Tag: Customers

You Don’t Deserve Customers 🤨

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Thoughts on not leaving customer acquisition to random chance.

Transcription

You don’t deserve customers.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I want to talk about this message here that I got from my friend Joe, Joe had just recently read my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you also can read it.

Now you can go out and purchase a hardback copy, I’d appreciate if you go to amazon.com or anywhere to get that or you can download a free copy, I’d appreciate that too.

I’d love to hear what you think, go get a free downloadable copy of, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business at AmazonProofBook.com.

Now let’s talk about what Joe was saying.

So Joe had his original message said something about, you know, the fact that he enjoyed the book and everything. And we kind of went back and fourth, we’re joking a little bit about the writing process, I guess you could say.

Then we got into a scenario where he was he said seriously, this is this was good stuff. And he said that.

What I want to talk about is what he mentioned here, he said, these are the steps that some people need to take in their businesses, it seems to me that some businesses fail, because the owners, employees, salesman, etc, either lack confidence in themselves, or they’re lazy, and just expect the client to magically appear and come to them without any type of working towards them. That’s a really interesting point.

I think it’s very common, it’s common among, you know, business owners, and it’s common around any executives that run a business is oftentimes we get into the feeling of well, we should just automatically get customers, clients, patients, what have you, they should just come to us, it just should be automatic.

It’s that whole, and I’m sure you’ve heard it a million times from Field of Dreams, build it, and they will come. And there’s more to it than that and it’s a constant.

I wouldn’t want I want to say battle, it’s it should be a constant engagement, though, you should be constantly engaging people to bring them your way to attract them your way to having them come your way without having to beg, borrow, steal, but honestly, leave a path to have a pathway that’s easy for them to come towards you.

Not necessarily too easy, but at the same and easy in the sense that, that there’s it’s clear what it takes to be able to work with you to get your services or your products. Having that is very, very important.

Often we get into this mindset that I deserve it, that I’ve already had this over here, I’m already offering this great service, this great product, they, you know, word of mouth should just automatically bring everyone to me. In some cases, you’ll get a lot of that.

One of the worst situations that’s something that I dealt with early on in my business was that I had a lot of people come to me via referral early on. And when you have that, you get into a place of feeling at ease.

That’s like, Oh, no problem, I’ll just keep duplicating. I’ll keep making people happy and then they’ll refer people who they know over to me.

It just doesn’t usually work that way unless you’re fully implementing it and you have a system to be able to develop that over and over and over again.

That shouldn’t be the only way that you get people. You can’t expect something that came easy to always be easy. I have, I had another one specific client, who always had a difficult time breaking out of the Yellow Page mentality.

So when he first opened his business, which is now you’re talking 40 years back, when he first opened his business, he put the kind of you know, it’s that whole idea of hanging your shingle out there, they used to say, you know, you hang your sign out there, and you open the doors and you got people you got some people you know who you, obviously you’re able to bring them in, and then you put an ad in the Yellow Pages.

And from that point on, every time someone needs that item, they call you up every time someone needs that service, they call you right up because you’re one of the only people in town that do it.

And you start getting a reputation for being the best person in town for doing it, especially if you’re cursed with having a great product are a great service.

That is good in the short run but the problem is when you have one way that you’re marketing yourself and all of a sudden through technology or any other reason, that way goes away or becomes a lot less effective, which is what happened with the yellow pages, they became a, they became a lot less effective.

So I helped help this person to be able to get their business online and be able to do a lot of things online. But so many of the things now require some form of interaction, some form of communication with your potential customer, and the competition is grown and everything else.

And you have to expect that no matter what you’re in, even if you’re you’re carving out your own niche, and you’re starting from scratch, and there is no competition, that’s a great place to be in.

But if you’re in that spot, and you have customers and you have something that people want, and they are getting it with what you’re offering, even then there’s going to be copycats, if it’s really good, if it’s really profitable, there’s going to be other people that come along that tried to do something similar.

Try to undercut what you’re doing and say, well, we’ve got a cheaper version of X, Y, and Z. That’s all to be expected. What you have to understand is, it’s not you, it’s not personal, you don’t deserve it.

Until you’ve done the job of bringing in people bringing in new people, via one of the best ways to be able to do it nowadays is via content marketing, which we want the things that I train people on.

But there are a million other ways to be able to bring people in content marketing is one of those things, though, that grows and becomes an asset to your business over time.

Whether you continue with the business, whether you sell it, you have you can sell it with the con with a content marketing system, you’re going to have something of great value.

But you can you want to have something that’s growing in many different directions and then be able to have systems that communicate with your customers to keep them as customers to have them continuous customers to bring them back as customers if you have a one time fix, they’re going to want that fixed later on.

So that whatever that is if that whatever type of service it is, whether you’re a regional service, or something at that can go international. Hopefully that all makes sense to you. It’s just a simple idea that I want to thank Joe for, for the endorsement of my book and thank him for for his comments.

It brought up some great ideas for us to be able to talk to you about today.

If you have any questions or comments about anything we talked about, leave it down below wherever you’re watching this or listening to it. You can also go to BrianJPombo.com find the original post and comment there.

You have a great night we’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Are You Confusing Your Customers? 😵

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Thoughts on creating confusion with your messaging to your customers.

Transcription

Are you confusing your customers?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J Pombo Live.

Let’s talk about customer confusion, shall we? 4

And sometimes it’s not your current customers, sometimes it’s customers, you don’t have yet your prospective customers prospective clients. It’s really easy to confuse people nowadays because people are inundated from every angle, every direction, they’ve got stuff coming at them.

Life is confusing.

It’s not easy to know what the right thing to do is at any given time. And so people can be misled, people can be bamboozled and what have you. And it’s easy to be just plain confused about the process.

It’s good when you find this out, though, and you want to find out whether your customers are confused. And the one main reason is if you see a large percentage, not taking the next step in your process, where you get movement, movement, in every funnel, every marketing funnel, you start with a lot.

Then every step that you have them taking, you’re going to have a huge drop-off, right just across the board, it just comes with the territory.

One of the things they always talk about when it comes to websites is every time you have them click to another page, you should expect at least half of them to drop away, if not more, right, which is why you want to limit how many times you have a person clicking to get to the next step, the more initiative that is required from your customer, the less likely they’re going to make it to the end of the yellow brick road and get in and purchase something from you.

So one thing you need to do is watch every step. And how many people are making it through every step of the process?

And this, this goes for online or offline, wherever it is from the point at which someone finds out about you to the point at which they purchase and where are the drop-offs?

Where are their huge drop-offs when there shouldn’t necessarily be and there are points in which you can orchestrate the drop-off?

Early on, I like to do it as early on as possible. I like to put off people who will not be good customers, or cannot afford what it is, whatever it is that I’m selling, I try to get that out of the way as early as possible.

So that the rest of the time, they’re more and more likely to be the ideal customer as we go along. But that’s up to you. I mean that these are all things that you have to strategize in the process.

But you have to know at which point you want people to be able to fall off to be able to exit. And at which point you want to be able to capture them so you can remarket to them, bring them back in re-explain the proposal, or offer them something that you haven’t offered them before.

Because Oh, you don’t like this?

Well, how about this, okay, these are things you have to keep in mind. And oftentimes, if you’re reaching a situation where you where people are not responding the way you want, quite often they’re confused.

They’re confused about how to buy, they’re confused about what it is you’re selling. They’re confused somewhere along the line, they don’t understand what’s going on. And it’s much easier to move on.

Or to get distracted by something intentionally or not, if it’s easy to pull them away if they’re confused. So sit down with your team and find out if there’s confusion, and where there’s confusion.

In most cases, if you have enough systems going, there’s going to be confusion somewhere. But it’s good to have a confusion audit every once in a while. If you ever need help with something like that. It’s the type of thing that I can come in and help uncover for you.

You can but you do a whole lot of this on your own. Or you may already have people on your team who can do it. I recommend you read this book and have your team read it. It’s a great gift for people on your team, especially in their marketing department.

9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

You can buy a bunch of hard copies. They’re relatively inexpensive. I don’t know what they’re going for right now on Amazon.

Amazon controls the prices there. So I don’t know it.

At one time they were 20 something bucks, but now they may be a whole lot more or a whole lot less I should say. You go get a hard copy, or you can just download a free copy over at AmazonProofBook.com That’s my website.

So give me your email address and I’ll send you a free copy. That’s all I got for tonight you have a good one in the meantime get out there and let the magic happen.

Customers Lie! 😲

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Say one thing but do another? People don’t do that.👀

Amazon-Proof Your Business➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/amazonbook/

Transcription

Customers lie!

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

We do this on a nightly basis, we get together, we have a little chat is about principles, strategies or tactics to help you take your business to the next level. Sometimes it’s very personal human stuff that affects everybody and sometimes it’s stuff that really has a lot to do with business. This is a little of both today.

Because in general, everybody lies to themselves, if to nobody else, and it’s not intentional, it’s not something we set out every morning to do. But it is something that happens.

It happens regularly. It happens so regularly that most of us are completely unconscious of it. So one of the conversations that we’ve had lately is we’ve talked about how you got to talk to your customers, you got to question them, you have to find out more about them, the ones that are good, the ones that are bad, so that you can start getting away from the ones that are less desirable.

Attracting more of the ones that you enjoy, you’re going to see commonalities between those people out there that you have not become customers yet, and the ones that you already have.

And so what you want is the commonalities that are similar to good customers, and not too bad customers, doesn’t mean they’re bad. You know, beyond beyond just being undesirable customers, it doesn’t make them bad people, okay. But there’s desirable qualities that you want in a customer. And it may be very personal, but it’s your business.

So you got to figure it out, whether you’re a business owner or executive, you got to figure these things out or you got good things that people bring to the table, and they’re good that you’ve decided on, and you have a right to be able to decide who to do business with. And so you got to be really careful.

Otherwise, you make a miserable situation, and you make a business that’s doomed to fail, if you attract the wrong type of people. Now, when you go out to start questioning them, and start finding out more of what they want, as opposed to you trying to come up with a product and just kind of guess at it and and spend a whole lot of money and put it out there and find out that nobody really wants this, or that nobody wants it based off of how you’re marketing it to them.

To find this stuff out, you’ve got to have conversations. But the one thing you have to know, while having these conversations that I don’t like to say straight off the bat, because it’s tough enough to get business owners to have the conversations to begin with.

But once you start having the conversations, you got to start noticing something, people lie. And customers specifically lie, they’ll lie.

Most time it’s not intentional, most of the time, if you ask them what the major issue that they have with the product, they’re going to say what they think it is, or if they have a major issue in life that they would be willing to spend money on to fix.

They may tell you what they think it is. But you have to dig deeper the way to get past the lies, you got to keep asking follow up questions. What is it about this you don’t like? How does that make a difference in your life?

How does this being a different color affect you? What does it affect other people in your life?

Does it you know, and you start digging, and you’ll start to see that the real problems are a little more deeper.

They’re all oftentimes, they’re both deeper and shallow, they’re deeper on the level of, of they’re being hidden. They’re being hidden from that person, even most of the time, they don’t know what the real answer is.

So you’ve got to help them dig a little bit deeper. That’s why surveys only show you so much and then you start finding that there’s a whole lot of these shallow issues that people have, meaning, you know, I feel like it makes me look funny if I if I use this color or there’s all these shallow that but it’s very human things.

These are human issues, humans status issues, status is one of the most common issues that people end up having with using one product versus another or using it in a certain way or a certain color or with a certain flavor.

And I’m not just talking products, I’m talking services too. It’s the same thing, okay.

People have hang ups and you got to dig a little deeper to find the true meaning behind it. And then you’ll find that that true meaning is common among a whole lot of people see you’re looking for that gold down deep but you gotta sift I don’t know if you’ve ever panned for gold or a few I’ve ever gone to one of these places that can show you how they used to pamper gold.

Well, they, you pull it up in the pan, you mix some water with, it’s just a little bit of the silt or whatever.

You’ve got to move it around moving around, you got to get all the all the stuff out of the way that is not, cannot possibly be gold and you keep going, you keep going, you keep going, you keep going.

Most time you’re not gonna find anything. And a lot of times the few things that you find are Neve isn’t even really gold. It’s it’s fool’s gold, it’s, it’s, you know, what do they call it pyrite or whatever.

It’s a big, long, painful process. But once you find that little flake of gold, that little tiny little tiny chunk, you do that over and over and over again. And that’s it’s worth its weight. In the long run, you have something that you you can get no other way. And it comes through conversation.

It comes through having relationship with your customer, it comes from knowing them better than they know themselves. So that even when they say the surface, excuse the surface problem that they have, you actually can know immediately that that probably comes back to this issue over here.

Takes a lot of digging in and you become innocence. a psychiatrist, I know you’re going, why would I want to do this? If I’m selling dog food?

Why do I want to do this if I’m selling whatever it is that you sell?

Well, it all depends. Do you want to keep things exactly the way they are in your business?

Or do you want to know your customer so well, that no one else can serve them as well as you can, then no one else can produce the items that you can produce or the services that you can produce because they just don’t know the customer as well.

As you see. That’s what you’re really after you’re after market control. Market control happens when you produce something that they didn’t even know they wanted.

That’s that there’s some real power to that, hey, if you want more strategies to help you out with your business, go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. You can go and buy one or you can get a free copy of AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow night. Like I said we go over these things on a nightly basis. So you come on back, and we’ll be here. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

Time To Fire Your Customers 🔥

Posted on by brianjpombo

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

R E S P E C T goes both ways. Some thoughts on why the customer isn’t always right.

Amazon-Proof Your Business➡️ https://brianjpombo.com/amazonbook/

Transcription

Time to fire your customers.

I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I don’t mean all your customers, but you do need to fire some customers more than likely.

In fact, one of the things when I come in and I end up working with companies, one of the first things we do is we identify who the best customers are. And we identify who the worst customers are.

And we do everything in our power to get rid of the worst customers. And we give them a chance we let them leave nicely, or we give them a chance to become better customers. But you can’t act like it isn’t a two way street.

I think so much of the issues now, even in society. And I don’t just mean the United States where I where I reside here, we’re here in Southern Oregon. I don’t just mean here, I mean, around the world, only, I think in in America, in North America, you United States of America, I should say.

It’s more obvious, right, it’s more clear cut, because there’s been such a huge difference between both sides, both different ways, the world has changed so much in such a short period of time, that there’s a there’s a big thing going on, and it comes back, I’m going to bring this back around to your business and your customers.

But it comes from thinking that we’re all owed something, and that our side is better than their side, you know, and oftentimes, this is this happens in business all the time. It’s, the employers owe something to the employees, the employees owe something to the employers, the the customers that very rarely do people think that the customers owe the person that is selling the item, but it’s a two way street.

If you’re selling it, you have the ability to make a price and and define the quality. And then the customer can pay that or not pay that.

But it’s a two way street, it’s not one is not better than the other one is not more powerful than the other, it takes two to make the engagement happen. And way too often, we keep acting like one side has power over the other, they only have power in the sense that they may have one side may have more power over one resource or another. But that doesn’t mean they actually have power.

Because that side wants something from the other side, and they either get it or they don’t get it. And if they don’t get it, they can go and get the same thing somewhere else. So don’t fall for it yourself as a business owner, or an executive of a business.

You should not fall for the idea that the customer because they’re our customer are somehow better than you. They’re a human being. They want something and hopefully you have something that they want, so that they’re willing to exchange their money for what you have. I know this is just basic 101 economics, but it’s the thing that most of us Miss.

And we fall for all of the jealousy and envy and all these things that occur in society nowadays, that try and pit us against each other. If you just see people for being people, regardless of all the other entanglements, all the other physical features and everything else that we get wrapped up in.

If you just see a person for being a person, and that includes seeing yourself on on a level, you don’t have to put yourself down to bring someone else up and you don’t have to put yourself down in order to make yourself feel better, right.

And I think a lot of times we get into a place where we think well because we’re privileged or because we’re this or because we’re that, that we need to hold ourselves back and push everybody else up.

Where in reality if you follow the golden rule do unto others as you would have done unto you, then everything tends to work out in the best it because it’s truly a universal concept.

So it doesn’t just mean you should be super nice to everyone and give everyone everything in hopes that they’re going to give you everything back. That’s not the idea. It’s more of be level with everybody, just be easygoing and level with everybody. Don’t be too nice and don’t be too mean.

Sometimes a little bit of tough love goes a long way. And sometimes you can you can be straightforward with someone and you’re being just as kind to them as if you were being you know, it’s that whole idea if you’ve ever known anybody had anyone close to you that was dealing with an addiction issue.

What do they call it when you, when you don’t stand up to them when you don’t show them that you disagree, and you try to comfort them in their issue. It’s called enablement. You’re enabling them to continue living wrong, to continue ruining their life and the lives of those around them. That’s not a good thing. And a lot of times, we enable, and I hate to take such an outrageous situation like addiction and tie it back.

But it’s, it’s the same, it’s the same thing in the sense that we all have our foibles. And we all have periods of time when we’re not at our best. And it’d be better if everybody was straightforward with us and didn’t give in to us.

Same thing with your customers, you can’t give in a bad attitude. You can’t give in when they’re asking for something when they’re asking for more than they paid for. You can offer them more than what they paid for.

But you can’t give him because they demand it. Okay, everyone ought to treat each other with a certain amount of humanity. And you’ve got customers that if you allow them to, they will treat you like dirt.

Not only will they treat you like dirt, they’ll treat everybody like dirt, if you put up with it. And you’re just creating, you’re creating a worse situation for you. Because you end up hating them, you end up hating your business, you end up hating hating your your co workers and everybody around you.

And then they go on and they continue on, you’re enabling that behavior to go on throughout their life, where it’d be better if you just say, hey, don’t do that. You want to do that you can’t do it here, you can’t act that way.

Here, you can’t treat my employees like that. You can’t treat my co workers, my partners like that. You’re not allowed to we don’t want your money here, take it elsewhere. It’s voluntary, it’s a two way street. And you need to start looking at people and not looking down at people either.

On the other end, a lot of people that get into business, they they look down on people as just, you know, another dollar bill walking through the door, you got to see him as a human being and expect them to come with their best and then you bring your best to them. I know this is really a theory, this is all over the place ethereal.

But it’s a principle that isn’t following enough and all of our lives can be so much better if we just expect the best from each other. And at the same time, we hold ourselves to a better higher standard, especially when it comes to business because business is nothing more than just people exchanging ideas, concepts, products, services back and forth, in exchange for something of greater or lesser value, equal value.

Something and that value is a very, it’s a very subjective term. But we’ll talk about that another time. This was just a general idea. I’d like to talk about this some more. Have you had the situation where you’ve had customers and clients that you absolutely hate, or that refuse to get along with you?

Time to fire them time to get rid of them. And there’s a lot more people out there that want what you have. So I’ve got other strategies all in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business you go check that out at AmazonProofBook.com you get your own free copy. Right away.

Go download it right now. Doesn’t take me having to approve it. You can get it right in your hands. We’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, you get out there and let the magic happen.