Best Never Beats Best Known

This week's episode is Best Never Beats Best Known.

Now, that could be the best company never beats the best known company.

It could be the best product, the best service, or even the best person.

So think about that. The best person never beats the best known person,  the operative word here is known, and it's not about who you know in business, it's about who knows you.

Because they can't do business with you if they don't know you. If they don't know you are in business, if you don't know that you serve their needs, and answer and fix their problems, the enemy of known is obscurity. I think a lot of us wander around in this fog of obscurity thinking that, business is gonna come and find us because we have the better mousetrap.

It just doesn't, it doesn't happen. And one of the challenges that I see, and one of the reasons for this podcast, Is that I see a lot of businesses struggle with bringing in predictable demand, attracting new leads. They tend to rely on their existing customers, and so they don't really have an ability to grow.

 If the economy takes a little bit of a downturn, their existing companies and their existing customers will take a downturn. And of course their fate is sealed. Whereas the best companies that thrive in any economy always have a great sales engine, a sales machine that can go out and attract new business and new customers in order to grow.

Why do we want to grow? Well, if you're a small business owner, and I hear a lot of you, complain that it's very, very hard to find talent. It's hard to recruit people. Well, people are looking for careers. They're looking for growth. They're looking to develop. And so if you don't have a path to grow people, to give them additional opportunities, more management bandwidth, or for them to expand their craft within your organization by taking on more and more business dealing with more and more customers, then they're not really gonna be that attracted to you. Also they're looking at your company and say, I've never heard of you, as opposed to this company, which I've heard a lot about, which would you join? You'd go and join the company that you'd heard about because the other one is obscure.

Even if you had better products and services and capabilities, we'll  go with best known. This lack of predictability in bringing revenue in is, a key business killer. Particularly when,  times get a little hard. The only way to save ourselves is we just cut costs. And when you cut costs, you're on a death spiral. You are gonna go outta business. And many, and many do.

So you, you can't sell to someone who doesn't know you.  This is the Sell the Sizzle podcast, but if you don't have anybody that knows you and that you are talking to, you can't sell them anything. So job number one, job number one in business is to get known.

To stand out. To stand out you need to be extraordinary. You can't be ordinary. You can't be sensible and meek because there's too much noise out there. The people that you're trying to sell to who've got millions of problems, lots of people are trying to get their attention. They're getting lots of ads.

Their phones buzzing all the time. They're running from meeting to meeting, and if you can't percolate to the top and grab attention, You are not even going to have a chance to get into the game.

 I recently attended some training, the Grant Cardone 10X conference and one of his mantras is

Money Follows attention.

So you've really gotta grab a people's attention. And once you've got their attention, you know, maintain that attention now. So, we need to promote, promote, promote.

 This might make you feel a little uncomfortable. I know. It made me queasy thinking about how to promote myself and my business because I come from a small town in England called Derby we were taught to be quiet, modest, you know, don't speak until you're spoken to.  Keep your head down. Fly under the radar. Don't toot your own horn. Don't, don't brag.

And so, we're, we're a little bit more conservative . then I moved to the US 25 years ago, and I marveled at the confidence that Americans exuded and they're,  not intimidated by, , saying what they're good at and what their businesses are good at.

And I thought, wow, how powerful that was. It was brought into a stark relief at my daughter's school. We had two daughters when we came over, four and two.  When, when the, the four year old was about five. She was in a school and they had an open day. And in the gymnasium they'd, they'd converted this gymnasium into Jurassic Park.

The theme was all about dinosaurs. And all the kids had , a card hung around their neck with ask me these three things.

 Around my daughter's n n neck, she's got a model of a dinosaur at  a station. And it said  ask me about the T-Rex. What do dinosaurs eat and how big was a T-Rex?

And then, Tens of parents would come up and ask those questions , my daughter just confidently and beautifully expressed her knowledge and was not phased by being in the spotlight, by speaking and by showing her knowledge. I contrasted that with perhaps an open day in the uk we would probably write an essay and we'd have a copy of the essay.

We wouldn't really be presenting. It's just a different style. I know it's changed now, but certainly I get a little bit uncomfortable with, saying, you know, I'm good at this, or I'm the best at this, or you need to believe me because. I've had to overcome that.

Cuz if in order for you to get attention, you've really gotta be able to say what's, what's really, really good. And so the more that you promote, the more attention that you get. The more people that know you, the more opportunities you have to sell and the more money you make.

Think about this in, perhaps your own town a good example would be., Who's the biggest,  car dealership  in your town? And you'd think, and you'd see all those ads in your mind.  In Charlotte,  Scott Clark Toyota is always promoting, and sure enough, he's the biggest car dealer  in Charlotte because he spends the most money.

So your first job in business is promotion. Promote, promote, promote.  First of all, you, you let people know that you are in business because they didn't know you were before that.  Let them know what kind of problems that you solve, and then you show how you're different and critically when you do this, when you gain this attention you can palpably show how much you believe in your product, company and yourself. If you're promoting with passion, with conviction, with distinction, people say, Hey, that person,  he really believes in his stuff, doesn't he? We should talk to him. We should find out if he can solve our problems.

It's a great way , to, stand out. You don't wanna fit in. Fitting in's not gonna get you anywhere. Fitting in's not gonna grow. You need to be distinctive. You need to stand out. You need to compel people to want to listen to you.

Now, in the past, how did we do this? Well,  this is what I did for, oh good, 15, 20 years. I'd be on a plane every day and I'd fly into a new city and I'd meet with an executive and I'd knock on their door and try and, convince them to, to buy my services, which at the time was large scale change management consulting. And then I'd get on another plane and I'd fly to another city and you'd only be able to do three or maybe five of those calls per week. I mean, it was grueling.

 Or  you sat in front of your desk and you got the yellow pages and the phone book out and you started making phone calls. But today  we are blessed with a mechanism to practically reach all 8 billion people on the planet.

I'm holding, I'm holding my TV studio in my hands here.

 I happen to use an iPhone, but you can reach pretty much everybody on the planet with this simple device.  It's amazing and it's got all of these tools on there to able to package and send your message. It's called social media. Think about that. You need to be on it.

To get that level of access and attention in the past we wouldn't be able to do that. You know that Procter and Gamble spends 10 billion, $10 billion on advertising. Ford Motor Company spend 2.5 billion on ads cause they want their products and their company to be the best known. They want you to go and buy tide

Ford wants you to buy the F-150, I mean the F one Ford F-150 truck doesn't get to be the best truck of the year, the best selling truck of the year for 20 years by them just saying it's the best truck and leaving it that, no, they promote the hell out of that. They're selling the advertising, they're putting those pictures on there .

Yeah, that's the bestselling truck because they told me it was the bestselling truck and I see it all the time. So it must be, it must be cuz it's well known and you've got people's attention.

So today you can, you can even have your own TV show. You can go on youTube and run effectively a studio on a YouTube, or you can live stream on Facebook and LinkedIn.

It's like having your own show. You can be the Kardashians. There's no reason why you can't be as famous as the Kardashians, so it's not, it's not optional today. To have a social media presence, it's absolutely critical that you take advantage of these media in order to gain the attention. Cuz if you don't have attention, you're obscure and you'll never grow.

 Here are some practical tips. You know, you can get a little overwhelmed. I've been, I've been overwhelmed thinking, well, what should I do to promote?

One of the ways I do it is I like talking.  I like the podcast, so I do podcasts. It helps me get my thoughts out and hopefully I'm helping you think.

You just need to pick one or two things. If you like to write things, write a blog once a week and  post that on one of the Facebook or Instagram or even send an email.

 it's so easy to write a blog these days. You can, you can go on to CahtGPT and say, write me a blog. I just did this with a friend of mine. He'd never heard of chat, G p T and I knew he was  a pickleball player. Great. The new great phase right fad.

 I said to him, I said, well, I'll show you how it works. He says, write me a blog on how to win a pickleball.  In 30 seconds, It wrote this beautiful, piece on the five key strategies for winning a pickleball. I said, Hey, Gary,  is this right? He said, oh man, that's spot on. And so it's very, very easy to generate some basic content.

Then you can, you know, you add your own personal style to it, so it, writing a blog might seem intimidating, but there are tools to be able to help you with that. If Blogging's not your thing, what I would suggest is you pick. Media, social media, platform, whatever. The right answer is which one is wherever your customers are.

But you know, the other answer is wherever you feel comfortable. If you feel comfortable on posting on Facebook or Instagram, go there. If it's  LinkedIn. Then do that, or it might be Twitter,

set yourself the goal this week of posting once per day on one of those platforms, and it could be something about your business, something about you, something about your customers, something about the problems that you solve.

Just keep on doing that. And do that for 30 days, you'll be, you'll be amazed at, the impact that it has.

If you want to get a little sexier, and this is a great way of communicating your belief, your conviction, your personal style is you can actually upload a video. I would recommend uploading a video to YouTube once per week on something, A problem that you address a little bit about your business.

People are always searching youTube, people search for problems.

Let's say you are a roofing contractor ? They might search for, they've got a leaky roof and they're gonna search, how do I fix the leak in my roof without calling a roofing contractor cuz they're worried about the cost, et cetera.

And you can make a video about that and you're thinking, well, well why would I, why would I do that? Why would I as a roofing contractor tell somebody how to fix the leak in their roof without calling me. Well just bear with me a second. So you might say, okay, this is how to , fix the leak in your roof.

 First of all, you know, you've gotta isolate where the leak is coming from. So get an idea of where that's coming from. Then what you'll need to do is you'll need to buy a 30 foot ladder. You can get one over  at Home Depot. That'll cost you $75 and place that on the side of the house and then climb up onto the roof.

You'll, you'll need some rope too, because you wanna make sure when you get on that roof right, you tie the roof to something solid. Cause if you fall off,  you could hurt yourself and die. So I strongly recommend that you take precautions. And then once you're on top of that roof, you  take a look at, you know, where the, and it might be a missing tile, for example, and you might want to replace that tile.

You're gonna have to go order a tile. They, they tend to come in batches of, 20 or 40. So you're gonna have to buy a lot of tile. Maybe you're only gonna replace one. And then when you put that tile on, you want to put it in, you're gonna get some of these tacks and you can go down the store and get those tacks.

Oh, you'll need a special hammer for putting in these tacks. Oh, and by the way, if you put the tack in in the wrong place you could damage the membrane that's underneath and,  remove the waterproof seal. And if you've got an insurance on your roof that will nullify  the insurance.

So you won't ever be able to claim against it if there's a big problem like a hail storm or something else that damages the roof more critically. And after all of that, you may not have actually isolated, the leak cuz they are very, very hard to find. And once you're all done, you can get back down the ladder.

And somebody's watching that thinking, oh man, that's a lot of work. I've gotta get a ladder, I've gotta buy special hammer, I've gotta get tacks, I've gotta get all these materials, I've gotta find out where the leak is.  This is quite, this is quite complicated. I, I better call somebody. This is too dangerous and too technically challenging.

Well, who were they gonna call?

Are they gonna call the best roofing company in the area? No.

They're gonna call you because they like you. They've seen you, you tried to help them. They know you know what you're talking about. They're gonna call you. So that's the power of putting out videos.

 Those are the practical tips for this week:

• Get a blog out.
• Post once a day
• upload a video

Get known, get attention, get sales. Start sizzling.