moments:
✔️ Recruit people who have the innate desire to care for others. You can’t train people to “love humans”. You must discover the special ones who have the gene in their DNA.
✔️ Eliminate the rules and policies in your organization that make no sense to customers and which disable the customer engagement process.
✔️ Expunge the Grunge in systems and procedures that complicate the engagement process. The CRAP must go!
✔️ Empower your frontline employees to make decisions to transform a ho-hum moment with a customer into a breathtaking outcome.
✔️ Have humans as a backup to technology supplied service elements—like FAQ’s & Chatbots—for those customers who have issues that cannot be satisfied by a predefined algorithm (which in my experience is most of them!).

Step #3. Recover miraculously when you screw a customer over (and you will). — Now that your Core Service delivery is meeting your customers’ expectations and you are adding a Magical Moments engagement layer, you’re done, right?

Everything is now taken care of and the illusive grail of sustainable customer loyalty has been secured.

Nope. Nada. Nein. Non. Nee. Nei.

Perfect systems don’t exist. Perfect humans don’t exist. Predictable environments don’t exist.

Things don’t always turn out the way we intend in the serving customer world. Human error occurs. Mistakes are made. Systems breakdown.

Sh*t happens!

And we need a strategy to recover from the serving OOPS! and continue to build the customer loyalty we have worked so hard to build.

Here is another formula.

Serving Recovery = Fix the Mistake in less than 24 Hours + SURPRISE! the customer with what they DON’T expect.

The interesting—counterintuitive—result is that amazing recovery actually strengthens customer loyalty and the customer forgets (or at least is willing to FORGIVE) the screw up happened, they are so mesmerized by the after-the-mess delight.

Jaw-dropping Serving Recovery actions:
✔️ Empower and hold people accountable to fix the mess the customer presents to them.
✔ Eliminate the organizational hierarchy and give the mess owner CEO power.
✔️ Measure how well you are doing to clean up your mess by asking customers who you’ve screwed over.
✔️ Recognize and reward “Mess Cleaners”; make them a critical part of the Serving Strategy success.

Final Formula:

Serving Strategy = Flawless Core Service + Dazzling Serving Experience + Jaw-Dropping Mess Cleaning

BOOM!

Cheers,
Roy
My 100 Podcast Shows that will make your business and your career incredibly successful.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION will share the specific Moves I made to achieve jaw-dropping growth in an insanely competitive internet business.

”The Audacious Un-heard-of Ways I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES” is the latest in my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

• Posted 3.18.24 at 05:49 am by Roy Osing
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March 11, 2024

Why a “Just About Right” Strategy is Insanely Outstanding

Why a “Just About Right” Strategy is Insanely Outstanding.

Traditional planning methods are obtuse.

They’re too expensive. Too time consuming. Too academic. Too unrealistic.

They’re founded on the premise that a “perfect” strategy can be developed by using planning pedagogy promulgated by “the experts”.

And that if the strategy conforms to traditional principles it will deliver unbelievable results.

Utter nonsense!

How can you have a perfect ANYTHING in an imperfect world filled with uncertainty, unpredictability, crazy change and chaos?

You can’t.

The best you can do is get your plan “just about right”, EXECUTE! it pristinely, learn from what you do, adjust your plan based on your learning and EXECUTE! again.

The proverbial “do-loop” to a successful strategy.

Based on action.

Doing stuff.

Trying stuff.

Cheers,
Roy
My 90+ Podcast Shows that will make your business and your career incredibly successful.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION will share the specific Moves I made to achieve jaw-dropping growth in an insanely competitive internet business.

”The Audacious Un-heard of Ways I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES” is the latest in my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

• Posted 3.11.24 at 05:13 am by Roy Osing
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March 4, 2024

7 Remarkable Moves to a Jaw-Dropping BILLION in Sales

7 Remarkable Moves to a Jaw-Dropping BILLION in Sales.

How did we take an early stage internet company to A BILLION IN ANNUAL SALES?

Was there one “silver bullet” that explained the phenomenal growth we achieved?

NO!

The BILLION was the result of doing many things that resonated with people in the organization and encouraged them to join our growth journey.

Here’s my Pithy Seven.

#1. Have a plan made to EXECUTE! — My Strategic Game Plan method allowed us to create our strategy FAST! and get on with execution, learning and adjusting it “on the run”.

#2. Be the ONLY one who does what you do. — We rejected the traditional CLAPTRAP claims like “We’re the best…” or “We’re number 1…” and created “The ONLY Statement”, a granular claim that distinguishes one business from another in a way that customers CARE about.

”Lawn and Garden Co. is the ONLY service partner who delivers tailored Property Development solutions for stratas. We only serve Strata Corporations.”

#3. “Cleanse the Inside” of your business. — We cleansed our organization of the CRAP, GRUNGE and STUPID POLICIES that created friction in the value delivery system.

#4. Be a “Line of Sight” leader. — To prevent organizational dysfunction we translated what our strategy meant to each and every employee on our team in terms of what additional things they needed to do and what they had to STOP doing.

#5. Hire for “goosebumps”. — If a prospective employee gave me goosebumps in telling me their story showing how much they “loved” human beings I HIRED them.

#6. Market to what people “CRAVE”, not what they need. — We morphed our marketing machine to discover what our customers desired, lusted for, coveted and craved, spaces where competitors were virtually nonexistent and premium prices could be applied without objection.

#7. Deliver “gasp-worthy” service experiences. — Our Customer Serving Strategy was more than delivering promised value, it was all about taking the customer’s breath away when they engaged with us.

Cheers,
Roy
My 90+ Podcast Shows that will make your business and your career incredibly successful.

My Podcast Show Audacious Moves to A BILLION will share the specific Moves I made to achieve jaw-dropping growth in an insanely competitive internet business.

”The Audacious Un-heard of Ways I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES” is the latest in my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series.

• Posted 3.4.24 at 04:57 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink