Tuesday Tuneup- #68
5 Things I learned last week.
Happy Tuesday everyone!
Change of pace this week as I share 5 quick things I learned or encountered that I thought would be interesting to pass along. If you like this format, or have a favorite edition that you’ve read recently, please let me know. You can give the post a like or reply. I do this for you and want to make sure the content is helping you in some fashion.
#1- It’s easy to destroy your email reputation and hard to rebuild it.
I have a client that has nearly 100% of all their emails go to the spam folder. Ouch! Appointment reminders, invoices, marketing messages, sales follow-ups, proposals… you name it and the customer never sees it. How did this happen? Most likely a sales rep was mass emailing a “Lead List” through his company email and as a result *THE WHOLE DOMAIN* was put in the do not fly zone. How do you fix it? The quick answer is…. there is no quick fix. You basically have to rebuild the reputation or start fresh. What can you learn from this? Don’t ask, allow, or support your sales reps buying a list of “leads” and then blindly emailing them from the company account. Email marketing needs to happen on a seperate domain rather than the main company email system.
#2- You can’t manage what you can’t see.
I was working with a client this week on their sales pipeline structure and management. In simplier terms, “When we give a sales rep a lead, what happens to it?” After digging in a little bit, it became clear that there were 100’s of thousands, if not *MILLIONS* of dollars in profit likely being sold elsewhere……… on the companies data. Ouch! This is because the system had no accountability, no benchmarks, no enforcement and no visability. The team that set everything up had never worked in sales, didn’t know what a good system looked like, and as a result, didn’t understand or know what the holes looked like. If you don’t know what you’re doing, get help. A small investment in somebody looking over things can mean huge savings elsewhere.
#3- If things feel frantic…. simplify.
I was working with a department manager last week and she was clearly overwhelmed. She said yes to everything, tried to sell every customer that would get on the phone, and was trying to train a sales team how to do the same. The result? Nobody performed well. She had no defined customer, no defined value prop, and no defined process. Trust me…. this is a great way to go broke and go crazy.
We looked at the data and 85% of her customers where all in the same demographic! She liked working with them the best, they where the happiest, and we could easily find them. The other 15% were the outliars and the nightmares. We stopped working with the 15%, got focused on our core market, and everything got drastically better. Saying NO to the wrong people is ALWAYS better than saying YES.
#4-Is your customer confused?
Along the lines of the above, I was on *THREE* vendor calls this week with clients and we had to ask “Are we your customer….. or…… it is somebody else?” This wasn’t some sort of ego play, we just honestly didn’t know. They had done a terrible job explaining their value prop and we where all confused why we were on the phone. If your customers are confused, go back to the drawing board and get simple.
#5- Happy, Hungry, and Humble.
Give me an entraprenuer with these three attributes and I’ll show you a winner. This is what I look for when I interview perspective clients. Unhappy, lazy, and cocky isn’t what I’m looking to work with…. and that’s OK with me. I’m the first to leave when I get the sense somebody falls into one of these buckets. Why? Because I’ve worked with enough successful people to know what they look like. So, no matter who you are, put a smile on your face, keep grinding and be open to new ideas. You do that long enough, and you’ll never fail!
Happy Selling!
PS- I’m very excited to announce that I am starting the Billion Dollar Contractor Community. We’ll have courses, forums, discussions, templates, scripts, live training webinars, and even turnkey marketing templates, automations and systems. It’s one more giant step in helping you win in business and in life! This will be a paid community at some point…. but I’d like to give all of you FREE access for life. All I ask for is your honest feedback and support.
We are still getting the initial content loaded in and it’s going to take a while to fully build out, but if you’d like to get early access and be a part of that process please check out: www.whop.com/billiondollarcontractor
Thank you as always for the support and I apprecaite you all!
-Steve