Radio Free Enterprise

Real estate is a topic that almost everyone has an interest in.

Even if you don’t currently own any property, you probably want to. And even veteran real estate investors, lenders and agents are always looking to expand their knowledge of this complex and fascinating subject.

A great source for real estate information is the Open House with Jerry Boutcher podcast and its accompanying searchable text knowledge base. Jerry Boutcher is CEO of Monarch Title and possibly the most authoritative voice on residential real estate in the entire country.

I have known Jerry since we were classmates at George Mason University in the early 1980s and have been working with him since 2004. As part of that working relationship it was my great pleasure to serve as the creator, producer and co-host of 83 episodes of Jerry’s weekend real estate radio show, Open House with Jerry Boutcher.

Clicking on the headline above will take you to over 60 hours of the most insightful discussion of residential real estate you can imagine. Whether you’re trying to buy a property, sell a property, find financing, write a contract - you name it - the answers to your questions can almost certainly be found there.

I often tell people that everything I know about residential real estate I learned from listening to Open House with Jerry Boutcher. Why don’t you join me? You’ll find out why the number one organic listing (out of over 10,000,000 pages) for the search term “Real Estate Podcast” is Jerry’s show.

The final step in The Customer Factory marketing model is pulling the trigger - and continuing to pull it for as long as you own your business.

While some Customer Factories begin driving sales right away, most take a little time to begin generating measurable results. You have to keep pouring the coal to your plan until you start seeing them.

Just as importantly, you can’t stop working your plan just because your plan begins to work. Many business owners make the mistake of pulling back their marketing energies and resources because sales are doing very well. You can’t predict when the next downturn will arrive and by the time it does it may be too late to get the wheels of your Customer Factory turning again in time to avoid a significant slump.

Successful businesses not only create effective marketing plans, they also implement them, continuously.

Why do you think you continue to see television ads and infomercials for Video Professor? Because the Professor’s indirect-response marketing assembly line continues to persuade thousands of people every month to order a free computer training disk “for just the cost of shipping.” His Customer Factory works and he’s working it for the long haul.

A big success factor in Step 4 is tracking your results. You must set a baseline of what your sales and sales sources were before you flipped the switch on your Customer Factory and how they change over time. Your front-line salespeople and order forms must explicitly ask customers how they came to you. Coupons, mail-back cards, toll-free numbers and web sites must all be coded to track lead sources.

If this all sounds like a lot of work - well, it can be, especially when you’re first setting up your system. But this investment of time and energy up front also allows many successful business owners to travel the world while tracking their daily results remotely through the Internet.

How’s that for a successful outcome?

Step 3 in The Customer Factory marketing model is choosing the right tools, and plugging them into your production process in the correct order to maximize their effectiveness.

The tools I’m referring to are the myriad ways you can touch your prospect’s conciousness with your offering: direct mail, web sites, telephone calls, personal visits, live events, radio and television spots, print collateral material, trade show exhibits, billboards, ad specialty items, email, door hangers, etc.

Of the four steps in The Customer Factory model, this is the one that most business owners mistakenly believe they understand.

Their mistaken belief is that a web site or brochure can work on its own to generate sales. They will often spend thousands of dollars on design and production only to find that their web site or print piece “just sort of lays there,” doing nothing. Nobody sees it so nobody reacts to it by placing an order.

These marketing tools can only be effective as part of an overall plan, a system, a marketing production process (see Step 2). Just like a great running back without a strong offensive line and creative play caller, a brochure left to its own devices will never score a touchdown. But a strong team, working together with each player taking care of their own job, can move mountains.

Let me give you an example. Procraft of Virginia, the home improvement company which was the basis for my book The Greatest Job You Never Thought Of, runs spots on radio and TV, they place large display ads in newspapers and they exhibit at home and garden shows. Prospects responding to these messages call a toll-free number to schedule an appointment for a free estimate. Operators ask the callers a series of qualifying questions and schedule sales calls with qualified prospects. Salespeople meet with the qualified prospects, make presentations, provide free estimates and close contracts.

These tools (radio and TV spots, newspaper ads, trade show exhibits, call center, sales team, sample packages and pitch books) plugged into this system generate millions of dollars in annual revenue. Success is tracked at every step and the process is continually refined to maximize results. Nothing is done outside of a plan. Nothing is left to chance. This is a Customer Factory.

Which tools you choose and how you configure them into your marketing production process is entirely dependent upon your unique situation, your industry, your comptetion, your customer design and your budget. One way to begin to understand what will work for you is to study what is working for you most successful competitors. If all of the top companies in your industry exhibit at trade shows, maybe you should too. If they all use direct sales teams, maybe you should too. If they all use direct mail, maybe you should as well.

Your marketing production process does not need to be as involved as Procraft’s in order to be effective. The main point you should take away from this posting is that any single tool is impotent on its own. It has to be part of an intelligent process with other players upstream and downstream of it, working in unison to communicate your offering to your target market and drive them to buy.

If you’ve successfully completed Step 1 of The Customer Factory marketing model (Designing Your Customer), you’re now ready to Pick Your Production Process, ie. choose your marketing production line.

There are a number of very productive processes to choose from such as retailing, contracting, direct sales, direct-response marketing, manufacturers’ representatives, e-commerce, wholesaling, tradeshow marketing, indirect-response marketing, etc.

The point here is to choose the process that best suits your firm, your industry, your personal objectives and your customer design, and start building an assembly line which will systematically move members of your targeted market from stranger to suspect to prospect to customer.

Let’s say you’ve started marketing cookies made from your own secret recipe. Should you sell them door-to-door (direct sales) or pitch them to local groceries and specialty shops (wholesaling)? Maybe you think you could sell them directly to consumers via direct mail and local cable insert ads (direct response marketing).

Even if, like the cookie baker, you have multiple potential production lines, you must first choose one and focus all of your attention, energies and resources on it, foresaking all others. You can revisit the others later and perhaps add a second assembly line to your overall Customer Factory.

When you’re just starting out you need to pick what you believe will be your most productive assembly line and pour the coals to it!

The first of my Four Simple Steps to Lasting Business Success is: Design Your Customer.

In standard marketing parlance this is referred to as targeting your market.

Offering a specific solution to a group of people who share a common need is a fundamental business principle. So why is it resisted by so many entrepreneurs? Because they feel it limits their potential marketplace. “If I only target this small group of people,” their logic goes “I’ll be passing up a huge number of others.” Sounds right. Dead wrong.

First off, in a marketplace as huge as the United States, you only need a small fraction of a percentage point of the total population in your customer list to make a fortune.

Secondly, you don’t have the marketing budget to successfully plant your message in the minds of millions of people (unless you’re Coke or Xerox or Toyota or…).

Finally, and most importantly, this small group of people who share a need that you can fill, a problem that you can solve, want to hear from you about your solution and are highly motivated to buy - now!

This is why Designing Your Customer has to be step one in your Customer Factory. Before you can even consider what your marketing message should say or how you should say it, you must first determine to whom you will be speaking - your target audience.

Defining Your Target Audience

And how do you define your target audience? How do you design your customer?

If you are already in business and have been for a year or more, the answer is simple: take a look at your current customer list and pull out the 20% of your clients who bring in 80% of your revenue. Where are they located? What do they buy form you? Why do they buy from you? How do they buy from you? What industries do they represent? What characteristics do they share in terms of size, demographics, economics, etc.

By going through the exercise of answering these questions you will quickly see some patterns emerge. The bottom line is that the customers you profit from the most are the ones that you can serve the best. And your examination of your top customers will tell you what you’re doing so well for them.

After creating a prototype of your Dream Customer, visit a web site like InfoUSA.com and run a search to see how many companies or consumers match that profile within a five-mile radius of your location. You’ll be surprised by the answer.

And, if you market to the whole country via direct mail, direct response and/or the Internet, you’ll be flat-out amazed how many prospects you can connect with - even in that smaller group who have an immediate itch that your offering scratches.

Conclusion

There’s no point in even turning the lights on at your Customer Factory until you’re clear about what kind of customers you’re looking to produce. Designing your customer first will make the next three steps a great deal more straightforward.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my 30+ years of entrepreneurial experience have lead me to the conclusion that the companies who succeed most rapidly are those that take a systematic approach to sales and marketing.

I call those systematic marketing programs Customer Factories and the mission of my new company is to show all business owners how to build Customer Factories of their own which will produce dependable, growing sales results for years to come.

The Customer Factory is not a new marketing technique. It is simply a new way of looking at existing successful marketing programs by employing a well-known model: an assembly-line factory.

Since most business owners are confused by marketing (Marketing is a Mystery and Sales is a Dirty Word) I thought it would be useful to distill the whole process down to what I call:

Four Simple Steps To Lasting Business Success

1. Design Your Customer

2. Pick Your Production Process (Your Marketing Assembly Line)

3. Tool It Up

4. Turn It On

In subsequent postings I will explain each of these steps in further detail. In the meantime, be thinking about the most successful companies in your industry and the marketing techniques they are employing. I think you’ll see their entire plan come into clear focus as you learn more about The Customer Factory model.