How To Build A Customer Factory

In this lecture I explain how to develop the type of Marketing Mindset employed by successful small business owners.

Successful small business owners understand and implement marketing on a consistent basis

You must focus on marketing

You must be committed; financially, emotionally, chronologically

You must become promotional

You will fail more often than succeed in marketing

You must be both persistent and consistent in your marketing efforts

You must never stop learning about marketing

I started my entrepreneurial journey in 1972 when my mother opened a copy shop

The copy shop was like a barber shop for business owners

I started observing business owners of all kinds

What is the difference between business that succeed and those that fail?

Companies that succeed understand and implement marketing

Marketing is a mystery and sales is a dirty word

People marketing because it involves talking to strangers on purpose

Marketing involves turning strangers into customers

Marketing is based on relationship-building

People are embarrassed to break the ice with strangers

People fear rejection

We don’t have the tools or techniques to talk to strangers

People buy from people they know, like and trust

This relationship requires time to develop

Customer Life Cycle Stages: Stranger, Suspect, Prospect, Customer Client

Definitions of each stage in the Customer Life Cycle

Stranger never heard of you, your company or your brand.

A Stranger doesn’t know if you’re a plumber or a Realtor

A Stranger has no idea what possible value or benefit you could offer them.

We are interested in targeted, qualified Strangers.

A Suspect has seen at least one of your marketing messages but is suspicious of it.

A Suspect is suspicious of all marketing messages.

A Prospect has need of your service and has seen enough of your marketing messages to consider the idea of doing business with you.

The Prospect will do some research before calling you.

The Prospect will look for online information and reviews about your company.

A Customer is a first-time / one-time buyer of your product or service.

A Client is a long-term source of repeat and referral business.

It’s critical to ensure the first purchase experience is exceptional in order to convert a Customer into a Client.

A Client is your more valuable marketing asset

Marketing is very much like dating. You are courting your customers.

You start by identifying a highly-qualified prospect. Don’t kiss on the first date.

Then you break the ice and incent engagement by asking questions

You don’t talk for too long but end by asking for her phone number.

After a couple of days you call - just as you said you would.

Your message remains consistent and appropriate.

Over time you reinforce, build and nurture the relationship.

Trying to turn a networking meeting participant into a new client

Break the ice by introducing yourself and giving your elevator speech

Get their business card / contact information

Send them a follow-up email and notecard

The will receive the email that day and the notecard 2-3 days later.

This is three touches in three days, reinforcing your brand in their mind.

Give them a call a week later and suggest a 30-minute meeting at a coffee shop

At the meeting ask questions and listen closely to their answers

Propose a solution based upon what you have heard / learned about them.

When they buy they become a Customer, a first-time buyer.

Over time I do business with them through several cycles

And then ask for referrals.

Just like Buyer’s Remorse there is an emotional reaction I call Seller’s Remorse

It’s our tendency not to follow-up with Customers after they make their first purchase

Just like a guy who doesn’t call a girl after the first time they sleep together.

I see this happen very often in multi-level marketing companies

Remember that creating Clients is the ultimate objective of this exercise

In addition to ensuring they have an exceptional first purchase experience, you should follow-up with them to reinforce that feeling of being well respected and taken care of.

Cement the relationship with a thank you note, telephone call or email or at least a satisfaction survey.

You must Design Your Customer first in order to manufacture exactly the kind that you want.

Not all potential buyers are an excellent match for your offering or your business.

The definition of Target Market

Target Marketing is entirely different from Mass Marketing

You can’t afford to market to the whole world even if you believe that anyone is a good target for your offering.

You will also get much better results by using specialized messages for specific target groups.

Example using a software company that has created an online appointment management system.

Target Marketing for Residential Real Estate Agents.

Boxcentric Thinking

Trying to be all things to all people

Fear of leaving money on the table

Specialized Solutions provide the highest profits

Target Marketing allows you to focus on the lowest-hanging fruit

Even by focusing on a very narrow niche, you will still find more business than you could possibly handle.

So focus and profit

Medical specialists make more money than generalists

Neurologists make more than General Practitioners

You become the trusted source of specific knowledge and solutions

Diagnose the problem, create the cure and profit from the results

What is your Identity, Brand, Unique Selling Proposition?

Does your business exist to serve you or your market?

Your identity must be expressed very clearly and concisely

The confused mind says no

Create your identity by writing your elevator speech

What an elevator speech is:

A 30-60 minute monologue that explains who you are, what your company does and why it’s great

Your elevator speech needs to include who you specifically serve/target

What their (information) need is

Why/how you’re the trusted information source / solution provider

A sample elevator speech for a residential real estate agent

In less than forty seconds you know exactly who you’re speaking with

You know what specialized knowledge he has and how it benefits his target market

Rich Harshaw’s thoughts on the importance of your company’s identity

You have to define your identity first before doing any other marketing work

Your identity must be expressed with Power, Precision and Passion

The real estate agent elevator speech with Power, Precision and Passion highlighted

A story from my experience as the owner of a printing business in the 1990s

I leased a $250,000 digital printing device that brought no additional value to my clients

I was selling a commoditized product into a hugely competitive marketplace

I was trying to be all things to all people

I had no specialized solution for a targeted market

Another printing industry person had a solution I just couldn’t see

Creating your Prime Client Profile is different for existing businesses than it is for start-up businesses

Start-ups can only create an educated guess based upon market research

Existing businesses need look no further than their current customer list

Who is your favorite customer?

Who buys the most from you?

Who buys the most frequently?

Who buys the biggest average orders?

Who do you enjoy working with the most?

Who are you able to most successfully serve on a regular basis?

Pick your single most favorite client and use that person/company as the basis for your Prime Client Profile.

Then describe them demographically.

Then add in features that would make them an even better client.

Why do they like you?

What have you learned about them?

How/why does your solution match their need so well?

My favorite customer in the printing industry was a small specialty manufacturing company

They see that 65% of their business comes from Dentists, 30% from Chiropractors, 5% Other

Dentists represent their lowest-hanging fruit, the market they should target first

They also know that multi-office dental practices get the most value from them and provide the most revenue for the least amount of work per dollar on their part

Since the software company is based in the U.S., I recommend they focus on U.S., multi-office dental practices

InfoUSA is the world's largest purveyor of business and consumer data. And all of their wares are available to you instantly, online. Click this link to visit their web site and get started.

infoUSA has great list-building resources for both consumers and businesses

They have almost 11 million U.S. business listings

We type in the word “Dentists” and find 154,636 total listings

If we narrow down to just practices with 20 employees or more we find 4,237 total listings

They also have 19,802 email addresses for those large dental practices

You don’t have to buy all the listings

You don’t have to buy right now, you can save your search results for later

You can get different levels of contact information on each record

What is a Marketing Process?

It's the whole enchilada.

What you’re doing for marketing, your approach, your strategy, tactics, your marketing assembly line.

Sample Marketing Processes include; retailing, wholesaling, contracting, direct sales, direct response, eCommerce, etc.

In this lecture I give three examples, direct sales in a home improvement company, eCommerce using an online education company, the process used by most retailers and restaurant owners.

I earned my bones as a salesman working for a home improvement company that did direct sales via in-home sales presentations.

The home improvement company targeted homeowners in the Washington, DC area, broke the ice with mass media advertising on radio, television and in newspapers.

Prospects called in and were asked a series of qualifying questions and then scheduled for an in-home sales appointment.

Then salesmen like me would visit the home and attempt to sell projects.

I did over 500 in-home sales presentations and closed about 1 out of 3 homeowners.

Online education platforms use an eCommerce Marketing Process.

They break the ice with online banner ads, text ads and Search Engine Optimization.

You are offered an incentive or discount to purchase so you visit the landing page.

On the landing page you learn more about the course and decide whether or not you want to purchase.

Whether or not you purchase, if you have registered with the site you will continue to receive email messages from them until you either buy, die or opt-out.

Retailers and restaurant owners often choose the Retail Marketing Process because they believe the adage “If I build it they will come.”

They pay for very expensive retail space and construct a large expensive sign in the hope that auto and foot traffic passing by their location every day will eventually move down the assembly line sufficient to give them a try, come in and buy.

This approach will achieve a certain level of success but it can be greatly supported and supercharged with the proper marketing strategy and tactics.

You can often learn best what to do by learning what not to do - by learning from the mistakes of others.

Marketing Processes can be broken by unfulfilled expectations, inconsistent messaging and lack of focus on follow-up.

In this lecture I review three companies with broken Marketing Processes.

The first company used the direct response marketing process to sell grass plugs to homeowners.

They sold millions of dollars of “dirt” but never followed-up with their customers in an attempt to sell them additional products and services for the home, even though they had all of the contact and payment information and knew that their customers were homeowners who were concerned with the condition of their yards.

Postcard Mania is has a great Marketing Process in place and can be very helpful in supporting your marketing efforts.

But, on multiple occasions they have not been able to get me their package of sample postcards.

Old Town Coffee and Spice doesn’t do any marketing at all!

You see it every day and it can work for any business.

Any marketing program you see an advertisement offering free information, that is Education-Based Marketing.

It is used to sell products, services and even charitable contributions and military enlistments.

Education-Based Marketing is great because: It’s an extremely effective ice-breaker; prospects qualify themselves; prospects give you all their contact information along with permission to communicate with them going forward.

It allows for a much deeper level of engagement.

Education-Based Marketing positions you as the trusted expert and advocate for their success.

The provision of detailed information at no charge clearly differentiates you from your competition.

EBM has Five Core Elements

The Free Offer / Specialized Information Product

A Registration Process

Immediate Delivery of The Information

A Customer Relationship Management System

An Ongoing Engagement Program

Contact Carly Switzer at PostcardMania.com by emailing carly@postcardmania.com or by telephone at 800-628-1804 x345.

Be sure to tell Carly you learned about PostcardMania.com from this class!

In this lecture I create an Education-Based Customer Factory for a retail shop that doesn't do any marketing of any kind.

First we Design Our Customer and decide to target locals as the low-hanging fruit for repeat and referral business rather than tourists who will only buy once.

Old Town Alexandria is an exceedingly high-income neighborhood with over 1,300 households that have annual income in excess of $250,000

In this lecture I create an Education-Based Customer Factory for a retail shop that doesn't do any marketing of any kind.

First we Design Our Customer and decide to target locals as the low-hanging fruit for repeat and referral business rather than tourists who will only buy once.

Old Town Alexandria is an exceedingly high-income neighborhood with over 1,300 households that have annual income in excess of $250,000

In this lecture I create an Education-Based Marketing program that involves a series of four quarterly live educational events at the shop.

The first event will be a coffee workshop presented by an expert and include free tastings along with a free half-pound of the exotic coffee of choice for each registered attendee.

I created a $15,000 annual budget for this program

My projections show that this $15,000 investment could generate as much as $250,000 in the first year and $1.25 million over the course of a five-year average customer lifetime.

Even if my projections are off by a factor of four times, you would still generate over $60,000 in the first year and over $300,000 over the course of five years from that $15,000 investment.

Click this link to get started with email marketing from Constant Contact.

After you create your account send me an email at frank@thecustomerfactory.com and I will have the good folks at Constant Contact create your Website Match email template at no charge, saving you $99.

While I recommend that you commit to at least a six-month email marketing program, you can cancel your Constant Contact account at any time - and get a full refund if you cancel within the first 30 days.

Access the full Constant Contact Services Pricing Grid by clicking this link.

People see a TV commercial, billboard, direct mail piece, etc. and think what they are seeing is marketing.

Those things are a part of marketing but they are not marketing per se.

They are only marketing tools to be used as part of your overall marketing process.

All of these tools can be extremely effective if used correctly, in the proper sequence down the marketing assembly line.

Physical tools include business cards, brochures, postcards and other direct mail pieces, information on disks, catalogs, advertising specialty items and so forth.

Physical tools allow you to ask for your prospect’s home address because they must be mailed or shipped.

Online tools include (multiple websites), email, directories, landing pages, banner ads, text ads (Google Adwords), SEO, SEM, streaming audio and video.

Click this link to learn more about Mike Stewart's Tablet Video Training program.

Deltina Hay's Twitter Essentials In Under An Hour course on Udemy.

Another great Udemy course from Deltina Hay: Facebook Page Essentials

Video is a great marketing tool that can be both extremely effective and inexpensive

Social Marketing Tools include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube and many others.

All of these platforms give you the opportunity for posts, promotions and advertisements.

Blogs and Review/Reputation Sites are also Social Marketing Tools.

Educational Marketing Tools include Surveys, Quizzes, Trivia Contests, How-To Audios, Videos and PDFs/White Papers, Success Story Interviews and Podcasts.

Mobile Marketing Tools include Mobile-Optimized Websites / Web Pages, SMS Text Messaging, Video, Mobile Apps, QR Codes, Restaurant Menus, Mobile Advertising

Personal Marketing Tools include networking meetings, sales calls, personal visits, handshakes, face-to-face interaction, telephone calls, live educational and social events.

It’s important to choose only the tools you need and use them strategically and sequentially.

Using your tools Auto-Magically will increase your effectiveness, consistency and persistence.

Click this link to learn more about Less Annoying CRM, start your 30-day free trial or sign-up and get started immediately!

Many people avoid using a CRM because they find it too difficult to use or too expensive to implement.

I’m very pleased to have found Less Annoying CRM because it is so simple to learn and use and it’s very reasonably priced - $10 per user per month.

Click this link to get started with email marketing from Constant Contact.

After you create your account send me an email at frank@thecustomerfactory.com and I will have the good folks at Constant Contact create your Website Match email template at no charge, saving you $99.

While I recommend that you commit to at least a six-month email marketing program, you can cancel your Constant Contact account at any time - and get a full refund if you cancel within the first 30 days.

Access the full Constant Contact Services Pricing Grid by clicking this link.

I believe that Constant Contact is the very best touch marketing platform for small businesses.

I have used Constant Contact since the 1990s and was once a Constant Contact Authorized Local Expert.

Constant Contact is an incredible value. For $15/month you can send out an unlimited number of emails to a list of up to 500 contacts.

Constant Contact has over 400 tech support people available 90 hours per week along with an enormous training library.

They have an event management platform called EventSpot.

Constant Contact has Facebook integration that allows you to post Facebook-only promotions.

They have a Daily Deal promotion platform called SaveLocal that is much less expensive than Groupon.

They also have a great Online Survey platform.

Click this link to get your free trial account with Shoeboxed.com and let them do all the work associated with inputting contact information from business cards you collect.

You can contact ExpressWriters by email at info@expresswriterteam.com or call Julia McCoy directly at 855-909-8326 to talk about generating blog posts, email newsletters and social media posts directly from projects you complete, all for under $200 per month.

Infusionsoft is a high-end, fully automated Customer Factory platform that can be hugely effective - if you learn how to use it and spend the time building its complex marketing processes. I don't recommend it for beginners but, in many ways, it is the ultimate manifestation of the Customer Factory Marketing Model for more advance/experienced entrepreneurs.

Automation is key to your marketing success.

Plan your work, work you plan.

Spend the time up-front to create an automated assembly line so that you will be able to spend much less time managing it going forward.

Data entry of contact information can be outsourced to the client or done quickly and simply using tools like Shoeboxed or CardMunch.

You can automate the generation of content to support your content marketing efforts.

Simply blog once per week on a recent job/product/customer/anything and then repurpose each blog post as posts on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Then use those four stories to create your monthly email newsletter.

ExpressWriters can handle all of this for you for as little as $200 per month.

You need to create two types of marketing calendars: 1) a global marketing calendar that covers everything you’re doing and; 2) a prospect marketing calendar.

This is perhaps the most important lecture in the entire course

All of the reasons that small business owners fail at marketing come back to a lack of commitment.

Successful marketing can be compared to training and running a marathon.

Everything comes back to your “why”

What is your reason for starting your own business?

Is that reason important enough to you to cause you to persist through every obstacle until you achieve success?

If not, you either need another why or you need to take another course of action.

You have to make a financial commitment to your marketing, be ready to invest the required amounts.

You must be emotionally committed to your marketing as well. You must believe that this will work and you can make it work.

Live your way into a new way of thinking instead of trying to think your way into a new way of living.

Act boldly and unseen forces will come to your aid.

You must be chronologically committed to your marketing: be willing to commit the time required to get your systems up and running.

The wolf is motivated but the rabbit is committed. You must be totally committed, like the rabbit.

Whether you believe you can or you believe you can’t, you’re right.

How to spend smart and track the returns that you’re getting on your marketing investment.

I have a strategy I call $20 Marketing.

With this strategy you can target 200 prime prospects for a total annual budget of $4,000 which is just about $11 per day.

If you can’t afford that you might want to cut back on your Starbucks budget.

This approach will allow you to communicate with your 200 BEST PROSPECTS multiple times, consistently, appropriately over time, moving them down the assembly line.

Touching your 200 best prospects 10 times is MUCH better than touching 2,000 less-qualified prospects only once each.

Where do you start? You have to start someplace.

When everything is a variable the best stake to put in the ground is money.

What will your annual budget be? Use the $20 Marketing model as your basis.

Lay the foundation then make some projects relative to particular milestones such as number of customers you want to generate in a given time period, customer acquisition cost for each of them, response levels to particular promotions, average purchase size, lifetime value and so forth.

I have a client in the home improvement business that has over 20 lead sources.

They track every lead back to its source and answer all the questions above.

They track the cost per lead and cost per sale, percentage of “sits” and percentage of sales as well as the average dollar value per lead issued to each salesperson.

At the very least you need to know the following: your current available capacity, your average ticket size and gross margin as well as your break-even sales level on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis.

Then you can project what amount of customer acquisition cost you can afford, estimate the lifetime value of a new customer and the number of new sales you have to generate to meet your goals.

Your customer acquisition cost must be less than 10%% of the lifetime value of the client.

Your marketing budget can’t break the bank.

You should have at least a 10%% annual conversion rate. If you are targeted 200 prime prospects you must be converting at least 20 of them every year.

In this section we quickly review each of the previous sections and use that information to build a Customer Factory for your business.

We walk through the worksheets to help you bring all the information together and cause it all to come into focus in your mind.

We’re going to go step by step, designing your customer, picking education-based marketing as your process, we’re going to discuss picking the right tools and then turning it on.

Spend some time answering these questions.

What do you think your company’s identity is?

How would your customers identify your company?

What do you want your company’s identity to be?

What does your marketplace want your company to be?

What is the crying need in your target market?

What is your Prime Client Profile?

I’ve picked your process for you: Education-Based Marketing

What sort of information product or special offer would you use to break the ice and get prospects to qualify themselves, engage with you, provide their contact information, and give you permission to communicate with them going forward?

How will you implement the five core elements of the Education-Based Marketing process?

How will you communicate the free offer?

What will your registration process be?

How will you quickly deliver on your promise?

What type of CRM are you going to use?

What sort of ongoing messaging are you going to use?

What marketing tools are you going to use?

In what order will you apply them?

How will you identify and gather together your targeted prospects?

What type of CRM are you going to use to collect and organize your prospects’ contact information?

What automation tools can you use to reduce your ongoing time commitment.

What is your “why” for being in business for yourself?

Why are you taking this course?

Why are you seeking to increase your sales?

How committed are you financially, chronologically, emotionally and totally?

What will your budget look like, annually and per prospect?

What will the size of your list be?

What are your projections?

What is your current average sale size?

What are you projecting your customer acquisition cost will be?

What do you project new customers will purchase annually?

How long will they stay with me?

What will each new customer’s lifetime value be?

I published this book on the sales profession in January 2004 after having incredible success doing a job I never could have imagined seeing myself as: in-home salesman for a home improvement company.

I have included the audiobook edition in this course to help you see that you too can become a top producing salesperson - for your own company!

The last few chapters talk about finding the right company and product to represent and doing employment interviews. These are not directly applicable to you though you may learn a thing or to about placing employment ads and conducting interviews with candidates.

The most valuable messages for you will come in the opening chapters where I discuss how I came to first change my perspective on sales work and then get to work producing an incredible amount of sales production in a job I never wanted, in an industry where I had on experience selling a service I had never heard of.

Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

SEO and SEM (Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing) are powerful marketing channels because people generally do not "search" for a solution until they have an immediate need of a solution.

If a homeowner in Springfield, Virginia has a hot water heater explode in the middle of the night and you have an online page or listing which is optimized for "24-hour emergency hot water heater repair Springfield, Virginia" they are likely to find you and call you at 3:00 am some morning.

This eBook gives you one task to complete each day for 21 consecutive days, after which you will find that your company will stop being invisible online and begin to appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) for a wide variety of terms.

Completing each one of these steps over the course of three weeks will require time, work and commitment. But the fruits of your labors could be a significant increase in the amount of business your company generates from the Internet.

This is a teleseminar (a seminar on the telephone) I did in 2006 which was structured for residential real estate agents but which is applicable to any local small business.

The combination of smartphone video and social media - especially YouTube - has created amazing branding and marketing opportunities for firms and individuals alike.

But if video marketing is so powerful, why is it that so few businesses and business professionals are taking advantage of it to build their brands and accelerate their revenue growth?

In search of the answer, I asked Justin Brown, co-founder of Primal Video, a video training and resources firm located in Brisbane, Australia, to join me for a conversation on Radio Free Enterprise.

Justin and his brother (and co-founder) Mike have produced 328 videos to date, that have attracted over 700,000 subscribers and millions of views.

They also run an online training program called Primal Video Accelerator that not only explains why video is such a powerful marketing tool but also teaches you how to leverage it most effectively.

As a graduate of the course myself, I can tell you that it is the real deal. In this conversation, I will ask Justin to share some tips on how you can start building your brand - business or personal - right away.

Learn more about Primal Video and their Accelerator Training Program. https://bit.ly/3e6bopW

At its heart, marketing is nothing more than starting a conversation with someone who could be an ideal customer.

Today there is no faster, easier, or more powerful way to start that conversation than to be the featured guest expert on podcasts your prospects are already listening to.

In his book, Podcast Guest Profits, Tom Schwab shares a step-by-step system for leveraging podcast interviews that has been proven to convert 25 times better than blogs.

Tom insists that, using just a microphone, an internet connection, and the information in his book, any professional can speak to millions of ideal prospects and turn them into profitable customers.

In this conversation I’ll be asking him what podcast guest marketing is, who it works for, and how any professional can get started becoming a profitable podcast guest.

Click this link to visit Tom's website, take his online assessment test, request a free copy of his book, or schedule a free discovery call with him: https://interviewvalet.com/rfe/

This is an audio recording of an interview I did with John Colley, host of The Online Learning Podcast, in January 2014.

I have included it in the course because it contains additional back story on the origin of The Customer Factory Marketing Model and also offers suggestions on other Udemy courses that you may find beneficial.

This an interview I did on my podcast, Radio Free Enterprise. Alex Berman explains the power of "Cold Emails" to start a powerful marketing conversation with a complete stranger.

It was originally an audio interview but I transformed it into a video so I could place it on YouTube where it would be transcribed and crawled by the Google and YouTube search engines.

I have also provided the audio file as a resource with this lesson.

This an interview I did on my podcast, Radio Free Enterprise.

Michael Cheng of Snip.ly explains how you can brand yourself and generate click-throughs to websites and landing pages every time you share links to videos, blogs, podcasts, and articles with clients, friends, and prospects.

It was originally an audio interview but I transformed it into a video so I could place it on YouTube where it would be transcribed and crawled by the Google and YouTube search engines.

I have also provided the audio file as a resource with this lesson.

This an interview from my podcast, Radio Free Enterprise.

In it, Tim Davis explains how real estate agents can position themselves high above their competition by using personal branding techniques. While Tim's model is targeted on real estate agents, his techniques will work for anyone in any job who is looking to stand out from the crowd.

It was originally an audio interview but I transformed it into a video so I could place it on YouTube where it would be transcribed and crawled by the Google and YouTube search engines.

I have also provided the audio file as a resource with this lesson.