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

by Daniel Priestley

Ideally, you also want to create a product‐for‐prospects that helps you to learn more about your clients too.

You might want their contact details or to better understand their needs. An elegant product‐for‐prosp...

My first business thrived because we crafted the perfect introduction workshop. Our core offering was a three‐month training programme but we never marketed the training programme directly. Instead we promoted a two‐hour preview event. We would get an average of 70 people coming to the preview ...

A few years later I got into the mattress business and applied the same strategy. We hosted a weekly dinner event about sleep and wellness. We shared insights into how important the health benefits of good sleep are, what stops good sleep and how the right sleep environment supports deeper sleep. At the end of the present...

Consider how confident you'd feel if you had capacity to take on 10 clients per month and you had 250 people a month at your products‐for‐prospects preview workshop. Consider how you'd feel if you had 25 times more people giving you their details and expressing interest than you could even look after as ...

NAMING YOUR TERMS One of the most powerful signals is naming the terms under which you will be doing business in the future. Naming your terms sends a powerful signal.

It's about setting standards and expectations in advance of a sale. “If you want to work with us, you need to behave a certain way” is the message a confident business gets across. You'll need to state whom you work with, how many people you can serve and on what terms you'll work with them. When you see a business naming its terms, you know it is on track to be oversubscribed. An oversubscribed restaurant might do things like stating its dress code, policy on bringing children, or right to rebook your table if you're not on time.

Is this something they do after they are oversubscribed or something they do in order to become oversubscribed? My belief is that you'll never become oversubscribed if you're not willing to name your terms. People like to know you have certain standards. They feel reassured that you turn some people away and that you're protective about who's part of your business.

Especially towards the end of the build‐up phase, it's particularly effective to start talking about your criteria, standards and terms for being considered as a client. Naming your terms isn't about being a snob or only working with the rich. A muddy music festival, a hairstylist, and a graphic designer can all name their terms. That is what signalling is all about – telling people when something will be made available and how to get it, when they have to register their interest by, when they will have to pay, and on what grounds they will be accepted or rejected. You're setting time limits, performance standards and prerequisites.

Activity Imagine for a moment that you really didn't need people to buy from you. Imagine that you'd secretly won the lottery and your business was only for fun now. What terms would you name in order to ensure business was fun?

Why would Rolex continue to waste so much money taking the expensive back page of glossy magazines? They know the value of getting oversubscribed and staying there.

As you approach your goal of having a lot of signalled interest in your offer, don't slow down. Don't stop running your ads, don't stop releasing your content, don't stop hosting regular events and promotions. Keep doing all the things that work to engage people in your campaign.

Being ridiculously oversubscribed wouldn't be so bad would it? Would it be terrible to have a six‐month waiting list? Would you be annoyed if people were placing deposits for your next batch of products that haven't even been built? These are good problems to have so don't be afraid of being “too oversubscribed.”

It's important to remember that, ultimately, you have to maintain a position where you have more buyers than sellers and some people miss out.

Activity How can you ask people to signal their interest to you? What interesting piece of content would you like people to read, watch or listen to before they meet with you or your team? Which lead generation tools and techniques are you neglecting? Building up your market is an essential step to becoming oversubscribed. There comes a point where you have generated significant interest and it's time to change focus and get people to take action. We will explore this in the next step.

PHASE 3 OVERSUBSCRIBED RELEASE: COMMUNICATING DEMAND AND SUPPLY TENSION BEFORE ALLOWING PEOPLE TO BUY Don't release your capacity until you are oversubscribed – you become oversubscribed when more people want your capacity than you can possibly deliver to. When you have more far buyers than sellers you can be confident of a successful result.

MEASURING INTEREST Knowing that you're oversubscribed is an important part of the process. It can be costly to educate and entertain people, and if you overinvest in marketing efforts, you might get yourself broke before you have a chance to sell anything substantial.

🌟🌟 Important Chapter

The guidelines I've given require you to measure two factors: The quantity of the signalled interest – This represents the number of people who are signalling interest in your campaign. This could be downloads, competition entries, surveys, views, tickets, pre‐sales, deposits, email enquiries, opt‐ins, registrations of interest.

The quality of the signalled interest – The quality of signalled interest relies on three variables: the time people invest in sending a signal, the money they spend in sending the signal and the suitability of the person sending the signal.

We can create - Levels of Signalled Interest 1. Leave their Email to receive something 2. Leave their Phone number and established contact on Whatsapp 3. Filled in the detailed form to Signal being invited to a Private Dinner with the Founder

To accurately measure signalled interest you need a central score board. You need to be able to see your scoreboard quickly and easily as you're running your campaigns to know if you're on or off target.

Some people might email you a general enquiry, some might fill in a special form online, and some might drive across town to place a holding deposit. You have to collate data from several sources so you can see in one place the various ways people have signalled interest to you. Not all signals are equal; the quality of the signals requires you to make a judgement call about the level of commitment a person has given you in order to send that signal.

Hot signals – The highest quality signals require target customers to spend time and money in sending a signal. If a perfect prospect spends $500 to attend a full‐day workshop learning about your product, that is a very strong signal because both time and money were invested. Warm signals – A moderate signal involves an investment of time or money but not both. People who attend a free two‐hour seminar have invested some time to learn but no money has changed hands yet. It's a good signal but not as strong as a paid event. Likewise someone might put down a refundable holding deposit on a product, which is a moderate signal because almost no time has been invested in sending the signal. Cold signals – A very soft signal involves some form of measurable interaction online. This would include people downloading a document, entering an email address into your website, watching online videos, entering a competition or taking a free sample. These weak signals are so easy to send that we need one hundred times your capacity in order to comfortably know you're in the zone of being oversubscribed sufficiently.

When you collect all of the signals you're getting from the market, you need to gauge whether you have hit a point where you can be sure you will achieve your desired sales targets. SUFFICIENTLY OVERSUBSCRIBE YOUR CAPACITY

During the build‐up phase, you've engaged in the process of entertaining and educating people who are interested. You've asked people to signal interest in several ways and you've collected and scored those signals – cool, warm or hot signals.

You now can judge whether you are sufficiently oversubscribed.

As a guide, you are oversubscribed when you have the following: Hot signalled interest is five times capacity –The number of people who have strongly signalled their interest to you is five times more than the amount of capacity you have. Example: You have capa...

Warm signalled interest is ten ti...

Cool signalled interest is one hundred times capacity

Exceeding any of these three targets will give you confidence that you're sufficiently oversubscribed.

If you've not hit any of these targets, you have to continue the process of building interest by signalling and 7‐11‐4–ing until you do.

This might mean that you continue to run advertising, host several more events, sell more products‐for‐prospects or push for more downloads until you've met ...

The key is to market for signals first, not sales. Build up demand and supply tension and only when there are enough bubbles behind the cork, do you pop the top off.

TRANSPARENCY Demand‐and‐supply tension peaks when it's transparent to potential buyers. When people can clearly see the ratio of people signalling interest relative to the available capacity is high, they feel a sense of urgency to act. Openly showing how many people have signalled or telling people these numbers is the crowning moment of an oversubscribed campaign.

One campaign we ran resulted in 300 people filling in a lengthy application form for 30 available licensee agreements. Upon completion we asked people to join an online group where the updates would be given. It was clear, ten times more people had submitted their forms than the capacity we had to deliver. Everyone could see that there was a lot of competing interest for every licensee agreement we had available. The transparency created a level of energy in people. Immediately we had emails from people who felt concerned they would miss out; some wanted to resubmit their forms and put extra effort into their answer. Some people said they would be thrilled to be selected, some were afraid to miss out, some said they'd be willing to pay more and others said they wouldn't bother getting their hopes up.

When we released the capacity, it was snapped up in a day. People could see how many others had responded and they weren't taking chances. Apple uses the media to si...

They report on Apple's capacity “We are told that the UK will only have three million units available. You'll have to rush to get one; some people are already camping out.” This doesn't happen by accident.

The crescendo of their campaign is when they open the doors of their retail store to a flood of people who want to be the first to get their hands on the new product.

The key to creating buying tension is for people to clearly see many others are interested and some people will miss out.

Transparency is a double‐edged sword. It can work for you when you have a lot of people buzzing around your business or against you when you don't. And it is often taking place even if you're not aware of it.

Consider the reason this happens from an attendee's perspective: there are 300 exhibitors who are all trying to win their business. They feel that there's endless choices and it makes them reluctant to engage with any of the sellers. So in this situation, transparency was working against us, because it was transparent that we were just one potential option amongst 300 others. Contrast this with the first promotional workshop event I ran. There were 70 people who were 100% focussed on what we had to say. Those people looked around the room and saw one seller and 70 buyers. Transparency was on our side; it was obvious we were oversubscribed.

If you're going to become oversubscribed you need to demonstrate that there's only one of you and plenty of people lining up to take whatever it is you have to offer. If people can see a line forming at your door – physically or metaphorically – they will want to know why and they'll want in.

Avoid scenarios where you appear to be one of many sellers and ...

Getting people to signal online is perfect for building transparency because people can easily see the accumulating numbers. We've often used Facebook, YouTube and Twitter at the centre of campaigns because it's built into their platforms to see the levels of engagement. For example, we will often use hashtags (#) to get people signalling that they are attending our events. Anyone who clicks the hashtag sees hundreds of people talking about how much they are looking forward to an event. A successful campaign I worked on with a client involved the creation of a pop‐up Facebook group with a seven‐day health challenge. Each day there was a new Facebook live session with a daily challenge. The group ended up with more than 33,000 people in it, each video had more than 1,000 views and hundreds of comments. At the end of the seven days, it was announced that this healthcare clinic was able to take on a maximum of 60 clients for a $4,000 transformational programme. Due to the level of transparency, it was easy for people to see that they would have to commit immediately or miss out. The online world is built on transparency of activity, and it's perfect for building the energy needed to be oversubscribed. If you can master the online world, the real world is your oyster.

THE CLIENT SELECTION PROCESS The process up until this point has been a little convoluted for a reason: it's weeded people out, educated people and given you a chance to get to know people better. This puts you in a unique position that few businesses ever experience –the ability to select the clients you want from a pool of potential clients.

Selecting whom you want as your client isn't only satisfying in the short term; it leads to a long‐term reputation based on the results and achievements of the people you work with.

When you carefully select your clients, you end up with clients who are best‐placed to get great results. When your clients are getting great results they become die‐hard fans. These fans rave about what you do and describe it as highly valuable. Fans hang out with more people who are similar to themselves and will probably get great value from what you do too. When the fans all start telling their friends, you end up being even more oversubscribed. With even more people to choose from you can be even more selective about whom you chose to work with and you may even put your prices up if you were a little too cheap to start with. Once again you find yourself working with people who highly value what you do and are perfectly placed to get great results. At this p...

MANAGING ENERGY There's an art to the selection process or the product release, one that allows you to maximize the built‐up energy you've created through signalling, entertaining and educating a lot of people. Your goal is to keep energy high for people's desire to buy from you. If you lose that spark, the entire campaign can fall apart and your market loses interest.

The tension between buyers and capacity is the critical factor for building and maintaining oversubscribed energy.

Using a number of techniques we can keep the ratio of buyers and sellers unbalanced so you stay oversubsc...