Business Made Simple: 60 Days to Master Leadership, Sales, Marketing, Execution, Management, Personal Productivity and More (Made Simple Series)

by Donald Miller

They get daily or weekly reports that reveal whether marketing and sales efforts are performing effectively.

They make sure the left and right engines are producing sales to offset the cost of overhead.

They make sure the profit margins on the products they create are high enough to cover the over...

They are constantly increasing the efficiency of their production, sales, and marketing.

Businesses get much more complicated as they grow, of course, but the five main parts of a business never change. When you understand how a business works, you can quickly analyze what is and isn’t working and monitor the health of the business.

Understand the five parts of a healthy business so you never experience a crash.

DAY TWENTY-TWO How to Create Strategy—Keep Your Overhead Down The body: Keep overhead as light as possible.

When a business fails, it fails for one reason: Overhead got too high for sales to cover. In other words, the engines of the airplane were too weak and the wings on the airplane were too small to provide lift for the oversized body.

The principle of keeping overhead down seems quite obvious. Sadly, that most fundamental principle is often forgotten amid the day-to-day running of a business.

Unless money is spent in the direct effort to make more money, that expenditure should be questioned. This is the key to keeping overhead in check.

This does not mean we get to spend as much money on marketing, sales, and product creation as we want. The truth is, we have to be lean, light, and efficient everywhere.

That said, an expense that leads directly to greater lift is going to get approved much faster than an expense that adds ...

It goes without saying that if your overhead (airplane body) gets big and heavy but your product offering is too limited (wings are too small) and your sales and marketing efforts are not ...

Are their unnecessary costs we can cut in this launch to make sure the entire plane doesn’t get too heavy? If we want the airplane to be safe and reliable, we must increase the efficiency and thrust of the engines, increase the size and strength of the wings, and decrease the weight of the body. In other words, we must increase efficiency everywhere. Always.

In order to create a safe business that grows, categorize your expenses into four major categories: product creation, sales, marketing, and overhead.

How to Create Strategy—Make and Sell the Right Products

Wings: Is there a demand for the products we are selling and are they profitable?

When choosing what products to focus on, you want to choose products that have two critical characteristics:

They are light. They can be sold for considerable profit or a smaller profit but at volume. 2.They are strong. There is a strong demand for the product in the marketplace.

In other words, regardless of how we feel about a product, we will only invest in products that are profitable and in demand.

You can quickly strengthen the wings of your airplane by clearing out products that are not profitable or in demand and replacing them with products that are both.

To increase revenue and profit in your business, analyze whether or not the products you are selling are in demand and profitable.

How to Create Strategy—Prioritize Marketing Right engine/marketing: Test how you’re going to market the product.

Here’s a rule: If you don’t attract people to the thing you built, they won’t come.

Before launching a product, I ask the marketing department to build a landing page (marketing page) for that product so I can survey interest in the product itself.

I literally have a website built as though the product exists and then survey potential customers to query interest. Instead of placing a “buy now” button on the website, I’ll place a “join the waitlist” button to see how many people click the button.

Building the marketing collateral before the product even exists does two things: 1.Helps you clarify your marketing language. Building the sales page for the product helps you create and review language that will pique a customer’s interest. Build the page, talk about it as a staff, and share the page with a select group of potential customers to get feedback. 2.Confirms consumer interest. Once you’ve clarified your marketing language, you can release the page to the public or to a select group of customers for preorders. Collecting preorders is a great way to build excitement about the product and find out whether or not people are interested in the first place.

Your landing page is a rough draft, of course, but it should be created as though you are launching the product to market. Every detail should be considered. Testing your marketing language is like testing an engine before you connect it to the body of the plane. Most businesses will wait till the last minute to prepare their marketing ideas because their energy is being used to create the product. But without the right marketing language and plan, nobody will be attracted to the product after it gets built. So why not test the engine first? By creating a test sales page in advance, you will gain more confidence in how you talk about the product and whether or not it will be successful going to market. You will also cause your marketing team (or plan) to be ready well in advance of the launch so you’re not waiting till the last minute to make sure this critical engine will provide thrust for the plane.

Create a marketing sales page to test marketing language and gauge interest in a product even before that product exists.

How to Create Strategy—Run a Sales System

Left engine/sales: Create a step-by-step path your customers can take to make a purchase, and monitor the progress of every lead.

A Step-by-Step Path

Qualify the lead. 2.Send the lead information and schedule a call. 3.Engage in an intake meeting. 4.Send a proposal highlighting predetermined talking points. 5.Enter into the closing sequence.

There are many ways to structure the path, but simply having a path will allow you to set goals and monitor the progress of every single lead.

There are various software tools you can use to monitor which potential clients are at which stage of the relationship.

Here’s Today’s Business Made Simple Tip of the Day Increase sales by creating a step-by-step path your customers can take. Then monitor the progress of every lead.

DAY TWENTY-SIX How to Create Strategy—Protect Cash Flow Fuel: Watch cash flow closely because if you run out of cash, the business will crash.

Here are seven financial questions to ask before making an important business decision: 1.How much cash will we need to create this product before we launch it? 2.What is our profit margin on this product? Will it be able to return cash to the coffers? 3.When will we start making money on this product? 4.How will launching this product affect our other revenue streams? Will it reduce cash coming in from somewhere else? 5.Does losing money on this product generate sales and profits elsewhere? If so, how much? 6.How can we make this product more profitable? 7.What iterations of this product could we sell for more money?

Here’s Today’s Business Made Simple Tip of the Day In every decision you make, ask yourself how the decision will affect cash flow.

How (and Why) to Clarify Your Marketing Message

All of those projects we are working on won’t go anywhere unless we can explain their importance to customers in a marketing message that attracts buyers.

Customers are not only attracted to a good product, they are attracted to a clear message that describes that product.

In the next two sections of the book, I’m going to teach you how to clarify a marketing message and then create a sales funnel using the sound bites you...

Any professional who knows how to clarify a marketing message is worth thousands more in the marketplace. Why? Becau...

The hardest thing to do as a professional is to get people’s attention, but in the next five days I’m going to teach you how. I’m going to teach you to invite...

Once you understand how to clarify a message, you can use that message to create marketing collateral, give better speeches, design a terrific elevator pitch, or even tell the story of why your work matters to the world.

In short, once you create a clear message, you can positively impact the world through your business.

DAY TWENTY-SEVEN How to Clarify Your Message—Use Story to Engage Customers When clarifying your message, use the power of story.

The only tool known to man that can stop people from daydreaming is story. When we start to hear a story, we stop daydreaming and pay attention. Story is that powerful.

A Character That Wants Something: