Elvis is considered the most valuable dead celebrity, and I suppose everybody knows who Elvis is. Hardly anybody else, living or dead, has such recognition.

In fact, most people think they and their businesses are far, far better known than they are. I hear from small town merchants who never advertise: “everybody knows who I am.” Maybe – but then it’d be reasonable to assume everybody knows who Greg Nielsen is in his dinky burg, too, but he advertises and mails constantly, massively, continuously, and that’s why he’s #1 there.

You’d think Platinum Member Rory Fatt would be “famous” in the restaurant industry. After all, he’s been telling his story there with full-page trade journal ads, articles, direct-mail, etc. for years and years, runs big boot camps, gives away cars, has thousands of members.

Were you he, you might think “every restaurant owner already knows my story.” For fun, recently, I asked two friends opening a restaurant, and four owners of different established restaurants if they’d ever heard of him. All swore they’d never seen his ads, never gotten mail, never heard of him.

Truth is, you can add all the marketing he’s done together and it’s like spitting once into the ocean. Heck, in a typical audience of entrepreneurs who should all have read ‘Think And Grow Rich’, a show of hands’ll reveal only about 5% know who Napoleon Hill is or have read the book.

There’s been at least 100-million dollars spent running Tony Robbins infomercials, and some think he’s enough of an icon that he winds up with a movie cameo or on Larry King arguing against the death penalty.

Pfui.

Show his photo to any 10 on the street or even 10 in, say, a bookstore, and offer $100 to anyone who can tell you who he is. Even in very small niche markets….for years, in NSA, with fewer than 5,000, I mailed and advertised and promoted like a banshee, telling my story tirelessly, thoroughly sick of telling it, and I’d still get long-time members asking “why don’t I ever get mail from you?” or “why didn’t I know about you before?”.

This is why…

(a) I push direct-response with direct ROI vs. brand or image building; unless you have Grand Canyon deep pockets and the patience of Job, you ain’t gonna achieve the Dominos or FedEx kind of marketplace mind capture. Not in this lifetime.

(b) I urge nicheing and slicing and dicing, to get to a small, manageable market where your resources can facilitate a degree of marketplace mind control.

(c) Why I tell clients they must keep advertising, keep mailing, send a monthly newsletter, “touch” 25 to 52 times a year and continuously tell their story as if no one’s ever heard it before.

I submit, that for any entrepreneur, New Client Acquisition Marketing is absolutely essential. The very survival of your business is dependent upon replacing lost customers! If you have any doubt, consider the following realities:

What you don’t lose, competitors will steal!

Demographers, scientists who study population characteristics, warn that depending on where you’re located, up to 35% of your customer base will die or disappear within the next 12 months. That’s right. Many will move away…some will die…and more than we think will be disabled, infirmed, unemployed, divorced, evicted or suffer a serious financial setback. Regardless of the reason, they will VANISH from your radar scope!

Worse yet, your most aggressive competitors will probably steal away another 5%-15% of your remaining customers. That’s why right now, at this very moment…your total “customer inventory” could be shrinking by as much as 50% a year!

If this figure seems ridiculous, stop and think. How many customers who you used to do business with are no longer around? If you could know the human stories behind these “missing customers,” you might be very surprised. So it makes the case that you must continue to diligently replace these missing customers with new customers.

Oftentimes when businesses try to replenish customers, most depend too much on “natural” population growth (averaging only about 1 or 2% per year) and too little on their own advertising and marketing efforts. I can promise you this…if you do NOT grasp the danger, and fail to fight back vigorously, you’ll have to be phenomenally lucky to stay in business, much less expand.

I want to share what you need to be doing when things don’t go your way…You know they never always do – do they?

I got a call from my trainer at the racetrack. We currently have 29 horses in the barn, 20 of which are mine in whole or part, and only 2 are in to race tonight. One of those two has ripped out a tooth chewing on his stall gate and may have to be scratched tonight. What are the odds?

In raw numbers, a freak incident, with less than a 10% chance of occurring. Or, if you calculate the number of horses who knock a tooth out chewing on their stall gates on race days, more like a .0000001% chance. But when you factor in the merry prankster Murphy, the odds are pretty damned good.

That’s life.

Most people spend a whole lot of time “poor me’ing”, depressed, angry, certainly distracted by all that goes ‘wrong’ in their lives. I try to spend very little time or energy that way. If something actually goes right, terrific. When it doesn’t, I’m not surprised. And I’ve usually got Plan B ready.

Expect the best, insure against the worst, respond creatively to everything in between.

I’ve put on hundreds of seminars, large and small. I have yet to arrive at the hotel or other site and find everything set up as it’s supposed to be. Not one time in 30 years. Not once. So call me “negative” if you wish, accuse me of “negative self-fulfilling prophecy”, but I get to every venue with ample time to fight, kill, fix, re-arrange, do the whole room and a/v over if I must. I trust nobody. I could think really, really, really positive and just show up on time. But I’d rather not slip on a banana peel just to amuse ol’ Murphy.

In the last post I told you about my fondest childhood memories of Thanksgiving and the marketing lessons to be learned.

Okay, enough of the thanksgiving warm ‘n fuzzy stuff. Let’s stick our noses deep into harsh reality.

Think back to when Hurricane Wilma threatened the Keys, Key West residents interviewed said they were ignoring the city’s mandatory evacuation order. This was after Hurricane Katrina turned Louisiana and a few other places into Afghanistan with more water. But hey, it ain’t gonna happen to me.

This is why it’s so hard to sell alarms, insurance, prostate exams. When I was working closely with a client in retail theft control, the biggest obstacle to cutting any store’s shrink by 70% was the owner’s insistence that his employees and his deliverymen would never steal from him – even though it’s fact that 95% steal.

People like Platinum Member Jay Geier and Gold/VIP Member Chris Mullins who help business owners get their incoming calls handled better and/or sell more effectively by phone have only denial in their way. Everywhere you look, people get themselves in trouble, make themselves miserable, lose fortunes by refusing to acknowledge risks and realities. Why? Because it is human nature. Very ingrained. Seductive, tempting and pleasurable.

Dealing with reality is usually painful and annoying, and given choice between Pleasure or Pain, almost everyone opts for Pleasure. But there’s two kinds of pain: one, immediate but temporary, the other permanent. One causes discomfort now, the other regret for life.

Tough-minded entrepreneurs insist on confronting reality no matter how painful. They are rare.

A client of years back, Dorothy Leeds teaches that the quality of one’s life is linked to the quality and quantity of questions you ask yourself. The tough questions are usually the most valuable.

So, a question – what smelly elephant’s camped out in your room that you are refusing to see?

Valentines Day is quickly approaching, and it got me thinking about holidays in general.The best of times was always during the holidays

Thanksgiving was a big deal when I was a kid. For us, it literally was over the river (a wood bridge) and through the woods to Grandma’s house we went. Relatives gathered. But mostly what I was waiting for was the Friday after Thanksgiving.

I vividly recall the day and weekend immediately after Thanksgiving as something really big and special, when I was a kid. That was the official start of the Christmas season. That’s when you drove into the city, to the big department store on public square, and saw Santa Claus, and shopped, and, in my case, got a snowball sundae at the Sterling-Linden department store’s cafeteria.

The death of the downtown department store as mecca has destroyed a lot of ‘specialness.’ Now the holiday shopping experience surrounds you and bombards you.

Worse, now Christmas season starts before Halloween. I’m sick of it before Thanksgiving even gets here. I don’t think we’ve done the kids, ourselves or even retail commerce any favors by stretching the season into a calendar quarter.

But the bigger point is how much of “the special” has been taken away, spoiled, diminished and diluted.

There’s real opportunity there for the marketer who finds a way to give his customers a truly special event, something to look forward to with anticipation, to experience with awe and wonder and fun.

In this post I want to wrap up our discussion on what to do when tragedy strikes. How you should protect yourself and also how you can profit from it without the need to feel guilty.

As a very pragmatic suggestion: do whatever good you can and choose to do regarding a tragedy. Do it of your own heart and mind, not merely out of obligation or peer pressure. And should you have fair opportunity to benefit or profit from it, whether as seller of needed goods and services, astute investor, or merely aligning your business with a charity connected to these events in a way that is also promotional and profitable, don’t hesitate to do so.

Do not feel squeamish or guilty about doing so. You and your opportunism are absolutely essential elements of our economic engine, without which no good can ever be funded or done. The entrepreneur’s understanding and use of the adversity/opportunity principle, the entrepreneur’s agility, his profit instinct, these are not just personal assets; they are societal assets.

Consider the singer or musical group that appears on the network televised concert to raise money for New Orleans relief. Consider carefully. Yes, they will work for free. Yes, they may have rushed forward to volunteer. And it is possible that they take such iniative and are eager to perform on such a program solely out of charity and compassion and a desire to do something constructive.
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I’ve discovered people I thought were smart, aren’t; people who should be right on top of things occurring, threatening or directly affecting their specific businesses or professions are either ignorant and clueless, in denial, or unable to think through the series of possible consequences.

Real estate investors weeks late knowing about the U.S. Supreme Court’s rewriting of eminent domain law, permitting, actually, under certain circumstances mandating forced transfer of one person’s private property to another private party.

Publishing executives unaware of the California Supreme Court decision putting B&N.com at a 9% price disadvantage to amazon.com.

Talk of a possible Do-Not-Mail-List legislation.

Both threats and opportunities are ignored. And I’m alarmed that people who should know, don’t.

So I question what you are paying attention to, reading, watching….whether you are intelligently choosing what to know and what to ignore.

If you care to try a 30-Day Experiment that we used to force on salespeople, I’ll bet you’d find it illuminating. Unplug all your TV’s and lock them away in the garage for a month*.
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Yesterday, Bill Glazer discussed the idea of Less Is More… So let’s continue with that concept. But first let me ask you this important question.

Do you know what a customer is worth to your business?

During a session with some of my top clients we had one of the participants, an astute businesswoman, discussing one of three businesses she owned, the only one not making money, made the statement that each account was worth an average of $18,000.00 a year.

I said each account was worth nothing.

Donald Trump tells the story, during his ‘crash’, of walking down a Manhattan street with Marla next to him, spotting a homeless person sitting by a doorway selling pencils, pointing him out to Marla and saying “That guy’s worth $70 million more than me.” In true financial terms, Trump was right. Of course, not in terms of skills, knowledge, ambition, resiliency or potential. But at that moment.

I am right about her accounts. If the business has no net profit, then the accounts have zero value. To that business. But I once had a company in that same situation, and I sold its accounts to a competitor for a big hunk of cash; while they were worthless to me they had value to the competitor. There was also value in making a competitor go away. But let’s keep this business. If we do, we have to dig in and do a lot of investigation and analysis.

Odds are, some accounts are quite profitable but others are big losers, sucking up inordinate amounts of time and material, providing the thinnest of margins. Odds are, some services are very profitable, others losers. Odds are, you can get to net profit by firing some clients, raising prices on some services even if it drives away some business. Odds are, you can get to net profit by cutting gross – not by growing it.

Most entrepreneurs are always thinking about “more.” But we must be sure whatever “more” we add or do equates to “more NET.”

I’m all for selling. I love selling. But I figured out very, very early that some sales are better than others and some sales aren’t worth making at all. In my first job, I quickly realized that the easiest types of businesses to place a book rack in were the worst accounts in terms of inventory turn and reorders, so I abandoned the path of least resistance altogether and worked harder at finding ways to sell to the best accounts.

In my speaking business, by the second year, I was turning down paid engagements that would place me in front of audiences ill-suited for my backend business.

In our seminar business that was aimed at doctors, I quickly identified that we could sell to virtually every female veterinarian who attended, but nearly all turned into refunds.

Why sell to them at all? I’m all for selling, but never for indiscriminate selling.

Let’s continue our discussion of Who is your customer and giving them what THEY want.

Here is their dreaded situation: their lead generation advertising / mailings produced a good number of leads from a good source at an affordable cost but none converted to buyers. Incredibly, both of these marketers keep wanting to talk about generating more leads or tweaking the lead generation message.

One thinks he can multiply zeroes by more mailings with the same unsuccessful message to his leads. This is called: working on the wrong problem. And it goes on a lot.

In this case, the people liked what was said to them in lead generation. They “bought” the Promise. Then, when the sales letter arrived, one or more of these things occurred:

• They didn’t like the means offered them to get the Promise they want
• They were not convinced the price was a bargain
• They didn’t believe and trust the selle.
• They finished reading/listening unconvinced of their own ability to use the means offered to get the Promise
• They didn’t feel a sense of urgency to grab the means immediately

There are other possibilities, but these are the biggies.

A related situation to think about – constantly – is whether you are working on big opportunities or small opportunities. You have to figure out what the value of each opportunity you might work on could be. Getting a refund rate from 4% to 3% has a financial value.

Making an upsell on an order form work with at least 10% of the buyers has a financial value. Both are probably doable. Which should be tackled first? Which has more value?

When something like the above described Dreaded Situation occurs, a lot of marketers are way too quick to abandon the project.

I caution against persistence morphing into stupidity. But you do have to consider the value of figuring out a marketing puzzle.

If doing so will let you operate in a competitive vacuum and dominate a niche, for example, vs. throwing up your hands and taking a path of less resistance, following many competitors into a cluttered market, you have to take into consideration the value of the former vs. the latter.

Most people do not factor ‘value’ into a lot of their decisions.

I am a big fan of Trump’s show The Apprentice and one episode stands out.

The night The Apprentice teams had to create TV commercials for a new Dove body wash product, Trump should have canned everybody, gone out on the street and picked 16 new candidates at random. He couldn’t possibly have wound up with a more pathetic bunch of dunderheads. Still, some of the mistakes that led to these truly horrid TV commercials DO get made a lot, by smart people too.

For example, not considering WHO the customer is. I cannot beat this up enough: the WHO is far, far important than the WHAT, WHEN or HOW in marketing. Yet I often catch people far along with developing products, ads, sales letters, etc., who I can completely stump with my first three WHO questions.

No one on these teams even considered WHO is the primary, most likely buyer of this product. The team that made the pornographic cucumber/gay commercial had the woman lose the guy to another guy; the men went off arm in arm to presumably enjoy the body wash together, leaving her with the cucumber. Obviously the entire commercial was ill-conceived, but if you were going to do this, you’d have to assume the buyers are women, not men, so you’d reverse it all, and have the women go off together, leaving the guy behind.

For example, finding a PRODUCT BENEFIT to talk about. Gee, that seems really obvious. But I often critique sales letters with no benefit in the first four pages. Teleseminar scripts with no benefits in the opening. And neither of those TV commercials advanced a benefit. But – how many Super Bowl commercials can you recall now, and correctly ID both the advertiser and the Chief Benefit for buying its product?

You usually have to decide on one to no more than three Chief Benefits to fixate on, emphasize, redundantly emphasize over and over and over again throughout a pitch. It takes a lot of effort to hammer a Chief Benefit into the distracted, mushy-thinking skull of today’s prospect. Hard to do if you don’t know what it is.

Decide on A THEME. (Oh, and just for the record, when you deliver what you believe is the right pitch to a valid group of prospects and they don’t respond, you are wrong about the chief benefits they want – regardless of how much you think you know about the prospects. They are not dumb or cheapskates or lazy or whatever. Their lack of response is your fault not theirs.