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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Olgierd, decide if he should individually contact his market or build a sales funnel to send traffic to.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s expert is Matthew Kimberley at Matthew Kimberley’s Website
- Flipped Lifestyle Membership
- How to Get A Grip
- Book Yourself Solid School
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Matthew Kimberley at matthewkimberley.com.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; we have got another Expert Q&A on the show today with you, and we are excited to bring back one of our favorite guests; it is Matthew Kimberley of matthewkimberley.com. Matthew welcome back to the show.
MATTHEW: Thank you for having me back, Shane and Jocelyn.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we are really excited to have you. Today we have a question from, now I’m going to try this, Olgierd, and we actually looked this up online, how to pronounce this and that is the Kentucky pronunciation –
SHANE: O-L-G-I-E-R-D [Unclear] or something, I’m not sure.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we are so sorry, Olgierd; I think that’s right. Okay, so it says, “I have a question related to markets size. I have a solution for an industry with about 100 or 200 prospects. Should I contact each individual person in my market, or build a sales funnel to attract them, or is this market size even worth it?”
SHANE: This was a very interesting question Matthew; Olgierd is actually a member of our Flip Your Life community. If you would like to learn more about that, you can flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and he really has fleshed out this and he is in an industry that is kind of B2B and it’s more like a furniture industry. So we’ve been helping him kind of sort through his avatar and his sales funnel in our forums, and he really only has about 200 companies that he can reach. But I think they are all going to be pretty big contracts if he did follow through with whatever services he is providing. So what do you think about that? Is this worth it? With that few people, should he just go ahead and try and contact them or is there some other form of marketing that might work here?
MATTHEW: Okay, so it’s a two-part question. Let’s deal with the last one first, “Is the market size even worth it?” You got to do your math in order to work out whether or not it’s going to be worthwhile. You know, work out what the average lifetime value of a decent customer would be, test it against whether your projections are true or not, perhaps with your first and then second customer, and then move on. But certainly, I would say how many clients do you need? You are in the furniture industry, no other context perhaps you need, five clients, six clients, ten clients in order to have a sustainable business. Perhaps it would be great if you had 200; I don’t know. There are probably only a handful of aircraft engine manufacturers in the world, probably fewer than a hundred, I’d say, but there are going to be some people who are making a full-time living for their families and their employees on the back of just serving two or three of those companies.
SHANE: And you said something – let me jump in real quick just for our listeners, the lifetime value of a customer basically boils down to how often they pay you; like frequency. Like if you sell one thing for 300 dollars and you never sell that person anything again, the lifetime value is 300. But if you sell them a 50-dollar membership for 100 months in a row, then the lifetime value of that client is going to be 5000 dollars or whatever. So that’s kind of what you are talking about here; right?
MATTHEW: That’s exactly what I am talking about. It’s the size of purchase multiplied by the frequency of purchase. So, you can put a dollar figure on that pretty easily. A lot of people in the expert space, which particularly which I deal with, are stuck on increasing the value per head or the value per customer, and very frequently is going back and selling the same thing again. And people who work in retail understand this full well; you don’t sell somebody one toilet roll. You sell them a dozen toilet rolls every couple of months and so yeah, very, very important to work out and also you know, we are on a side tangent here Shane, but your best prospect is your existing customer.
SHANE: Oh yeah.
MATTHEW: People forget that. Really, every time I launch a new product, or a new program, the first 20% of people who sign up are people who’ve spent money with me before, always. It always happens. So, your market size is probably worth it, you’ll be the only person to know the numbers. So then you bring another question, which is they say either 100 or 200 prospects in total and then you say, “Should I contact every individual person?” So you know, honestly, yes is the answer. I would adopt a multi-pronged approach to contact these people; I have considerable experience in B2B sales, I used to run a technology recruitment company in Belgium, and the approach that I would adopt would be multi-pronged. I would bounce them. Now bouncing is an expression that I have borrowed from the pick-up artist industry, if it can be called an industry; these horrible – sorry, I shouldn’t say horrible, I’m sure some of them are reformed now, but you know, these slightly predatory males who would trawl Sunset Boulevard back in the nineties to pick up chicks using various neuro-linguistic programming techniques, very, very interesting from a psychological point of view, one of their approaches is called bouncing. Bouncing is where you can speed up the perception of the depth of the relationship. So people feel they’ve known you longer and therefore trust you more readily, if they encounter you in different places. So the pick-up artist would say, take a girl to three different locations on the same night and she feels that because you had three shared experience, she knows you three times better than if you had stayed in the same club. Club-restaurant-nightclub or bar-restaurant-nightclub something like that; three shared experience, deeper level of connection, and you can apply this to your prospects as well. So let’s say we are going to choose three different ways of approaching these same people; first thing I would do is identify all these people by name the best you can. If you don’t have a name, call the company and say, “What’s the name of the person I need to speak to?” Don’t make it too difficult; stick them all in your CRM system. If you don’t have a CRM system, you’re a fool.
SHANE: Buy one now.
MATTHEW: Get one – even if it’s just Outlook or Gmail or pen and paper, it doesn’t matter but you’ve got to keep tabs on these people because they’ll move around, they’ll change and you want to have a long-term relationship with them. So you put them in there and then you say, how can I hit them from multiple angles? And I’m just brainstorming now, on behalf of your client who’s name I won’t even attempt to pronounce, I would say, listen, here’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to phone them, I’m going to speak to them on the telephone, I’m going to send them an email, I’m going to interact with them on social media, I’m going to send them a letter, I’m going to make sure that I appear in the publications that they read. I’m going to make sure I appear on stage at the conferences that they attend. I’m going to make sure that they see my photo on billboards outside their office. I’m going to make sure that I feature as an interviewed expert on the radio shows that they listen to. I’m going to make sure that I send them breakfast by courier one morning. We used to do this with great effect. Think about the more difficult to reach prospects; if we couldn’t get a hold of people, if they were always refusing our calls or similar, 7 o’clock 8 o’clock in the morning, we’d send a delivery of a hot croissant, a hot coffee, cold orange juice, the daily newspaper, and a little note saying, “Please take my call, I’ll be calling in 15 minutes.” And it’s very difficult to say no to somebody when you’re eating breakfast that they have sent you, if they say can I have 15 minutes of your time.
SHANE: While checking their email, they are eating the biscuit that you sent them and your email shows up, right?
MATTHEW: For sure. Or perhaps you can deliver it yourself. It’s high-risk because people might think you’re too forward but hey, I’d go for it. So that’s what I would do. I would approach them but not just pick up the phone, not just follow them on social media and leave comments on their website, but all of the above. And I would track these people because your prospects will make investments in you, and this is straight from the book, the solid methodology that I teach, people, your prospects will make investments in you, that are directly proportionate to the amount of trust that they have, and one of the fastest ways to increase trust is to show up regularly as somebody in their lives. We don’t trust people we don’t know generally, but we do trust people more, even if we’ve only seen them in the neighborhood. So let’s say that you desperately need to go to the toilet and your toddler is not going to be able to come with you for whatever reason, halfway through an ice-cream, might throw a tantrum. You look around, and you need somebody to watch your toddler while you run to the John, and your choices are:
1. Somebody you know very well.
2. Somebody you have kind of know because you’ve seen them maybe, around in the neighborhood for the last couple of years, but never spoken to them.
3. A complete stranger.
Well, your choice is going to be obvious; first it’s going to be the person you know really well, but if they are not available, you will still make an investment of trust in somebody that you have seen around in the neighborhood because you deem that because you have seen them around, they’re unlikely to kidnap your kid; right?
SHANE: Exactly.
MATTHEW: That was a really stretched analogy [Crosstalk]
SHANE: You just take a person that you have some kind of trust with.
MATTHEW: How can we most rapidly increase trust and of course, the best way to make people give us their trust is by doing what we say we are going to do. So, I would, given that market size, I’d get on the phone for a few weeks, three or four weeks, find out what you can about these people, maybe even a week actually – you can probably hit 20 people a day and then second week for callbacks, maybe third week for the really difficult-to-reach ones, and then do anything it takes; letters, emails, the works and absolutely and see what you can give them. With a market that size, I’m hoping that your offer is quite –
SHANE: High, valuable –
MATTHEW: in terms of value, yeah, in terms of the dollar value. I hope that your clients will be investing a lot of cash in you. So in order to do that, you’ve got to get them to trust you. So don’t just go – this is sales 1-0-1, don’t just call them up and say, “Hey, I’m interested you in selling you something, do you want to talk?” but find another, more nuanced, more sophisticated way of building a relationship because you can position yourself very quickly as the go-to person in a market of that size, especially if you are at the center of a network, where all of those 100 people know you, and they’ve even known each other through you, because then what do they talk about? They talk about you.
SHANE: Right, which is why we go to small, live events whenever we can, because that immediately injects us into circles of people who know people that want that want to do or buy or like what we do; right Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: Exactly. And I think, in this situation for Olgierd, I mean, this could be a good thing to have such a small pool. As long as your numbers add up, I think it’s a good thing to have customers that you can personally contact.
SHANE: Because if you can get into one circle of ten, that circle of ten is probably connected to the other 20 circles of ten that are in that industry. All right, that was a great answer to that question, Matthew. Matthew Kimberley is the head of the Book Yourself Solid Coach and training program and the author of the self-help classic, ‘How to Get a Grip’. Matthew, if anyone wants to learn more about you, or they want to contact you, what is the best way for them to do that?
MATTHEW: You’ve got to get on my email list by going to matthewkimberly.com and putting your email address into any one of the dozen or so boxes that will jump up in front of you.
SHANE: All right guys, that was wrapping up our interview with Matthew Kimberley, awesome answer to that question; that just goes to show you, if you do have a small market, it doesn’t matter. Get out there, put yourself in front of the right people, if your offer is good enough and it adds up over the lifetime of your client, you are going to be able to make money online. We will catch you guys next time, until then, get out there, take action and flip your life.
JOCELYN: Bye!
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