Oversubscribed: How to Get People Lining Up to Do Business with You

by Daniel Priestley

When you are selling something of high value like the implementation of a full and remarkable solution, consider selling it in staged components. Break the big commitment into a seri...

In 2016, Donald Trump shocked the world with his technical win based on the electoral college, not the popular vote. He had engaged data analytics companies to create a marketing campaign unlike anything the world had seen before. Using a loophole in Facebook, his controversial data marketing team at Cambridge Analytica were able to piece together vast amounts of data about voters and then deliver uniquely targeted campaigns to each voter based specifically on their existing views. For people who cared about guns, he ran ads about how his opponent was anti‐guns. For people who loved Hillary's Democratic opponent Bernie Sanders, Trump ran ads encouraging them not to bother voting at all. He focussed his money into the locations that mattered most based on the data and the likelihood of winning the most electoral college votes, not the popular vote. Data informed every decision about what to say to the people that would deliver him the White House.

Following Trump's victory, we will see a huge shift in marketing spends towards data and analytics. Big brands will adopt the approach of gathering as much data about people as they can and then hyper‐targeting their marketing messages to people based on their existing preferences. Eventually every marketing campaign will speak directly to the person who's seeing it.

REPLACE YOUR MARKETING BUDGET WITH A REMARKABLE BUDGET

Traditional marketing and advertising is not as important as it once was. What matters most, now and in the future, is having a product that is worth talking about.

The advertiser will pay to get you thinking – but you will probably buy the product that is the most “remarkable.”

When someone asks, “Who should I buy from?” it is your name that should come up. That's remarkable.

Your businesses must begin investing more money into your products and your customer service and less money into advertising and traditional forms of marketing. Oversubscribed businesses spend money on their existing customers before they spend money on their prospective ones. It seems counterintuitive – but if you get it right, your existing customers go out and do your marketing for you.

I would go as far as to say you should take at least 50% of your traditional marketing budget and transfer it to the “being remarkable” budget. If you do, your products will sell because other people w...

Marketing tools and techniques are powerful when it comes to getting things moving in the right direction, but the long‐term success of your business requires every touch point and every interaction you have with your...

Story

On social media, Richard Branson is followed by many millions of people, whereas Virgin is followed by just a few hundred thousand. Roughly speaking people feel 20 times more inclined to connect with a key person of influence than the brand.

Gone are the days when a company of any size can survive as a faceless corporation that exists as a set of logos, colours, symbols and sounds. Nowadays, fast‐growth brands are driven by the personalities that represent them.

Today people want to know who the founder is, the CEO's background and what sort of beliefs the leaders hold. Companies that become oversubscribed build and leverage the...

YOU ARE WHO GOOGLE SAYS YOU ARE

Staying oversubscribed long term requires you to pass the Google test many times each month. Your reputation is an asset more valuable than anything else you own; treat it as such. Develop it, grow it, enhance, improve and protect it; then watch the steady stream of dividends it provides.

Consider the way the engine of a car hums along. If you look closely, you notice that hum is a series of well‐timed revolutions. In the same way a business that is humming along is often a series of well‐timed campaigns.

Great companies – like Nike, Apple and Virgin, for example – all started and continue to thrive using campaigns.

Whether you're B2B or B2C or both, integrating a campaign methodology into your 12‐month plan will drive growth faster than you could imagine.

Examples: A repeatable weekly campaign for a health and fitness business I know is a boardroom of eight potential clients who attend a lunch and learn session that they host every Wednesday. A martial arts school I know has special white‐belt briefing sessions for ten parents each week before a class. A membership organisation has a 30‐day trial membership that starts every Friday for five new members.

The most powerful way to become oversubscribed is to be utterly remarkable in everything you do. Invest thousands of hours in becoming the most visible, valuable, noteworthy, raw talent in your industry. If you're at that level, you'll always be oversubscribed.

Activity What weekly baseline of activity is required to reach your goals? What quarterly spotlight campaigns could you run to engage your market? What big message do you want to share with people that is more important than what you sell?

PHASE 1 CAMPAIGN PLANNING: KNOW YOUR CAPACITY, WHO IT'S FOR AND WHEN YOU CAN DELIVER IT How many remarkable client relationships can you have? How many epic products can you sell? For how many hours can you deliver truly great work?

Knowing your real capacity is powerful. It's almost impossible to become oversubscribed if you don't know what your capacity is.

Unless you can understand this unmet need and what the problem is that you solve for your perfect client you can never generate such a client.

The thing that matters when it comes to capacity is your ability to leave people uplifted as a result of doing business with you.

What did you do to make your customers so happy? What ingredients go into leaving someone uplifted?

When you understand the ingredients for creating a delighted customer, you can then work backwards from there and calculate your current capacity to make someone feel that way.

WHO'S YOUR MARKET? Becoming oversubscribed is about finding a market that highly values you, has the capacity to pay you and that you want to serve.

This combination is important, even two out of three won't work.

Don't only settle for target customers; challenge yourself to look for some aspirational customers too. An aspirational customer not only loves what you do but also has the capacity to pay, and you love working with them. They also bring in new customers who trust their judgement too. An aspirational customer for a gym would be a fitness model. An aspirational customer for a branding agency would be a hugely respected brand. An aspirational customer for a business coach would be a fast‐growth tech company that regularly features in the media.

Activity: Who's your market? Who has the capacity to pay you? What would they highly value from you? What about these people makes you feel drawn to working with them? Who would be an example of an aspirational customer?

For this reason, you'll need to create at least two types of products: A product‐for‐prospects – Aimed at generating lots of happy customers, this product is a low‐risk way of having a first experience with your business. A core offering – A full and remarkable client relationship that evolves over time, reflects your core offering and solves a real problem for your client.

Your job is to keep focussing on creating a delighted customer. Crack the code on what constitutes value for them and how best to deliver that.

Stay curious and focussed on the reality of the situation. Don't see the world as you'd like it to be; see what's really going on and be willing to make changes until your customers leave feeling uplifted.

Activity What negative feedback does your business typically get? What less than positive things might people be saying behind your back? How could you change things so your business delights people?

THE REAL NUMBER Now you're looking at your business through different eyes. What's your current capacity to create a delighted client? I've done this activity with some people and their answer is zero. They currently do not have the capacity to leave anyone feeling delighted. The goal for their business is to get the capacity to make one person feel great about doing business with them. They need to innovate, repackage, change their prices or go looking for the right type of buyer.

So – what's your number? How many people do you have the capacity to delight in the year ahead?

When you break it down over the year, achieving your capacity number might require just two sales per week and 12 sales that come from a quarterly spotlight campaign.

Staying oversubscribed requires that you're constantly aware of your capacity and you are planning campaigns a year in advance so that you stay oversubscribed. You need to know how many customers you can delight and when you can delight them.

In order to achieve this goal, you need to be thinking ahead at all times. A powerful campaign needs time to build up momentum. If you don't allow enough time, there simply isn't e...

How many total clients do you want per year?

50 Clients across 2 games

Breaking it down, how many clients do you want per weekly campaign? (I only assume 46 weeks of the year will be productive.)

Roughly 1 client per week

How many clients do you want per quarterly campaign?

3 per quaterly tournament = 12 total

Isn't it interesting that when you break it down it feels more empowering to most people to know that their business will be oversubscribed if they can keep up with those targets rather than the endless game of chasing “one more client.”

CREATE A CAMPAIGN THEME

The ads barely mention Chipotle and they don't talk about Mexican food at all. These ads have had tens of millions of views on YouTube and are shared millions of times on social media; this would never have happened if they had talked about their products.

Oversubscribed businesses more often talk about something bigger than what they do. They talk about the lifestyle of their customers, they talk about philosophy, they talk about a big problem they want to solve or they talk about the transformation they want to see in the world.

You must look for the bigger game your business is playing for and beat the drum for it in your campaigns. It's far more compelling for you and for your customers to get involved in a big game than simply focussing on the basic products and services you sell.

Making Poker Fun again

In a famously effective Nike campaign, Michael Jordan talks about all his failures. He talks about all the times he failed and how it cost his team the game. He explains that failure is a big part of success. There's no mention of the shoes or the clothes, in fact the Nike brand doesn't appear at all in that commercial (only the Air Jordan logo). Steve Jobs reinvented Apple with the “Think Different” campaign. He championed “misfits and rebels” and reminded us that it's the people who are “crazy enough” who change the world. It was an idea that was much bigger than hard drives, processor speeds and RAM. Every business, yours included, is up to something big in the world and you need to be bold enough to share it. It takes courage to stop shouting about your products and to start talking about your big ideas, but it's worth it.

MAKE A STEVE JOBS TYPE - COMMERCIAL Which talks about - MAKING POKER FUN