The 8020 Blog

I preach this message from dawn to dusk most days: “find a specific unmet need in a small part of a large market and then develop scalable (key word) product features to meet that need”. If you will do that then your marketing efforts will yield fruit and you find that the truism is true: the riches are in the niches.

If you want to see what a tiny, tiny niche can yield ($20 million) then please click here:

http://www.guzer.com/videos/needle-art.php

My thanks to my friend and colleague Graham McGregor of TwoMac Consultling (one of the best sales and marketing guys I know) for taking the time to share this with me…

Successful business owners work hard.

And so do almost all of the unsuccessful ones.

So what’s the difference? Well there are a bunch of things but one of them is that the successful hard workers are focused on executing an effective strategy. The unsuccessful ones may be spending just as much time, energy, money and ability but they are scattering the power of their resource because they don’t have a one clear strategy to focus on.

Once a business owner has a great strategy the next trick is sticking to it without being distracted by the enemy. The enemy of great strategy is the good idea.

In other words it’s easy to be seduced by all of the offers in the market place promising us the world on a plate if only we buy their product/service. Once you have a great strategy, learn how to stay focused by saying yes to everything that is aligned to the execution of that strategy and no to everything – and I do mean “everything” – else.

I regularly (almost once per week) conduct a simple survey which consistently reveals that 92% of business owners think they have a truly great product but not enough clients.

The second part of the survey shows that 78% of the same people do less than 2 hours a week of direct marketing activity. Many of these people are stressed from not having enough clients but actually do zero hours of marketing activity per week.

Why is that? Well here’s my take: these people are neither stupid nor are they lazy. They simply lack a proven, effective, step-by-step process for engaging in marketing activity.

I’ve seen previously marketing-paralyzed business owners transform into marketing machines once they gain the confidence that a well thought out value proposition and approach gives them.

Get your product good enough (not perfect: good enough is good enough) and then develop a clear and compelling customer value proposition. Then refuse to be distracted by anything (e.g. developing another product feature or a new web site or an updated brochure) and invest 20 hours a week in marketing – do it right and in less than 4 weeks you will have more clients than you can handle.