How to Confidently Buy All the New Customers You Can Stand

How to Confidently Buy All the New Customers You Can Stand written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

 

While the title of this post may seem a little odd or even off-putting, when it comes right down to it a lot of sales and marketing involves purchasing business.

When you advertise, you invest in the opportunity to generate customers. When a salesperson prospects and goes on a sales call, you're investing time and salary or commission in the act of acquiring customers.

Here's what I know – most small business owners invest far too little in marketing, in part, because they don't fully understand how to do so confidently.

I mean, if you write a check to Facebook or Google and have no sense of what will happen and what it will be worth, it can be a little intimidating.

Let me ask this – if you knew, with complete certainty that for every $2 you spent, you would get $5 back – would you go get all the $2 bills you could find?

To understand how much you can invest or, better yet, should invest in marketing you must understand what a lead and ultimately a customer is worth to your business.

These may seem like rather advanced metrics, but they are critical if you are to grow. Quite often the thing that chokes off growth is the failure to invest properly in marketing.

If you know that a customer is worth, say, $10,000 a year and yet you only invest a few hundred every month in acquiring them, you are effectively suffocating your ability to grow.

Now I'm not suggesting you spend for spend sake, note that I've used the word “invest” to describe this activity, but to invest wisely you must understand a few important metrics.

Advanced conversion metrics

I love tracking conversion rate on the whole, but the following three pieces of the puzzle should be considered separately to get a complete picture of conversion in your business.

1) Value of a Lead – This is every visit to your website or subscriber on your email list. For example, if you have 1000 subscribers and your email marketing efforts generate $10,000 a year, you could say that the value of 1 subscriber on your list $10.

Armed with this knowledge you might start to think of some new ways to focus on list growth, not for growth sake, but to generate far greater opportunities for business.

Or if your site had 25,000 visitors last month and you made $25,000 net profit –  that's an average of $1 per visitor.

I realize that this may be a gross oversimplification of the many moving parts in your business, but the goal here is to narrow your focus on just a handful of things so you can stay focused and hopefully stop wasting time on things that don't matter.

With this number, you can begin to focus on how much you can spend to generate more traffic or more sign-ups.

Here's a nice article from FormStack that goes into the factors involved in calculating the value of a lead.

2) Lifetime value of a customer – this is the amount of profit a customer returns over the lifetime of being a customer. This number allows you to think about how much you can invest to land a new customer.

If a customer is potentially worth thousands to your business over a three-year span, for example, you know how much you can spend or are willing to spend to get that customer, knowing that if you keep them happy, it will be money well spent.

The other thing this number allows you to do is think about cost vs. return in your business model. If you can create a product/service mix that allows you to recoup your marketing investment with the first sale, you can then go to work on selling more from a break even point.

One of the most potent ways to grow a business is to spend every dime you can to break even on the first sale and then go to work on selling 20-30% of those customers a far higher priced, higher profit service.

In this model, your customers are paying you to market to them and armed with your increasing lifetime number; you know what you can and should invest every single month.

This kind of turns the % of revenue model for marketing investment on its head, and that's a good thing.

Here's a more complex description of the formula that can go into calculating the lifetime value of a customer.

3) Cost to acquire a new customer – this is the marketing spend required on average to acquire a new customer. This can be a moving target for some businesses, but it's a key factor in creating your marketing budget and understanding the value of your marketing activities.

This is the most important number when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of your marketing channels or traffic sources. For example, if your lifetime value is $100 over a year and your cost to acquire a new customer on average is $25, but the cost to acquire customers in a channel like Google AdWords is $75, you might reconsider that channel.

If you've never tried to determine this number, you may have to take a fairly crude approach at first and simply determine how much you spent last year on marketing and divide it by how many new customers you acquired. This will change as you start investing in new approaches and tracking effectiveness.

Here's another great article from the folks at Kissmetrics on calculating customer acquisition cost.

Initially, you should spend some time and create guestimates for each of this metrics, so you have something with which to start working.

From there you start to refine the inputs that go into each number so you can lay the entire picture out on a dashboard or spreadsheet that allows you to monitor changes and accuracy over time.

When you get the point where this thinking permeates your marketing approach, and you can clearly see what every dollar you invest returns, you'll be ready to buy all the business you can handle.

How to Confidently Buy All the New Customers You Can Stand

How to Confidently Buy All the New Customers You Can Stand written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

 

While the title of this post may seem a little odd or even off-putting, when it comes right down to it a lot of sales and marketing involves purchasing business.

When you advertise, you invest in the opportunity to generate customers. When a salesperson prospects and goes on a sales call, you're investing time and salary or commission in the act of acquiring customers.

Here's what I know – most small business owners invest far too little in marketing, in part, because they don't fully understand how to do so confidently.

I mean, if you write a check to Facebook or Google and have no sense of what will happen and what it will be worth, it can be a little intimidating.

Let me ask this – if you knew, with complete certainty that for every $2 you spent, you would get $5 back – would you go get all the $2 bills you could find?

To understand how much you can invest or, better yet, should invest in marketing you must understand what a lead and ultimately a customer is worth to your business.

These may seem like rather advanced metrics, but they are critical if you are to grow. Quite often the thing that chokes off growth is the failure to invest properly in marketing.

If you know that a customer is worth, say, $10,000 a year and yet you only invest a few hundred every month in acquiring them, you are effectively suffocating your ability to grow.

Now I'm not suggesting you spend for spend sake, note that I've used the word “invest” to describe this activity, but to invest wisely you must understand a few important metrics.

Advanced conversion metrics

I love tracking conversion rate on the whole, but the following three pieces of the puzzle should be considered separately to get a complete picture of conversion in your business.

1) Value of a Lead – This is every visit to your website or subscriber on your email list. For example, if you have 1000 subscribers and your email marketing efforts generate $10,000 a year, you could say that the value of 1 subscriber on your list $10.

Armed with this knowledge you might start to think of some new ways to focus on list growth, not for growth sake, but to generate far greater opportunities for business.

Or if your site had 25,000 visitors last month and you made $25,000 net profit –  that's an average of $1 per visitor.

I realize that this may be a gross oversimplification of the many moving parts in your business, but the goal here is to narrow your focus on just a handful of things so you can stay focused and hopefully stop wasting time on things that don't matter.

With this number, you can begin to focus on how much you can spend to generate more traffic or more sign-ups.

Here's a nice article from FormStack that goes into the factors involved in calculating the value of a lead.

2) Lifetime value of a customer – this is the amount of profit a customer returns over the lifetime of being a customer. This number allows you to think about how much you can invest to land a new customer.

If a customer is potentially worth thousands to your business over a three-year span, for example, you know how much you can spend or are willing to spend to get that customer, knowing that if you keep them happy, it will be money well spent.

The other thing this number allows you to do is think about cost vs. return in your business model. If you can create a product/service mix that allows you to recoup your marketing investment with the first sale, you can then go to work on selling more from a break even point.

One of the most potent ways to grow a business is to spend every dime you can to break even on the first sale and then go to work on selling 20-30% of those customers a far higher priced, higher profit service.

In this model, your customers are paying you to market to them and armed with your increasing lifetime number; you know what you can and should invest every single month.

This kind of turns the % of revenue model for marketing investment on its head, and that's a good thing.

Here's a more complex description of the formula that can go into calculating the lifetime value of a customer.

3) Cost to acquire a new customer – this is the marketing spend required on average to acquire a new customer. This can be a moving target for some businesses, but it's a key factor in creating your marketing budget and understanding the value of your marketing activities.

This is the most important number when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of your marketing channels or traffic sources. For example, if your lifetime value is $100 over a year and your cost to acquire a new customer on average is $25, but the cost to acquire customers in a channel like Google AdWords is $75, you might reconsider that channel.

If you've never tried to determine this number, you may have to take a fairly crude approach at first and simply determine how much you spent last year on marketing and divide it by how many new customers you acquired. This will change as you start investing in new approaches and tracking effectiveness.

Here's another great article from the folks at Kissmetrics on calculating customer acquisition cost.

Initially, you should spend some time and create guestimates for each of this metrics, so you have something with which to start working.

From there you start to refine the inputs that go into each number so you can lay the entire picture out on a dashboard or spreadsheet that allows you to monitor changes and accuracy over time.

When you get the point where this thinking permeates your marketing approach, and you can clearly see what every dollar you invest returns, you'll be ready to buy all the business you can handle.

ED Reverser by Max Miller

ED Reverser by Max Miller

​Max Miller has ED Reverser manual to assist any men planning to do away with ED at last. This ED Reverser book assists males sustain an erection adequate for intercourse. It works by unwinding particular muscles in the member and distending blood vessels that increase blood circulation to the male sexual organ and helps to trigger an erection.



There is nothing more embarrassing to a man than not pleasing their partner in bed. Erectile Dysfunction (ED) is one of the most typical problems that men of any ages face. ED Reverser is an all-encompassing guide that aims at bringing this problem to an end. The guide carries the history, the causes and tested options to the issue. The author, after understanding just how much Erectile Dysfunction can injure men's self-confidence and relationships, chose to come up with a workable option.



ED Reverser is authored by Max Miller. It is a program that unveils scientifically proven truths about ED and natural approaches and suggestions to cure it permanently. The ED Reverser program is offered in type of a digital PDF that you can immediately download on your PC or mobile phone. It is a step by step guide that has actually already been utilized by thousands to cure impotence. The ED Reverser eBook is well organized revealing the real causes of ED and sharing natural treatments such a change in diet to healthier portions to treat the illness.



ED REVERSER DETAILS



There is a lot to gain from the ED Reverser program. To begin with, the program recommends a complete list of vital nutrients including proteins, amino-acids and select enzymes. Max Miller, in ED Reverser, keeps in mind that through using diet plan, one can increase the blood circulation to the sexual organ thus beating ED. To this end, he shares all the information searchinged for about foods and nutrients.



Supplements play a crucial role in our health. ED Reverser shares a lot of natural supplements that you ought to require to counter the nutritional reasons for ED. You can modify the program to suit your requirements and your schedule.



Max Miller invested years with Erectile Dysfunction and when he could not take it any longer, he decided to invest his time in research study. His marriage was on the verge of breaking after investing years with his better half without sexual intimacy. He shares his story about how ED humiliated him during his honeymoon and during a vacation to the Bahamas. ED Reverser is an outcome of years of research study.



The ED Reverser program works in a simple method:



Erection is attained as a result of blood vessels relaxing and the penis being engorged with blood. However, when you suffer ED, these blood vessels do no unwind. Swelling squeezes close these blood vessels blocking blood from entering your penis. When the swelling is chronic, it results to long term erectile dysfunction.



ED Reverser shares swelling damaging foods that will provide you an erection after a few weeks. It likewise shares sandwich dishes, 13 foods you should prevent and natural supplements to take to conquer ED.



The ED Reverser program shows you 11 lifestyle tricks such as relaxing workouts that beat inflammation, how to cook your food under low temperature and how to prevent tension. Max Miller keeps in mind that stress is a significant cause of ED. He extracts his details from Harvard Anxiety, Anxiety and Tension Research Center.



 

The Secret to Getting Unstuck

The Secret to Getting Unstuck written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

This post applies to business and life I think – so use it as you will.

I’ve owned my own business for a very long time and like most businesses I’ve had my share of ups and downs. More often than not though I’ve had sometimes long stretches where I mostly just felt a bit stuck – not going anywhere exciting and not knowing what my next move should be – only that I should move. (Probably a bit of undiagnosed ADD creeping in here.)

Lately, I’ve been writing and thinking a lot about growth and the need to focus in order to do so, and I think I’ve unlocked or at least begun to understand that the secret to getting unstuck does involve focus but more than that it involves what I’m going call optimization.

It’s not enough to just choose a narrow focus you’ve also got to choose an objective for that focus – you have to create what and why.

Optimization over focus

Now I know there’s been plenty written of late on purpose in business and choosing the “why” you do what you do. Heck, I’ve contributed to that chatter myself, but there’s always been something sort unpractical about that entire conversation. Sure, I do want to save the world and the whales, but sometimes I have trouble aligning that with what I do day to day.

So, here’s what I want to put out to the world of business that I don’t think is talked about enough.

To feel fully focused and alive in your business, I believe you have to decide just what you are optimizing your business for and then go about staying on that path in everything you do.

Here’s what I mean.

The 5 points of optimization

I believe there are essentially five things you can optimize your business for, and each of these things suggests that you must adopt a certain point of view about your role in the business.

So here goes. (Feel free to add to this list as I’m certain there are more, but in the spirit of focus I’ve opted for less.)

Profit – A business or life optimized for profit means you must make decisions that are more about helping others get what they want rather than building a large following or name for yourself. Have you ever noticed that some of the most profitable businesses are ones you’ve never heard of. That’s because they are busy making products that help other get famous or, at least, live their dream. These businesses are led by people who like to make others shine. That’s why I think the conversation around profit being something bad is so misguided. Sure, there are people who profit at the expense of others, but that’s not the profit optimization I’m talking about. Here’s the tough thing about this one for many business owners – you usually have to get good at giving others credit.

Lifestyle – Today there are countless individuals starting “lifestyle” businesses. That’ the dream, right? Four-hour workweek anyone? There’s no question that there are people living the dream, traveling the world, leading and running causes under the banner of a lifestyle business, but they’ve made choices. They’ve optimized their life, their living situation, and their expectations for what work looks like to fit this choice.

Legacy – Building something that lives on after you let go is certainly a driving force for many. I’m not sure too many businesses get started this way but plenty evolve to this place. Again, this objective involves choice making. Legacy businesses have to invest in building assets and creating endowable innovations and earnings. This might mean making hard choices about both investments and short-term gains.

Growth – Pure growth firms are today quite often associated with the tech startup scene, but it’s just a mindset. A firm that chooses growth and scale must constantly experiment, measure, analyze, and gamble to some degree on rapid change. This can be exciting, gut-wrenching, lifestyle altering and very, very profitable if you win, but it’s not for everyone.

Authority – We’ve seen a surge in authority building over the last five years as many early social media adopters became authorities in a space that rewarding people for engagement, but perhaps not so much for ROI. To some degree, the authority business is a choice that involves a fair amount of ego to sustain. It’s a beast that isn’t ever satiated, so it require constant innovation, platform and point of view.Now, I’m not suggesting that any of the paths above is right or wrong or that one is more suited for someone who does or does not want to get rich. There are countless examples of highly profitable businesses whose owners enjoy an incredible lifestyle many industry authorities who have become incredibly wealthy due to their status.

Optimize for one or none at all

Now, I’m not suggesting that any of the paths above is right or wrong or that one is more suited for someone who does or does not want to get rich. There are countless examples of highly profitable businesses whose owners enjoy an incredible lifestyle many industry authorities who have become incredibly wealthy due in part to their status.

But there are many more examples of people who think they have made one of these choices only to find themselves rather stuck or even failing at some level. (This, of course, may be a measure made up and articulated by a panel of their peers)

Okay – after about 900 words I’m going to give you the real point of the post – in order to thrive in business I believe you must choose to focus on one and only one way to optimize your business and make every decision for how you spend your time, how you market your business, how you build what you build, based on that one thing.

So, a business that chooses profit must be able to build a culture where credit is given to others, where service is about helping others get what they want, where staff, partners and customers are the focus of business decisions.

Far too many business owners say they want to build a highly profitable business and then spend a great deal of their time worrying about their Klout score of some other measure mostly useless in the pursuit of profit.

Others claim that a lifestyle business is their dream, but then they never really get around to creating product v.001 so they find out what’s it like to check your PayPal account from a cabin in the woods.

Look, I get, this stuff is hard, so my intent here is to simply acknowledge that most of the stuckness you might be feeling is self-inflicted and until you realize that you can’t optimize your business for everything the sooner you’ll find focus, make decisions that are true for you, and perhaps for the first time in a long time, start to understand why you do what you do.

Try it out for yourself. Consider the options I’ve listed above and ask yourself, which one of those am I (are we?)

Now, ask this question over and over again – What would a [profit or growth or authority] business do?

The thing is once you commit to this you can start to determine that only thing that matters our business is X – and then you can start to let go of so many of the things you or someone else has convinced you are important.

I know that this is a much bigger topic than that space of one blog post can fully unpack, but just for today – consider what you need to optimize for and start doing it.