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How To Sell Anything
+ a common mistake new business owners make
Last month, we decided to start a new business. By the end of week one, after 3 hours of work, we had three paying customers worth ~$45,000 in annual revenue.
How?
Cold email.
It took us about an hour with the help of ChatGPT 'give us a list of every business in New Zealand that does _____' to gather an email list.
Then we emailed 5 at random. We received 4 responses and, after a few phone calls, had 3 new clients.
Why? We offered people something they wanted.
In our case, we offered to help organisations get more money - which, when you think about it, is all B2B marketing/sales ever boils down to.
As you can see by our disappointingly simple email format, it has nothing to do with our linguistic abilities or a new growth hack format.
Line 1: Tena koe ***
Line 2: I'm reaching out to see if you would like to get….
Line 3: I've helped **** get **** and can help you do the same.
Line 4: If you're interested, please shoot me a reply.
Line 5: Ngā mihi, ****
Alex Hormozi's best-selling direct marketing book is titled: $100M Offers, which sounds exciting, but the subtitle is where it's at - How to make offers so good people feel stupid saying no.
All cold emailing and any sort of advertisement for that matter comes down to is the result you can promise and who can you promise it to.
Notes:
Growing a business becomes remarkably easier when you find an offer people care about.
We've struggled with this for a long time at our gym. Six years later and we still haven't found that winning promise.
Every gym is 24/7, Friendly, Supportive and blah blah blah, but none, at least as far as we're aware of, promise anything interesting that isn't complete bullshit.
When we do, though, which we'll keep trying to do, our trajectory will change overnight.
A Common Mistake New Business Owners Make
Meetings get a bad rap, and they deserve it because most of them are a waste of time.
Think about how much it costs to break up everyone's workflow to sit in a room and share a bunch of words that lead to nothing.
Smart companies that love deep work, like SaaS, are waking up to this issue and even enforce no-meeting days - so their developers don't have to sacrifice uninterrupted work for our post-primary school version of show and tell.
There is one good reason to have meetings. If and it's a big if, they are structured correctly, they can be an effective problem-solving tool.
And the framework you need for this structure is IDS - taken from the EOS business management system.
IDS is an acronym that stands for Identity, Discuss & Solve.
We use it across all our businesses at all levels of work to meet in groups and resolve problems.
Here's how it plays out.
Say you're on a call with your team and want to address your low lead numbers over the past few weeks.
First you take the floor and raise the issue you want to discuss as precisely as possible, like:
"Our lead numbers are 50% below our target for the past 4 weeks, and we need to fix this." - that is the Issue.
Now you can Discuss it.
So you go around the table and ask everyone for their input. Find out why they think it is happening and what might be done to solve it.
The marketer on your team says, 'Our creative is tired, so our ads just aren't working anymore'. The business manager says, 'My daughter was telling me about how everyone is on TikTok these days, maybe Facebook is done, and then your sales manager pipes in with ', A bunch of people have told me that it took them 3 or 4 goes to signup for our webinar - I think there's something wrong with the landing page.'
Now with everyone's input considered, you can agree on a Solution as a group.
In this case, the obvious first step is fixing the landing page issues. So you and your team agree to hire a dev off Upwork to troubleshoot your landing page JavaScript problems.
IDS is effective because:
First, you're not solving problems in silos, you get outside angles that others too close to the problem may miss. In this case, the marketing team might have focused on the creative and not known about the landing page.
And secondly, you leave the meeting with an agreed next step to resolve the problem.
This is the most important part of IDS - you must finish the IDS process with an agreed next step, assigned to someone, with a due date.
We usually solve 3 - 4 business issues each team call. Making their ~$250 cost value-additive rather than a frustration point for everyone involved.
Notes:
Some problems aren't immediately solvable. We allocate a fixed amount of time to each issue we want to discuss, so we don't waste a whole call on something we won't solve anyway.
And sometimes, issues take several weeks to completely fix; with those ones, we keep bringing them to the table until we ultimately figure it out.
In general, we spend about 30 mins in team meetings problem-solving. Regardless of what else happens, this guarantees their value.
A Common Mistake New Business Owners Make
You'd think once a business owner has found an almost guaranteed way to get customers, as we have cold emailing like discussed above - that they'd keep doing that.
They often don't.
Almost all business owners, at some point in their journey, walk away from sure things to experiment with, probably not going to work things.
We’ve done it lots. So this is a reminder for us as much as it is a warning to you.
Don't.
It’s simple risk vs reward.
No sane black-jack player hits on two tens. Why go off the beaten path when they well-trodden one works.
Building a business is hard enough. So when you find a sure thing, there are only two sensible plays:
1) Do more of it.
2) Do way more of it.