Brian J. Pombo Live

Brian reveals the 10th way to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvXMjC6MZkI

Transcription

The 10th way to Amazon-Proof your business.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

I have here in my hands my book,9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

But this discusses only the first nine ways and I realized that there was there's actually a 10th way that I talked about briefly in chapter five and chapter six, which you can check out, I'm not going to ruin it for you chapter five and chapter six cover an area that most businesses don't have that they all need.

But there's also another element to those chapters and I would make it the 10th way to Amazon-Proof your business and what is the 10th way?

The 10th way is called, Offer Advancement.

This is a funny thing because it's not something it's not so commonly discussed. That it is something you can go look up, I was looking for keywords to try and catch people who are looking up details about this.

And I wasn't able to find really anything out there that is so common that people are looking it up on YouTube and Google and so forth.

I just had to kind of go back to scratch and say, Okay, well, if I were to tie this in with my original book, what would I say?

It really is offer advancement.

What does offer advancement mean?

Well, I'll tell you what the fifth and sixth chapters are all ruined for you. I won't get into the detail, you can read about that but the fifth and sixth ways are offering belonging and offering ongoing.

So belonging is about having a part of your business that allows the person to be a part of a community. It's offering that belonging concept, the belonging, feeling that the most famous one of the most famous ones that I could put out there is Harley Davidson.

How you know when you're in Harley Davidson, that's a cult, I mean, that is belonging.

When you own a Harley, when you want to have a Harley when you walk around with Harley patches, I mean, that is something that's very specific.

It's a very specific type of motorcycle, nothing funky, none of the other motorcycles function quite like a Harley Davidson. It has a specific sound, it has a specific feel everything else.

So you need to offer that type of belonging and you also need to offer some form of bond going whether there's belonging attached or not. But if you can have those two together, then you have some type of membership ongoing. Having it to where you give people the option to purchase from you on a regular basis.

It's not rocket science but how many businesses actually do that?

I mean, very few, especially local-based businesses, if you've got a local or regional business chances are you don't have an ongoing option unless it's already kind of contained within your industry.

But you want to look way outside the box and look at the possibility of offering something on an ongoing basis. But I won't get too far into those I want to talk about at the next level.

The next level is advancement is once a person feels like they belong once a person feels like and I don't care if you're offering, if you're running a hair salon, it's the same same thing.

If they feel like they belong, if they have the ability to pay you on an ongoing basis,

Brian shares a content marketing experience he had with a big company and why things went wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBW-qdl5S20

Transcription

Content marketing horror story.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

Let's talk about content marketing and a very specific horror story that I had.

So, it this is, this is not uncommon when you're dealing with larger brands. But it's something that can happen to you even if you're a smaller brand. If you're not a household name, I was working with a company that was a house, well, it is a household name, they are legendary. If I told you it's a one-word company, if I told you their name, you'd know who they are and what they do.

You can find their name plastered somewhere on my website with companies that I've worked with. But this particular scenario was one of those just horrible situations because this was quite a few years back and they had a Facebook feed.

I don't know if they're still doing this but they had a Facebook feed that had about 20 to 30 posts a day. And so there were just constant posts going through their Facebook page and it was a major thing.

They have millions of people following them on Facebook and this was before Facebook was really tamping down and keeping things from getting out there unless you bought ads, and so forth.

So that a lot of this stuff was getting out to people. But it wasn't getting a whole lot of attention. Not a whole lot of love back not a whole lot of likes. I mean, for the number of people that were seeing it, you had very few likes, very few comments.

And the real problem is most of it was commercials. It was just one commercial after another all day long through their Facebook feed, just pumping stuff garbage out, they're not good commercials, not good stuff that is really attracting attention.

This is just fluff, just garbage brand stuff as if they needed any more hardcore branding, what they needed is value.

They needed something entertainment, anything. But it was horrible. It was bad.

So we were helping a certain division to get more attention and so there was this whole idea that they were going to be an interview on a podcast that I was representing, that they were going to do an interview and we were going to go in and promote it through their Facebook page, just once a major deal.

There was going to be a giveaway with gas cards and all this other stuff was a great big, broad thing that did not have much direction. I told everyone early on, I said I don't see this going anywhere because we're talking about getting one post out of you know, 20, 30 posts a day.

I don't see this getting a whole lot of attention. Unless we're putting hands behind it even back then I could see that we needed to be putting more oomph behind it.

Yeah, but we got millions of followers, this is going to get tons of attention.

Wow. Okay, but I don't see this happening.

And sure enough, this thing popped up just like everything that pops up in their feed. And it got taken over by the next thing that popped up in a few hours and that was it.

That was the end of it. There was nothing else. It was horrible.

There were views, there were likes. Not many comments. Nobody participated.

If there were people that participate there were not very many people participating in the contest that was attached to it. It achieved nothing.

Just what is direct response marketing and why should it matter to your business?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMd43s1X6Ns

Transcription

What is direct response?

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

You know, this is one of those topics that you either are in the know or you aren't. And if you aren't, is a great place to start.

So what is direct response?

You may have heard this term used out there it's a reference to a style of marketing.

So oftentimes you hear it called direct response marketing.

Sometimes it's been shortened or abbreviated as direct marketing.

What is it?

Why is it different and what is it that it is different?

It's different than to this day, it's different than most types of marketing out there.

Although the Internet has definitely weighed it, and made it a whole lot more easier, a whole lot more important, a whole lot more commonplace.

So what is it?

Well, let's talk about what it isn't first.

In most cases, your everyday marketing is very much about awareness. And it's oftentimes referred to as brand awareness, or brand awareness marketing.

And that's the idea of just getting out there and putting your logo out there and putting your name out there, and hoping to build awareness around your name and logo.

And that works to an extent, especially if you're dealing with a very small community, you're dealing with a locality, you're dealing with something that's very controllable, then you can kind of get a feel for how aware someone is about your brand and your idea.

But if you're not giving them reasons to do something specific, then you're not taking part in what is direct response marketing. direct response marketing is the idea of getting a direct response back from the person that is consuming the marketing.

Whether it be advertising, direct advertising, or whether it be any, any other types of marketing, it's that the whole goal is to get a response.

And somebody who might be new to business would think well, well, yeah.

Isn't that what you want?

Don't you want people to buy things?

Well, yeah, everyone wants something to happen but if the marketing does not direct a person to do anything, that would elicit a response.

And it isn't really direct response marketing. There's a lot of amazing material out there about this, you can scour YouTube, you can go and purchase large courses in it.

And you could just pick up books, some of my favorite books that started me in this journey.

I've only been involved in the direct response field or understanding it as a professional since 2012, is when I came upon.

One of my first books was Dan Kennedy's NOBS Guide to Pricing Strategy.

And that blew my mind that there was this distinct difference in the way that certain people thought about marketing and certain other people did it.

And so that took me through the entire series of the no BS Series guides. This is a really good one to start with is a little bit of an older copy an older edition. But this is the no BS guide to direct marketing.

Specifically, it says direct marketing for non-direct marketing businesses.

Thoughts on charting out information about your ideal customer and how you can better serve and communicate with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VniXJV4k8Cg

Transcription

Secret customer retention strategy.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

We're going to be talking about customer retention.

So as you can probably guess, the reason why you're watching or listening to this is that you're a business owner or executive and you're looking to hold on to customers.

There's a whole lot I can assume about that but it's something that I talk about a lot without talking about, always directly.

In fact, a whole huge portion of my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. In fact, I was just looking at a copy right here. Hard bound, if you want to go get a copy, but it's short, it's a quick read. chapters five and six have a whole lot to do with customer retention and I'm not even going to cover it here.

What I am going to cover here is one word, that opens up an entire different way of looking at retention that I would guess you wouldn't have thought of directly. But go check out my book.

To get those other ways, you can if you don't want to buy one, you don't want to commit to that, go get a free copy. If you want a digital copy, you can go to AmazoProofBook.com.

And so, AmazonProofBook.com for, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

Now, let's talk about the secret to customer retention that most people don't ever cover. And it's a simple concept but it can go in a million directions and it's a complete and it doesn't matter what industry you're in either.

This is true across the board. In most industries, I would say in most businesses there is no type of strategy whatsoever that covers this one point, the secret the real secret to customer attention. Excuse me, I just ruined it.

The real secret to customer retention is attention.

It's keeping the attention of your customer.

Now don't just throw that away, as if, Oh yeah, whatever.

No, honestly, you got to think about this.

If you can hold their attention you can retain them as a customer or you can drive them away quicker, depending on how you how you look at it.

But overall, you're going to retain more than you drive away. And the ones you retain are going to be with you longer and more valuable, then any that you end up losing.

Initially you do need a strategy, that you're making money off of a customer on a regular basis for any of this to really work.

So that is something you got to build into your business. And like I said, I discussed that in my book. That's one of the points I discuss in my book but you do need to have that initially, because you got to, you're going to have to spend some money to do this, you're going to have to spend some time and or money to keep attention.

Here's how I like doing it.

Initially, if you have zero ideas on how to handle this now I know a whole bunch of tactics and you can go back through the years of all of my videos and audios over at BrianJPombo.com.

You can go back through all this for free and pick up little pieces here and there of how you would go about doing it in a tactic way. But if you want to start from scratch, and you want to build your own way, and just really mark down the road, sit down and think about who your ideal customer is and then ...

Value of getting out and helping others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH-deDZjwfY

Transcription

Spiritually stuck.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Unlike a lot of my more upbeat posts, this one is good, it's gonna be a little bit of a downer but I'll give you a bright side to it.

And it's one of those titles I don't expect to get a whole lot of play off of, it's not something that people are searching for, that I've been able to find. But I couldn't quite put it in any other way. This isn't my story. This is a story of a new friend that I made.

Today, I was talking with a gentleman, older in age. But it was very clear that he was, I guess, I don't know of a better way of saying it a spiritual crisis, in the sense that he was stuck.

He was stuck in this place of repeating these horrible scenarios from his life.

He was horribly traumatized as a child by his father specifically. It's something that continued throughout life, where everybody just seemed to use him as their punching bag. And if you attract that, you know, after a while, it's not your fault, but you end up becoming responsible for attracting abuse and bringing it into your life because that's just what you're used to doing.

You allow it to happen to you.

It's impossible not to, especially when you're young, you don't know how else to handle it in when you're traumatized.

It's just something that keeps repeating over and over again, until you learn how to handle things properly.

I guess you would say, change the ending of the story. So I'm not sure if this is going to mean much to you, if you feel like you're in a position similar to my friend, where you're just not quite sure what to do next, you know, you have solutions in front of you.

You don't even know how to really apply them properly.

You feel like, there's no hope it seems to work for everybody else, but not for me type of thing. I'll tell you what really hit me hard while talking with this person, and hit me hard because it was a new phenomena but something that I've discussed here before.

What hit me hard is when I asked him, What are you doing on a daily basis?

What do you what are you doing in life?

And I asked the question, because I was afraid of what the answer was. And I was right. Because what the answer was nothing.

This person did not have much of a life he did not get out there. Especially one of the things I found with people that are stuck in their own heads, and stuck in these paradigms is they don't interact with other people, they find a way to close themselves off from society.

They don't have close family or close friends that they can trust in or that they can help really honestly, it's this huge selfishness that can follow you.

I'm not saying about you. But this can happen. I've seen it way too often. Where there's a selfishness that you're so stuck in your own head and your own problems, that you can't help other people with their issues. A

nd I'm telling you, you can help other people, even if you're a horribly damaged person, there's still things you can do to help other people but you've got to be around people to begin with.

You have to learn how to deal with people and not resent them, or judge them for all of their issues.

If you can do that you can find a way to help people even though you sti...

Brian shares a personal story that happened today and how keeping your emotions in check can help you solve problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRfq4b6dxqY

Transcription

Intuitive business building.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Let's talk about intuitive business building, shall we. I've got a story that has nothing to do with business. But it proves a point better than even the business story I had for today.

So I had a I had a really great interview this morning, and I can't wait for it to come out just more than anything, not for what I said in it but what the host that I was with, it was so cool getting to meet him. Finally face to face, we had chatted a little bit back and forth over social media and the admirers from a distance of each other's work. And I really am excited to see what he ends up doing with his company as he moves ahead, can't wait to see more about that.

And I'll tell you more about that in the future. So stay tuned.

But I want to talk with you about something that happened later in the afternoon we had a situation. I've got one of these things where we have certain days of the week that are left a little wide open in the schedule, so that we can fit in little odds and ends of our lifestyle. And Fridays is one of those days in general. Sometimes it's packed in tight, but other times, we leave it a little bit loose just to fit in all the things that we need to do during the day.

I had a situation that I wasn't planning on where I needed to go get a couple of tanks of gasoline, we get this. So in Oregon, they add all the extra stuff to your gasoline. And it's not good for yard tools and so forth.

So I had to go get some of the gasoline that had no additives in it for the yard stuff. And just in case we get in a situation where the electricity goes out, which tends to happen toward the beginning of fall winter, when the rain starts coming in the electrical grid for some reason can't handle it or they use it as an excuse to shut things down.

But we get into a situation where we have no electricity, so you got to have the generator going. So you got to get go get gasoline, so I go in with my empty containers to go get gasoline and it's not that far up the road, it's probably three miles up the road to this gas station. And so I was no big deal.

I tossed my shoes on, I didn't even put real shoes on, I've got these stupid rubber crock things. And so I had those on, I wasn't even planning to wear those there. But I just I've just it's just a quick thing, it wasn't meant to take that long. I go to the gas station, I park. It's an odd situation because it's away from the other gas tanks and so forth.

So it's a different area and I get out of the car and I'm like okay, now I got to go around and open up the other door to pull the tanks out.

So I unlocked the other door, make sure that happens. I set everything down, I go over to the other side. Instead of pushing unlock on the car, I pushed lock on the car, and my keys got locked in, but not just my keys, my phone got locked in, everything got locked in. And I just realized that, you know, since my wife had her phone number change, I never memorized it. I never wrote it down. So I don't even know how to get ahold of my wife and this wasn't supposed to take long.

This was supposed to be a quick since scenario. And so it was one of those things where when we're a ways out in the country, so I'm like, Okay, if I called if I call a locksmith open up the car, that might take a while.

Brian chats about the Worthington Method and actions steps to take in your business.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGH7RAqpQjw

Transcription

What are your three actions?

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live. Where we talk about all the strategies, tactics and principles that you need to be able to explode your business.

I want to talk about three things that this was something that came to me today is that I've never developed a way to easily describe in a quick way, what it is that I do with businesses when I'm businesses that I invest in businesses that I partner up with, what is it that I actually do?

And what if I could encapsulate it all into three ideas, three actions that, that I take part in, and I want you to try this for your own business.

So if you if you're a business owner, if you're an executive, you're one of the people that are in charge, can you break down what it is you do for your ideal client, customer, so forth?

Can you break it down to three things or three areas that you cover or something specific in terms of an outcome?

I don't know if I'll stick with these or promote them or anything like that but this was, this was kind of what I came up with. So there's three actions, there's three things, and the first thing that I take everybody through is a process that the easiest way to explain it would be to call it strategic order.

And I please don't try not to judge me too much for my horrible second grade handwriting but it's all about strategic order.

I go in that typical situation with with a business is I go in, and we sit down and we just start at the very beginning. We look at where they are, where they want to be how soon they want to get there.

What's the ideal situation and we start creating strategic order?

We do this through a process that I call the Worthington Method.

So this is something that I came up with, I'm just gonna say W M here.

Worthington Method is really the beginning of all of this. And it's the process that I take companies through, you can go and check out my other videos that have to have to do with the Worthington Method.

In the future, I'm hoping to have some examples up here, people that I've taken through that process, but strategic order is all about setting up and saying okay, what do we need to do when when I was talking with a banker, that not not a specific banker.

But you know, we say banker with picture a guy in a suit with a mustache and a top hat, these cartoony concepts that we have in our heads, but a person in the banking industry that is, is working in a, in a growing bank, they have multiple locations, is on the East Coast of the United States.

And we were sitting down, he is one of the main executives in charge. And we say what are the what are the main issues you're facing?

We're just kind of giving her an initial having an initial conversation over some of these things, because one of the people that I work with was helping him out with some with some other items. And he said just in general, what what are the strategic concerns that you have?

And he said, we know everything we need to do, but we don't know of the order in which to do them.

That thing that hit me, I wrote it down immediately, and I said, that is encapsulating.

What so many business owners have an issue with is they know what to do,

Building relationships from marketing your products and services.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTMJeWGPXiA

Transcription

Marketing to relationship.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Let's talk a little bit about business marketing, shall we, and how that leads into having a business relationship. Because in the end if you really look at it carefully, and you really look at building a business that lasts, that works as an asset that continues to produce.

With at least less effort put in over time, at least from you, as a business owner or the executive, then it's going to take being relationship reliant, which is one of the three pillars that we teach here at BrianJPombo.com.

It's one of the three things that I look for the three major pieces that I look for when I'm looking for a business to invest in or to partner up with is those ones that already have that relationship reliance built in.

In the end, the understanding that every thing that you do in business has to do with other humans, whether you deal with them directly or not, it's you're dealing with other humans, and if it's going to work for the long run, which is be ideal in all circumstances.

So whether you're talking about your customers or clients, whether you're talking about your business partners, the other executives that you may work with your employees, co workers, vendors, anybody that you have any form of business relationship with, it needs to be as stable relationship as possible, it needs to be one of these things that solid, and that starts from the very beginning.

In your marketing, if you understand that with your marketing, you're trying to do a few things I understand initial marketing is you've got specific calls to action.

You've got a specific demand that you're making of the person or command I should say, as I think Perry Belcher used to say that it's really a command that a call to action is a command.

You're saying this is what you need to do?

This is the next step.

And that's all important in in the terms of the short term strategy. So in terms of short term strategy, your marketing is trying to get them to do something.

You're trying to get them to either purchase a product or service, or sign up for something, maybe give exchange you their email, in exchange for some type of item or some type of idea.

I mean, there's a million things of what that first processes, but in the long run, you just need to understand that the long run is going to take a relationship and you need all the things that every relationship needs.

A whole lot of that is is under this auspices, it said over and over again but it can't be said often enough with the right context. People do business with people they know, like and trust. In that order, they got to know you first, they got to know I killed next, and then they got to trust you.

It goes beyond trust and a long run. But they at least need to get to that point to have a solid relationship with you over the air does, I don't care if they're buying dog food from you, on a monthly basis.

Whatever it is, it all comes back to that it all comes back to a trust based relationship. If you know that you're marketing, everything you do in marketing, everything you do in any form of communication, with your potential customer, with your current customer with your previous customers.

All of that changes if you realize that the real goal is to ...

Brian talks about the advantages to slow selling fro Neil Rackham's book, SPIN Selling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smEDWeDjMVY

Transcription

Advantages to Slow Selling, SPIN Selling a review.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today we're going to be talking a little bit about this and a little bit about the concepts that were brought out by this book SPIN Selling, by Neil Rackham.

You could tell this isn't a book, this is a collection of CDs, an abridged version of his book is just something I had available in front of me here that this was a real and I have to thank Sam Ovens was the one that tipped me off to how good this one was, it came out in 88.

And it's one of those that isn't brought up very often SPIN Selling, it's an acronym, SPIN, it's for Situation, Problem, Implication, Need.

And what that means is, it's a process that he takes people through to do consultative selling. So it's all about the slow sale and he talks about that early on discussing how, if you have certain products that are made for everybody that are impulse buys, then it doesn't take a whole lot of salesmanship to sell them.

It doesn't take that long if it takes a conversation, it takes a quick conversation, it takes, you know, a little bit of a demonstration, it takes some shown showing you why you need it. And you either want it or you don't want it and you buy it.

That's all fine and good.

There's a huge value to that as soon as you go up in price, and further in how much time the product or service takes to complete or to be able to move on. Or let's say it's an ongoing product, some type of deal where you're going to be paying forever, you know, if you're talking about that, then a lot of times you're going to need some form of consultative selling, you're going to take a longer time to go about selling something to someone, explain it to them probably take more than one touch.

It'll probably take more than one situation when people talk about selling they talk about as if it's all the same thing.

Where if you're selling something that's very simple and very straightforward, and it's a low price, that's a whole different situation than selling somebody on something that is a larger price is going to take more commitment.

It's going to take a whole lot of back and forth from the person that's purchasing or from their company or what have you.

Then you've got a longer process on your hands. And you've got to be open to having a longer process, you got to be open to willing to have a little bit of a back and forth.

Like I talked about being relationship reliant is a huge piece of this. And so you're going to want to develop some type of relationship long-term with the potential customer or client.

Now that's where this comes in.

He was one of the first ones to really talk about this in mass nowadays, it's talked about all over the place. But this is great if just for the historical benefit of going back and reading or listening to spins online. Excellent, excellent book. And there's a lot of pieces in it that I would say, have possibly changed, but it's very principle-based. So the ideas in it are very useful, especially if you don't have any salespeople, direct salespeople in your organization.

If you have an e-commerce website, and you have no one on salespeople whatsoever.

I highly recommend that you read books, and listen to conversations about selling one on one...

Thoughts on Brian's preferences when walking someone through a strategy session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_oTqsNxczc

Transcription

The dreaded strategy session.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I've worked a long time as a strategist and one of the things that are very common in the field and in the field of consulting is the concept of the strategy session.

When I first started, it was an uncommon term, but it has become synonymous. It's been everywhere, ubiquitous, I should say.

You see strategy sessions are offered all the time, are strategy sessions.

And I'm saying this from the perspective of somebody who uses strategy sessions, I still haven't renamed my strategy sessions, maybe by the time you're watching this will have a different name for it. Because I don't like to be painted in the same sense of how other strategy sessions are.

So I'm going to tell you, for those of you who don't know what they are, I'll explain that this is for people who have either been through one worthy recipient of strategy sessions, or for those who are putting on strategy sessions.

I like to talk with you because this is a really interesting concept.

When I first started out, I'll tell you how it happened is when I first started working in the field of consulting.

This concept of having a strategy session, and I can't remember what we were calling it originally something like a discovery meeting or something of that sort. And there's a handful of phrases that describe them out there.

And what they?

What they really are, in the long run is a sales pitch.

In most cases, they're a disguised sales pitch.

I went through one today, and I wanted to tell you more about it.

I was interested to see where it was going to go based on who was putting it on it was by a rather large company. And also, I wanted to see, you know, the process, I figured there would probably be some type of pitch toward the end that's in most cases, what happens. And I just wanted to see how that how it ended up working.

I love going in and being able to see this from the customer's point of view as much as possible. Because one thing that I found that works in a strategy session is to not pitch at all, at the end you offer a doorway to walk through if they're interested in having a further conversation about working with me, or what have you.

But try to offer as much value upfront, and then see where they go from there. That has worked out well for me, it's allowed me to be able to set aside people who would not make good clients, and partners, and also be able to have further conversations with the people that would and so it's really for my benefit, it's for their benefit because they get something out of it.

And that was always my goal is that give something and to eventually get something from the right people.

So that's kind of how business works, isn't it, but it tends to be used more and more as a sales tool and that's it.

And so you a lot of times people are put in this position, and there is a very specific process that they take you through of asking questions.

If the person's very skilled, they're good at asking questions following having follow-up questions, getting down to the meat.

And especially if you have a sale at the end,