A weird way to eat in restaurants

Wouldn’t this be a weird way to eat in restaurants? You start by going to one of your favorite restaurants and ordering a fantastic, 4-course meal. Then you take two bites of an excellent salad, wipe your mouth and leave.

Next, you drive to another one of your favorite restaurants and order another fantastic, 4-course meal. This time, you take a couple sips of wine accompanied by two bites of the delicious entrée you’ve ordered. You then wipe your mouth with the fine linen napkin and leave.

To finish up, you hop in your car and drive to yet another restaurant and repeat the same behavior of ordering a tantalizing, 4-course meal. To complete the evening, you skip the third course entirely and head straight for dessert. You take two bites of the most delicious dessert you’ve ever tasted, wipe your mouth, leave the restaurant and drive home.

But here’s the kicker… not only do you eat in this weird way today,but you repeat it every time you dine out

Imagine dining out this way, not just once, but every time you go out to eat. People who witnessed your behavior would think you have a screw loose. And you and I would have no problem agreeing with that assessment.

But – when it comes to marketing, this is how most people behave every day. And not only does it go unnoticed, but no one seems to think there’s anything wrong with it.

Consider this, though. If you’re constantly chasing the next big marketing tactic, take one bite then drop it and chase the next one, how effective do you think that will really be for you?

If you’re constantly looking for some new form of media (social media, some new email “hack”, a new opt-in page format designed to cleverly get more people into join your list, and so on), but you merely dabble with them for a day or so before moving on to the next form of media, how much benefit do you really get from it?

If you’re constantly trying every new traffic generation tactic that comes along (and there seem to be dozens every month), what are your chances of mastering any of them and truly generating the amount and quality of traffic you want? Slim to none is the only reasonable answer.

But as I said, this is exactly the way most people and most businesses market. And if you examine your own marketing efforts, you’ll most likely discover that this process represents the bulk of your own marketing.

So how do you overcome this damaging “bite and run” approach, turn it around, and start making your business as profitable as it really could be? The answer may surprise you.

The real source of exponential profits in any business

You can turn all this around and eliminate the chaos of constantly chasing new marketing tactics, technology and media by shifting your focus to the assets you already have in your business. Some of these assets include your customers, new and past products or services, prospecting methods, your reputation, customer loyalty, relationships with your vendors and other businesses, and much more.

Over the next few months, I’ll be creating more posts about exactly how to do this in each of these areas as well as many other areas. But what’s more important to do right now is establish the foundation for increasing your sales and profits while eliminating nearly all of the wasted time and money you’re currently experiencing. So the fundamental principle is this:

There is always more money in your existing assets than there is from trying to make new sales. Always.

So that means that you need to shift the focus of your marketing away from chasing the new to concentrating on reaping the benefits of your existing assets. And if you’re like most businesses, you spend around 90% of your time chasing new sales and just 10% fully capitalizing on the assets you already have.

So back to our restaurant analogy, you’re constantly taking one bite here, then moving on to the next tactic, technology, or media, when you already have a fantastic, 4-course marketing meal sitting right in front of you. All you have to do to enjoy it, is to shift the balance and invest 90% of your time on the assets you already have, while devoting just 10% of your marketing efforts to chasing new sales.

I know this sounds odd at first, but the fact is that large direct marketing companies have been using this approach for decades to cream their market. So let me wrap up by giving you a few reasons why this approach works so well:

• It costs you nothing to reach your existing customers and offer them more of your existing assets. You’ve already paid all the costs of acquiring them, but you never capitalize on the full worth of your investment if you neglect your existing customers.

• The relationships you’ve worked so hard to build are your fastest, most reliable way to build your list. Relationships with vendors, your customers and other businesses can easily be leveraged to generate far more traffic than you can paying through the nose for traffic tactics and tricks that rarely produce any results.

Generating traffic is nearly always the most expensive (and most inefficient) marketing task for any business. But you can eliminate that expense entirely and generate more traffic at the same time by leveraging your relationships with customers, vendors and other businesses. And I’ll show you exactly how to do this in future posts.

•  Selling more to your existing customers is faster, costs nothing and is risk free because of the “T Factor”. So what the heck is the T Factor? Quite simply, it’s Trust.

One of the primary reasons it’s so hard to make a new sale is because your prospects don’t know or trust you. They’ve been burned so many times by other companies, both small and large, that it’s difficult for them to know who to trust.

But once you’ve made a sale to a customer and delivered what you promised – and hopefully over-delivered – you gain that customer’s trust. And once you’ve earned a customer’s trust and no longer have to convince them to take a chance with you, as long as you’re offering additional products or services they value, these are the easiest sales you can ever hope to make.

The choice is yours

So what would you prefer to do – spend 90% of your time making easy sales to customers who will appreciate you even more for it, or constantly struggle to find the next big thing that’s supposedly sure to bring you a flood of traffic?

That choice is always available to you. Just remember – the new, the shiny, the different always looks so promising and so much better than what you’re already doing. But in actuality, those things are usually a huge disappointment.

Am I nuts? Am I right on target?

Feel free to let me know – or share your own experience with this topic – by leaving your comment below.