At this stage of what I hope to be a long and prosperous relationship between us, I'd like to take the opportunity to share with you my philosophy on how and why it's important to not only analyze success practices and principles from other industries, but to borrow them and apply them to your business.
On occasion people have mentioned to me, "Jay, your powerful concepts and principles are fantastic, but I'm not quite seeing the relevance to my business, my practice or my life."
I have stated from Day One that I am committed to helping you build your business. So, I'm going to practice what I preach when I say "fall in love with your customers," because I REALLY DO CARE about helping you achieve your own business breakthrough, whether that's increased sales and
profits, a better outlook toward your business and life, more time with your family, or whatever else is your top goal!
That's why I'm providing you with this FREE bonus report that I call, Adapting and Adopting Profitable Ideas. My intent is to encourage you to adapt to your business the proven principles that I write about and to wholeheartedly adopt them. Your breakthrough likely will come from applying the strategies and techniques from other businesses and industries to yours.
If you'll bear with me for a few pages, I think I can help produce multiplied results for you and your business or professional enterprise from now on.
So if you'll sit back, get comfortable and open your mind, I'd like to take you on a quick journey into my experiences with adapting and adopting profitable ideas.
Warmest regards,
Jay Abraham
Breaking Away From the Pack
Let me start with this observation:
Most people in your industry all do the same things pretty much the same way. It doesn't matter to me what field you're in, whether you're an operating business, a professional, a non-profit organization, a start-up business, or a manager with profit-and-loss responsibility - you are in an industry.
If you look at the top five or ten competitors in that industry, almost everyone generates their business, derives their customers or clients, and creates their profits from the same basic approaches.
Let me clarify. The way you get your customers is probably very similar to the way your competitors get theirs. That means that if your industry is one in which almost everybody sells direct, you probably have a sales force, too. If your industry is one in which almost all the business is derived by displaying at trade shows, you probably get almost all your business from trade show exhibitions, also.
Is this good? I don't think so. Why? Because your only advantage is to maybe be 10%-15% more effective, more ingenious, more aggressive or more professional than your competitors. It dramatically limits your area and level of growth potential.
Why limit and restrict how broad your success, growth, profits or progress can be?
From my vantage point, there's no reason whatsoever that you have to limit how much more successful your enterprise can be than your competitors'. But it's impossible to be much more successful if you're all doing the same things the same way.
A question that I'd like to pose to you is, why do you have to do it the same way as others? Where's the law that says you're only limited to following suit - that you're only limited to being a sheep following the leader in the flock?
There is NO LAW that says you have to limit the way your company grows or builds its business to the same methods and procedures your competitors use.
I'm not saying to stop doing that. All I am doing is questioning it, and asking you to examine and question whether or not there are other more powerful, more effective, more productive and more profitable alternative methods, processes, procedures and selling approaches that you could be using in addition to, or instead of the approach your competitors are using.
A story needs to be told at this time to make my point.
It's an old story that's been around a long time, but one I think you'll find very useful in understanding the point I want to make.
There was a man who married a woman he loved very much. They had a very nice family. She had a very nice mother, and she had a very nice grandmother.
Every year at Christmastime, the man and his wife hosted the family for Christmas dinner. His wife had an unusual procedure that she went through whenever she made Christmas roast. She'd start by cutting both ends off the roast before she'd put it in the pan.
For three years, the man thought nothing of it but found it a little curious. Then, in the fourth year, as he was watching her do it, his curiosity got the better of him. He couldn't help but ask her, "Honey, why in the world do you cut the ends off the sides of the roast before you put it in the pan and bake it?" His wife, rather matter-of-factly looked at him and said, "Well, because my mother always did it that way, and she taught it to me."
Now the man's curiosity was piqued. He went to his wife's mother and said, "Mom, let me ask you a question. Why did you cut the ends off both sides of the roast before you made your Christmas dinners?"
And she said, "Well, because my mother always did it that way, and she taught it to me!"
Grandmother, as luck would have it, was still alive, and she was sitting in a corner of the room. Uncontrollably curious at this point, he asked her, "Grandmother, tell me, please, why did you cut the ends off both sides of the Christmas roast before you put it in the oven?
Without blinking an eye, Grandma looked at him and said, "Well, when we came to the United States from the old country, we didn't have a lot of money, and we didn't have a very big apartment, and we had an even smaller oven. We couldn't get the roast in the oven unless we cut off both ends."
So my question to you in the beginning of this journey together is, "Are you cutting both ends off the roast because everybody else in your industry is doing that?"
I suspect that you learned to do what you're doing in your business from other people you observed, worked for or trained under. I suspect they learned what they do, and they run their businesses and grow their businesses the same way.
I've had the good fortune of observing and getting deeply involved in more than 400 industries. I can tell you for a fact that less than 10% of the industries that I work with are coming close to using their time, opportunities or selling efforts anywhere close to full potential.
The primary methods they have settled upon are actually some of the least effective, least successful, least productive and least profitable approaches they could possibly be using.
The United Nations Diplomat Strategy
I want to ask you a question.
What difference would it make in your business if instead of having 100% or 90% of your customers and sales coming from one profit source, you had eight separate profit sources flowing together to bring you continuous and broadened sales?
If wouldn't be all that bad, would it?
Well, that's what I want to move you to desire and achieve. It's actually easier than you'd imagine. You don't have to sit around squinting your eyes and looking up for divine inspiration.
All you have to do is let me guide you to one simple strategy: Observe the success practices of people outside your industry (many of whom stumbled into those practices just as you've stumbled into yours) and determine how much or what part of their methods, strategies or processes you could use directly or indirectly in your business.
I call this the United Nations Diplomat Strategy. Why do I call it that? Because it's based on a commitment you make to me that you'll start interpreting, adapting and adopting what other people in other industries do, and see how many different ways you can directly or indirectly apply it to your business.
If you'll start doing that, tremendous breakthroughs can't help but happen. Why? Because while your competitors are struggling to improve upon the same basic ways they grow their businesses, you're playing an altogether different, fresh game with no competitors and a whole new playing field.
While they're all using salespeople and knocking on doors, you can be using telephone salespeople. You can be using sales letters. You can be forging strategic alliances.
And what happens? Very quickly, while their growth is severely limited and can only possibly be, at best, linear in nature - meaning they can only get small, incremental gains - your business will start growing explosively!
Why do you want to adapt and adopt? Because as you're building your business Parthenon, you don't want to reinvent the wheel. The easiest way is to borrow profit-proven, success-certain approaches or methods that people in other industries have already spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to develop and experiment with, and have had years to perfect.
Why should you have to do it alone? That gives you no leverage.
If you take ideas and applications that other people have already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt will work - ideas, concepts, methods or approaches that are driving multimillion-dollar businesses - it should be easy to take elements and directly or indirectly apply them to your business.
What does direct or indirect mean? It means that many of the methods you will observe and discover people in other industries using, can be directly and easily applied to your specific business. However, you'll have to modify some of them. You can't use some of them the same way they're using them, but that shouldn't stop you.
Possibility-Based Thinking
Your challenge in this process must be a philosophy based on possibility thinking.
Possibility-based thinking is the true core that fuels all the achievements you'll be obtaining as you follow the mindset and methods I'll teach you over the time we'll work together.
The essence of possibility-based thinking is to ask yourself what is possible. It's to look at things with an eye toward what is possible. Or, how could I make that directly work in my situation or with modification?
This is distinctly different from an impossibility-based way of thinking, which most of your competitors live with. An impossibility-based way of thinking or mindset is one that says, "I can't use that. That's from another industry. My business is different."
Let me clear the air once and for all.
It doesn't matter what industry you are in. Whether you are in the retail, wholesale, service, professional services, manufacturing, high-tech, low-tech or no-tech industries, you have the same simple objectives and requirements to grow and build your business --- irrespective of the industry.
Let me describe those objectives:
Number one: You've got to get the most yield you can out of the customers you currently have.
Number two: You've got to get the maximum number of customers you can from the best possible source of prospects you can identify.
Number three: You've got to make the time, effort and money you spend produce the best, highest possible result now and in the future.
Number four: You have got to use the velocity and critical mass you have in motion to your best advantage.
What do I mean by velocity and critical mass? Velocity is all of the activity you've got in place. You've got to take the velocity or the programming you have in place and question how many better ways or expanded ways you could do that. You've got to take the critical mass - meaning the customers, relationships and the distribution channels you have in place - and ask, "How can I use that to better and broader advantage?"
Some Techniques You Can Try
Now that you understand the general philosophy and the basis behind possibility-based thinking and the basis behind possibility-based thinking, let me make it simple for you with a few examples of concepts, techniques or methods, and show you how they would directly or indirectly apply to different business situations.
You still might have to modify the situation a bit, or it might be a perfect example that you can apply directly to your enterprise. The point of this illustration is to get you excited about stretching your mind and your imagination to constantly discover how many different, better ways you can approach the areas of prospect identifications, prospect generation, customer development, advertising, selling and so on.
As I point out in the 21 Power Principles of Business Builders Who Get Rich, reversing risk by offering a prospect your guarantee of anything they buy, is a wonderful way to overcome "buyer hesitation."
By lifting risk from the buyer's shoulders and carrying it yourself, your sales proposition will be so much more powerful, appealing and embraceable that many more customers will take advantage of your offer.
The first thing that comes to mind with risk reversal is Domino's pizza. When Domino's started, they said, "It absolutely must be a hot, fresh, delicious pizza delivered to your door within 30 minutes, or it's free."
And, Federal Express said, "If it doesn't get there by 10 a.m., it's free!"
Here are some more examples of companies or practices that I've worked with that use risk reversal quite effectively:
* Tire chains and electronics stores doubled the difference back if you found it for sale at a lower price.
* A medical doctor guaranteed that you'd be satisfied with his service or there would be no charge - just tell the receptionist at the end of your appointment that you were dissatisfied, and the doctor would waive the charge.
* A hospital emergency room guaranteed people that if they came for normal, non-catastrophic emergencies, they would receive treatment within 20 minutes, or there would be no charge.
* A dentist guaranteed that if you had any pain in the procedure, there would be no charge.
* An optometrist, who has the largest practice in Dayton, Ohio, gives the first full examination free of charge with no strings attached. He'll write you a prescription that you can take anywhere to get filled.
* A dermatologist conducted free screenings and free initial examinations, and he charged nothing. His business went up about $500,000. Similarly, I've worked with many chiropractors who have performed free examinations, and some have done free screenings.
* One doctor said, "Pay me whatever you think it's worth!"
* A real estate agent doesn't guarantee to buy a house back, but he does guarantee not to transact business until the customer first talks to 10 of his past clients who have either purchased or sold homes through him and are satisfied.
Additionally, he offers to guarantee that if you're unhappy with any house you buy as a result of doing business with him - whether he sold you the house or served you in the purchase - that within one year, he will sell the house free of commission. He also pays the moving expenses to any other home up to $2,000 and pays to connect utilities.
* A management consultant guaranteed his clients a minimum of 15% improvement in productivity that was measurable in the first year, or he would refund 100% of his fee.
* A computer imaging company guaranteed a very specific dollar savings that law firms could expect to get, or the company would refund pro rata up to 100%.
* A health supply company that sold vitamin supplements and nutritional supplements on what's called a continuity basis would ship a supply every month. The company would wait 30 days to bill the customer's credit card. The customer had 30 days to try the supplements. If the customer changed his or her mind or became dissatisfied after using the product, he or she could just call and say, "Don't process it!"
* A book publisher would not deposit your check for 30 days to ensure that you had enough time to read his books and to see whether they provided you value.
* A mini-warehouse added $1 million dollars by giving you the first three months free for signing a 15-month program. If you were dissatisfied at that time, you got to move out and received a 100% refund. He also provided the moving van and the equipment free of charge and gave you the locks, too, as a gift.
* A specialty newspaper publication in San Diego guaranteed people a minimum return on their ads as long as they allowed the newspaper to help create them. They were targeting very specific products and services, and if the customer didn't get that return, the newspaper would reduce the price of their advertising up to 100%.
* A coin dealer wouldn't let customers buy coins until they first read 100 pages of authoritative material that would help them determine whether or not coin investing was right for them.
* A mom-and-pop grocery store would say, "I think you would enjoy eating lunch in our deli, but let us buy you a light lunch today." They would give you a little half-sandwich and a glass of lemonade or coffee for free. They build a $50,000 lunch business that way!
* A carpet cleaning company more than quintupled its carpet cleaning service by sending out certificates good for two rooms cleaned for no charge whatsoever - no strings attached. They did such a good job cleaning the carpets of the first two rooms that the people would have them extend the service in their home to an average of six rooms.
* A stop-smoking program guaranteed that if you didn't entirely give up smoking within 45 days, they would refund your money.
* An artist wouldn't deposit your check until his work was displayed in your home.
Add-Ons
I have explored the concept of add-ons. I have stated in the past that "Any product or service that gives your customer a more complete, convenient or efficient end result is a great add-on."
That statement still holds true.
If you keep your customers' desired "end results" clearly in mind, you can almost always add products and services that help customers achieve their end results more completely, conveniently and efficiently. At the same time, you'll increase your sales!
Some examples:
* A medical doctor, put signs through his practice during the flu season saying, "Flu shots today, only $19.00." He sold something like $2,000 extra in shots per week and paid all of his overhead with it. He also provided allergy shots in the summer under a similar offer.
* Shoes stores sell socks; clothiers that sell suits also sell shirts, ties, shoes and socks.
* Software companies add technical support and specialized training programs. One software company added $800,000 in one year by aggressively selling specialized live training programs tailored to its customers.
* Cosmetic products companies offer packages. Instead of selling just lipstick, they give you an incredible incentive to buy more.
* Restaurants are notorious for add-ons. They offer you dessert, wine or a special appetizer.
* Furniture stores offer you the accessories at a preferential price. For example, they'll offer you a beautiful picture for only $200 more, or a gorgeous lamp that normally might sell for $300 for only $200 more. Or, they'll offer you a package, such as a whole room, at a much more preferential price.
* Wineries, particularly the ones in Napa Valley, are starting buying clubs. Instead of selling you just one bottle, they'll give you the first bottle free if you sign up for their month two-bottle wine-of-the-month. They figure one was is $20, but they get $40 a month from you if you join the buying club.
I have provided you a chart that outlines the aforementioned examples of risk reversal. My challenge to you is to take those examples and think of ways to adapt and adopt them to your business. Then try the same with add-ons. I think you'll find it amazingly simple once you adopt the mindset of possibility-based thinking with all of my strategies and techniques.
One final note: don't be afraid to try new ideas! Share this information with your employees or colleagues, and challenge them to do the same!
As you read the ideas, strategies and techniques I discuss, ask yourself "How can I adapt/adopt this idea to my business?" Before dismissing the idea as "not related to my line of business," spend some time thinking of how it could apply or what variation of the idea could work for you and help grow your business.
People who have adapted a true marketing mindset have written or called with some amazing breakthroughs. For example, a limousine service owner has found some great add-on services and grown his business dramatically. A financial services company has held informational seminars on its products and added dozens of new customers. Many customers in various field of business have been able to add unique forms of direct mail to their Parthenon, with staggering results.
Experiment, test and evaluate the ideas we discuss. Look at other industries and find ways to borrow strategies that work. Look to find ways to make ideas work for you instead of reasons why they won't work.
In his book, The Winner Within, Pat Riley talks about breakthroughs. He says, "A breakthrough is a positive thunderbolt. It enables the team and the winner within to grasp and to realize their mission by defining and fulfilling the most important performance goals in life." He goes on to say, "…business breakthroughs are more likely to come from the head than the heart. Often they entail defining old problems in new ways, or the road to fresh solutions wouldn't even occur to you."
Pat Riley coached the Los Angeles Lakers to four championships in nine years by being unique and trying new ideas - like a 6'9" guard, and combining rookies with proven veterans. By adapting and adopting new ideas, you may achieve your own Business Breakthroughs.
Adapting and Adopting Risk Reversal
Think about how you can adopt these examples to your business:
· Tire Chain--Double the difference
· Medical Doctor--Waive the charge
· Hospital--No charge if service isn't fast
· Optometrist--Free examination
· Dermatologist / Chiropractor--Free screenings
· Doctor--"Pay me whatever you think it's worth"
· Real Estate Agent--Sell your house within a year if you're unhappy
· Management Consultant--Guarantee productivity
· Computer Imaging Firm--Guarantee specific dollar savings
· Health Supply Company--Return product
· Book Publisher--Hold customer check for 30 days
· Mini-Warehouse--First three months free
· Specialty Newspaper--Guarantee a minimum return on advertising
· Coin Dealer--Educate consumers
· Grocery Store--Free lunch
· Carpet Cleaner--Certificates for free service
· Stop-Smoking Program--Refund money
· Artist--Product trial
Good luck.
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