Lesson 4:

How To Enter A New Target Market And Dominate It In
45 Days Or Less For
$3 A Prospect Or Less

Here's the next challenge. How do you take the message you so lovingly crafted and birthed, and deliver it over here to these people you've carefully selected, in a way that is effective, efficient, affordable, involves little or no manual labor – I'm philosophically opposed to manual labor – and will magnetically attract back to you the perfect prospects who are ready, able and eager to buy and buy only from you, so you get to sell in a competitive vacuum. How do you do that?

Well, if you make a list, and if you stop to think about it, whatever business you're in, whatever sales career you're in, you can make a long list of media – things that you can spend money on to deliver marketing messages. Depending upon your business, you can advertise in the newspaper, in consumer magazines, or in trade and industrial journals. You can advertise in consumer industrial directories. You can go exhibit at home and consumer shows or trade shows. You can advertise in the Yellow Pages. You can go on radio and television. You can put telemarketers on the phone. On and on and on and on.

Here's a couple things you need to know. First of all, all that stuff works, and it all can be made to work better with good direct response methods. But only a handful, a handful of all those things that you can do, can be converted into a system. And system's one of my favorite words. System means reliable, consistent, predictable results. You get it working once and then it keeps working on its own for a long, long, long, long, long time before you have to tweak with it again.

We need marketing systems. And the example I'm going to show you of a marketing system is so predictable, so reliable, so consistent, that you go to bed at night, when you have this working for you, knowing – not hoping, wishing, not even praying, but knowing – within a small, acceptable range of variance, how many good prospects, customers or clients are going to come to you by noon the next day, every single day, for as long as you use the system. And it's like a thermometer. You can even turn it up or down to get more or less anytime of the week, month or year that you want them. It's that scientific.

So I'm going to show you one example of one marketing system. This example does several things. It demonstrates to you what a system ought to look like, versus just catch as catch can media. It shows you how to take a message, deliver it to a market in a way that's effective, efficient and affordable. And this one has a bonus to it. This one shows you how to enter a new target market and dominate it in 45 days or less for $3 a prospect or less.

You become the dominant presence in any target market you can define. If you can define a target market for me and it doesn't have to be geographically precise necessarily, but if you can define the target market, then this particular system, in 45 days or less, $3 a prospect or less, makes you the dominant presence in your category or business in that target market. Everybody knows who you are, what you do, why they ought to do business with you, what your USP is, and a significant percentage have responded to you.

A "Stolen" Strategy

There's a couple of caveats, things I have to tell you about this before I show it to you. The first is I stole it. I'm a huge believer in creative theft. Do not know if I've ever had an original idea in my life, but the older I get the less interested I am in encountering those things. Pioneers come home full of arrows. So I'm interested in stuff that works.

But I get to do something you don't get to do. Last three years, my consulting practice, I've worked with clients in 136 different product, service, business and professional categories. So you, today's a weird day for you because you're sitting with people who do different things. But most of your continuing education, whatever business you're in, here's what you do. You belong to a national association totally made up of people in your business. You belong to a state or local association totally populated by people in your same business. You go to its conventions, meetings and conferences, organized by, put on for and put on by, and attended by people in your same business. If you go to a strange town, you look in the Yellow Pages in your section to see what everybody else in your business is doing. You read books written by people in your business.

We have a technical term for this. It's called marketing incest, because it works just like real incest. In a short period of time, everybody seems to get dumber and dumber and dumber and dumber, until the whole thing just grinds to a creeping halt.

All great advancements in businesses come from outside the box, not inside the box. I get to do it. What I get to do as a consultant, I get to go over and work with industry A. And because everybody's myopic, while I'm over there I notice something that's phenomenally effective. Hardly anybody else outside their business is doing it but could be doing it. I borrow it from industry A and I take it over and I teach it to industry B. And while I'm over there, I notice something they're doing that hardly anybody else is doing but could be doing. So I borrow it from industry B and I take it back and I teach it to industry A. It's a disreputable way to make a living, but I'm a high school graduate.

This particular system I'm going to show you as an example I borrowed 25, 26, 27, I don't know how many years ago now, by observation only, from the real estate business. Realtors have a marketing term they use called farming. And what they mean, they don't mean Gabor sister, mule, funny hat, pitchfork, Green Acres song, move to the country. But the agricultural analogy is there.

What they mean, if you hear them talking about farming, what a realtor means is getting a small, carefully selected, manageable target market, and setting out to become the dominant presence in their business, in that target market, in as short a period of time as possible.

Now, they do it with manual labor. I don't like manual labor. But conceptually, it's the best marketing advice you're going to get as long as you live, so let's spend a minute dissecting it.

What they mean by farming is getting a small, carefully-selected, manageable target market, and then nurturing it, setting out to become a dominant presence.

Now, they mean geographically small. I don't necessarily mean geographically small. A small target market for you could be all the dentists in your city who earn over $100,000 a year. But it could be all the dentists in North America who earn over a quarter o f a million a year. It's a defined target market. Small, carefully-selected, manageable, set out to become the dominant presence.

The Biggest Mistake Most Marketers Make

So why small? Because the biggest marketing mistake most marketers make is marketing too big. I'll say to somebody, "What's your target market?" The guy says, "Salt Lake City." "Terrific. If we send one postcard once-a- year to every adult in Salt Lake, which can hardly be called an intensive campaign, what's our budget have to be?" "A quarter of a million dollars." "How much you got?" "$600."

Problem. You want a formula? Here's a formula. Somehow, preferably by science, by strategy, by demographics, psychographics, but if necessary by personal preference or bias, but somehow, you have to shrink the size of your target market so that whatever resources you're willing to commit allow you to have big impact. Somehow, you have to shrink the size of your target market, so whatever resources you're willing to commit allow you to have big impact.

There's absolutely no point in jumping up and down in the ocean and thinking you've done something. You want to jump up and down in a puddle. You can move from one puddle to the next, but you want to work puddles, not oceans, small, carefully selected. We talked about the power of selection of target marketing. Carefully selected, manageable.

Manageable means either they all in the same place or they all belong to the same thing, or they all read the same thing, or they're all available on a list somehow we can affordably, effectively and efficiently reach them. Small, carefully selected, manageable target market set out to become the dominant presence in the target market in as short a period of time as possible.

We just want to do it by substituting something for the manual labor the realtors invented. And what we're going to substitute is a very particular type of direct mail. The example I'm going to show you is a direct mail example.

Now, two quick caveats:

First of all, direct mail is not the only thing I teach, not the only thing you should use, not the only thing in my system. In fact, far from it. There's all sorts of media and delivery systems that can be used. But direct mail can be, and often is, one of the best bangs for your buck if you learn to do it right.

Which brings me to the second caveat. As soon as I start to talk about it, one-third of the ears in the room flop right over. "Man, we've tried direct mail. It doesn't work in our state, city, business, industry, product category, it's too expensive, it's too complicated."
A couple things about that.

First of all, you and I go through life only doing the things that work real, real well for us the very first time we do them. Less kids with each generation.

Secondly, you have not tried direct mail the way I'm going to show you how to do direct mail. In fact, almost everybody makes this mistake when they do try it. They get a list from somewhere. Maybe not a very good list, but they get a list. They print up something, they send it to the list, and almost no matter what happens, ugly, bad, good, they never mail to those same people again. Or if they do, it's three, six, eight months later by accident, and they send them the same stuff they sent them the first time.

Save your money. Never do one-shot mailing. Let me explain to you why that can't work. Here's how people do not live.

The last thing Harvey says to Marge when he leaves the house is not, "Marge, I want you to stay home. Don't go to work, don't take the kids to school, don't go to the grocery store. Do not leave this house. Do not leave the foyer. Stay right here in the foyer with your nose pressed against the window, watching for the mailman. When the mailman arrives, I want you to hustle your buns out to the mailbox and get the mail before somebody gets it, a bird snatches it, it catches on fire, or it gets wet. Get it back in the house. Guard it until I get home. Together, we will open the mail. Because today might be the day that a life insurance agent sends us one of those nifty letters where we can get a free road atlas if we let him come over to our house and beat our brains in for three hours, and I want a free road atlas."

This is not how people live their lives. And what makes people think they can print up one crummy goldenrod flyer, send it out one time and get some stampede of response, it's a mystery to me. The thing doesn't even nick them on the way by. They don't even feel the breeze.

Do you want to know secrets? Quickly go to the lesson 5 and I'll reveal some killer secrets that will make you money...

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