The Most Common Sense Principles – Applied
August 18th, 2021 // 3:43 pm @ Scott Manning
This week we are applying those three seemingly common-sense principles of business success that most fail to execute and make common practice.
They are the difference maker for a street-smart entrepreneur running what might be considered a ‘small business’ (though I don’t like to use the term ‘small’ because it’s more accurate to say the ‘right size for you’ business based on your goals and desired lifestyle).
Regardless of size or structure, you owe it to yourself and every one in your business to maximize the profitability and to leverage every asset. These three principles are foundational to make sure that you are doing just that.
We’ll quickly review and then move to specific application.
First, capturing prospect and customer contact information – then actually doing something with it.
Who cares about what restaurants and other businesses you frequent do, let’s talk about what you do.
The first most obvious part of this is that you communicate with your customers more than just when you are attempting to make a transaction.
If you only rely on the customers that say yes in the moment, you won’t have many customers. Therefore, you had better be in the relationship and the nurturing of that relationship business.
In dentistry, practices assume they’ll always be busy and their focus, because they are busy, is on the patient in front of them; not all the ones at home. There is little if anything done before or after the patient experience from most practices.
There could be so much more value created, trust built, patients multiplied, dollars extracted, and most of all patients helped by bridging the gap and creating relationship between visits.
Here are the easiest ways to apply this principle…
First, don’t be bashful to ask for and capture contact information so you can execute on number two and three.
Second, be in the lead generation business and then nurture those leads into customers. Do not just be in the convincing a prospect to buy by any means necessary, otherwise you will always be missing the bigger dollars.
Third, which we are going to move into here in a moment but never stop the experience – follow-up, enhance your marketing, and expand your selling opportunities by moving into a relationship model of nurturing your prospects and customers.
Action Question: where do you have gaps in your experience from website to phone call to front door to initial transaction and beyond?
The next big principle is follow-up in every way. I don’t just mean chasing sales, I mean what do you do with the contact information you captured.
Specifically answer this question and follow my principle of “what can you do to build a better customer?”
What can you send them? How can you engage them? What do they need to consume, learn, or understand? How can you build value in advance of the sale?
And then of course the really advanced part that most won’t ever do: what can you do after the sale to keep it going – rinse and repeat these four questions.
I gave you my super secret before and I’m not going to repeat here but it is one of the very core ‘if I could only do one thing’ success strategies when it comes to marketing and specifically to these four questions.
Now to get more specific on follow-up…
After someone buys what do they get?
After someone buys what else should they buy?
If someone doesn’t buy what happens?
Then we move into other strategies depending on your environment for selling whether online or physical.
Here’s a simple example for my doctors… we never want a patient to feel like a decision is an ultimatum or an all-or-nothing deal and yet we also never want to not swing for the fences by properly giving a patient an opportunity to go all in on a comprehensive and highest value investment in their health.
This is a balancing act that you have to figure out and that is why the first principle is so important and why relationship-based business is the key because this balance comes naturally when it is genuine and authentic. This takes the selling out of selling by being real with your customers in the first place.
You can’t stop after the first no or the first sale or the second or the third… your business should be a continuum with your customers and that’s what a real strategic and deliberately built backend is. The people who do this right see this as a business within a business.
Now, for the next one, which will set us up for next week’s Newsletter, is keeping the main thing the main thing and not allowing yourself or your team or your customers or any part of your business to become part of the sales prevention department.
I’m going to break down the five reasons why businesses go lame and how owners sabotage themselves and fall into this trap next week.
Today, it is very simple, the point of this is: it’s not about what’s easy it is about what works and at the very same time it’s not just about what’s best for the customer it is about what’s best for the company’s objective with the customer (obviously, you are here reading so it goes without saying about having integrity and operating with ethics).
Here’s what I want you to think about…
What in your business have you watered down to make ‘easier?’ What has your team stopped doing or where have systems become ineffective because it’s not convenient anymore?
I see businesses cut ‘costs’ where it totally diminishes their experience and the reasons why customers came to them in the first place.
Countless businesses overcorrected last year on experience and they might as well closed their doors because they cut out all the things that made them so unique and likely profitable. All while others flourished, even with reduced customers, because they refused to compromise their core principles of how they operate.
I have a motto that I teach our Doctors and Teams and that is we only help the people who say yes and therefore every decision we make is weighted against that sentence and if it helps more people say yes then that’s what we do. Not can we do it cheaper or faster or easier. That’s not the point and not even more profitable.
This prevents change for the sake of change or just being bored and losing sight of the point and purpose of the business.
That said ‘yeses’ have different degrees of profitability and so we had better engineer the business for the highest value yeses, which we’ll be talking about in the coming weeks.
For now, take a cold hard look at your business and get rid of any policy or person, protocol or part that is in the way of people giving you money and building better customers by creating more valuable experiences and relationships.
And if you take these three principles seriously, you’ll find a nearly effortless and constant windfall of opportunity coming your way with more quality and quantity of customers who value what you do and are willing to pay you for it!
Category : Blog