The Marketing 24-7 Podcast

We have all heard about the 80/20 principle, but how does it apply to making some fast money in business?

Ask an audience to stand up if they own a pair of shoes, stay standing if they own 2 pair, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 pairs... you will ultimately be left with one person (likely a lady 🤣) still standing. If you do the math and add the shoes owned in the room 80% of the shoes will be owned by 20% of the audience.

Same will apply with:

• Watches owned

• Domain names owned

• Anything you can think of

Stop treating all customers the same, because 20% of THEM are very different.

Armed with the basics of 80/20, entrepreneurs can supercharge their profits.

No matter what you are marketing there is always a cohort that will go straight to the top and buy the VIP experience. The catch, is this more expensive offering must feel more valuable! An $800 product must feel worth it. Nobody will pay $800 for a $3.50 cup of coffee, but some will pay $1800 for that same barista machine for home.

If you do not offer your clients a super-deluxe experience, I will guarantee you that another entrepreneur will.

Great marketers are the alchemists who craft endlessly irresistible offers, such that people spend disproportionate amounts of money.

“Sports fanatics’ insatiable itch”

Season tickets, VIP boxes private memberships they all sell, to somebody!

You can get a single ticket to the football for $60, season tickets for up to $2000. But, the most luxurious VIP boxes require multi-year commitments of hundreds of thousands of dollars. How do sports get 50% of their revenue from 1 percent of customers? They scratch the “sports fanatics insatiable itch”!

In other words...

“How much money will a raving football fanatic, who has money, spend on football?

Virtually an unlimited amount!

Almost everybody has one passion, interest, obsession where they will gleefully spend irrational amounts of money.

Somehow, they will find a way to justify it.

Whenever there are rabid, obsessive customers, there is a great business. For some, its rock concerts for others its rare books and for my wife it is shoes. A member of the 20% 🤷‍♂️.

Most people have the wrong idea about the very purpose of business.

Unions would have you believe that the purpose of business is to employ people. The government thinks the purpose of business is to pay taxes. Communities think the purpose of business is to provide jobs, and sadly a lot of businesspeople think the purpose of business is to provide them with a job!

So, most businesspeople behave with an employee mentality. They don't even have an owner mentality, let alone an entrepreneur mentality.

Smart entrepreneurs understand that their business is a tool, a device, a means of creating money that you then take for yourself spin off and invest elsewhere. It's a different paradigm and very few people make that paradigm shift.

Business is used to Make money

Once one makes it one should Manage it

To Use it… but the most important aspect that most business owners miss is…

To Liberate it.

The ordinary businessperson typically leaves their wealth in their business, and it gets trapped in there. Often the mindset is in 20 years from now, 30 years from now, 45 years from now, I'm going to sell the thing. And that's when I'm going to get all my money out.

The problem is, first of all, it's very hard to predict what's going to happen in 30- or 40-years’ time (think Block Buster Video Store). And so, what you think you may be able to sell for $x, you may or may not be able to realize.

Beyond that, it simply means that you've left the money idle for all of that period of time before you get at it and start using it better.

So, one of the key responsibilities that everybody misses is extracting cash. Most people think of business as a thing to put money into. A smart entrepreneur’s belief is that business is a thing to get money out of.

It comes all the way back to a very basic personal finance principle, pay yourself first. Whilst most business owners pay themselves last.

You pay everybody else; you pay all the bills. If there's anything left, you take some. Quite often there's nothing left.

Most entrepreneurs think like this.

And it's exactly wrong. It's the polar opposite of how business should be run.

You get paid first, and if you can't get paid, then the whole deal is bad, and get out of it as quickly as you possibly can.

Your job is to extract wealth from your business on a day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year basis, and accumulate your wealth outside of your business.

Your ability to create wealth from a business actually depends on how many times you can turn the same invested dollar over. If you're not good at that, you can't liberate money out of the business because you have to leave a whole lot of dollars in the business because they're not turning, well then your business is sick and some solid medicine is required.

Change your mindset – think cash liberation and you will find that your decisions, your actions, and your results will start to get you on the right path.

Grace Jones once sang - “I am not perfect, but I am perfect for you”.

This is the song I am about to send to a person who sent me an email of complaint this week.

The email said, "Peter, your continuous autoresponders are driving us mad. An occasional one is wonderful! A deluge, No, thanks. Signed off." 

It is essential to recognise what our clients or potential clients think, feel, fear, aspire to, their shortfalls, and strengths are. I urge people in marketing to be mindful of their client's avatars every time they communicate with them.

Here are my thoughts about this. Learn more about the reason for my podcast, why I email you when it is ready and what you can take out of it.

Advice to entrepreneurs, always pay yourself in terms of time, and you will learn how much time is really worth.

Here is a story.

At a break in a workshop a bunch of people were going to eat at a restaurant a few kms away. Everyone whipped out their phones for Uber. It’s better, faster, and cheaper than Taxis, right?

Well, not so fast, Jose'.

In this case, it was the opposite.

15 minutes or so for Uber, yet there were 3 Taxis right out front the hotel.

“I always use Uber,” one of them said.

Sigh.

Look, I have nothing against Uber.

That’s not the point here.

Lack of awareness of time.

The point is, here was this small bunch of entrepreneurs who thought saving 80 cents or whatever was more valuable than their time. Yes, I know it was just 15 minutes. But it’s not the amount of time that’s the problem here, it’s the corrosive effect not valuing time has on people.

This mindset carries over into business, too.

I see it all the time.

Like people who spend weeks stuffing around with WordPress instead of hiring it out to a trained pro to “save money.” Or the monkey who spends hours each month trying to do their own taxes and bookkeeping instead of having someone who’s versed in the ways of audit/asset protection do the deed to, you know, “save money.” Or the newbie who changes his own oil, mows his own lawn, and cleans their own office (instead of outsourcing these tasks to experts at these things) to, you know, “save money.”

And so on, and so forth.

All that time is gone.

Poof.

You’ll never see it again.

Unlike spent money, you cannot “make” back spent time.

You can only spend it.

And, when it’s gone, it’s not returning.

I know this falls on mostly deaf ears. But, it’s the one or two people who take it to heart I care about.

The rest of you?

Well, go ahead. Keep stepping over dollars to pick up cents.

Those of us who value time will see you from the top…

One of the most anticipated aspects of the AFL Grand Final, The NRL Grand Final and The Superbowl is the halftime entertainment or as the Americans call it “The Halftime Show”.

As evidence one needs simply to look at this year’s line-ups. The Superbowl had a hip hop extravaganza featuring Mary J Blige, Eminem, Dr Dre and Snoop Dog to name but a few. The AFL featured Robbie Williams accompanied by Delta Goodrem and the NRL selected Australian veteran rocker Jimmy Barnes and a host of his friends.

But, it hasn’t always been like this.

This podcast outlines how this odd business decision has paid off.

Let us be honest, by and large it is a crowded market.

The likelihood that your product or service is so unique that you do not have any competition is as rare as a Fremantle Dockers premiership :)!!

We need another Real Estate Agent (not), nor do we need another Coffee Shop, yet, new market entrants are constantly making an impact.

How can you make an impact with your product or service and this podcast will discuss how!

When you position yourself in the market as infallible, you’ll stop taking risks in order to avoid looking bad, and this will be the beginning of your end. 

Staying relevant is so important. You must be at the front of people’s minds every day and all of the time. 

The best way to do that is to always be trying something new or cool, and creating an atmosphere where people want to know what you’re up to and how it’s going.

I remember working alongside an overseas marketing guru once. He was so afraid to do anything risky that would upset his position in the market that had any blemish to it whatsoever. 

He had such a high opinion of himself that he had positioned himself in such a way that it made it VERY difficult to make a mistake.

Think about your positioning in your marketplace. As you position yourself as an authority or expert, how are you going to set parameters for yourself? Obviously, this depends upon your profession – if you are a dentist or a beauty therapist you probably want to be technically excellent but if you are in more forgiving professions you can perhaps be a bit more fallible.

For me for example, I am in the imperfect area of marketing, I’ve picked a positioning standpoint that allows me to try things risk things and at times fail but learning from each of these without I believe lowering my status. 

I am being me – open and honest and in doing so created a character that simply tries to share all the risks and the flops but emphasising what I have learned from them.

I remember vividly seeing this in action when I was working for a family property developing company that was being viewed as a take over target by a major National player. Whilst all of us lieutenants in the transaction were outing on our best performance and appearing really certain as to what we did – our founder, our boss – the owner was being himself warts and all and in doing so – not only did he land the deal but he came over so sincere, so worldly, so experienced, so capable with dealing with all sorts of things that the National company not only bought his family business but quickly moved to have our guy lead the whole company.

This is how this podcast began. 

It is an unedited, raw look at the inner workings of Peter Gianoli —a human who loves to try new things and learn along the way. There’s no sugar coating. 

In some episodes, it’s clear I or my clients are having a win and I want to share with you why this has happened – what is working whilst at other times I will share with you what I am grappling with. No matter what, I want to share the real truth because this is consistent with my positioning.

This allows me to take big risks, stay relevant, and keep my status intact. 

So, if you can from a profession point of view - don’t enter the marketplace as the infallible guru. It’s the fastest way to fall to the bottom and become irrelevant.

Pick a position that allows you to fail and get back up again.

Is your offer really finished? 

Is the funnel complete? 

Is there something more you can add? 

Ask these three questions all the time, even when you have an amazing funnel. 

At any point in the sales process, you can do more if you just ask yourself the question “what else can we do?” 

If people click on your landing page but do not give you an email address, retarget them with ads. 

If they give you their email address but do not buy, contact them with an email or text or messenger sequence. 

If they buy your low-cost product, how can you add more to it with an order bump? 

Are there additional upsells you can add after they’ve made that first purchase? 

If they don’t take the big upsell, can you down sell something instead? 

What touchpoints can you create when the buying process is over to give them an opportunity to purchase higher-end products? 

Even if you’re making a lot of money—in fact, Especially when you’re making a lot of money—look for where you can add more. 

I guarantee there is always more you can do.

In this podcast, I'm gonna talk about human emotions and what drives us to make decisions.

We individuals are very simple folk. We do things really mainly for two distinct motivations. Either to move away from the pain, or to move towards pleasure.  Now, we have to keep that firmly in our minds when we put together our  sales and marketing initiatives.

So, what I ask my clients to do when I take on a contract is to spend a lot of time getting to understand what are the pain points that people are moving away from, that this particular product is offering,  and what are the pleasure points that this particular service, or product can deliver. The better I get to know each and everyone of those- that I can tell you categorically, the better the sales and marketing efforts will be.  

So I go through an exercise.

So when I start with the pain points.  

Moving away from pain.  

I dig deep to find out what’s going on inside my dream customer  or the clients’ heads when they’re trying to move away from pain. Now, I force myself to write down a dozen phrases that the dream customer is saying or thinking as they try to move away from their pain.  Now, if you’re struggling to fill this out, write down what you used to say to yourself when you were in similar circumstance and then attempt to elaborate what the dream customer would be thinking.  Now, if you're looking for places for ideas, then I suggest you research for forums, message boards, get on to facebook groups, and you will see a lot of these pain points and a lot of discussions people are getting into, in those particular places. 

Now the same goes for moving towards pleasure.

Now what I do, what I like to do is I try to deduce what’s going on inside the dream customers’ heads when they’re trying to move towards the pleasure.  And  this  too -  I write down at least a dozen phrases that dream customers are saying or thinking as they try to move towards the pleasure. And here too, you can pick up those examples from forums, message boards, facebook groups and the like.

And you know another  place you can do it is by going to your competitor’s ads, your competitor’s websites - and looking at some of the language that they use because those guys have probably also done these exercises or aspects of this exercise themselves. And by compiling from these industry’s files, you’ll get a really good look into what’s going on in your dream customer’s mind. As they either move away from pain or move towards pleasure. 

Now, this may seem like a superfluous exercise but trust me, it isn’t. 

The more zeroed in, the more fixated you become on this, the more you listen. The more voyeuristic you can be then the better, I guarantee -  your marketing and your sales effort  will end up accordingly.

So go ahead, do this exercise.  You don't have to do this in one sitting. You can keep a notebook and collectively add to them  every time you’d come across a conversation that you experience with your dream customer about their pain or their pleasure they’re heading toward. And the better you put them together,  the better they cut through in the foremost of time.

Protect Your Shelf Space

What is that new business idea or shiny object costing you in terms of focus?

Stores like Coles and Woolworths only have a certain number of shelves. Every single item placed on their shelves is sharply judged based on performance.

If a product doesn’t do well, it’s removed from the shelf to make room for a better option. They are protective of their shelf space.

But in consulting or the service industry, it’s harder to see this principle in action. Our products are intangible or digital. Our shelf space is between our ears, in our minds.

There came a point in my company when I realised how having my hands in all these business ventures was limiting my ability to grow my business. I had to protect my shelf space and let go of a lot of projects to keep it clear for what I wanted to grow.

The hard part for us entrepreneurs is we have so many good ideas, it’s hard to see them as unworthy. They aren’t bad at all! But in a sea of ideas, the merely good ideas become true enemies of the great.

We have to be ruthless with our mental shelf space and remember that whatever we focus on, that’s what will grow.

Take inventory in your store, and clear away anything that isn’t a top performer.