by simply making it free to try. Then on top of just letting you in, you want us to let you see how horribly unorganized we are? Tack on another huge gap. We'd say right about now, the gap is as big as the Grand Canyon. Focusing on price as the only gap between us is misguided. Taking price away as an issue is like stepping a foot closer when you're two miles away.
Instead of focusing on the cost, let's look for ways to decrease the gap. As potential clients, we really want to get to know and trust you before we have you in our home and give you access to our mess. If, however, we regularly read great tips on your blog and we get updates via an e-mail newsletter that we signed up for, then we will begin to get to know you.
This is also a great opportunity to look for products you can create that would require less trust and be more scalable.7 Why not reduce your customers' hesitations and come out with an e-book titled 30 Days to a Clutter-Free Home? Get out to network and meet other people in your industry or local market and let them know about your business. Local businesspeople can become clients and can recommend you to others, which is very valuable.
Just please, for us, don't put the “Free Consultation Offer!” on the back of your business card. It's like going out on a singles night and letting people know you have a “Free Make-Out Offer!”8 You are not going to this event with the goal of landing a client; you're there to build relationships. We are going to speak often in this book about the difference between your goals and your results. Your goal always needs to be engagement; business will result.
The same goes for a business where your market is made up of solopreneurs – companies that are a one-person show. If, for example, you are a virtual assistant9, most likely your website talks somewhere about “freeing up your time.” As entrepreneurs running a business, no one knows better than we do that we're overworked, and we know we need the help – that's why we're looking on your site. But for us to give away part of our business responsibility is like dropping your kid off at the first day of school. We're protective and territorial about it and won't just let a person who offers us “One Hour Free!” to step in and represent our business.
On the other side of that, if you are a solopreneur reading this book, remember that because all points of engagement between your company and your market are potentially UnMarketing opportunities, the people you hire have to be as good as you when they represent it.10
Other areas that have a huge trust gap:
■ Accounting
■ Anything to do with kids
■ Wellness practitioners
■ Life insurance
■ Counseling
■ Life coaching
■ Lawyers
■ Many, many more11
Your entire focus when you try to attract new clients in these areas is how you can build trust to reduce that gap. When was the last time a cold-call increased trust for you? We thought so.
5
ROD
RETURN ON DONUTS12
Beside a fortune-teller, in a strip mall in Vegas, we found the best donuts in town. Well, technically, Yelp found them. We simply bought 10 dozen and bribed our way to a 9 a.m., standing-room-only, live UnPodcast audience.
Create great content and the audience will come.
Create great content and feed everyone Ronald's Donuts, and a packed room of hungover marketers will come.
We got back from Vegas and into the studio, raving about Ronald's Donuts. We shared our Yelp story of how the donut shop with over 500 reviews and 4.5 stars caught our attention and our hearts. Just what we needed: another thing to miss about Vegas.
Fast-forward a few months later to another studio day. We were just getting ready to leave when Alison noticed a box sitting on our doorstep. A box of Ronald's Donuts, with a note attached from someone we'd never met – Petrus Engelbrecht, a real estate agent from Sotheby's.
Petrus had attended a talk Scott gave to real estate agents and decided he wanted to be our Realtor. The talk gave him all the tools he needed to get noticed, so he decided to do a little research. He listened to the podcast, heard about our love of Ronald's Donuts and decided to have a dozen flown in by a partner in their Las Vegas office. And then, he just left them on our doorstep.
Now, one of us would never eat random doorstep donuts (Alison) and one of us had eaten six before we got to the studio…
We weren't in the market for a house. We hadn't even mentioned looking for one online. Too often in business we focus only on those ready to buy. If someone isn't ready, with money in hand, we ignore them. It's buy or good-bye. But great marketing is about more than that. It's about staying in front of your target market, so when they're ready for your product or service they choose you.
And no one has demonstrated this better than Petrus.
Scott has lived in Oakville his entire life, surrounded by ads for Realtors. Their faces on benches, the backs of buses, flyers in newspapers, and on lawn signs. Now we're just spitballing here, but we'd say there are about 10,001 real estate agents in our town whose faces we've seen (and sat on from time to time), but when it came time to look at houses, there was only one we wanted to talk to. Not only had we never seen Petrus on a sign or business card, but he was new to the area, to the continent to be exact. And he was new to real estate.
Not only was Petrus' approach creative; he gave without asking. He didn't check in the day after dropping by our house to see if we wanted to buy a house now. He had an idea and took a chance, and it worked. A few months later, we bought our dream home and Petrus got his Return on Donuts.
Since then, Petrus and his family have become friends and we've referred him to many others. He is a great agent, which is actually the real point here. No amount of donuts in the world will help your business if you're not great. The donuts opened the door (literally) but it was his passion, intelligence, and skills that kept it open.
He took the whole thing up another notch when he brought over a gift for Scott during the holidays. Knowing Scott's passion for comic books and specifically Wolverine, and his hatred of QR codes, Petrus had a one-of-a-kind piece commissioned by local artist Mike Rooth, as you can see in the image provided.
6
RESTAURANT THAT DIDN'T GET IT
When you open a new location-based business that relies on a specific geographic clientele, the biggest hurdle you have to overcome is getting people to come to your business the first time. New customer acquisition is where start-up businesses spend most of their marketing dollars. Why not get people to come by using the foundation of human nature – making people feel special?
A
Scalable is the ability to do something in a large amount. An hour of your time isn't scalable, but an e-book is.
Okay, that would be hilarious.
It's like having an administrative assistant, but they work from home. We've used them for years. And suggest you do, too.
“Represent” does not have to mean direct client contact. If the person you hire works on research, formatting, or e-mail filtering, it can still affect your brand.
This is the great bullet-point cop-out. When someone writes to us and says, “You forgot this one!” we can just reply, “Yeah, that's what we meant by many, many more!”
This is a new chapter to the second edition of
