In today’s podcast, I’d like to share with you the audio of the third video I did on the topic of Total Market Domination. In this session, I explained how to overcome obstacles so you can dominate your market. This podcast also mentions a free pdf mind-map you can follow along with. If you’d like to download a copy of that pdf and see the videos that go with this series, you can access all of that at topsecrets.com/tmd. That’s topsecrets.com/tmd. Now here’s the audio of video 3.
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Hi, I’m David Blaise… welcome to Video 3 in our workshop series on how to create top of mind awareness and dominate your market.
If you’ve already taken the time to check out videos one and two in this series, and added your comments and questions, thank you! I really appreciate the input, and I’m excited to share this information with you today.
I LOVE hearing from people who say, “you know, I’ve never really thought about the idea of dominating my market before, but I can really see how it would be helpful to create more awareness and increase my market share.” That’s a beautiful thing!
After all, as we discussed in video one, there are leaders and followers in every market. And the leaders tend to dominate, while the followers are left fighting for the scraps! Besides that, if you’re not leading your market, it means someone else is, and that is never going to be good for your business.
In video two, we identified twelve primary obstacles that keep business owners and salespeople from creating top of mind awareness and dominating their markets.
And today, with Video 3, I’d also like to share a mind-map that I put together for you, to show you what it will take to overcome each of those primary obstacles. So if you haven’t done so already, be sure to click the button below this video and download a copy of your mind-map right now. If you print it out now, I will be happy to walk you through each of the steps in this video.
As you’re doing that, I just want to let you know something. The reason this is so important, is that very often we think in terms of goals, objectives, and things we want to accomplish in our lives. But standing between us and every worthwhile goal, there are often significant obstacles, designed to slow us down or keep us from getting there at all. And no matter how attractive or desirable the goal we’re after, if we can’t overcome the obstacles, we’re just not getting there!
Imagine you’re driving along a road, on the way to somewhere you really want to go. The weather’s beautiful, you’re making great time, but all of a sudden, you look ahead and see two gigantic rocks blocking your path! At that point, it’s not about your desire to get where you’re going. It’s not about your motivation to make it happen. That’s not going to do it. It’s not even about the potentially bad consequences if you don’t get there. In that moment, it’s no longer about the goal at all.
Your success depends entirely upon your ability to overcome the obstacle. Will you go over it? Will you go under it? Will you go around it? How are you going to do it? What if your secondary route is also blocked? What if the third route is blocked as well? That happens.
In fact business, sales and life seem DESIGNED to throw obstacles in our path, and if you can’t overcome the obstacles, you can not reach your goals.
So, if you’ve downloaded your mind-map, let’s get started with the 12 Biggest Obstacles to Creating Top of Mind Awareness, along with the recommended solutions to each one.
Okay, as you can see in the PDF, I’ve listed out each of the 12 obstacles, along with a recommended solution to each obstacle. Beyond that, I’ve also included what to do to implement the solution and why it’s important to do that. I’ll give you a brief overview of each one, so you’ll have a crystal clear idea of what needs to happen if you want to create top of mind awareness and dominate your market. So let’s zoom in and get started.
Obstacle One is that it never occurred to them. The solution to that is “decide to dominate.”
Here’s what you need to do. It’s important to get grounded in the mindset. It’s a daily thing. You don’t dominate by accident and you don’t dominate occasionally. You need to gear your brain toward the idea that everything you’re doing is designed to create awareness among exactly the people that you need to reach in your market. You need to understand the necessity to maintain focus on that. Don’t take your eye off the ball. It’s easy to let life interfere, but if you want to dominate, you’re going to have to make sure you maintain control and maintain focus on the activities we’re about to discuss. You need to see the vision and know where you’re going. It never happens in a vacuum.
So why is this important? Well, without a strong decision deciding that you’re going to create top of mind awareness and dominate your market and without a reason for doing it, you’re just not going to do it. You won’t take action on it. The fact that it might never have occurred to you that you should even want to dominate your market, tells you it’s never been a priority in the past. If you want it to be a priority going forward, it requires making that decision and thinking in terms of the reasons why it’s going to be so important to you.
Without a vision you have absolutely nothing to pursue. That’s why it’s so important to maintain that vision, decide what you’re going after and pursue it every day. Without a plan for domination, you will not dominate. As I mentioned in an earlier video, it doesn’t happen by accident.
Obstacle Two: They don’t know who they’re after. The solution here is to identify and select your markets and sub markets.
So here are the specifics. You need to decide which market or markets you’re going to approach initially. Now, this isn’t something that you decide once and you have to live with forever. It’s the kind of thing that will evolve. It will change over time, but right out of the gate, you need to decide who it is that you want to go after for this first round. You want to identify the specific businesses that you’re going to target based on geography, industry interests, demographics, or whatever else you decide is going to be the most important criteria.
For example, I’m going to target businesses in my area with more than 100 employees. If you’re going B to B. I’m going to target cosmetic dentists in the tri-state area. Whatever tri-state area might be around you. I’m going to target homeowners who live in three upscale local developments that I decide on. I’m going to target soccer moms within 100 miles. Obviously these are just examples, but you’re making the decision upfront. Also, if soccer moms within 100 miles is too much, then maybe you say, “okay, I’m going to target soccer moms within 25 miles or 10 miles or five miles or one mile.” You’re establishing your sub markets based on what you can actually do. Why is this important? Because it forms the core of your domination plan. You have to know exactly who you’re going to be going after, if you ever hope to reach them. And by breaking it down into small, manageable pieces… that makes it doable, even if you’re operating on a limited budget. And ultimately everyone is operating on a limited budget
Obstacle Three: They fail to establish meaningful contact with the decision maker. The solution: You need to choose your targets.
Specifically, you’re going to identify the exact people that you’re going to initiate contact with next, and you’re going to gather their contact information. It’s that simple, but it’s also ridiculously important. Why? Because you can’t proceed without it.
If you don’t know exactly who you’re going to go after, you cannot create awareness with that person. And this is going to determine who you’re actually going to sell to. Now, for some people, you’re going to look at this and say “This is ridiculously obvious. Of course I have to know who it is I’m going after.” While others might say, “Hey, this is something I’ve never done at all. I’ve only ever run advertising to see who’s going to come through the door.” And if you can do that, if you can run ads and you can have a steady stream of new people coming through the door, then essentially your targets are choosing you. That’s great. But if that’s not happening to the extent that you need it to, then it’s going to be important for you to establish the targets you’re going after. And even if you’re running advertising, you’re still going to need to decide who it is that you’re going after. If I’m running Facebook ads, am I targeting a particular group of people based on their demographics? All of this is what allows us to establish meaningful contact with the decision maker.
Obstacle Four: Poor or ineffective communication. The solution is to craft your communication and your messaging.
Here’s what you need to do. You need to determine first what you’re going to say to your targeted prospects. What’s the most important thing you could say to someone who is new to your business? You want to create bullet points for you, based on that information, and you want to make sure that’s available to both you and your team. And as you’re putting together your messages, you want to think in terms of gearing them toward their need.
In every sales situation, there are two sets of needs. There’s the customers need (the reason they’re buying from you in the first place,) and then there’s the salesperson’s need (the need to make the sale.) When you’re messaging is geared toward making the sale, instead of getting the customer what they need, you always lose. That’s why you have to make sure that your messages are geared toward their need and not just your need. Why is this important? Because many businesses go in unprepared. They just wing it and when you wing it, anything can come out. Terrible things can happen. You don’t want to let that happen.
In addition, your messages can be inconsistent from day to day, or person to person. If you don’t take the time to bullet point out what you want to say to every prospect and make sure everyone has access to it, you’ll find that you say different things from day to day (just based on what you’re thinking or feeling) and you’ll find that your people may be saying things that are different from yourself or different from each other. As a result, customers have inconsistent experiences, and inconsistent experiences are not good if you want to generate consistent business. When you craft your communication and messaging in advance, decide what you want to say and bullet point it out, your approach will be far more strategic and that will allow you to win.
Obstacle Five: They fail to get attention. The solution is to orchestrate memorable first contact.
Here’s what you need to do first, identify and brainstorm the most powerful, positive first impression you can create. What is that? Is it a cold call? Is it a drop by visit? Is it a note wrapped around a rock thrown through a window? Hopefully not. When we think in terms of the most powerful, positive first impression you can create, it’s very likely not the thing that’s going on now. Powerful positive first impressions are ideally things like referrals or having a great first get together when you meet someone for the first time. You want to initiate contact with the top buyers in your market. That’s the entire purpose. Then you want to execute flawlessly. Now, obviously it’s not always possible to execute flawlessly, but that needs to be the goal — to make sure that when we are meeting someone for the first time, when we’re initiating that first contact — that it is powerful, positive and that it’s done well.
Why is this important? Because your first contact determines what they’re going to think of you, very likely for the life of the entire business relationship, so you want to make sure that you start off right. Also, when you take the time to think through it, it differentiates you immediately because many of your competitors are going to fail to do this. When you do this well and consistently, you start off on the right foot, you make a great first impression, and you’re far more likely to have a great relationship all the way through.
Obstacle Six: Their followup is terrible. The solution here is to master strategic followup and qualification.
Here’s what I mean by that. We need to understand the reasons for our followup. Why are we getting in touch with this person? Is it to introduce ourselves, is to remind them of a conversation we had had previously? Is it to close the sale? Is it to get a referral? Strategic follow up means we know why we’re calling, and we’re focused relentlessly on doing that. But we want to make it strategic and not just relentless. In other words, it’s not just about going after them again and again and again. As we talked about it in a previous video, there’s a big difference between repetition of contact and intelligent repetition of contact. It’s the strategic approach that makes it intelligent, so don’t miss that element. We also want to use our follow up to release poor quality prospects — to just get rid of them.
The purpose of follow up is not to badger people into buying from us, particularly if they’re not qualified to buy from us in the first place. So the best thing you can do when you’re following up is to get rid of a poor quality prospect so you’re not wasting your time on them going forward. Why is all this important? Because most of your competitors are going to be bad at this. It’s just a fact. Most businesses in general are pretty bad at this. When you get good at it, you’ll build your client base far more proactively and you will accelerate the sales cycle, which means you’ll be able to close more sales, more quickly. Strong incentive to make it happen.
Obstacle Seven: They don’t know who’s where or what’s what. The solution to that is to master segmentation strategy.
Here’s what you need to know about that. Every single prospect you ever come into contact with will fall into one of just five categories. They’re either ready to buy right now or they have a specific date in mind when they want to buy or they’re just open to it, they’re generally receptive to the idea, but they don’t know exactly when they want to buy and they’re not ready to buy now. That’s the first three. Beyond that, they may be disqualified. No need, no desire, no money, no budget, no willingness to spend. Or they may be unresponsive. If you’re reaching out to a prospect again and again and again and they’re not getting back to you, that indicates an unresponsive prospect. When you recognize that every single prospect you ever come into contact with will fall into one of those five categories, you realize how important it is to make sure you know where each person stands, and that’s the next thing we want to do. Know and document where each person stands in your process.
Who’s ready to buy now? Who has specific dates in mind, who’s generally receptive, who’s disqualified and who’s unresponsive? And then you want to proceed based on that segmentation. If they’re disqualified, you don’t want to keep going after them. If they’re ready to buy now, you want to make sure you get them a price and get them closed. If they have specific dates, you want to get them scheduled for follow up at the appropriate time. Why is this important? Well, different prospects are at different stages of the buying cycle and the wrong approach at the wrong time is not going to make the sale, so you want to make sure that your messaging lines up with the stage of the sales process where they are. And we need to proceed then, based on the prospect’s current stage of readiness.
Obstacle Eight: They’re spotty. They fail to remain visible. The solution here is to maintain visibility with drip campaigns.
Here’s what we need to do. Craft a simple series of communications that applies to a particular group. For example, brand new prospects. What are three different messages you’d like to communicate to brand new prospects? Take a moment, open up a word document and map out three brief communications that you would like to have with a brand new prospect. Then do the same for people in your pipeline who haven’t ordered. What are three different messages you’d like to communicate to that group? And what about established clients? Think in terms of three different messages that you’d like to send out to establish clients. Jot them down, save them into a Word document and we’ll discuss what to do with that in a few moments. Then the next thing we need to do is to determine our delivery mechanism. How are we going to communicate this to people? Are going to send emails? Are we going to call them on the phone and say it to them? Are we going to text it to them? The purpose of all this is to stay present and top of mind without spending all of our time doing it.
Why is this important? Because you can never disappear from your market. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve been pursuing someone for a long time, you keep going back, they’re not ready to buy, and then you turn your attention elsewhere, you go back later and you find they bought something from someone else. That’s an example of what happens when you disappear from the market. It creates a void that can be filled by others. If you don’t want this to happen, then maintaining visibility with drip campaigns will keep you in front of them, even when you’re not physically there. And that’s important. You have to be there when they’re ready to buy, which could be at any time. And this consistency of communication creates credibility for you and it creates comfort for them.
Obstacle Nine: They can’t do it all themselves. The solution here is to automate lead generation and follow-up.
Here’s what I mean. You can use technology to generate leads 24/7 even while you sleep. Now that statement, “even while you sleep,” it sounds so hokey, but believe me, there is nothing more exciting than when you get a lead in the middle of the night while you were sleeping and response to send out to them immediately without you having to do it. Automated lead generation and follow up is about automating the sequences that you created above. Once you’ve decided what you want a new client to see, you can make sure it goes out to them. When you know what it is that you want an established client to see, you can do the same thing. And another huge advantage is that you’re creating consistent communication from prospect to prospect. That means that one person doesn’t get the star treatment while someone else gets completely ignored.
Why is that important? Well, you’ll never do this alone. If you rely on yourself to be able to put out every communication you need, to every person you ever come into contact with, you’re going to drop the ball. You’re not going to be able to do it. When you delegate it to technology, it happens consistently, like clockwork, day, night, weekends, whenever. And you can engage people while you’re busy doing other things.
Number 10: They can’t close the sale, the solution: Close like the wind.
Here’s what we need to do. First of all, identify your best closes. Is there something that you say to people that very often gets them to order? Hopefully there is. If so, you want to identify what they are. Then you want to document or bullet point those best closes so that you can replicate them. You want to be able to get it out to your team so that the very best approaches are shared, not just hoarded. In addition to that, you want to practice them constantly. This means once you’ve identified what your best closes are, once you’ve documented them, you want to say them over and over again until the muscle memory in your tongue allows you to just say them as if you just thought of it. Why is all this important? Because nothing happens until a sale is made and making the sale often requires closing. Zig Ziglar is famous for his statement “Poor salespeople have skinny children.” If you want to be able to feed your kids, you’re going to need to know how to sell well, and that includes being able to close the sale.
Obstacle Eleven: They don’t know what’s working. Solution to this is to review your results.
It’s pretty straightforward. You want to evaluate the success and failure of each of your Total Market Domination efforts. Everything that we’re doing above you want to see what’s working and see what’s not. You wanted to determine your pluses and deltas. Your pluses are the things that are working, and that’s why they’re represented by a plus sign. The deltas are the things you want to change. Delta is a Greek symbol that looks like a triangle, and it represents change. So there are two things you always want to look at in every campaign. What’s working well? That’s the plus. And what do I want to change? That’s the delta. Once you’ve identified those, you systematize your pluses, you build them into your process, and then you fix or eliminate the deltas. You fix or eliminate the things that need to be changed.
Why is all that important? Because perfecting your approach requires experimentation. You’re going to be experimenting anyway. Might as well keep track of what’s working and what’s not. If you don’t evaluate your results, all that experimentation is wasted. Finally, your biggest breakthroughs are going to come from evaluating your successes and failures. So you need to make sure that’s all baked into your process.
Obstacle Twelve: They quit too soon. The solution here is to identify opportunity and repeat.
Here’s what we need to do. Consider your next opportunities, your next markets, and your next sub-markets. After going through this process, it’s likely you’ll find things that are working really well. It’s likely you’ll spot markets that seem receptive. It’s likely you’ll identify sub-markets that could be receptive to you. At this stage of the process, that’s what you want to think about moving forward, evaluating each campaign and each opportunity, based on what you learned from your most recent experiences. This allows you to lay the groundwork for success by repeating what worked and eliminating what didn’t.
Why is all that important? Primarily because market domination is a process. It’s not a one time event. It’s not like you can just go out, do one thing one time, and all of a sudden dominate a market. It’s an ongoing process, as we talked about at the beginning. The purpose of each campaign is to learn, grow and expand.
Sometimes you’ll do a campaign and it’ll do great. Sometimes you’ll do a campaign and it’ll do less than great. It doesn’t matter. The purpose of the campaign is to find out what’s working and what’s not, so we can build in what’s working to each step of the process. Then each completed step lays the seeds for your next campaign. When you actually follow these recommendations, it becomes a whole lot easier to lead, and to dominate your market.
In addition to the twelve obstacles we discussed today — the external forces that need to be overcome to dominate your market — there are also three internal obstacles that do the most harm to business owners and salespeople.
The first one is thinking that you don’t need to do it. “I don’t need that. Things are okay the way they are.” Hey, if things are really great, then it’s possible no changes are necessary. But if that were the case, you probably wouldn’t still be listening to this message. Listen, it’s not about whether or not you need to do THIS. It’s about whether or not you need to do SOMETHING. Business is changing. Are you?
The second one is thinking you don’t have time. “I don’t have time to create that kind of awareness with people.” Well let me tell you, it takes a lot more time to stick with the regular daily activities, wondering where your next sale is coming from and wallowing in a state of tedious, repetitious, boring, soul-crushing, business as usual — like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day — living the same experience over and over again. It’s much faster to take action now and begin immediately to create the top of mind awareness you NEED to start getting the results you WANT.
And the third is the money. Some just think it will cost too much. But here’s the truth: Sitting still is far more expensive, because your expense clock is always running. Daily overhead costs like rent, mortgage, heat, electric, car payments, phone payments, internet access — all these charges continue to add up, every day, every night, every week, tick tick tick, regardless of whether you’re bringing in a dollar or a million dollars. So the reality of the situation is that it costs you far more and it takes you a lot longer to wait around, see what happens, engage in “business as usual” and hope that things will change on their own. All the while knowing that your situation can never change, until you do.
If you never realized before, the importance of creating top of mind awareness with all the people in your market most likely to buy your products and services…
If you never realized before that there are leaders and follower in every market, and that leaders dominate, while the followers fight for the scraps…
If you never realized before that if you’re not the leader in your market, then someone else is the leader and you’re the follower…
Well now you know it. So what are you going to do?
You can start by taking action to overcome the twelve obstacles we discussed today. You can just print out your mind-map and get started. But if you’d like help with that… If you need direction… some fine tuning and specific guidance, then maybe I can help you. In a few days, I’m going to be opening the doors to my Total Market Domination course. Nice title, right? 😉
It’s a twelve module course, in which I’ll walk you though each of the steps we discussed earlier today, from mastering the mindset, to identifying your markets and sub-markets, to choosing your targets, crafting your communication, orchestrating first contact, mastering strategic follow-up, qualification & segmentation strategy, creating drip campaigns, automating lead generation and follow-up, closing, evaluating your results and perfecting the process, by systematizing what works and eliminating what doesn’t — fine tuning it each time you go through it.
If you’d like me to work with you on ALL of that, then be sure to check out my next video in which I’ll outline all the time-sensitive details. If that’s NOT for you, then I hope you’ve at least been able to benefit from the material you’ve received from me on this topic. I hope you’ve seen the opportunity that comes with creating top of mind awareness, and the necessity of being a recognized leader in your market. And I hope you’ll let me know your thoughts about this workshop in the comment box below. It took quite a bit of time to put this together, and your feedback will let me know if that was time well spent.
In any event, I hope you got a lot out of this and I’ll talk to you in the next video.
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