The Sticking Point Solution by Jay Abraham

Book Notes
The Sticking Point Solution by Jay Abraham

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Language: English

Summary

Jay Abraham provides playbooks to overcome the 9 most common struggles businesses face (in a recession). Useful, but longer than needs be. I recommend his YouTube seminars over this.

Key Takeaways

  • If you can’t be the only business to satisfy certain criteria, then be the first to tell the marketplace what those criteria are and that you satisfy them. Advertise what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and what doing it means to the betterment of the buyer.
  • Ask the right questions: not “Am I worthy of this goal?” but “Is this goal worthy of me?” 
  • Do people have a compelling reason to make a change? Does it spring from pain, fear, or pleasure?
  • Consultative selling: qualify, pre-close, then present.
  • Always use your time to produce the greatest strategic, long-term pay-off.
  • Measure everything you do as an investment or a profit center, not a cost expense.
  • Recognize when you’re paying too much – and when you’re paying too little.
  • Being preemptive means dealing in advance with all the factors that keep a client from moving forward or making a choice. You need to prove how you’ve overcome numerous obstacles that your competitors haven’t even acknowledged.
  • Be proprietary by owning the marketplace. You can’t be a commodity if the market is your market.
  • Be your client’s most trusted advisor.
  • Being preemptive means that you anticipate the reasons that your clients hesitate to buy from you and assuage those fears. Three steps to preemption:
    • Preempt the concerns that hold your client back
    • Preempt your client’s fears about the outcome
    • Preempt your client’s inability to see the advantage of choosing you 
  • To seal the deal, eliminate risk.
  • Good leverage is taking action with the goal of producing a predictable, calculable amount of ROI.
  • When joint-venturing: increased sales do not come from increased contacts; they come from higher-quality contacts. 
  • Success is a by-product of contribution.

What I got out of it

A more well-written than Jay Abraham’s first book, this time he focuses on 9 common problems companies face, especially in a recession, and how to overcome them.

There’s more substance and actionable advice this time around, but I still prefer his YouTube seminars over this. Just like his previous book, I think this one could’ve been one-third to half its current length.

That said, I think any business struggling in 1 of the 9 ways Jay mentions will find some value in going through his checklists and implementing the steps one-by-one.

Some things I think more about after reading this book:

  • Consultative selling: qualify first, pre-close second, then present.
  • Become your market/niche’s most trusted advisor.
  • Asking the right questions.
  • Do people have a compelling reason to change? Fear, pain or pleasure?
  • The quickest way to increase sales is by eliminating perceived risk.
Table Of Contents
  1. Summary
  2. Key Takeaways
  3. Summary Notes

Summary Notes

Introduction – Bad Economy? Good News!

A “stuck” business is one that fails to grow predictably every year, every quarter, every day. You let the market determine your destiny.

The top four reasons for stagnation in a business: 

  1. Not incorporating growth thinking into every aspect of the business; 
  2. Not measuring, monitoring, comparing, or quantifying results;
  3. Not having a detailed, strategic marketing plan with specific performance growth expectations; and 
  4. Not knowing how to set appropriate, specific goals.

Business success is as simple as finding an “under-recognized” or changing need and filling it in with wisdom, empathy, and understanding that no one else can demonstrate or display.

How to get your business unstuck:

  • Break down your numbers.
  • Have a process that continuously and predictably attracts prospects and new buyers.
  • Focus on exponential, not incremental gains.
  • Clarity about your challenges and realize they’re not insurmountable.
  • Understand your competitors’ appeal and how to position yourself against them. 
  • Know which alternative products your prospect can buy, including inaction.
  • Incorporate growth thinking in everything you do with partners, buyers or the market.

Is Your Business Stuck? 

Most businesses do not have a proper plan based on four essential factors: 

  • Product
  • Market
  • Migration
  • Marketing

One reason business people become stuck: no passion for what they’re doing and for whom they’re doing it. 

The nine sticking points:

  1. Losing out to competition
    • Peter Drucker: “Since these business owners are not constantly working to obsolesce themselves, they can rest assured that their competitors are.”
  2. Not selling enough
  3. Erratic business volume
  4. Failing to strategize
  5. Costs eat up all the profits
    • Why?
      • Don’t measure their marketing investment.
      • They cut back sales & marketing investments in bad times, when they should be adding.
      • Measuring the wrong thing or in the wrong way.
  6. Doing things that aren’t working
  7. Being marginalized by the market
    • If you sell the same thing at the same price and in the same way as everyone else, you must add value or you will be marginalized by the marketplace.
  8. Mediocre marketing
    • Marketing definition: “Teaching” a given marketplace that your particular business can solve their problems, fill their voids, or achieve opportunities, hopes, and goals the way no other business can.
    • Marketing is the bedrock of virtually every enduring dominant business.
  9. Thinking you can (and should) do everything yourself

Are You Stuck Losing Out To The Competition? 

Jay Abraham 101: optimization, then innovation.

To innovate recognize: 

  • What you’re doing isn’t the only way you can be doing it. 
  • To judge impact, compare the new thing to the old.
  • If you discover a better approach, it’s time to scale up; if not, it’s time to move on to something else.

15 ways of preeminent marketing:

  1. Be a trusted, lifetime advisor. Add “in your service” to everything you do.
  2. In any transaction, tell your client, “Here’s what you’re not being told.” 
  3. Promote your achievements and value in the context of benefits it brings to the client. 
  4. List your flaws to appear real and honest.
  5. Treat each relationship as a long-term investment.
  6. Know your strengths and weaknesses, and play to the former. That’s where the leverage is. Too many focus on improving their weaknesses and lose out.
  7. Control your risk and point out the overlooked risks and dangers the market is exposed to, then help your clients reduce or eliminate these. 
  8. Use research and data to make your point, prove your advantage, and demonstrate your performance. Summarize, compare, interpret, and analyze it in a way that people can appreciate and act on. 
  9. Challenge the status quo with a fresh perspective or a better strategy for your market. 
  10. Continually add to your brand equity by doing more, caring more, contributing more. 
  11. Form alliances and advisory boards. 
  12. Get endorsements and testimonials – often – from buyers, influencers and media.
  13. Hire the best. Pay them richly. But pay them mostly on performance.
  14. Make yourself known. Do it with the right people. Make the impact worth the effort. 
  15. Project the image of true success, long before you’ve fully achieved it. It’s only a matter of time before it will occur.

If you can’t be the only business to satisfy certain criteria, then be the first to tell the marketplace what those criteria are and that you satisfy them. Advertise what you do, how you do it, why you do it, and what doing it means to the betterment of the buyer.

Roadmap 

  • Marketing, innovation, and strategizing produce results; all the rest are costs. 
  • Stage 1, finding the highest and best use, is optimization: taking what’s working and making it work to the nth degree; or, fixing or replacing what’s not working. 
  • Stage 2 is innovation: engineering breakthroughs, taking controlled risks, and looking outside the industry for new ideas. 
  • Instead of focusing on change, focus on changes. 
  • Ask the right questions: not “Am I worthy of this goal?” but “Is this goal worthy of me?” 
  • View your business as the market’s most trusted advisor: What you do is for a greater good, and you’re being selfless in your business goal to serve the client better and more fully than any other competitor does.

Action step: pick 1 way of the preeminent marketing list and do it.

Are You Stuck Not Selling Enough? 

You can change the game you play in an instant.

Four steps in the purchase process: 

  1. The prospects recognize they have a need. 
  2. They decide whether to do something about it or not. (Your biggest competitor is the status quo – inaction.) 
  3. They evaluate their options.
  4. They select a vendor.

If you’re in B2B, your purchase hierarchy will be different: 

  1. The prospects go to their current trusted provider. 
  2. They ask their network. 
  3. They contact a recognized brand. 
  4. They shop around.

Do people have a compelling reason to make a change? Does it spring from:

  • Pain
  • Fear, or 
  • Pleasure?

Most powerful sales approach: consultative selling. Three components: 

  • Presenting
  • Qualifying
  • Closing

Imagine three companies: 

  • Company #1 has a four-month sales cycle and a 90 percent close rate. 
  • Company #2 has an eight-month sales cycle and a 60 percent close rate. 
  • Company #3 has a fourteen-month sales cycle and a 2 percent close rate. 


What does Company # 1 know that the other two are missing out on? Company #1 employs a “Quid Pro Quo” approach. It uses consultative selling and first qualifies the transaction: 

  1. What is the problem that needs to be solved by making this purchase? 
  2. What does the client hope to accomplish with this purchase? 
  3. Company #1 pre-closes the sale, by eliciting an assurance that the client will purchase from Company # 1 if it is able to deliver everything discussed in the qualifying phase. 
  4. Company #1 presents the product/service solution. 

Company #2, on the other hand, is stuck in the traditional approach, in which it qualifies, presents, then closes. It’s simply not as effective. 

And Company #3 presents, then qualifies, then closes – which is a very shaky tactic.

Consultative selling – key points:

  • You are a professional facilitator, not a salesperson.
  • Work like a doctor, winning confidence by displaying confidence in your abilities, making a thorough diagnosis of the problem, and offering your prescription without hesitation or fear of rejection. 
  • Focus on the client, not on the order. 
  • Not getting the deal is okay. 
  • Insist on an open and honest conversation. 
  • You and the customer must have equal business stature. 
  • Play fair, or not at all. 
  • Don’t do bad deals. 
  • They sell you – you don’t sell them.
  • Believe in mutual degrees of commitment. 

7 ways to leverage your marketing: 

  1. Great headlines: specific benefit that’s catchy and uses key words.
  2. Distinguish yourself: set your prospects’ buying criteria for them, so that only you can clear the bar. Focus on one specific, relevant niche.
  3. Offer proof to build credibility.
  4. Reverse your customers’ risk.
  5. Include a call to action.
  6. Offer a bonus.
  7. Summarize your offer: reiterate the problem you solve, the benefits for your buyers, and the upside with no downside. Then tell them again how to act now.

10 great advertising headlines (from How to Write a Good Advertisement)

  1. “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
  2. “A Little Mistake That Cost a Farmer $3,000 a Year.”
    1. The negative idea of offsetting, reducing, or eliminating the “risk of loss” can be even more attractive to the reader than the “prospect of gain.”
  3. “Are You Ever Tongue-Tied at a Party?”
    1. “This is talking to me!” 
    2. It asks a question – and people will want to read the answer. 
    3. The best interrogative headlines are challenges that are difficult to ignore, cannot be dismissed with a quick no or yes, and – even without further reading – are immediately pertinent and relevant to the reader.
  4. “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?”
    1. A direct challenge. Read the headline again, eliminating the vital word “These.” This word is the hook that almost forces you into the copy. “What are these particular mistakes?” the prospect thinks. “Do I make them?” 
    2. This headline promises to provide helpful personal information in its own context, not merely as “advertising talk.” What I call the “attraction of the specific.” 
    3. Many of the best headlines contain specific words or phrases that make a promise to tell you one or all of the following: how, here’s, these, which, which of these, who, who else, where, when, what, why. Also enormously catching is the use of specific amounts: the number of days, evenings, hours, minutes, dollars, ways, types of.
    4. “Attraction of the specific”: compare the appeal of “We’ll Help You Make More Money” with “We’ll Help You Pay the Rent. “
  5. “When Doctors ‘Feel Rotten,’ This Is What They Do.”
    1. The suggestion of paradox, because we seldom think of doctors as being in poor health themselves. 
    2. It carries a note of authority and greater assurance of a reward. 
    3. Positive promise of reward in “This Is What They Do. ” 
    4. Unabashed colloquialism “Feel Rotten” gets attention; it sounds human and has surprise value.
  6. “Guaranteed to Go Through Ice, Mud, or Snow – Or We Pay the Tow!”
    1. If you offer a powerful guarantee with your product, play it up strongly and quickly in the headline.
  7. “Is the Life of a Child Worth $1 to You?”
    1. Strong emotional appeal
  8. “Six Types of Investors – Which Group Are You In?”
    1. People self-select
    2. Illustrate the “point of you.” Use “you,” “your,” or “yourself.”
  9. “For the Woman Who Is Older Than She Looks.”
    1. This headline was a stopper for thousands of women – and proved more successful than “For the Woman Who Looks Younger Than She Is.”
  10. “Announcing … The New Edition of the Encyclopedia That Makes It Fun to Learn Things.”
    1. Announcements win attention because people are interested in new things. Look for phrases like “new kind of,” “new discovery,” “new way to,” and so on.
    2. Undeviating affection for the old and proven may be strong in other countries; in ours, the desire to try the new is stronger.

Bottom line:

  • People buy because they place their trust in their relationship with you.
  • Basis of consultative sales is the Quid Pro Quo approach: qualify the transaction, pre-close, then present.
  • Focus your advertising on the audience. 
  • Make it easy for your clients to buy. 
  • Sell more through joint-ventures.
  • Make your offer irresistible by leaving no room for your customer to say “So what?” 
  • Change your approach to change your results.

Action step: Ask your client more questions to understand his situation. Be a doctor.

Are You Stuck With Erratic Business Volume? 

The biggest problem for SMEs: 

  1. They’re not strategic. 
  2. They’re not analytical. 
  3. They’re not systematic.

Selling a second time is easier than selling a first time.

The 2nd biggest problem for SMEs: they apply a one-size-fits-all approach to their clients base and business (growth) model.

Analyze the origin of your client, then project conservatively:

  • What specifically they will most likely buy in the future
  • How often they will buy
  • And how long they will continue to buy.

Bottom line: 

  • Take only those actions that advance and enhance your long-term strategy of
    • Attracting prospects
    • Converting them to clients
    • And creating a lasting, repeat-buying relationship with them.
  • The most important step in strategizing is to ask yourself: What kind of people or businesses do you want your business to attract, and why? 
  • Analyze your past and current actions to determine how to invest with optimal long-term returns.
  • Create a system for converting and maintaining clients, then constantly test and analyze it.

Action step: define your ideal client.

  1. What problem does your ideal client have that you can solve effectively and profitably? 
  2. What kind of individual or company is your ideal client? 
  3. Where is it located, how big is it, and why do you enjoy serving it?

Keep this definition of your ideal client where everyone in your organization can see it daily.

Are You Stuck Failing To Strategize?

Always use your time to produce the greatest strategic, long-term pay-off.

An exercise to determine the highest and best use of your time: 

  1. Write down the three most critical tasks you’re paid by your business to do. 
  2. Break those three tasks down into sub-tasks, for which there are usually as many as seven. 
  3. Give each of those sub-tasks three different values based on
    1. Their relevancy
    2. Your competency
    3. Your true passion for doing them
  4. Then delegate 80%: giving what you consider work to people who think it’s play. 

Three kinds of people in business: 

  • People who make things happen,
  • People who watch things happen. 
  • People to whom things always seem to happen.

Productive meetings have an agenda, which includes:

  • A summary of what the meeting’s about
  • The expected outcome
  • The topics of discussion and how much time is allotted to each
  • The priorities involved

A checklist to work ON your business: 

  1. Continue to identify and discover hidden assets in your business. 
  2. Mine cash windfalls out of your business each and every month. 
  3. Engineer success into every action you take or decision you make. 
  4. Build your business on a foundation of multiple profit sources.
  5. Be different, unique, and advantageous in the eyes of your clients. 
  6. For maximum loyalty and results, create real value for your clients and employees. 
  7. Gain the maximum personal leverage from every action, investment, and time or energy commitment you ever make.
  8. Network/mastermind/brainstorm with like-minded, success-driven people who share real-life experiences with you.
  9. Turn yourself into an idea-generator and recognized innovator within your market. 
  10. Make “growth-thinking” a natural part of your everyday business philosophy.
  11. Reverse the risk both for yourself and for your clients in everything you do (so the downside is almost zero, and the upside potential nearly infinite).

The success of your business is based on three factors: 

  • Purpose
    • Not just the market niche you fill, but the greater good you bring to the market.
    • With a higher purpose, you never have to question why you work every day.
    • Continue to add more value and benefits to your buyers and you never have to doubt your purpose.
  • Possibility
    • What can you add to the client’s buying experience?
    • In which other ways can you sell and market your business or grow your relationships?
    • What can I do if I increased my profits?
    • How can my business impact the world yet to come?
  • Passion
    • The fuel that drives all achievement, whether in art, technology, or marriage.

Bottom line: 

  • Time, energy, and opportunity costs – your three most valuable intangible assets. 
  • Your success and the success of your clients are one and the same. 

Action step: stop being your own administrative assistant. Delegate. Start with your email.

Are You Stuck With Costs Eating Up All Your Profits? 

7 bartering strategies you can implement immediately:

  1. Save cash on capital expenditures.
  2. Print your own currency or scrip, usable only at your place of business.
  3. Keep in mind that your bartering partner may never cash in.
  4. Convert your bartered items into cash.
  5. Create a barter profit center.
  6. Finance rapid growth without cash.
  7. Recycle dollars right back into your own pocket.

“Partner or Perish”: form strategic alliances to dramatically expand and enhance your potential.

A powerful strategy to grow profits: package your work as proprietary, not a commodity. Add elements, tangible or intangible, to make the product incomparable to anything else out there and increase your perceived value.

Bottom line:  

  • Measure the ROI of your marketing. Not measuring = money down the drain
  • Measure the performance of
    • Identifying your audience
    • Reaching that audience or making them come to you
    • Closing the audience on transactions that motivate them to return. 
  • Adjust your measurement horizon in terms of your overall outlook. If your business is declining, you have to change how you operate. 
  • Measure everything you do as an investment or a profit center, not a cost expense.
  • Increase your ROI with bartering.
  • Recognize when you’re paying too much – and when you’re paying too little. 
  • In tough times, increase your marketing investments (instead of reducing them).

Action step: ask yourself what you can offer in a barter relationship right now, then call and close your first barter deal.

Are You Stuck Still Doing What’s Not Working?

When the old way of doing things stops working, most business don’t change their tactics, but just do more of the same.

10 questions to ensure what’s working and what isn’t:

  1. What business are you currently in? 
  2. What’s the market you currently address/serve? 
  3. How are you reaching that market? 
  4. How many additional practical ways can you expand, contact, or access that market?
  5. What product{s) and/or service{s) can you sell? 
  6. What additional products/services can you add/offer? 
  7. How many can you create? 
  8. Where would you turn to find outside outsourced producers? 
  9. Who else has access to the same or related prospective buyers as you? 
  10. What is the marginal net worth/lifetime value of:
    1. The initial product you sell? 
    2. The next transaction? 
    3. Your total years of revenue?

Then:

  • Write down your assets and resources. 
  • Note the skills and abilities at your disposal (yours of your team). 
  • List your other assets, such as your sales force and your strategic relationships. 
  • List your available resources, such as equipment, space, and underutilized labour.

One of the easiest methods of investigative marketing is to ask your clients about their own businesses. How: 

  • How does your business sell and market? 
  • What business strategy, model, and revenue approach do you use? 
  • What/who do you target demographically? 
  • What selling system and mechanism do you use (e.g., mailings, cold calls)? 
  • What processes are part of that mechanism? 
  • Are any of those processes an industry norm? 
  • What have you tried in the past versus recently?

Business potential vs actual success:

  • Only the potential of your business is determined by your talents, knowledge, commitment, and the amount of time and effort you spend trying to grow it. 
  • The actual success of your business is determined by your constraints – and whether or not you break free from them.

10 common constraints:

  1. The idea that mistakes should be avoided at all costs.
  2. Flying blind (until it’s too late).
  3. Linear thinking: your business is a system with many legs. To overcome it:
    1. Identify a problem in your business. 
    2. Reframe it as a system problem – from the “who” to the “what.”
    3. Probe and quantify to get to the root cause.
    4. Clarify the problem, then clarify the desired outcome.
    5. “The solution is to install a system that will [desired outcome]” 
    6. Define the specific solution and assign someone to creating it.
    7. Implement.
  4. Inefficient ways of working
  5. Being alone and lost in a networked world. To overcome it:
    1. Create a mastermind group who can help you solve any problem your business encounters. You need three types of people in your network:
      1. People who either have the answers you need or can connect you to the ones who do.
      2. People who have the resources you need.
      3. People who can perform specialized tasks better than you/your team.
  6. Bottlenecks in your sales process
  7. No follow-through and follow-up
  8. Never trying something new
  9. Being afraid to try something new
  10. Not testing and analyzing your business approach

Bottom line: 

  • If you’re doing what everyone else is doing, you aren’t differentiating and will get stuck. 
  • Think outside the industry box. Look at other industries and break down their processes. Can you adapt them to your business?
  • Five easy steps to become creative:
    • Gather raw material
    • Allow things to gestate
    • Forget about it for a while
    • Write down every new idea
    • Review and revise

Action step: call a client and have a conversation about his or her marketing strategy. 

Are You Stuck Being Marginalized By The Marketplace? 

Being preemptive means dealing in advance with all the factors that keep a client from moving forward or making a choice. You need to prove how you’ve overcome numerous obstacles that your competitors haven’t even acknowledged.

How to preempt your competition: 

  1. Preempt any concern that’s holding back your client by acknowledging that concern and overcoming it.
  2. Preempt your client’s lack of confidence in the outcome by:
    1. Clearly stating your certainty in the plan
    2. Describing what the steps and results will be like
    3. How you will deliver a better desired outcome for your client
  3. If your client does not perceive the advantages inherent in working with you, preempt this by helping him establish specific buying criteria, including value-added follow-up or transactional additions such as products or services.

Bottom line:

  • If you believe you’re a commodity, you’ll become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 
  • Marginalization and commoditization are holding your business back. 
  • Be your client’s most trusted advisor. Operate from a position of integrity and service. 
  • Being preemptive means that you anticipate the reasons that your clients hesitate to buy from you and assuage those fears. 
  • Three steps to preemption:
    • Preempt the concerns that hold your client back
    • Preempt your client’s fears about the outcome
    • Preempt your client’s inability to see the advantage of choosing you 
  • Be proprietary by owning the marketplace. You can’t be a commodity if the market is your market.
  • Focus on the external: How can you add more value for your clients?

Action step: list the three to five most common objections your prospects have about you or about what you offer. Ask yourself how you can address them in advance every time, and thus get them off the table. (this reminds me of the final rap battle in 8 Mile)

Are You Stuck With Mediocre Marketing? 

The difference between mediocrity and prosperity for SMEs can be found in marketing first, strategy second.

Marketing can be the most leveraged investment for a business if you understand its role:

  • To identify, connect with, and attract the best quality and quantity of desirable prospects 
  • To convert these prospects into first-time buyers, upgrade them to multiple-product buyers, and compel them to return as often as they find it necessary (and desirable) to receive the absolute maximum outcome 
  • To ethically mine them for alternative or ancillary revenue streams that will improve the quality of your relationship and enhance, enrich, or protect the results in their line of business

First, ask yourself: What is it I want to accomplish? Then identify the more expedient, leverage-able, alternative ways to get there.

Maven Matrix:

  1. Gain your market’s trust
    1. Gain it by simply caring more. 
    2. If you can show your prospects what they should be doing differently to solve their problems, fill their needs, or achieve their goals, you’ve just begun the process of winning their trust.
    3. Know and describe their “pain points” to thrive.
    4. The process:
      1. Describe the market’s biggest problems & frustrations.
      2. List them into chronological order. 
      3. Determine which comes first (or is most important to the majority), what comes next, and so on until your list is sequenced.
      4. Come up with at least three ways to articulate these problems better than your prospects have been able to.
      5. With the prospects’ problems laid out clearly in front of you, you are now free to craft the best way to solve them.
  2. Establish your preeminent, proprietary Maven Persona
    1. People can only get to know you through the consistent persona that you project through your communications.
    2. A persona isn’t a fabrication. It’s a distillation – a public presentation that allows you to communicate your essential beliefs, values, and standards in an efficient way. An effective maven persona combines your own personality with those traits that resonate most with your market.
    3. You have to create a character for your business that people will like and trust. The more successfully you do this, the faster your business will grow.
    4. You’ll be more believable if you’re not perfect.
    5. Think about your own pre-eminent persona:
      1. How can that persona be improved or redefined?
      2. Imagine a Hollywood actor playing you in a movie.
        1. Which actor would get the job? 
        2. How would he or she act? 
        3. What would the story be about? 
        4. How would viewers describe the character? 
      3. Now think about what personas would score high in your market.
        1. Which personality types are they attracted to? 
        2. Which types do they find easy to like? 
        3. Which character persona “voids” are waiting to be filled?
  3. Develop a vision for your marketplace
    1. The key to rapid success is to fall in love with your clients.
    2. Dig down and find a real and purposeful reason for your company to exist.
  4. Tell your creation myth (aka origin story)
    1. Tell the world why you’re in the market you’re in.
      1. Reveal your hopes and dreams
      2. Your current frustrations
      3. Your personal failures
      4. What you’ve achieved so far
      5. What you’re still struggling to achieve
      6. Do that, with honesty and passion, and you’ll achieve success beyond anything you could ever expect.
    2. An honest “I feel your pain” story can be effective to connect with your market. 
  5. Become a polarizing figure
    1. Successful mavens have a strong point of view. More direct and passionate opinions resonate better.
    2. No need to be negative or “name names.” But denounce what must.
    3. Think of yourself as a reformer: 
      1. If you were a client in your market, what would you change? 
      2. How would you improve things? 
      3. What’s wrong? What’s needed? What’s missing?
    4. Launch a consumer crusade.
  6. Develop your own phraseology
    1. Develop rituals or behavior that clients can expect and look forward to.
    2. Charles Dickens used this: when creating his characters, he gave each one a unique verbal tic – a special phrase or accent or way of beginning a sentence – so that readers instantly knew who was speaking.
    3. Imagine that you’re writing a book or an e-book on your market.
      1. What would you say? 
      2. Could you find new words, new phrases, to describe different aspects of the products or services in your market? 
      3. Could you organize your market better than it’s now organized? 
      4. Could you prioritize better? Value things better?
  7. Use a signature communications channel
  8. Create a Velvet Rope community
    1. Imagine your ideal client. Someone who raves about you.
      1. What you would do for such a client?
      2. How would you treat him or her? 
      3. If you knew he would make you X amount of money each year, how much of that would you be willing to spend to keep him happy? 
    2. Think how you can help, not only your current clients or prospects, but their clients or prospects, their friends, their relatives – anyone they come into contact with.
      1. Examples: promotions, giveaways, free reports, and advice hotlines.
    3. Think “virally”: how can you turn your happy clients into evangelists for your products, your cause, your vision?
  9. Accelerate the process with mentors

Action step: Write down the top three pains your clients and prospects feel. Keep this list in sight at all times and your business will grow to the extent that you feel – and can articulate – these pain points.

Are You Stuck Still Saying “I Can Do It Myself?” 

To seal the deal, eliminate risk.

Joint venturing is the fastest, safest, most flexible route you have.

The first step to push past your fear: recognition. Verbalize your need to set up a concrete goal, then explore all your options and break them down.

There are many things you can’t afford, but if you joint venture and pay for them in proportion to incoming revenue, they become a profit center (instead of a cost center).

How joint ventures revolutionize your business:

  • Increase your sales and profitability
  • Provide added value to their (and your) clients
  • Allow you to enter emerging markets instantly
  • Give you the opportunity to share the costs
  • Give you flexibility in the way you operate
  • Reduced risk
  • Allow you to access knowledge and expertise outside your company
  • Strengthen your expertise in an industry and extend your product offerings
  • Provide marketing or sales channels
  • Allow you to stay focused on your core business while expanding

“Jay, what’s your theory of management?” “Don’t manage. Do joint ventures.” Plug into the resources of others, and they’ll provide whatever you’re missing. Be the big thinker, the deal-maker, the strategist, and the visionary.

Bottom line: 

  • Entrepreneurship is about leveraging combined efforts. Helping other people get what they want so they’ll give and get you everything you want. 
  • Good leverage is taking action with the goal of producing a predictable, calculable amount of ROI. Bad leverage is taking action blindly, without knowing what ROI his activities will produce and only hoping for the best. Choose good leverage.
  • When joint-venturing, avoid getting caught up in theory, starting out too big, or getting intimidated. 
  • Increased sales do not come from increased contacts; they come from higher-quality contacts. 

Action step: Drop everything and create one small, low-risk joint venture right now. 

How To Get Going And Growing In A Crisis Economy 

Your first plan of action should be to structure joint ventures with groups who already have access, trust, and a credible relationship with the market segment you want to reach: 

  • Go to noncompetitive businesses that sell to the same buyer you’re after. 
  • Sell something unrelated to the same buying influence. 
  • Go to anyone selling a product that your target buyers typically purchase before, right after, or at the same time they buy the product you sell. 
  • Find your market’s local, regional, or national association, journal or organization and start an endorsement deal in which it endorses and promotes your product. 

All deals should be done on a pure performance basis whenever possible so that you pay the selling source in direct proportion to the actual sales that its involvement generates. You can also make similar arrangements with the sales force of any company selling directly to the same market you are targeting.

The key to success to structuring performance-based deals is knowing your cost for acquiring a new buyer:

  • The profit available on the initial purchase 
  • The number of times that new buyers will likely repurchase over the next year
  • The number of years that the buyers will continue to purchase
  • The additional products they will most likely purchase over the course of their buying cycle
  • The profit those subsequent transactions will earn you

A proactive strategy to get clients from weaker but respected competitors (in a recession): contact them and offer to purchase their active buyers for zero up front, but that you’lll take over servicing of orders and pay them an ongoing share of either the revenue or profits.

An easy “stealth” way to grow a business with salespeople in a recession:

  1. Know your marginal net worth numbers
  2. Go to all your competitors’ top salespeople and offer them 100 percent of the profit for all the accounts they bring you that you aren’t selling now – if they switch employers and come to work for you (and stay with you a minimum validation period of time). Plus, give them a generous, above-current-level, ongoing commission afterward.

The key to collaboration:

  1. Recognize what those on the other side want or need most that is not being provided and show them that you will deliver it in better ways, more quickly and easily than any other option they have. 
  2. Empathize with what they are going through, so they  trust your intentions and plan.

Another powerful strategy: make even more irresistible offers. How:

  • Generous and irresistible risk reversals, trial offers, and money-back guarantees so people can’t NOT try.
  • Add more bonuses, add-on products, services, or extended warranties to the purchase to make it such a great bargain that prospects can’t possibly say “No.” 
  • Defer payments for your prospects so they can test and use it now, but pay when their financial circumstances have improved. 
  • More support, follow-up, and benefit than usual to make your clients feel comfortable committing immediately.

Look at your basic business – not at what you do sell but at what you don’t sell that your type of buyer or client needs, wants, and will buy in a recession.

Ask yourself:

  • What else do existing buyers want or need? 
  • What else do unsold prospects or leads want or need to buy?

Tom Phillips took an idea and $1,000 and transformed it into a $450-million-a-year industry leader. He did three things every year, without fail: 

  1. Enter one new market for each product or service he sold. 
  2. Introduce at least one new product or service to existing buyers. 
  3. Acquire, usually on a pure performance-payment basis, at least one new business that can benefit off of his infrastructure and buyers.

Bottom line: 

  • In a recession, set up an offence and a defence. Offensively, look for weaknesses and hidden opportunity. Defensively, stop whatever isn’t working. 
  • Invest in media: they’re losing business so you can find many bargains. 

Conclusion 

Doing business alone – not partnering with others – is selfish for three reasons: 

  1. If you have a great product, you should contribute, because success is a by-product of contribution. 
  2. Whether you are an entrepreneur or a corporate executive, your family looks to you to make your business or career as fulfilling, low-stress, and asset-accruing as possible, for both you and them. 
  3. You owe it to your employees, investors, and other stakeholders to make your business as profitable as can be, because they, too, count on you.

Related posts:

  1. The Dhandho Investor by Mohnish Pabrai
  2. Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got by Jay Abraham
  3. The Art of Money Getting by P. T. Barnum
  4. The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes