Mindsets that make money

Jim Rohn, in my opinion, one of the best business mentors ever, always said that "the thing that will make the biggest difference to your health, relationships and your bank account in the next 12 months, is your philosophy"

Mindset is super important for the success of small business. Having been running our own small businesses for over 20 years, and having made more mistakes than I care to remember, I've come to the conclusion that there is a priority in small business that needs to be paid attention to, that by and large is not.

In my experience the area of marketing is the most important and least understood and least focused on area of small a business. Small business owners tend to focus on pretty much from most other areas of the business (the ones they find comfortable) except for the marketing.

You could have a business where you are lousy at people management, customer service, administration and even sales, but were outstanding at marketing, you could still survive. Granted it would be an ugly stress filled business, but surviving.

Marketing is much more than sticking an ad in the paper or Yellow Pages. You need to understand psychology and to be able to implement a measurable, evolving strategy.

An outstanding marketer knows that most of their ideas will fail, but also knows if they continue to implement, measure and test, they will find a marketing strategy that will blow the competition out of the water. That's the great thing about becoming committed to marketing, is that if you are prepared to fail enough, and keep going, you are guaranteed success!

The biggest mistake I see, is far too many small business owners making delegate responsibility for their marketing strategy to which ever sales representative walks through the door from the Yellow Pages or local radio or TV station. You need to understand that their motivation is to make their business successful, it is your responsibility to make your business successful.

Show Them How It's Done

I'm sure you will agree from the last post that measurement is essential for a successful small business. There are many things that can be measured, but they tend to fly under the radar because we are “too busy".

I always remember the story told by Jim Rohn, sadly departed but one of the world's best ever business coaches and mentors. He would paint the picture of the sales manager talking to a salesperson, and asking the salesperson how many sales calls he had made this week. The salesperson began with a reply "well…" And Jim would butt in and say “John, I don't need a story, that's why I made the box so small, so a story wouldn't fit, I just need a number".

I always get a giggle when remembering that story, and when I tell it to others you can bet any money they start to think that I should use that to measure my people's performance. And that's okay you can, but what if you were to use it for yourself.

As the leader of an organisation no matter how big or small, you should be leading from the front, and having your own scorecard, to ensure that you perform the essential daily, weekly and monthly tasks. It is of course significantly more effective in encouraging your team members to measure their performance, when you do it first

Invest more time measuring and less time worrying

How do you measure and test in your business?

I suspect that the majority of people reading this post, would not have formal measurement processes for many parts of their business. In fact in my experience, very few businesses measure anything at all, other than the level of the bank account.

The more I delve into this space, the more it seems essential to begin to formally measure various parts of the business. It turns out that many things, for example, parts of a marketing strategy, don't work the way we think they should. And strangely enough, when things are tested the results are often the exact opposite of both what we thought and our personal preferences.

As an example of this, a number of the world's top Internet marketers have done extensive measurement and testing on “ugly" websites that sell product versus “pretty" websites that sell product. And of course there are exceptions to the rule, but in the main, ugly websites, ugly sales letters and ugly video sales letters significantly outperform the prettier and more professionally produced websites, sales letters and video sales letters.

The challenging thing for most Business owners is that their ego gets in the way and they choose a website, for example, that they prefer themselves rather than testing and measuring to see which performs better.

This is just one example, but there are many areas of the small business that could and should be tested and measured to improve performance. A focus in these areas can often add thousands of dollars to the bottom line very quickly and with little to no expense. By just knowing your metrics and making a few simple tweaks and changes.

If it's not measured, it won't be managed.

How do you make your customers feel appreciated?

I want to tell you about a recent study I was reading about. The study was measuring the value of tips left by a restaurant patron. The 1st thing that was compared was the difference between delivering the bill to the patron, and delivering the bill along with a chocolate. The bill that included chocolate, increased the level of tip by 3%.

Interestingly enough, adding a 2nd chocolate, increased the level of tip to 14% higher than the Bill delivered by itself. The 3rd experiment had the waiter deliver the bill with a chocolate, then turn away from the table and begin to walk away, but then after a few steps, stop, return to the table and reach into their pocket, and add a 2nd chocolate for each patron. With the addition of this way of delivering the 2nd chocolate, tips increased by 23% compared to the Bill delivered with no chocolate.

So what can we glean from this study for your business?

This whole study reflects the power and strength of “the law of reciprocity". It shows that not only working out ways to thank and appreciate your customers with simple small gifts will enhance the customer experience, but also the way that those gifts are delivered can increase the perceived value considerably.

Take action and brainstorm with your team a number of ways to show your appreciation to your customers. Test each method to see which ones get the best response and use that as the control. Then make it a regular part of your team discussions to come up with new and better ways to show your appreciation to your customer for choosing you to do business with over your competition.

Using the law of reciprocity in your business.

You have probably heard the saying “givers gain". The basic premise of the law of reciprocity is, we tend to get back in life, what we give out.

It seems to be very common within most small businesses, that most of the decisions on how the customer is treated is based on what it will either cost or make for the business. Rather than what the customers experience will be, that will cause them return over and over, or walk away never to return.

There are many ways in small business that the law reciprocity can be used to build the customer base as well as profits. Get a team together and brainstorm as many ways as possible that we can create little gifts and/or positive experiences for the customers when ever they come in contact with the business. A great way to positively impact the customer is to create a series of high perceived value surprise bonuses, that I never talked about before the sale, but are just delivered as a surprise after the sale is made. This will come as a very unexpected positive experience to the customer, and because it is such a rare thing to happen, it will most definitely differentiate your business from your competitors.

This Mistake Will Cost You Valuable Sales

So, should we use pain or pleasure in our marketing message?

Well clearly the answer is both. It would be wise to remember that the majority of people are twice as likely to take action to avoid pain, than they are to gain pleasure. Effective marketing messages will always aggravate the problem the target market is already thinking about. But it can actually be counter-productive to your sales if you simply create additional fear with your marketing message, without giving a clear and concise, spelled-out, step-by-step process of actions to take for your customer to eliminate the fear or pain, or fix their problem.

Studies have shown that the majority of people, when presented with a message about imminent danger, will often block out that message, or consider it not about applicable to them, in the absence of the clearly spelled out steps to take to avoid the danger.

So remember to always include clearly defined action steps in any of your marketing messages that include a call to action.

More Or Less, This Is The Question

Is it better to give your customers more or less choice?

In previous posts I have mentioned that it is far more profitable to find new products for existing customers, than it is to find new customers for existing products. If you follow this line, you will obviously end up with extensive numbers of products. The challenge here is to make sure that you don't offer your customers all of these products at once through any of your marketing and advertising strategies.

It seems many business owners feel that it is better to offer their customers, or potential customers many choices, in an attempt to get them across the line and make a sale. The truth of the matter is, the more choices you offer the less sales you will make. People are funny animals, when presented with multiple choices, the predominant choice tends to be doing nothing at all.

Check out these numbers from a study done in a supermarket on a jam display. Tests were conducted over different times of the day, and different days of the week, where the display was changed from displaying either 6 Jams to taste test, or 24 Jams to taste test. The results were clear and astonishing. Whenever there were 24 jams on the display, only 3% of people made a purchase. When the display contained only 6 jams, 30% of taste testers purchased.

So whilst it is a good idea to be continually looking for new products for your existing customers, it is important that through your marketing and advertising messages you do not muddy the waters with too many choices.

How to be twice as productive, without going to a seminar!

If I were asked to do the world's shortest time management seminar, I would simply talk about words and language.

Around 20 years ago, when I 1st started listening to people like Anthony Robbins, I remember him saying that "nothing has any meaning other than the meaning we give it". What he was suggesting was that the words that we use, give what we are observing the meaning.

Over the many years that we have been running workshops and training, it is being common for me to tell people “change your words and you will change your life". This is never more true than any area of time management. You would have probably heard yourself say, as well as many others around you say “I didn't get time to do that" or 'I don't have time for this". Other derivations of these types of sayings could be “I ran out of time, or I didn't get a chance".

Unfortunately, believe it or not, everyone gets the same amount of time each day, it all comes down to the choices you make. So, here's my guarantee... If you will eliminate the types of words and phrases that I spoke about earlier, and replace them with phrases that put you back in control such as “I choose to do this, and I chose not to do that", you will start to take back control and feel significantly better, and best of all become unbelievably more productive.

Take this idea on a lightly at your peril. This could quite conceivably be some of the best personal and professional information that you could ever implement.

The Best Investment You Can Make!

In a recent book called “conquer the chaos" the authors suggest that if you are in small business they will be chaos. The secret is to reduce the huge amount of self-created chaos.

A simple discipline of a written plan every day can have a profound effect on how much self-created crisis can be eliminated. A secret for creating an effective daily action plan, to make sure the list doesn't contain more activities in the time available that day to complete them. Your daily action list should not be a storage facility, it simply create overwhelm which is not the most effective emotion.

It is important to have the right mindset about planning. Unfortunately many people see planning as “time spent". The truth if you are doing high-quality written daily plan is, that it is time invested. In fact every moment invested in high quality planning, or make every other moment in your day significantly more valuable.

How To Reduce Advertising Costs & Attract More "A" Class Customers

A couple of posts ago I put forward the suggestion that “it is more profitable to find new products for your existing customers, than it is to find new customers for your existing products". The reason for the suggestion is that the huge majority of small businesses tend to focus all of their effort into finding new customers. In the last 19 years, the cost of adding a new customer to a business has tripled. And the value that new customer brings to a business, over the lifetime of that customer, has halved.

So it should be obvious, that the Lions share of activity needs to be focused on strategies and actions to create additional and improved products and services for your existing customers.

By ensuring that your customer experience is consistently a WoW experience, and in addition, having a consistently promoted referral program, so you're very excited and appreciative customers are bringing new business in for you, you can significantly reduce ineffective marketing and advertising costs.

How To Get More Productivity Step-By-Step

Balance is the cornerstone to effectiveness. When most people think of balance they think of the balance between work and personal life. What I am focusing on in this particular blog post is achieving balance just in the work part of your life to gain maximum productivity.

Just as when you are looking at all of the areas of life, for example, physical, financial, family, social, work and personal development, to gain a work life balance, we can use the same approach to gain balance within just the work area of your life, to gain maximum productivity.

The 1st step you need to take with this process is to list the areas of your business you are responsible for. For example, sales management, managing the finances, marketing and promoting the business, training the team and so on. If you are a small business owner reading this you would probably be thinking “it would be nice if that's all I had to do". So there may be more areas that you need to take note of, but to get started simply look at the highest leveraged areas of the business that you are responsible for.

The 2nd step, is to write yourself an objective for each of these high leveraged areas of your business. Keep it simple here, create objectives or targets that can be accomplished within the next week or so, this way you learn "how to win". This is a better approach than setting massive big one year goals that end up causing overwhelm, and you will eventually throw this whole idea out the window.

The 3rd step, is to break down those objectives into action steps that can be taken within a 20 min or less time frame. Basically what you are doing here is breaking the big objective down into bite sized chunks.

The 4th step, is to commit to looking at the list of activities on a daily basis, and ensuring that at least one activity from your list of actions gets written onto your daily action list.

By following these for simple easy to implement steps, you will start to make massive productivity gains by having a more balanced approach to your day, rather than getting sucked into spending large chunks of time in just one area, causing other areas of your business to go unattended to and causing unnecessary crisis, that will take time out of your day that you could be investing in other business building activities.

Double Your Productivity

Seems like a big claim but, most people are far from effective as they don't have a high quality daily process to follow.

I have for almost 20 years used a paper based diary system for daily planning, and have from time to time tried electronic tools because I love gadgets, but I still find that the paper system is still far more effective and faster.

The biggest discover in recent times has been the idea of a "Personal Success Ritual"This is simply getting up early enough to get yourself into an environment that you cannot be disturbed in and getting yourself into the best place for high productivity and focus.

Begin by taking care of yourself physically with water with perhaps lemon to alkalise your system, ten start to either watch or read on a subject that gets you inspired. Obviously the ideal subjects are around business improvement.

After around 40-50 minutes of positive input into your mind then begin to plan the day. Because of what you have been exposed to earlier those actions will be a priority in your plan but the biggest benefit is having created a powerfully positive association to your plan you will be more motivated and focused and something would have to be incredibly important now distract you from your plan. As opposed to most people who can and do get distracted by the smallest of things.

How to ensure your customers are treated like VIP's, all of the time

It is simply amazing, the number of businesses I come in contact with, that really pay very little, if any, attention to the needs of the team members. There is an, all too common philosophy that says, "I pay them, that should be enough" Well is' not enough!

If you are serious about creating the best business you can, you need to know how to prioritise the 3 integral parts of a business, the owner, the team and the customer.

When asked "which of the 3 is the most important to the business?" the answer is almost always the customer. I beg to differ. I think the number one priority is the health, mental and emotional needs of the owner. If they are bringing their "a game" daily they make good decisions and become a great role model.

Next is the team. They need to have their emotional needs met. They need to feel that they are cared for, respected, appreciated and make a meaningful contribution to the team and business.

Third is the customer. Get the first 2 right and the customer will be treated like a VIP whether the boss is there to observe or not.

For additional ideas and resources check out the FREE articles here

How to dump bad customers and attract great ones.

Watch episode 2 of UHPTV on how to dump bad customers and attract great ones!... Plus have a laugh!

There Is Profit In Words

One of the most costly mistakes small business owner make with their marketing messages is using the words that they use, not the words their target customers use. Often this is "Jargon" that is mostly noticed in industries such as the I.T. or computer industry. But just because you aren't in that industry it doesn't mean you wont fall foul of this faux par.

You must have your radar working at all times when you are interacting with your customers and start to take notice of the words they use. I would suggest you create a file to capture words and phrases in and refer to this "swipe file" whenever you are putting a marketing message together.

For more ideas to find the hidden profits in your business check out the FREE ARTICLES at UncoverHiddenProfits.com

Save Huge Money With The Right Marketing Focus

Since 1983 till now the cost of recruiting a new customer to your business has increased by 300%. The amount this new customer spends in your business has reduced by 50% over the lifetime of the customer.

So an example could be if in 1983 the cost of getting a new customer was $10 and they spent, on average $250 with you your gross profit would be $240. Today getting that same customer would be $30 and they would only spend $125. Reducing your gross profit to only $95. A reduction of over 60% in gross profit, not to mention the addition time and frustration it takes to attract new customers today, with the incredible amount of "marketing noise" that exists that wasn't around 200 years ago.

So it make so much more sense to invest your time, effort and money in creating additional services and products to sell to existing customers than trying to get new customers to buy existing products and services

How to increase profits in just 3 minutes

Most small business owners are time poor, so we created UHP-TV to give the small business owner proven ideas to improve business and increase profits in just 3 minutes.

Enjoy it, pass it on, but most importantly, DO IT!

See you again soon with the next episode of UHP-TV