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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.

After two wonderful years helping Monarch Title create a top-rated radio show - and grow from two to eight locations - I’m returning to private practice as a business author, speaker and consultant.

The name of my new company, The Customer Factory, speaks to a conclusion I have reached after 33 years running and helping small companies: Consistently high levels of sales are not achieved accidentally, but systematically.

Every successful business owner I have met has a clear marketing and sales plan, and they work that plan consistently to achieve their goals. I call these strategies Customer Factories and I have seen them pumping out profits in companies of every description nationwide.

The Mystery of Marketing is much like the Mystery of The Pyramids. You don’t need help from extraterrestrials, only a clear plan, commitment to investing the necessary resources, and a willingness to perform simple tasks again and again to achieve incredible results.

I’ll create the plan. Are you ready to do the rest? Call me at 703-401-3170 to find out.

Have you ever looked at your business like a franchise?

In other words, have you considered what it would take to replicate everything you do in such a way that complete strangers could operate an exact copy of your firm in a distant city with only a few weeks training and an operations manual?

If you haven’t, maybe you should. It’s an instructive exercise, one recommended by Michael Gerber in The E Myth which will be reviewed in a separate posting.

One man who took this exercise to its logical extreme was Ray Kroc, who saw the success the McDonald brothers were having with their small hamburger stand in San Bernadino, California and dreamed of duplicating it across the country and around the world.

The story of how Kroc happened upon the McDonalds and how McDonald’s grew into a global business over the ensuing decades is chronicled from two different perspectives in two great books, both of which I highly recommend you read.

Grinding It Out is Ray Kroc’s autobiography. In it he talks about his childhood and his background selling paper cups for 17 years (yikes!) before acquiring the rights to market a machine called the Multi-Mixer which could produce 5 milkshakes simultaneously. When he received an order for four Multi-Mixers to be delivered to a single small restaurant (who needs to make 20 milshakes at once?), he decided he’d better take a closer look for himself - maybe he could help his other customers sell more milkshakes and himself sell more Multi-Mixers.

The throngs of people lining up to buy hamburgers, french fries and sodas from a single window through the front wall of the store at noon that day changed his plans completely. He no longer wanted to sell Multi-Mixers, he wanted to sell McDonald’s restaurants. The rest, as they say, is history.

While Grinding It Out is a lightly romanticized telling of the famous McDonald’s story from Kroc’s perspective, McDonalds Behind The Arches takes a more dispassionate approach to the tale and offers a more even-handed description of Kroc, warts and all. The stories of disputes with franchisees and the problems Kroc had with the McDonald brothers are told from an outsider’s perspective. Interestingly though, both books tell most of the stories the same way - just in different voices and, in the case of Behind The Arches, in much greater detail.

I loved both of these books and recommend you read the shorter Grinding It Out first. Pardon the pun but when you finish that one you’ll be hungry for much more information on how a single restaurant was transformed into the biggest food service business in the world. At that point, McDonald’s Behind The Arches will really hit the spot.

I never cease to be surprised and disappointed by business owners who avoid the whole topic of marketing.

At a recent business meeting I attended, six owners of a franchised financial services company sat around the table discussing issues of common interest: production, marketplace conditions, human resources challenges, etc.

They spoke excitedly, engaging with each other on topics that clearly were important and interesting to them.

But when a topic regarding business development was raised, the room went silent. Even though every person in the room could personally profit from the plan being outlined, none were interested in discussing it.

The exact reason why is shrouded in mystery but I can tell you that I have seen similar behavior at other companies many times over the years. When it comes to sales and marketing, most business people just don’t want to talk about it.

Common reasons include ignorance, disdain for anything “sales” oriented, a desire not to ask stupid questions and so forth. But I truly believe the biggest reason why they don’t want to talk about it is because they just don’t care. They just want to handle the nuts and bolts of their businesses and leave revenue increases to divine providence.

This lack of what I call a Marketing Mindset is prevalant throughout most small businesses. In my 30+ years I have seen little change on this front and so anticipate that little ever will.

The lesson to entrepreneurs: Get yourself into the Marketing Mindset. Study everything you can about marketing and sales. Role-model after companies in your industry who excel in these areas. Nothing can have a more beneficial and immediate impact on your business than increased sales. Get with the program!

In my book on the sales profession, The Greatest Job You Never Thought Of, I listed five reasons why I believe most people avoid sales as a career path.

Each is a fear the person holds, such as fear of rejection or fear of talking to strangers.

One of the biggest roadblocks is the fear of being labeled “A Salesman.” It needn’t be.

It’s true that salesmen are perceived as pushy people who talk too much and don’t care a whit for the needs or desires of their customers. They just want to “sell” something so they can stuff more cash in their pockets.

There are salesmen (and women) who deserve this perception, though with each passing year fewer and fewer are able to make a living because of the increasing sophistication of the buying public. For the most part, that approach just doesn’t work anymore.

If that’s the case, what’s a salesman to do? If you can’t push someone into making a buying decision, how are you going to sell anything?

Zen Selling

You never push. You don’t have to.

You only communicate - in person - with people who have been qualified as having a genuine need for your valuable offering. These people already have a general idea of the value of your solution (through consistent marketing or advertising messages) and have asked to learn more.

You don’t talk, you listen; asking questions to understand your prospect’s unique needs.

You don’t spit out a pitch full of features, functions, benefits. Confident in the depth of your product knowledge - and your offering’s ability to successfully solve your tightly-targeted market’s problem - you calmly explain how you can help and how alternative courses of action would not yield the same outcome.

If the prospect chooses not to select your offering, you thank them for their time, learn what you can from the experience and calmly move on to the next qualified pre-qualified appointment, confident that this “no” just got you closer to your next “yes.”

If the prospect does choose to become your customer, you make sure that the expectations you created for them about your offering are fulfilled, creating so much satisfaction and confidence on their part that they happily send repeat and referral business your way.

At the end of the purchasing process, your prospect is truly glad that they chose to speak with you about their problem, and chose your offering as the correct solution.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Selling is not something you do TO someone, it’s something you do FOR someone: connecting their need with your solution.

And those who do it best, persuading the fish to jump into the boat, are richly rewarded - not in the hereafter but right here during!

Live long and prosper Grasshopper.

How do you take someone from “Never heard of you,” to “Here’s my check”? Systematically.

Unfortunately, most small businesses have no specific approach to marketing - systematic or otherwise. To them Marketing is a mystery and Sales is a dirty word. Not only do they not understand the process, they don’t like it! And don’t want to be associated with anything that even smells of “self-promotion.”

If we’re not talking about your business, this might make for an interesting philosophical conversation: Why would someone invest thousands of dollars and all of their valuable time into something they didn’t know how to promote? How could they be so good at the nuts-and-bolts of their business, and so willing to outsource accounting and other functions that they’re not as good at, but completely ignore or avoid the most important success factor of every business?

Two reasons: Fear and Ignorance.

In my book on the sales profession I outline five reasons why people avoid sales as a career. All five boil down to fear, including the fear of talking to strangers, the fear of rejection and the fear of being labeled a “salesman.” An additional problem for entrepreneurs is that they are often ignorant of even the most basic marketing principles and so avoid trying anything that might make them look foolish if it doesn’t work.

These are legitimate concerns, but they must be overcome if an entrepreneur is to succeed. If you think your business can launch and grow without a complete and consistent answer to the question “How are we going to sell this stuff?” you are mistaken.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Learn all you can about marketing and sales and proceed confidently. If somebody tells you “you sound like a salesman,” tell them “Thank you very much!”

In my previous posting I listed the Six Disciplines of Small Business Mastery, the first and most important of which is What Do You Want From Life?

This is a deep, existential question that most of us avoid - often because we’re afraid of learning the answer. But, if you are planning on creating a business that will fulfill your personal, financial, familial and even spiritual objectives, you have to first define those objectives.

Going from the ephemeral to the quantifiable, let’s start with how much money you want to make. I like starting with money because it represents a hard number we can all put our arms around and often everything else quickly becomes clearer once we put a stake in the ground here.

In starting your own business, are you simply looking to replace your current income as a salaried employee or are you hoping to create enormous wealth for yourself? I’ve always worked with a nice round number like $100,000 per year or $20,000 per month. I like these because they give me specific targets I can measure my performance against on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Once you’ve decided how much money you need to make, choosing a business to pursue becomes a little easier. You might want to open a little gift shop on the corner but you’ll never make $20,000 a month there. Narrow down your choices to just those things than can fulfill your financial goals within the next five years.

Next, are you planning on starting a growth business or a lifestyle business? Your average storefront or franchise is a lifestyle business where you are tied directly and physically to the premises and workflow on a daily basis and so can’t take long vacations or open multiple locations. A growth business is one where you have a new idea or a unique take on an existing industry and plan to grow it locally, regionally nationally or even worldwide. Here you may work 100 hours per week for 3 years in the hope of selling out for millions or eventually going public.

In either case, it’s important to start from the end and consider how and for how much you might sell your business in the future. Are you building up equity or have you simply purchased yourself a job that will expire when you turn out the lights? These are tough, but important questions.

Finally, what do you really want to be doing on a daily basis? If you know of a line of work that fascinates and fulfills you, it won’t seem like work at all. On the other hand, if you buy a franchise doing something you’ve never done before and it turns out you hate it, life is going to suck. And it will continue to suck until you find another sucker to take your place.

The lesson for entrepreneurs: Don’t even THINK about starting a small business before you have answered the questions above. They aren’t easy, but they are essential to building a business that will support the life you want for yourself and your family.