Secrets to Success
Secrets to Success
Your personal corporation
Part one in a series of five Whether you're a business owner, a professional or a proud employee of an organization -- you have what I call "your own personal corporation." The more you do to effectively market your "personal corporation" (your skills, the benefits you bring to your job, etc.) the more you'll gain in benefits and rewards.These principles will give you a fresh perspective on marketing. You'll begin to see what you may have been doing wrong, what you've been doing right, and what you need to do differently in order to get exponential results from every single marketing effort you make.
At the base of all successful marketing strategies are personal relationships. The goal of any marketing is to build long-term relationships with your clients and ethically draw on these relationships to sell them as many beneficial products and services as possible. In effect, what you are doing when you follow this principle is you are building a "marketing funnel" that channels you an ongoing stream of new and repeat sales along with ongoing and self-replicating profits.
Before we get rolling, let me just stop here and state three points very clearly. If you want these 12 principles to work successfully you must master the following prerequisites:
1. You must know specifically what your clients want/need and you must have a proven product or service that provides a solution to current challenges.
2. Once you know exactly what your clients' needs are, you must focus exclusively on those needs (not your own).
3. You must service your clients much better than any of your competitors.
If you are willing to build on these three fundamental prerequisites, I guarantee you'll be more profitable.
Now let's look at the first two of the 12 principles.
1. All of your business, all of your marketing, all of your profits depends on your clients.
While this may seem obvious, if you consider the failure rate of businesses today, the only thing that is obvious is that most businesses don't fully understand and appreciate this principle. The true function of any successful business is to sell people precisely what they want to buy. Put another way, clients really don't care about you or your business. All they care about is how you can make their lives easier or better. They want results. They want their needs met. They don't want to give you their hard earned money unless you can give them a legitimate reason why they would benefit by doing business with you over your competitor.
2. Your company must have a specific theme -- your ESA.
Your ESA is your "essential selling advantage." It is a statement of the specific advantages you bring to your clients that set you apart from your competitors. Your ESA is always stated in terms of the benefits your company delivers to your clients. In addition to four other profit-maximizing benefits that you'll gain directly from a clearly crafted ESA, the fifth benefit is very basic but nonetheless important. The fifth benefit you get when you develop your ESA is that it helps you clarify the precise nature of your business. This article series is based on the course book, "Small Business, BIG Profits," a high impact, low cost marketing program for the small business owner.
John-Paul Micek is a small business strategist
and chief operating officer at RPM Success Group.
Reach him at JPM@RPMsuccess.com
or toll-free at (888) 334-8151.