Philip Morgan helps custom software shops get more leads without hiring a salesperson. He does this by helping refine their positioning and create effective content marketing systems. He is the author of two books, The Positioning Manual for Technical Firms, and The Positioning Strategy Guide. Philip describes himself as an introvert who specializes in marketing for introverts.
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Narrowing Your Focus
- What is the most important thing you can share about pricing?
- The foundation of your ability to increase your prices is your ability to deliver more value to your customers.
- The key to delivering more value is your willingness to restrict or narrow who you serve and what you do for them.
- Narrowing is difficult because it triggers a survival instinct.
- People who are self-employed often did not study business or marketing but are figuring things out as they go.
- They believe they have to be flexible and adaptable to serve multiple markets.
- By narrowing his focus from a generic writer, demand for his services went up and so did his rates.
- What was the inspiration to specialize in positioning?
- Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind and a series of articles in Advertising Age, speaking to Fortune 500 companies.
- “You need to own a word in the mind” is a poetic definition of what it means to market yourself.
- Choose an attribute that potential customers care about (safety) and be the company that provides it (Volvo).
- What is the difference in the mindset of a creative vs. a coder?
- E-myth discusses the differences between the manager, the entrepreneur, and the technician.
- Coders are very creative people, with coders applying their creativity differently in the reality of developing code.
- The idea of voluntarily agreeing to do something boring is terrifying to a creative person.
- Most software developers have above average intelligence and some things come very easily for them (such as the public school system).
- They will hit a ceiling on their business growth, due to underdeveloped marketing skills.
- The technician hits a rate ceiling, because they start to get pushback from their customers since they have focused on their craft, but not their business or marketing.
- How important is technology for a technical consultant?
- Technology is only about 20-30% of the value proposition for technicians.
- Understanding how to solve an expensive problem is the most important thing.
- Imagine you are responsible for P&L at your customer's company, you will have a very different way of looking at the world.
- You will realize that the things important to you (technology) do not matter in the world view of a P&L person.
- Fear is related to having to talk about yourself differently for marketing and sales.
[clickToTweet tweet=”Your ability to increase your prices is your ability to deliver more value to your customers.” quote=”The foundation of your ability to increase your prices is your ability to deliver more value to your customers.”]
Solve the Expensive Problem
- What is an undifferentiated specialist?
- Everyone is an undifferentiated specialist because being a jack-of-all-trades feels secure.
- You offer a weak value proposition when you are an undifferentiated specialist and are seen as a commodity.
- The strongest value propositions speak to a problem that someone has.
- You have to become specific and you force yourself into having to say no.
- Choosing what to focus on is challenging when you are new to the business world.
- Everyone has challenges to get over to make positioning have a benefit for them.
- There are other ways to have a successful freelance business, but positioning helps you deliver more value.
- Luck can take you a certain distance down the road and is not a bad way to get started.
- You can build a business you can retire on better with positioning.
- What is the “third way” to develop business?
- Luck and hustle are the first two ways to business development.
- Positioning is the third way.
- Narrowing your focus will help you understand your customers at a much deeper level.
- It is hard to build up real expertise when you are multi-tasking; you are always on a learning curve if you are a generalist.
- As a specialist, you learn a customer's language, how to help them make more money, and how to help them avoid problems endemic to their business model or their industry.
- When you focus on a specific market, you can identify a customer's preferences (conferences, podcasts, publications) which will let you target them better when your marketing shows up in those places.
- You can create value faster when you are well positioned.
- When you position yourself as an expert, it is easier to move away from the hourly billing model.
- The people who give Ted Talks are specialists.
- What is an expensive problem?
- An expensive problem is why the P&L person is looking for a solution.
- It could keep you up at night, trying to solve it.
- An expensive problem gets the business owner's attention, like getting more leads.
- If you can align your positioning with how to solve expensive problems, it is easier to win a customer.
- What is the economic value of an expensive problem?
- It usually boils down to increasing revenue or profit.
- If someone's value proposition has no impact on revenue or profitability, it is a much harder sale.
- Solving an expensive problem will make more money, will save money, will allow for more profit or has a clear return on investment.
- It is difficult to create something simple; simple is hard.
- Your message about value should be easy to spread through a referral network.
- Solving one problem for one audience helps you be more easily referred.
- Emotional levers are often easier to uncover when they are tied to revenue and profit.
[clickToTweet tweet=”You offer a weak value proposition when you are an undifferentiated specialist.” quote=”You offer a weak value proposition when you are an undifferentiated specialist and are seen as a commodity.”]
The Timeframe to Reposition
- What is the reasonable timeframe to reposition a business?
- Three to six months is what is expected to reposition.
- If a wolf is at the door, you probably need a different approach to achieve faster results.
- The larger your company, the longer the time frame will be.
- You can change your mind overnight, but your position needs to be changed with a concerted effort to marketing (website, social media presence, modifying case studies, refocusing your outbound marketing, etc.)
- You do not want to change your position and then have a potential customer go to your website and see something that does not support the position.
- Do market validation before you invest much time in marketing.
- What are the primary criteria to determine what to sell?
- “Can you sell it?” is the primary criteria.
- Does it get the attention of a large number of potential buyers?
- Is it economically viable?
- Do people want what you are selling?
- Cindy Alvarez wrote Lean Customer Development, which will help with prevalidation of doing what you want to do.
- Ask your previous customers about what you want to do.
- Interview people in your target, without your biases getting in the way.
- Talk to real people in a way that makes it possible for them to give you useful feedback.
- The Positioning Manual for Technical Firms will give you concrete instructions for how to research your market.
- What is your new book?
- The Positioning Strategy Guide talks about how to become a leader in your market.
- Leaders in an industry get free stuff: the lion's share of attention, free publicity, are asked to speak at conferences and asked for quotes from the press.
- The next version of The Positioning Manual will have more of the high-level insight from The Positioning Strategy Guide.
- How you implement the idea is from The Positioning Manual.
- What is one of your best stories about creating value for a customer?
- The Positioning Manual is a $49 book, that provides insights which will provide him an additional $1 million lifetime revenue.
- Sales have gone up 48% at a Member Up after they narrowed their focus.
- “This is by far the most valuable email I have ever received from an email list,” was feedback he received from a free email.
- The reachability and scalability of a book are hard to argue with as some of the best ways to create value.
- Part of his screening process for new customers is to talk about the lifetime value of their customers to make sure they will get ROI.
- Wes Higbee's episode, The Value of the Customer's Customer, speaks to that idea.
About Philip Morgan
- Website: PositioningCrashCourse.com
- Twitter: @Philip_Morgan
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