Ready Fire Aim Notes

Four aspects of entrepreneurial success:

1. A seller: someone to market the product
2. An improver: someone to improve the product
3. An organizer: someone to make sure things flow smoothly
4. A pusher: someone to get people to do what they are supposed to do

Role you should not give up as business grows: seller

During first 2 stages of growth – order of priorities:

1. selling
2. pushing (to make sales)
3. Improving (products and sales)
4. Organizing

Priorities for a stage one business

Sequence and priority:

1. Get the product ready enough to sell it, but don’t worry about perfecting it.
2. Sell it.
3. Then if it sells, make it better.

Optimum Selling Strategy

4 Questions to determine oss:

1. Where are you going to find your customers?
2. What product will you sell them first?
3. How much will you charge for it?
4. How will you convince them to buy it?

Where are you going to find your customers?

Do what everybody else is doing. Assemble a master list of media placements. A map where all the marketing activity in your industry is taking place. Objective is to find out where competition is advertising, how often they are advertising, how much they are spending on it.

What product will you sell them first?

steps to creating a pdt that can launch a business:

1. Find out what products are currently hot in the market.
2. Determine if your product idea fits that trend.
3. If it does, set to go. If not, follow steps 4 and 5.
4. Come up with me too versions of several hot products.
5. Improve them in some way by adding features or benefits the originals lack. Find faults in them and turn them into opportunities. Compare hot products and figure out which characteristics are most appealing. Make list of shortcomings you notice.

How much will you charge for it?

Copy competition. Or give a discount. This is only for front end product.

How will you convince them to buy it?

Sales copy

Mastering the Copy Side Of Selling

Four Concepts Every Marketing Genius Must Know:

1. The difference between wants and needs.

• Must stimulate emotions that will help you sell products

2. The difference between features and benefits.

• Who are my target customers?
• Why exactly do they want little things like ____ to be easy?
• Keep going until have described very specific benefits or desires that important and true to you.
• Should be based on emotions that are tempting or taunting to your customers.
• Fantasies they dream about during the day or fears that keep them up at night.

3. How to establish your unique selling proposition for your product

• Highlight one single benefit above the rest. When this benefit can be presented as uniquely characteristic of your product, you have an advertising proposition that can last and last and last.
• Make it in some way better than the competition. Eg. Fedex
• Make it in some way seem better than competition. Eg. 7 Up
• Must make it beneficial to the customer
• Look at other similar products and find gaps, unfilled customer wants, such as – faster service, better prices, superior quality, convenience, personal service, better guarantee.
• Tell trade secrets that public does not know
• 3 aspects of a solid USP
  • Appearance of uniqueness
  • Usefulness
  • Conceptual simplicity (nothing sells well that is difficult to explain)
  • Eg: The only selling from the stage program that is created by a former teacher turned seminar pitchman.

4. How to sell the USP

Once establish the USP, need to sell it. All effective sales efforts have 4 components:

1. The Big Idea
   • Main idea used to sell pdt
   • Not USP
   • Idea big enough to sustain ad campaign
   • Look for something that excites me
   • Something that you would like to have yourself
   • Stop and ask if customer will be excited by idea like me
2. The Big Promise
   • How would it improve your customer’s life?
   • Do headline and lead for ads
3. Specific claims
   • What could a person do if he gets what you promised?
   • Just brainstorm without editing first
   • Then go back and make claims as specific as possible
4. Proof of those claims
   • provide real life examples of people who gotten the benefit as a result of the promise delivered
   • Historical proof
   • anecdotal proof
   • testimonials

Cheat sheet for creating first advertising campaign

• make a list of every feature of your product that you can think of
• brainstorming with two of three creative types, make a separate list of every possible benefit those features can provide
• identify a rising trend in your market – a trend that is just beginning
• Ask yourself: “Which of my product benefits could tie into that trend?”
• Identify those benefits as potential USPs
• By talking to experienced industry professionals and interviewing potential customers, find out which of your potential USPs are the strongest
• For each of those strong USPs, create a Big Idea
• For each of those Big Ideas, create one or several headlines that express a Big Promise.
• Working with a copywriter, make a list of claims for your product, including proof of those claims
• Get at least two versions of the advertisement written – each version expressing a different copy approach – and test them
• Take the version that works best, and make that the basis of all your sales and marketing efforts

As you roll out ad campaign, make plans to start the process again so you can keep your selling ahead of the market

Secondary – Yet Important – Priorities for Stage One Business