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

by Daniel Priestley

At the very least, talk about the outcomes and benefits that you can bring rather than the product itself.

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My company Dent talks about the importance of becoming a key person of influence; this clear outcome is more interesting than the services and training that we provide in order to achieve it.

Don't expect people to get excited by the commodity you sell.

The best and longest‐lasting campaigns centre on purpose. The reason you began your business or chose to work on the team you are part of isn't only about the money. You're doing what you do because you believe there's more to it than just the cash.

MAKING POKER FUN AGAIN

If you can get other people to believe what you believe they will want to be part of what you do too. The key is to talk about something bigger than what you do.

Activity Why are you passionate about your business beyond the money? How can you make others feel that way too? What themes would engage your customers that have nothing to do with the literal aspects of what you sell?

🌟🌟 Make Good Content - even if it has nothing to do with Poker

CREATE A CAMPAIGN TIME LINE When you know the number of campaigns you intend to run, you need to break them down even further into a campaign time line and divide each campaign into its components: The start date and finish date of each campaign The communications schedule – emails, direct mail, press releases, advertising and so on

Main events – entertainment, seminars, launch parties, grand opening and so on Sales meetings – one‐to‐one presentations, follow‐up calls and so on

Post‐campaign activity – telling the stories, reporting results, follow‐up, thank‐you messages

All of these components need to be placed on a time line. It might be monthly for small campaigns or a six‐month schedule for bigger ones. My approach is to create campaign time lines on big poster paper or on a large whiteboard. Our team works together to fill in as much detail as we can. We mark in every single email, every meeting, all the webinars, every advertisement, every Facebook post and every sales meeting. When we're done, we take a photo of it and send it to our graphic designer who creates our campaign time line. We print it out on a poster and put it up on the office wall so that we can mark off each milestone every day.

What is your core offering for clients? What's your product‐for‐prospects to attract customers? How many clients will make your business oversubscribed for the year ahead? How many campaigns will you run in the year ahead? How many clients do you need to generate per campaign?

PHASE 2 BUILD‐UP: WARMING UP THE MARKET WHILE SENDING AND COLLECTING SIGNALS

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People take time to warm up to a buying decision. They typically don't just hear about something new for sale and purchase it right away. They need time to learn, trust, explore and get ready to act. The build‐up phase respects this about people and creates a journey of signalling to your market and collecting signals back from your market before you ask for any firm commitments.

THE POWER OF SIGNALLING The Glastonbury Music Festival is considered to be an institution in the music scene. The festival has run for more than 30 years and attracts more than 120,000 people each year, who mostly camp out for the four‐day event. Selling 120,000 tickets sounds like a mammoth task and yet they manage to do it every year in a matter of minutes. They have it down to a fine art and it involves a lot of signalling. If you are a hopeful attendee the first thing you need to do is signal your interest by pre‐registering for tickets. You'll then get an email from the organizers with an overview of the rules and guidelines for buying tickets, as well as the date tickets will go on sale. They then ask you how many tickets you intend to buy. You log into their website and signal that you will want up to a maximum of six tickets, and they reply that you'll be given a short window of time to buy them on the release date.

A week before release, they name the exact time and date the tickets will be available. They openly share that over 350,000 tickets are pre‐registered, but that they'll only issue 120,000. They remind you that all tickets are usually sold in under 30 minutes from the release time. They also inform you that at this point you will not even be told the names of the bands that will be playing – you'll have to buy your tickets blind. They tell you that in the months after you buy your ticket they will be releasing the line‐up of bands that will be performing at the festival for you. If you're unhappy with the bands, you'll have another window of time to give up your tickets and get a refund. This will also be the small window of time (about five minutes) for people who missed out to buy any tickets that were relinquished. This sounds like an awful lot of trouble, doesn't it? Why can't you just buy a ticket when you want to? Why can't they tell you who the bands are and then you can buy a ticket if you want one? Why can't you get a refund whenever you like? Why can't the organisers stress out all year hoping you buy when you're ready rather than making you follow their plan?

The answer to all of these questions is because the organisers of “Glasto” aren't silly. They know how to stay oversubscribed, and signalling is a big part of it.

Signalling is about telling people what's going to happen before it happens. It's about explaining your process and your terms in advance so that the market can prepare itself. It is also about getting your market to signal its intentions back...

During the build‐up phase, a campaign‐driven enterprise isn't hoping to sell some products; it's strategically ensuring that the product will be oversubscribed when the time comes to make sales.

DON'T ASK FOR THE SALE – ASK FOR THE SIGNAL

Most companies market their core products for sale. They don't ask for signals and they don't have products for prospects. If they have a widget to sell, they run an ad asking people to buy the widget. If they can take on more clients, they phone people and ask if they want to become a client. This rarely results in people rushing in to buy – and it won't ever get a business oversubscribed.

Rather than asking people to buy, ask them to signal interest. Let them know that there will be a widget for sale soon and if they are interested in more information, can they please email a request or fill in an expression of interest form. This is a much lower commitment for people. Rather than having to get their credit card out right ...

I've tested this many times and the results always excite me – even when I know what to expect. When you ask people to buy straight away they only have two choices: they buy or they don't. It's a binary decision. But people aren't binary. What if someone is 90% ready to buy? They are interested in what you have to offer and would probably purchase if they could just sort out one or two things. If you give them a decision to buy or not to buy, the binary choice forces them to not buy. This means hundreds of people might see your offer, be very interested but not 100% ready to buy and you simply don't know that they are interested. You'll get a better picture if you ask people to signal their interest. People who are only 10% interested in what you have might still signal their interest to you. Once they've done so, you can make sure they have all the information they need. Or perhaps sig...

A big part of becoming oversubscribed involves asking people for signals rather than sales. You need the patience to signal your intentions to the market and then ...

THINK MOBILE AND MEDIA ASSETS FIRST The first one to five interactions people have with your business are likely to be on their mobile device in the form of media or content.

Of course, they are distracted by other things while they're doing it.

It only takes a split second for them to start reading another tweet, Facebook post, search result, song, map, email, game or movie. This means that if you don't get your signalling right for a mobile device, you probably won't win the business beyond that.

Giving frequent updates that connect with people Using location‐relevant content

In the build‐up phase of your campaign you need an arsenal of well‐planned digital assets ready to deploy to people's primary device – their phone.

EDUCATE AND ENTERTAIN You've signalled your intentions to the market. You've asked them to signal back with their interest and they have done so. It's not yet time to ask for the sale. Now you have a captive audience of interested people, your job is to educate and entertain them until they are totally comfortable with the idea of buying from you.

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Entertainment is a powerful way to do this. It can build rapport, connection and pique emotions. Sport, music, art, food, drinks, humour, introductions, fashion, theatre and the like are your tools for entertaining your prospective clients during the build‐up phase.

Education is powerful too. It builds trust, understanding and engagement. Trainings, seminars, webinars, workshops, manuals, reports, statistics, thought leadership, guidance, consultation and measurem...

However, be cautious when combining entertainment and education together. Trying to do these things at the same time in equal measure is rarely successful and can go badly if served in the wrong doses. Imagine if they stopped the men's tennis final at Wimbledon to give everyone a tennis lesson. That would be weird.

The best formula is to combine these two using the 80–20 rule.

You should aim for 80% education mixed with some light entertainment at the edges.

Your ultimate goal is to turn people who are interested in working with you from “maybe I would” to “I'd love to.” That goal can take time: seven hours, to be specific.

“7‐11‐4”ING BUILDS DESIRE

As discussed, big decisions take about seven hours, 11 interactions or four separate locations or sources of information until a sense of trust is built.

During those seven hours, 11 interactions and four locations people establish their criteria, look for relevance, develop an emotional connection and build trust, rapport and understanding.

Then something magical happens. You get sick of thinking about it and you're ready to make a decision.

So how will this help you become oversubscribed? If you sell something to which a purchaser is required to have an emotional connection, develop trust or gain a new understanding – and if he or she must make a significant decision – you would be silly to try to force the deal to complete sooner than seven hours. Japanese businessmen know this. They will rarely talk business until after a round of golf or two. It can actually blow the deal to bring up the to...

Even in the high‐stakes environment of a hostage situation, research from FBI negotiators claims people are six times more likely to agree...

During the build‐up phase you want to have plenty of ways to connect with people. You want to send thoughtful emails that have relevant information, you want videos people can watch, podcasts people can listen to, events people ca...

At each step, you want to give people an easy way that they can signal thei...

It could be as simple as asking people to drop you an email, put their business card into a bowl or fill in a basic form. As you entertain and educate your market, pay careful attention to...

None of this matters if you are selling something trivial that a person doesn't need to learn about. It also doesn't matter if you're happy to compete purely on price with tiny margins. But when you want to offer something new or important and you want to be fairly rewarded, the 7‐11‐4 rule is vital. Expect your interest...

Your goal is to clock up seven hours with as many people as possible using your tools of entertainment and education. You don't want to do this in a creepy, annoying or pestering way. You want people to want to spend seven hours with you. Maybe you host great parties, maybe you chair industry meetings or maybe you take people out for coffee once a month. As long as people like spending time with you it won't be time wasted.

BRAINS DON'T KNOW IT'S DIGITAL Social media and digital technology enable you to leverage this process even more. If people read your blogs, follow your tweets, watch your online videos, listen to your podcast, click through your slides or flick through your photos, it's as good as sitting face‐to‐face. Strangely, the human brain can't distinguish between digital media and real life. We feel sad when a celebrity dies, even though we never met them in real life because digital interactions such as media or text triggers the same response as moments of connection in person. Celebrity endorsements are effective because of the seven‐hour rule. You are seeing someone familiar, whom you have most likely spent seven hours watching, recommending a product. Companies who use celebrity endorsements are effectively leveraging the seven‐hour relationships that have already happened.

Their research indicates that it takes an average of 11 ZMOTs, or touch points, in order to build up trust with someone. They advocate that a lot of these touch points can be digital content with the same effect.

Selling your core offering is the ultimate goal; but in order to be oversubscribed on that offering you'll need to educate and entertain people for seven hours, 11 interactions or four locations. The fast‐track approach to getting a strong signal from your market while also clocking up time and interactions with them is to sell products‐for‐prospects. These are products designed to be given cheaply or freely in order to achieve the goal of educating or entertaining people. A book is a product‐for‐prospects; an audio podcast is a product‐for‐prospects and a software download, a sample, a workshop, a diagnostic, a report, a party, tickets to a game, merchandise or apparel could all be products‐for‐prospects.

🌟🌟 Podcasts and Lead Generators are clocking up time with the potential clients

Your business will sell more of its core offering if you produce more products‐for‐prospects too. It's a simple activity: your job is to create scalable products that help to educate or entertain your market.