Are you making cash in your business? How is your cashflow?

Cashflow is the king in your business. If you don’t have enough cashflow, your business will struggle. Your business will die a slow painful death. That is the truth…… Ask your accountant.

I have seen a lot of business close, even had my own couple of business close due to the lack of cashflow. Then I found the key to success, allowing me to build not one, but two successful businesses. The joy of building a green level business is down to one single thing – a successful promotion. 

I don’t mean just throwing out money on advertising, hoping it will stick. I mean a detailed promotion plan keeping you focused on making targeted sales to the right customer. 

But don’t take it from me – after all you don’t know me. So, let’s look at a case study, Roger James Hamilton. In Roger’s framework, he always talks about the right promotion plan. All his businesses run on promotion plans. If you want to work with Entrepreneur Resorts, Entrepreneur Institute or GeniusU you need to provide a solid promotion plan. Why am I mentioning this? If you look at Roger’s businesses, the Group has built sales/revenue up to approx. USD 10 million in 2019. So, I guess his businesses are a pretty good business case, right? 

How will you build a successful business? 

The 7 common mistakes made - why your promotion will fail

The two keys to a successful promotion – Value and Leverage.

Key 1 - Value 

Customer Avatar

Do you know who your customer is? Can you name him / her, do you know where they are and what their pain point is? Have you spoken to your customer, or are you assuming you know your customer? 

The 5 Ps 

• Problem - Validation is the key, find the first customer and really find their pain point – the problem you want to solve. Remember, especially when you are dynamo energy – it is always about the customer’s problem, not your solution! Get your blaze on!
• Promise – What is your customer going to get? Be specific and tangible. This is the reason your customer will want to buy from you.
• Product – Here comes the solution, but remember the solution needs to solve your customers pain point, otherwise you will leave the customer disappointed and they will never buy from you again. Even worse, they will share their disappointment with others.  
• Proof – What’s your social proof? Do you have testimonials, videos and facts from your previous customers? If not, you need to get the proof. As people don’t know you yet, they will take the word from people who worked with and have been successful!!
• Price – How much are your products/solution? Now again, who is your customer avatar? Can they afford your solution? No point putting it up to thousands of dollars if your avatar is drowning in debt!

Your main focus is your customer avatar. As soon as you loose track of your customer, you have lost the success of the promotion.

Customer Pathway

How will you get your customers to buy from you? How will you introduce your customers to your solution?

• Source – find 4-5 ways of finding new leads. This can be from digital marketing, from your existing customer database, maybe from live events? How will you find your customers? What’s your source?
• 2-3 levels of products – not everyone is ready to buy the top shelf product. In reality your new customers need to build trust with you before they pay you thousands of dollars. So, how can you introduce your customer to free and low entry / low ticket items to start building trust? 

Compelling offer

The key to a compelling offer is that it is targeted to the one specific customer avatar. Don’t make the customer avatar to broad as it will dilute the language and you won’t be able to cut through the noise of all the hundreds and thousands of other offers. 

Appeal to the customers pain point as well as appealing to their fears. If you limit the offer, the timeframe and give them bonuses you will make this offer a no brainer. Make it easy for the customer by removing the obstacles and throwing in lots of benefits. 

Hot tip: The benefits should not cost you anything. What can you offer them which is already up and running. 

The Plan

You have investigated your customer and their pain point, now it’s time to plan. As any idea and any product won’t go far until we throw in some tempo energy. 

Objectives

• Financials – break down the revenue your promotion will make, calculate the expenses it will take to build the promotion and what profits you will make. Be clear on the financials of your promotion, this might be boring, but it is key. No point in running a promotion without making money.  
• Learning – what do you want to learn from this promotion? We want to ensure that we progress in the business so each objective needs to teach us something. 
• Development – we want to progress in our business. So, what are you developing? Your brand, your product range, your team? 

Milestones 

You need to set out what you want to achieve in the timeframe of your promotion. You have 12 weeks, so where do you want to be in the end? What do you want to celebrate?

Set your milestones based on your objectives. Don’t create millions of them, one or two per week will suffice. These are what you review every week, making sure you are on track with your promotion. 

Celebrate when you have reached them, adjust accordingly when you have not. 

Hot Tip: Make sure you utilise the whole 12 weeks of your promotion, you don’t need to do all in the first couple of weeks. 

Key 2 - Leverage

Build a successful team – a promotion is nothing without a team to execute. 

Choose your lead wisely. Who is going to be your Promo Lead? Who can motivate your team and still focus on getting stuff done? Who will keep the oversight whilst everyone is busy doing day to day activities? Someone who can react to the right now, but also keep an eye on what’s to come.

• Build your team – you can’t do it alone. Allocate your team members and give them clear responsibilities. The more defined their roles, the more efficient your team. Use the Wealth / Talent Dynamic square. It will guide you to build a high performing team. 
• Project Plan – great to have milestones, they will keep us focused, but how will we achieve them? There are plenty of free tools (Asana, Wrike, Trello…..) to help you build milestones out into detail. This will keep you going every day, making sure you will keep focused and tick off one item at a time to bring in the cash into your business.

Building numerous Promotion Plans for myself and my customers and leading successful promotions, I get excited to see a successful promotion being built. The first one is hard, but soon it will become the key to your business and the cash will be coming in.

Want to build a successful promotion? Need help leading your team? Book a strategy session with me. I would love to discuss your next promotion with you. 

Here is my invite to you, connect and quote GESGP19 when booking a strategic call before the 31st March and the first two clients signing up with me will receive a USD$700 discount on Promotion Lead Services.