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  How to Make The List

  Have everyone on the leadership team brainstorm what they believe to be the following:

  • The geographic characteristics of your ideal customers. Where are they?

  • The demographic characteristics of your ideal customers. What are they? (If you’re marketing business-to-business, consider characteristics such as job title, industry, size, and type of business. If business-to-consumer, then age, sex, income or profession.)

  • The psychographic characteristics of your ideal customers. How do they think? What do they need? What do they appreciate?

  With the answers to these questions, go to work on creating The List, which consists of the key contact information for each prospect. I won’t kid you—creating The List will take some work. It involves a combination of examining your current prospect lists, generating referrals from existing clients, reading trade publications, purchasing lists, asking around, and telling your salespeople to keep their ears to the ground. You have to harvest and then stockpile these names in a database. Once they’re compiled, your sales/marketing manager has a list of all of your prospects in one place or at least knows where they are and manages them accordingly, confirming that the sales and marketing efforts are laser-focused on them.

  Determine the best way to reach these people by using your newly clarified marketing strategy, which you will complete at the end of this section. Most companies realize that the best way to reach their newly clarified target market is through referrals, using their clients to connect with their prospects. You have a variety of options to reach your target market; it all depends on the best approach for your company. McKinley uses banking relationships; Image One uses a combination of cold calls, referrals, and direct mail; and ZenaComp uses networking. Once you’re clear on your core values, core focus, 10-year target, and marketing strategy, the answer should present itself. With this clarity, you can move forward with a targeted approach to your sales and marketing efforts. That will create a growing snowball until you reach a point at which the sales effort becomes self-perpetuating. The task of generating new business will then require considerably less effort than it did in the beginning.

  Add your Target Market to the V/TO.

  YOUR THREE UNIQUES

  Other common marketing terms for this are “differentiators” and “value proposition.” Plainly put, these are what make you different, what make you stand out, and what you’re competing with. If you line yourself up against 10 of your competitors, you might all share one of these uniques. Some of you may even share two, but no one else should have the three you do. You need to settle on three qualities that will truly make your company unique to the ideal customer.

  Again, what you’re creating here is focus. The most common mistake that most organizations make involves competing in too many sectors, markets, services, or product lines, and trying to be all things to all people. It’s a game you will not win.

  Rather than your salespeople saying, “Yes, we do that, and oh yes, we’ll do that,” to everything, they should be saying, “If you’re looking for that, we probably aren’t the company for you. What we excel at are these three things.” The reality is that if those people don’t want what you have to offer, they’re not the right clients for you in the first place. In the end, you’re both going to end up unhappy anyway.

  Southwest Airlines is a great example of this. It focuses on low fares, on-time flights, and having fun. That’s what drives everything in that organization’s business model. If you’ve flown on Southwest, you know it doesn’t offer any frills. As a result, it doesn’t appeal to everyone, but that’s okay. Southwest matters to its ideal customer and that’s all that counts.

  In the company’s book Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success is a story about a woman who sent Southwest a complaint letter after every flight she took. She would complain about problems such as the lack of assigned seating, the lack of a first-class section, the lack of meals, the flight attendants’ uniforms, and the casual atmosphere. According to the book, one of the letters made it up to the desk of then-CEO Herb Kelleher. It took him 60 seconds to write back the following note: “Dear Mrs. Crabapple, we will miss you. Love, Herb.”

  If you believe in your Three Uniques, and you believe they matter to your ideal customer, you should never apologize for them.

  How to Choose Your Three Uniques

  For this step, you might consider including your sales team in the marketing strategy sessions. List everything that you believe makes your people, company, product, or service. What do your ideal customers think is unique about you? Ask them—it’s a 10-minute phone call.

  Through the process of elimination, make some tough decisions. Debate and decide which are the three that truly make you unique, and which matter to you and your customer. The individual uniques don’t have to be different from those of your competition. It’s the combination of all Three Uniques that makes you different. No one else should do all three the way you do.

  Examples

  Identity Marketing and Public Relations (a PR and marketing firm)

  1. We get what you do

  2. We generate results

  3. Full-house, in-house

  McKinley (property management)

  1. High touch customer service and sales

  2. We invest in our people

  3. We take an owner’s perspective

  Autumn Associates (property and casualty insurance)

  1. Our people/core values

  2. By referral only

  3. Client-selection process

  Add your Three Uniques to the V/TO.

  YOUR PROVEN PROCESS

  My dad always teaches, “Never tell someone something you can show them.” In most companies, when salespeople are meeting with a prospective new customer, they normally try to win new business by using countless words and visuals in the form of pages and charts. When it’s all said and done, they end up looking just like everyone else.

  There is a proven way you provide your service or product to your customers. You do it every time, and it produces the same result. It’s what got you where you are. What you need to do is capture that process in a visual format to guide your sales team. It should be encompassed on one single piece of paper, it must illustrate your proven process, and it must have a name. It should show each step, from the first client interaction to the ongoing follow-up once your product or service has been delivered.

  There are typically three to seven major steps in any company’s proven process. The EOS Process is shown on the next page as an example. Creating a standard proven process to use in selling situations will give you two very powerful advantages. It will increase your potential customers’ confidence and peace of mind in doing business with you. Second, as most other companies don’t illustrate how they work, it will makes you stand out among the competition.

  Rather than giving them a sales presentation and inundating them with information, you’re saying, “Let me show you exactly how we are able to accomplish great results for our customers. We have a proven process that we follow called The (your company name) Difference.”

  An ancillary benefit of creating your proven process is that it will help your organization internally. Each person in the organization will know how his or her actions affect the customer and why his or her step in the process is important.

  How to Create Your Proven Process

  Step 1

  With your team, illustrate on a whiteboard what you believe are the major steps in your proven process and then give each step a name. These major steps are the touch points with your customers when you interface with them. The rule of thumb is three to seven steps.

  Example

  It took financial services company Schechter Wealth Strategies about three hours to create its proven process. After much discussion and debate, the team agreed they had six steps in their proven process:

  1. Discovery
/>   2. Solution Presentation I

  3. Competitive Bidding

  4. Solution Presentation II

  5. Solution Implementation

  6. Review and Service

  Step 2

  Once your steps have been determined, add two to five bullets under each item for your salespeople to use as talking points when selling to a prospective customer. For example, in Schechter’s case, under Step 1, there are three bullets: (1) about us, (2) about you, and (3) defining your objectives.

  Step 3

  Give your proven process a name. If you cannot come up with a name, simply call it “Our Proven Process” or “The (your company name) Difference,” as many EOS clients do.

  Step 4

  Once you’ve hammered out your proven process, turn your work over to a graphic designer to give it a visual based on your company’s colors, logo, and look and feel. As a result of all the work you’ve done, this should be relatively inexpensive. The graphic designer simply needs to design your proven process in a way that is appealing to you, your people, and your customers.

  Step 5

  Have it professionally printed, in color, on a heavy stock, and/or laminated. This will increase the perceived value considerably in the eyes of your prospective customers.

  Add the name of your Proven Process to the V/TO.

  YOUR GUARANTEE

  The fourth and final element of your marketing strategy is your guarantee. Think of what Federal Express did with overnight delivery: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” Domino’s did the same with pizza delivery: “Thirty minutes or it’s free.” Now hospital ERs are adopting the idea with waiting room times, guaranteeing a wait of 30 minutes or less. Some even guarantee no wait at all.

  A guarantee is your opportunity to pinpoint an industry-wide problem and solve it. This is typically a service or quality problem. You must determine what your customers can count on from you. If you guarantee it, that will put their minds at ease and enable you to close more business.

  Some businesses are not suitable for guarantees. Fifty percent of EOS clients do not have guarantees because they haven’t been able to come up with a great one that will drive more business. You will not go out of business without a guarantee, but you will attain your vision faster with one. You’re actually closing less business now because you’re not entirely putting your prospective customers’ minds at ease. If you can do that, you will gain more customers.

  Image One came up with a guarantee that it has been capitalizing on for over eight years. The biggest single problem its customers faced in the laser printer service business was losing days of productivity as a result of their printers being down. Co-owner Joel Pearlman solved it by guaranteeing, “Four hours or it’s free.”

  Your guarantee has a secondary benefit. It forces all the people in your organization to deliver on it. That in turn forces you to look inward and make sure you’ve got all the right people, processes, and systems in place to do so. If not, you’ll be forced to improve upon it. Your client will never need to make good on that guarantee if you’re at your absolute best.

  How to Select Your Guarantee

  Brainstorm with your leadership team and list what you believe to be the biggest frustrations, fears, and worries for your potential customer when doing business with you. The ideal guarantee is backed up by a tangible penalty if you don’t deliver on it. Your guarantee must drive more business or enable you to close more of what you’re not winning. If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t waste your time using it.

  It’s a good idea to ask a few ideal current customers or prospects for their feedback. Sometimes my clients have a hard time with the word “guarantee.” In these cases, call it a pledge, commitment, or promise. This seems to move the creative thinking process forward.

  List all the possible guarantees you’d be willing to offer that will put your potential customers’ minds at ease and close more business. From there, choose the best one. If it meets all of the above criteria and you believe it is the right one, then roll it out.

  You may not get this one on the first try. Be patient and the right guarantee will come. The awareness alone will start to give you and your team ideas. For example, I was driving by a collision shop the other day and saw that it had a banner that read, “Free Loaners.” It’s addressing its customers’ biggest frustration: being without a car. On the radio, I heard a mortgager guarantee any loan in 14 days or you get $500. Once you’re aware of them, you’ll see and hear guarantees everywhere. Yours will come.

  Add your guarantee to the V/TO.

  Now that the four elements of your marketing strategy are clearly defined, it’s time to pull the entire marketing strategy section together. You can now clearly communicate a consistent marketing strategy for the entire organization to support, which clarifies for everyone what they must deliver. This becomes the foundation for all of your sales and marketing materials, messages, and presentations moving forward.

  Go after all of the prospects on The List, communicating with them why you’re unique, showing them your proven process for doing business, and offering them your guarantee. This incredible precision in your sales and marketing efforts will increase your sales dramatically.

  WHAT IS YOUR THREE-YEAR PICTURE?

  With the first four sections of the V/TO complete, you now know who you are, what you are, where you’re going, and what marketing strategy you’re going to use to get there. It’s now time to illustrate what your business will look like three short years from now.

  With life and business moving as fast as it does in the 21st century, there is little value in detailed strategic planning beyond a three-year window. A lot can change during that time span. For the investment of time and money into that kind of planning, there is typically very little return. It’s still valuable, however, to create a picture of the future organization three years out. This will accomplish two vital objectives. First, your people will be able to “see” what you’re saying and determine if they want to be part of that scenario. Assuming they do, if they can see the vision, it’s more likely to happen. Second, it greatly improves the one-year planning process. With the three-year picture clearly in mind, you can more easily determine what you have to do in the next 12 months to stay on track. As Napoleon Hill said, “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can surely achieve.”

  As you can see on the V/TO, the three-year picture is composed of measurables at the top and bullet points to create the picture. It’s simple but powerful. Do not underestimate the importance of this section, but also don’t overthink it. You’re painting a picture of the destination, not discussing every obstacle along the way.

  PAINT THE THREE-YEAR PICTURE

  Schedule an hour with your leadership team. Once you’re assembled, have a copy of the V/TO placed in front of each member. Begin by selecting a future date. I recommend keeping it within the end of the calendar year, thus making it easier for people to envision.

  Next, determine the revenue picture. Start by asking your team this question: What is the annual revenue going to be three years from now? This is always fun, because you find out if your leadership is in sync with how fast you want to grow. You will typically get a range, but you’ll have to settle at one number. One new client’s range was between $20 million and $100 million. Can you imagine how different those individual future views must have been? They can’t coexist in the same company without creating complexity, confusion, and frustration. That client eventually got everyone on the same page with a figure of $30 million.

  Wolff Group originally had a range of $10 to 25 million, with two co-owners at either end of the spectrum. At the time, it was a $4 million company with 51 employees. Through much discussion, debate, and study, it settled on $15 million, and both owners, along with the entire leadership team, ended up on the same page and equally excited for their future. The need to create a three-year picture becomes more and more evident every time I work
with a client.

  The next step is to agree on the profit number. This will be a similar conversation, but should be settled much more quickly. After that, you’ll want to determine your specific measurables. Measurables give everyone scope and size. Every organization has one or two very specific figures that are a telltale sign of the size of the organization. It might be a number of clients, large clients, units, or widgets produced.

  Atlas Oil Company supplies fuel to gas stations, and its measurable is gallons. Last year, it moved 725 million gallons. In its three-year picture, its measurable is over a billion. This number shows scope and size, and it forces the team to think about what it will take to almost double the size of the organization in three years. Equally as important, it confirms that the leadership is in agreement and ready for that type of growth. Another example is Zoup!, a company that franchises a casual soup-and-sandwich concept. Its measurable is its number of stores. Last year, Zoup! had 38 stores; its three-year picture measurable is 94.

  Once you’ve determined your numbers, have everyone on the leadership team take a few minutes and write down bullet points of what the organization will look like on that date three years from now. Factors to consider include things such as number and quality of people, added resources, office environment and size, operational efficiencies, systemization, technology needs, product mix, and client mix.

  Combine these results, and after some discussion and debate, your three-year picture will typically contain 10 to 20 bullet points that describe what your organization will look like. In addition, each person on the leadership team should verbalize his or her vision for his or her individual role in the organization in that time frame. You’ll gain some interesting insights into people’s motivations and help get everyone’s expectations in line.

  You cannot move on and finalize your three-year picture until everyone on the leadership team sees it clearly. At this point, everyone in the room should close his or her eyes as one person reads the three-year picture out loud. The picture must be visible in each person’s mind. Each must believe in it and ultimately want it. After all, they are the team that needs to make it happen. In this session, encourage people to speak up, debate and go back and forth, but ultimately they must agree on all of the major points. You now have a three-year picture that you can take to your organization at large.