This book was recommended to me by my friend Shane. His companies Hunting Country and Mineral Marketing are among the best around. Here's to all the good times and all those crazy nights that we had. These books will get me there. Two ranches down the street. It's never last call at our favorite hole in the wall. Thank you for saving me a seat. Thank you Shane.

I enjoyed reading this book and felt it had a lot of great ideas and that it was worth the time to read. Regardless of your stage in business, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to take their business mindset to the next level. There’s always something new to learn.

My favorite takeaways were:

• Don’t Major in the Minor Leagues.
• Branding happens as a result of a successful lifetime customer, not before.
• Don’t step over dollars to get to pennies.
• Alan’s definition of an entrepreneur: “someone who solves people’s problems at a profit”.
• Dig first in your own backyard when seeking treasure.
• A customer won on price, will be lost on price.
• What gets measured, gets managed.
• Small hinges swing big doors.
• Don’t give squeaky wheels oil, replace them.
• Entrepreneurs make things happen for themselves, they don’t wait.
• If you can master “herding cats”, the ability to get independent and difficult people to all go in the same direction working on behalf of your cause, you’ll be unstoppable.
• Knowing and not doing is the same as not knowing.
• Now you know! So get to doing it already!

Buy The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib on Amazon

All content below are notes taken directly from Allan Dib’s book The 1-Page Marketing Plan

Introduction

• It’s very common for small businesses never to grow past the point at which they generate just enough profit for the owner(s) to make a modest living. It seems that no matter how hard the owner(s) try, their efforts to get to the next level just lead to frustration. At this point, one of two things happens. Either they get disillusioned or they just accept their fate - that their business is nothing more than a low-paid, self-created job.

In fact, the reality is that many business owners would probably be better off just finding a job in their industry. They would likely work fewer hours, have less stress, enjoy more benefits and have more holiday time than in the prison they have created for themselves. On the flip side, there are a few business owners that just seem to have it all. They work reasonable hours, have fantastic cash flow from their enterprise and enjoy continuous growth.

Many business owners who are struggling blame their industry. It’s true some industries are in decline. If you are in one of these dead or dying industries, it may be time to cut your losses and move on rather than torture yourself to death financially. This may be particularly difficult if you have been in the industry for a long time.

Don’t waste Time

• 64% of effects come from 4% of the causes. 96% of the stuff you do is a waste of time (comparatively)

• Struggling businesses owners will spend time to save money, whereas successful business owners will spend money to save time.

Define Marketing

• If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying “Circus Coming to Showground Saturday” thats advertising.

• If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town thats promotion.

• If the elephant walks through the mayor’s flower bed and the local newspaper writes a story about it, that’s publicity.

• If you get the mayor to laugh about it, that’s public relations.

• If the town’s citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they’ll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions, and ultimately they spend a lot at the circus, that’s sales.

• And if you planned the whole thing, that’s marketing.

Strategy vs Tactics

• You hire a builder and an architect first and they plan everything out from the major stuff like getting building permits, down to what kind of tap fittings you’d like. All of this is planned prior to a single shovel of dirt being moved. That’s strategy.

• Then, once you have your strategy, you know how many bricks you need, where the foundation goes and what kind of roof you’re going to have. Now you can hire a bricklayer, carpenter, plumber, electrician and so on. That’s tactics.

Crafting Your Message

• If you haven’t first clarified in your mind why your business exists and why people should buy from you rather than your nearest competitor, marketing will be an uphill battle.

• You need to develop your unique selling proposition (USP). This is where a lot of people get stuck. They say something like “I sell coffee. There’s nothing unique about that”.

• Why should I buy from you rather than from your nearest competitor?

• The answer is to develop a USP. Something that positions you differently, so that prospects are forced to make an apples-to-oranges comparison when comparing you with your competitor.

• If they can do an apples-to-apples comparison of you and your competitors, then it comes down to price and you’re toast. There’s always someone willing to sell cheaper than you.

• We want to get into the mind of our prospect. What do they really want? It’s rarely the thing you are selling; it’s usually the result of the thing you are selling.

• If you confuse them, you lose them.

• Your prospect has three options

  • buy from you

  • buy from your competitor

  • do nothing!

• The 30 seconds that follow the question “What do you do?” is one of the most commonly wasted marketing opportunities. The response is almost always self focused, unclear and nonsensical.

• Bad marketing is highly product-focused and self-focused. Good marketing, especially direct response marketing is always customer and problem/solution focused, and that’s exactly how we want our elevator pitch to be.

• “You know [problem]? Well, what we do is [solution]. In fact, [proof]!”

• Remember people are much more willing to pay for a cure than for prevention. Targeting existing pain rather than promising future pleasure will result in much higher conversion, much higher customer satisfaction and lower price resistance. Look for pain points in your industry and become the source of relief.

• Rather than using the conventional, boring, “professional” sounding copy, we use copy that is like a car accident - no matter how much you don’t want to, you can’t help but look.

• The masses are living lives of quiet desperation. They are absolutely craving something that grabs or entertains them, even if it’s just for a moment. Your job is to give it to them.

• People buy with emotions first and then justify with logic afterwards.

• The five major motivators of human behavior, especially buying behavior, are:

  1. Fear

  2. Love

  3. Greed

  4. Guilt

  5. Pride

• Another excellent way to enter the mind of your prospect is to find out what they blame, and to use a device in your copy known as “the enemy in common.” If you ask most people why they haven;’t achieved success, some of the most common responses include:

  • the economy

  • the government

  • taxes are too high

  • poor upbringing or parenting

  • unsupportive family or friends

  • no time

  • no money

  • no opportunity

  • lack of skills or education

  • unfair boss

  • one thing wrong with this list… they aren’t on it!

• Always choose clarity over cleverness.

Reaching Prospects with Advertising Media

• What gets measured, gets managed.

• What you don’t know, WILL hurt you.

• If you’re a small or medium sized business, you need to get a return on your marketing expenditures. Putting your comparatively tiny marketing budget into mass marketing would have the same effect as peeing in the ocean.

• One of the massive advantages of targeting a niche is that your marketing becomes much cheaper… the entire goal of your ad is for your prospect to say “Hey, that’s for me”. Trying to be all things to all people is unlikely to garner the same reaction.

• If your marketing consistently fails and loses you money then STOP and change what you’re doing.

If you don’t measure your marketing results thats just plain stupid because with the technology we have readily and cheaply available, it’s easier than ever to track your marketing results and return on investment.

• If your marketing is working and consistently giving you a positive ROI, then you should crank it up and throw as much money as you can at it.

• What if your largest customer leaves you for a competitor or what if they go out of business?

• What if there is a change of government legislation and the product you currently offer gets outlawed or regulated into oblivion?

• What if your main advertising strategy stops working?

• What if your currently high search engine rankings disappear or pay-per-click rates rise sharply?

• What if your biggest supplier raises prices, has a supply shortage or goes out of business?

• What if you rely on email marketing and the government cracks down further on this strategy?

Capturing Leads

• All other things being equal, the more money you can spend marketing to high-probability prospects, the better your chances are of converting them into a customer.

• Here’s the other big reason you want to avoid selling directly from your ad: at any given time (on average) 3% of your target market is highly motivated and ready to buy immediately. These are the prospects most mass marketing hopes to convert. However there’s a further 7% who are very open to buying and another 30% who are interested but not right now. The next 30% are not interested and finally the last 30% wouldn’t take your product, even if it were free.

• When you educate and teach, you are seen as an expert and an authority. You’re no longer questioned; instead you are obeyed and seen to have a personal, genuine, helpful interest in other people.

Nurturing Leads

• Advertise with the intention of finding people who are interested in what you do

• Add them to your database

• Continuously nurture them and provide them with value

• Stay in contact regularly

• You’ve become a marketing farmer, you’ll have a rich and continual harvest as your database grows in number and quality

• Instead of being a pest, I advocate becoming a welcome guest. Send your high-probability prospects a continuous stream of value until they’re ready to buy.

• Lumpy mail is an attention-getter and allows you to be very creative with your direct mail campaigns. In the first mail industry, trinkets purposely inserted for attracting attention are called “grabbers” (3d physical objects).

  • ex Books, people are conditioned to almost never throw books out.

• Nothing should be left to chance. A shock and awe package is an amazing tool for delivering that “wow” emotion to your prospect.

• Your shock and awe package should do three things:

  • Give your prospect amazing unexpected value

  • position you as an expert and trusted authority in your field

  • move your prospect further down the buying cycle than they would have otherwise been.

• Let your competitors do cheap and efficient marketing while yours entertains, delights, inspires and wows. It will put you worlds apart.

• Another important attribute of high-growth businesses is that they;re not timid with their offers. They take risks, use compelling copy, and make outrageous guarantees.

• More compelling and more frequent offers - rapid business growth

• Any change that becomes part of your routine, whether positive or negative, will have a profound impact over time. If you make the crafting and sending of offers to your list of clients and prospects a part of your regular routine, within a short time you’ll have a dramatically different business.

• You can’t be all three! Pick two!

  • the entrepreneur - they make it up

  • the specialist - they make it real

  • the manager - they make it recur

• As entrepreneurs we have a “can do” mindset. This often means that when something needs to be done, we are tempted to roll up or selves and just do it. However spending a lot of time doing things that aren’t in your area of expertise or aren’t a good use of your time can quickly become a very expensive exercise, Remember money is a renewable resource - you can always get more money, but you can never get more time.

• If someone can do it 80% as good as you can, then you should delegate it.

Sales Conversion

• Alan’s definition of an entrepreneur: “someone who solves people’s problems at a profit”

• Conventional Wisdom would have you believe that the more choices you offer, the more sales you will make. However this has been proven totally false time and time again.

• Offering too much choice can actually prevent sales.

• 10% of your customer base would pay 10 times more and 1% of your customers would pay 100 times more!

• A better option than discounting is to increase the value of your offering.

• Don’t step over dollars to pick up pennies

Delivering a World-Class Experience

Qualities of Extraordinary businesses that become Tribe Leaders

• They continually focus on wowing their customers, which turns them into raving fans

• They create and foster lifetime relationships

• They make it easy and fun to deal with them

• They create a sense of theater around their products and services

• They have systems so that they can reliably and consistently deliver a great experience

• Think of each piece of technology as an employee. What am I hiring this employee to do? What are its key performance indicators (KPI)?

• Systems allow mere mortals to run an extraordinary business. Once you have a business system that is replicable, people will want to pay you large sums of money for it.

• There are 4 main types of business systems you need to create, regardless of what type of business you are in. Scalable and replicable systems.

  • Marketing System: generate a consistent flow of leads into the business

  • Sales System: lead nurturing, follow up and conversion

  • Fulfillment system: the actual thing you do in exchange for the customers money

  • Administration system: accounts, reception, human resources, and so on, support of all the other business functions

• Customers don’t find out how good your products and services are until they have bought from you.

• In short, business systems start with documented procedures and processes that allow your business to run without you. Most often these are in the form of checklists, but video and audio training can also be an important part of it. Collectively, these materials are referred to as an operations manual and its purpose is to capture the collective “know-how” of the business.

• Systems build your business into a valuable asset

  • Leverage and Scalability: systems give your business the ability to expand. You can replicate your business in other geographic ares yourself or by franchising or licensing the rights to your business system. Many fortunes have been made this way.

  • Consistency: Consistency is one of the kes to delivering an excellent customer experience.

  • Lower labor costs: when you and your staff don’t have to waste time and effort reinventing the wheel each time, this improves your efficiency and reduces your labor costs

Fire yourself!

• If you have to perform all of the roles in your business it is a problem because if you are indispensable, you are a bottleneck and the business will only move as fast as you can

1. Step 1: Identify all the roles in your business

2. Step 2: Define what tasks each role performs

3. Step 3: Create checklists for properly completing these tasks

• You’ll rarely make as much money running a business as you will selling one. The person or company who puts you out of business is your ultimate customer and satisfying them will result in the biggest payday you will ever receive.

Increasing Customer Lifetime Value

• Dig first in your own backyard when seeking treasure. Most businesses have a rich “diamond mine” in the form of existing customers that remains largely untapped, yet they leave this “family” of existing customers after the first few transactions and spend all their marketing energy, money , and resources on seeking new sources of revenue.

• If you hold your prices constant for a long time, in real terms you’re effectively lowering them because inflation makes the same nominal amount of money less valuable over time.

• A customer won on price, will be lost on price

• If you’re particularly concerned that your existing customers won’t tolerate a price increase, you can try “grandfathering”. This is where the price increase is only applicable to new customers and the existing ones are “grandfathered” in at the current price level. If you do this, ensure you tell your existing customers what you’re doing, as this can reinforce to them what a great deal they’re getting and increase their loyalty to you since you’re making them feel special.

• “Would you like fries with that?” is responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars to McDonalds and a similar upsell strategy could be worth.

• A great way of framing an upsell is to say, “Most customers who bought X also bought Y.”… People want to participate in social norms. By telling them what “normal” buying habits are, you tap into the powerful, deep-seated psychological human desire to fit in.

• High ticket options give clients an upgrade path, something to aspire to. People always want what they can’t have and having ultra high ticket items in your suite of products and services can keep alice their desire to buy from you in a future when they’re in a better position to do so.

• Give them a reason to come back. Example the $30 voucher for every $100 they spend. Voucher only good for 6 months and can’t be used the same day as its received.

• What gets measured gets managed. Small hinges swing big doors.

• … It’s the low value, price sensitive customers who complain the most, waste huge amounts of your time and always need to be chased for payment. The high value customers who are the most profitable tend to pay on time, treat you with respect and value your services. Part of housekeeping is firing these low value problem clients.

• Don’t give squeaky wheels oil, replace them.

• Better still, you can kill two birds with one stone by sending problem customers to your direct competitors.

Orchestrating and Stimulating Referrals

• Most people have about 250 people in their lives who are important enough to invite to a wedding or to a funeral

• One of the best strategies for getting what you want in business and indeed in life - just ask.

• So many people just wait to be discovered, wait to be picked, wait to be referred to. You however are an entrepreneur, which means you make things happen for yourself. You don’t wait for them to happen to you.

• The bystander effect is a phenomenon that occurs when a large crowd gathers around an ongoing emergency or crime and essentially treats it as a spectator sport. Everyone in the crowd assumes that someone else will intervene, assist or contact emergency services. The end result is the terrible event is compounded by the fact that no one took the initiative to help.

• In first aid training, they teach you not to call out “somebody call an ambulance!” or “somebody get a blanket”. “Somebody” is somebody else. Instead they teach you to make eye contact, point to a specific person and give them specific instructions. You point directly at the man with the green hat and you say “You, call an ambulance!”

• A brand is the personality of a business. You can substitute “personality” for “brand” in any sentence

Conclusion

• The ability to get independent and sometimes difficult people to all go in one direction working on behalf of your cause is a skill you should commit to mastering. The late great Jim Rohn referred to it as “herding cats” and almost nothing pays more than mastering this skill.

END OF NOTES

Thank you Allan Dib for the excellent content. Well done.

Buy The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib on Amazon