Today we have part 3 of the training on how to make money in a down market. Previously, we talked about how you get customer attention and how you drive it towards your offering or your business house. I call it the business house or also the back office so that the structure of the Lean Startup is your message; that’s the first layer. The second thing is Outreach. The third layer is called the business house. I also call it the back office.
Now, when I first came out with this term back office or The Lean Startup and the three layers in the back office, I got a lot of questions from people saying, why are you calling it the back office? It’s my whole business. I have a shop. I have a consultancy. I have a chartered accountant firm, or I have a medical practice, or I have an architect’s practice, I have a small business. I have a factory.
What you’ve done is you’ve got customer attention. The customer attention is all over the place. You can use different tools technology. Let’s talk about the internet for a second. It is simpler to understand because everybody is there on the internet. So even the non-business owners understand this stuff. So customer attention is there on the internet.
You have decided the certain area where you’re going to solve a customer’s pain. You’re going to solve the problem, going to solve the pain, you’re going to bring them a solution, and then you craft your message and Outreach. That whole lesson that I put up previously, you need to go through the whole thing how the message crafting etc., is to be done, and then you amplify customer attention. And once this customer attention is amplified, you want to start providing them solutions to their problems.
Now at this point, what happens typically with Indian people? Why do I say Indian people because the Indian economy is in a huge stage of evolution right now, and if you understand the whole wave of this evolution, you’ll be very rich in the future. You will be future proof for the next few years. But if you don’t understand it, then regardless of how much education or understanding you get, you’re going to be stuck, and the same mindset will keep you small. It’s going to keep you middle class. It is going to keep you at risk of getting hurt by every little problem in the market, whether it’s political changes, GSTD monetization, Covid situation, or war.
We are tuned to say that this is my product, or this is my offering, or this is what I do; what we don’t understand is this is only 1 or 2 percent of the game. Once you have got customer attention, you have retained customer attention and have magnified customer attention. You need to figure out what they would love to have, provide that, and get paid for it. One of those may be your product, but you may not convert it to sales even at this stage. So, in a normal sales environment, people convert maybe 1-2% of all the market they got and meet.
In the Outreach Program, you will be able to convert, ranging from 10-30% percent. In certain scenarios, I’ve converted 40% also, it was not 100%, but even at 40%, it is a minority; more than half of them are not converting.
So what do you do? You want all hundred percent of them or as close to 100% as possible. Customer mindset or customer problems are solved in three ways.
What are the three ways?
- Clarity
- Education
- Solution
The first thing that they want is they want Clarity. They are confused. They want clearance from the confusion. The second thing they want is education and the third thing they want is a solution.
Coming back to the internet, why do I use the example of the internet? Although much of my business runs outside the internet, my consulting business runs in the physical world. But why do I use the internet? Because people are spending all their life on the internet these days. So whatever it is that you provide them, they’re going to go to Google nonetheless.
Clarity
What are the things they’re looking for? They want to be clear in their heads. There is an ocean of options available to people. There is a glut of information, and there’s a glut of products and services with everybody yelling at them about the solution. I mean, you go to Facebook; they’re just crazy. What they want is Clarity. So what they want is structured information. What is relevant? What is not relevant? Of all the things that are relevant, which ones are important and which are not?
Education
The second thing is education. How do you utilize, or how do you actually solve the problem you have? How do you go about solving the problem that you have, which is tips and techniques?
Solution
And then, finally, the solution, which could be your product, which could also be a competitor’s product, which could also be a third product that you did not know existed today in the market. But the moment you find out, you need to include it in your product portfolio. Now, you don’t need to own these products. You don’t need to buy them and keep them in the warehouse—nothing like that.
We have a concept called Promo Partnerships. Once you’re an expert at getting customer attention, amplifying customer attention and getting them to a point where they want to do something, you need to have a range of options. You need to have a range of options to give them a range of options to get them and have them choose whichever one they like. Now, this is a limited set of options. You already provide them simplified structured information, how to take decisions. You’ve given them some tips and techniques on how these different products and services can help solve their problem, and then you bring them to a set of products and services where all of these products and services are going to pay you.
So you have a promo partnership, and all of these different companies you promote to the customer; instead of being stuck to your one product, you provide a plethora of products. So regardless of which product they choose, you get paid. Now you may not get paid 100% of the profits. You may have to split it depending on the deal with the actual company providing the product. You will be surprised to find that 83% of all companies in the market pay promo partners to get them customers. So you can form a promo partnership with a bunch of companies.
What happens if you provide five different products and the customer doesn’t like your product for some reason? They go to any of the other four products; you’ll still get paid. So what is your success rate now? It’s up from 2% to maybe 10-15 %. Suddenly, you’ve been Quintupled your success rate. Now, you can structure these tips and techniques into the form of a program where customers actually pay you to solve the problem.
Customers pay you to understand the tips and techniques to solve their problems. So you get paid over here. How much can you get paid in the Education part? Maybe 20 to 30 percent conversion. So you got 10 to 15 percent conversion in the Solution part and 20 to 30 percent conversion in the Education part. To provide strategic information, you can utilize that as an advertising technique where you provide structured strategic information for free, or you can actually collect money in the Clarity part.
So, you get paid another 10-15% in the Clarity part. For all the marketing activities that you do, you collect close to 50%-60%. Now, this is the conversion rate. This is not the amount of money you make. In some of these cases, the money involved is maybe less, and in some of the cases, the money involved will be more. What if I could tell you that these customers will now pay for life. So how does that happen?
Third Layer: Constant Improvement
In the first blog, I talked about layer 3 that we never discussed until now. The first layer is the Express Highway, and then you have the customer outreach. There is a third layer to this. The third layer is called Constant Improvement or Constant Learning. Why do you have constant Improvement? Because once you start making money from all of these customers, they know you, like you, and trust you. So it makes sense that whenever they have the next layer of problem in a major area, which has some relation to your industry, your product, your service, whatever you provided them or whatever problem you solve for them, they’ll come back to you. At that point, you need to be ready with the next layer of products to supply them. Now, they are going to buy from you in almost 100% of the cases. Whatever they want to buy, they’re going to come to you. Why?
Because they already did business with you. Because you already provided them with a great amount of Clarity, provided them with great products and services and a great amount of support. So you did solve their problem. Imagine if the area of problem is in their health, and they were able to get a fitter body or something like that while working with you, getting your tips and techniques, your educational program and then actually utilizing, let’s say, something like supplements or something that you provided them. Now what happens is if somebody in their family has a blood sugar problem, who are they going to come first for advice? They are going to come to you. They are going to come to you, and at that point, you need to have this entire three layers of information, which is structured information and educational product and actual products and services for the diabetes problem. What if somebody in their family starts having a cholesterol issue? You need to have another three layers for every problem in the overall healthcare industry.
All you need to do is keep adding products and portfolio services to your total business. And that’s why I call it the back office because your product, which could have been one of those, has ceased to be relevant. The game is changing. Being stuck to a product or providing a product or doing anything like that is less than 2% of the market, and that you probably feel that already right customer attention is going all over the board. Trust is down in a down market. People don’t trust you. So what you must do is build trust. Once you build trust, you can monetize that trust a hundred ways from Sunday. The concept is called a business House. Business house means not only will you have your own product in there, but you will also have promotional partnerships with a bunch of other products and services that you trust, and you can transfer their trust to your customer. You’re going to have educational products, which means you’re going to bring down all of the learning knowledge you collected in your last 20-50 years on the planet, and you’re going to create an educational product out of that. You’re going to get paid for that either directly or indirectly.
So you can get paid on all of these different layers and improve your conversion rate from 2% to 60%. Now, in the last three months, what I’ve done is, I’ve created these layers of products and services sitting at home in the lockdown, and my conversion rate in my traditional businesses is close to 15% in this business. I’ve hit a max conversion rate of 40%.
The fun part of this is that once you build this community, it pays you forever. Now, this customer community at every level when they need a problem solved, who will trust the most? They’re going to trust you.
So what are the three areas for you that you need to build? And these are critical.
Selfie Video
The first thing is a selfie video. If you do not understand, we’ve discussed a lot of different concepts in the last two or three blogs. If this sound interesting, that’s great. If you don’t understand all of them, that’s cool. Not to worry. We have a structured program that you can utilize at some point. These are the three things I want you to know that you will be doing if you want to utilize it to add six figures to your business or your gross profit in the next 30 to 90 days. Selfie video is free and can be learned anytime or anywhere.
Community Building
The second thing is Community Building. Create a Facebook group and form a community where you can add value and increase your people’s confidence.
A layer of Three Product Lines
And the third thing is to build a layer of three product lines. Or build up a portfolio of a minimum of three product lines. One is an informational product that sells on the internet all day and night long. Second is your consulting service or a community product. Let’s say Consulting service. And then you have a hard product and service or whatever you have. If you already have a product and service, that is great. If you don’t have a product and service, you can set a promotional partnership with many products and services, which are exchanged in so-called marketplaces. You go to a marketplace, you can set up a promotional partnership with relatively ten companies in a single day.
If you already have a product and service or already have something that you’re offering in the market, that’s great for you. I was offering a High ticket Consulting service for corporates in the market where I get paid over 50,000 Rupees an hour. So, this is not something that I could offer individuals from the internet because nobody pays fifty thousand rupees to someone per hour on the internet. So what I did was create a layer of information products. I created many affiliate products, which are products that can help you get all of this customer attention that we spoke about previously, magnify all this customer attention that we spoke out of previously and put money into your bank account. And then, I promote these products to people there in the launch program. People who are interested in the products or services, all of them join my community and work alongside me.