One of the concepts that many successful entrepreneurs like to share is Ready, Fire, Aim.  It’s a fun play on words, but it also embodies an action mentality.  It’s about making a clear plan, taking action, then adjusting your course while you are in motion because it’s a lot easier to steer a moving vehicle.

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In the past, I’ve been amazed by the split-test results that would increase sales for my clients. Things like different colors, different graphic positions, different fonts, different colored backgrounds brought bumps in response. But I have found that the most significant increases in sales occur when: 1. You are targeting the right audience for your offer. 2. You have the appropriate message for that audience. 3. You make it easier for people to buy from you.

Michel Fortin: From Black Hats are For Magicians, not Marketers

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While there are a lot of details that must fall into place for you to reach your business goals, the major elements are simple. You need: to know where you are now, to know where you want to go (goal), a vehicle to get you there (sales system), fuel for your vehicle (traffic), and a way to measure your progress to stay on target (tracking and reporting).

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I’m sure it is abundantly clear that I place a high value on being able to measure marketing results.  I mean, I went so far as to create software from scratch so that I would have the *right* measurement and analysis tool for my business — that software is now available to you.

But people who know me commonly assume that the reason I am so focused on measurement and analysis is because I’m a ‘numbers guy.’ And that couldn’t be farther from the truth.  The reason I am so focused on marketing metrics for Infopreneurs is because I know three things: 1) nothing is more important to an Infopreneur’s business than the effectiveness of their selling system, 2) if Infopreneurs don’t make good decisions about the most profitable places to spend their time and resources they won’t survive and 3) with with a little bit of focused attention, taking small steps to optimize a sales system over time can transform a mediocre business into a profit-pulling powerhouse .

When you *know* these three things, there is only one conclusion you can draw — it is vitally important to be able to measure and analyze the performance of every component of your selling system so you will know where to focus your optimization efforts in the future.  It’s not a choice of if you are going to work to improve your marketing results next month, it’s a matter of what you are going to choose to focus on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacepleb/ / CC BY 2.0

It’s all about focus — the decisions we make about where to place it.

What really determines your focus are the strategies you choose.  Metrics only tell you what happened in the past and where you might focus your optimization efforts.  Strategies, guide your activities and great strategies give you the biggest return for the time and resources invested.

Since choosing strategies wisely is such a critical skill, I thought I would invite my readers to work out their strategic thinking muscles with a little optimization strategy challenge.

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As I completed my last post, which was about operating principles for my business, I realized that It would probably be helpful to explore these ideas a little deeper. To show you how they might look when applied to my business.

Of course, I consider it unlikely that you will use the exact same operating principles in your business, but if you see what they mean in my business, I hope you will consider developing your own operating principles.

You may remember that one of the operating principles is “Focus on the Core.”  Today, I’d like to take a deeper dive into this principle because it is one of the top-of-mind challenges I’ve been working to resolve for several years now.  Without a major sharpening of my focus, I probably would not be here writing on this blog today.

A Bit of History

Let me just tell you where I was two years ago.  I had over 40 ‘active’ projects.  I was doing small business consulting on a fee for service basis, publishing a daily marketing tip ezine, I was involved in no less than 3 joint venture startups, I was dabbling in information products, and I had a big vision to build a new company around a software tool for Infopreneurs.

Oh, and I still had a couple of clients in the corporate world too. In short, my business was a mess and I knew it. I was working way too hard and the value I was providing was spread way too thin to have any real impact for me or my clients.

When I took a hard look at my business, I realized that there was one part that was bringing in consistent income, one part that made sense as the future foundation of my business, and many other parts that just did not fit at all. That’s when I resolved to focus my efforts on the core of my business, and clear out the rest of the projects and distractions.

Out of necessity, I have gotten much better at focus. Now, two years later, I have just one consulting client, and the rest of my focus is on creating VisiOlo (my #1 project) and making it the best it can be.  So, while my business still has two sides, it is much more manageable and I can build a lot more value for the markets I serve.

So, what I really have is two businesses. One is a high-involvement consulting practice where, at this point, I can only handle one client at a time.  I get deeply involved in their business and develop various marketing projects to help build their bottom line.

I don’t really write much about that business, I only mention it here because it is relevant to this idea of focus.  When I say “my business” on this blog, I’m always referring to the second business I run, which is a digital publishing business focused on software.  The publishing business has launched several products and publications, but VisiOlo is our #1 project — it’s the foundation of everything else we want to do.  More about those other products below.

I realize that my idea of focus is contrary to the way many people approach an information marketing business, especially with my strong belief that 99% of micro-publishing businesses (Infopreneurs) should focus on just one niche.  But this approach has served me well and I think it will serve you well too.

As a refresher, here’s how I described Focus on the Core in my previous post…

I think focus, or lack thereof, is one of the biggest challenges Infopreneurs face — self included . Everyone knows about focus in general, but what I’ve found helpful is to look at focus in my company as having 4 different elements:

• • Audience: Who is our ideal prospect? What are their core needs?
  • Best At: What are we better at than anyone in the world?
  • #1 Project: What is our most important project? Is this project a good combination of what our audience needs and what we are best at?
  • Next Step: What do we need to do next to move closer to completion of #1 project?

Given these 4 elements, let me tell you where I think my company is with each.

Audience

This was one of the things that came sharply into focus right after the ‘turning point’ I described above.  I knew that my entire business would depend on which audience I chose to serve, so the decision was not taken lightly.  It was, however, taken quickly.  I already knew that the place were I could serve best would be with the Infopreneur audience.  I did, however, take the time to run some numbers and do a market analysis.  All of the facts supported my desire to focus on the Infopreneur market.  Since then, I can honestly say that we have a great focus on this market as a company, and it is only getting sharper.

Best At

I have to give a big nod to Jim Collins and his book Good to Great.  This one took a while to define, and it is also a bit aspirational (in other words, we are getting there).  Defining what my company is best at was a bit challenging because we are very good at many things — we have a generalists organizational skill set — but we had not been clearly great at any one thing.  Or at least that is what it felt like at the time. But the answer, looking back on it, has been very clear all along.

What we are ‘best at’ is helping Infopreneurs measure and optimize the effectiveness of their online selling systems (make more money with the same or less expense).  Are we truly the best in the world at this?  I say, maybe… because it’s not really a contest.  I can honestly say, though, that for most of our customers we will absolutely be the best in the world at helping them measure and optimize the effectiveness of their selling systems.

#1 Project

Hooo boy, this has been an interesting one and a constant source of dissonance.  It took me a long time to realize it, but I was addicted to the energy, excitement and hope that comes at the start of a project.  I rarely, if ever, said no to a project.  If I had an idea or someone came to me with one I’d literally go from ‘that’s a great idea!’ to ‘let’s do it!’ without much thought in between.

At the same time, I have known that VisiOlo was my #1 project for five or six years now.  Hence the dissonance.  When you have a clear #1, and don’t really have much time to focus on it, you set yourself up for a lot of frustration.

So, it took all of two years to clear out (most of) the clutter but I can honestly say that my company is totally focused now on it’s #1 project.

I have even made the decision to close every other project and discontinue every other product (more details to come on each specific project, and maybe some deals

Next Step

This principle is clearly borrowed from David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. GTD contains many components, but the idea of defining and focusing on the next step in a project has been a breakthrough for me.  Without this focus, I would have gone crazy about 6 months ago when it seemed like we would never get this project to launch.  Right now, every VisiOlo team member knows exactly what their next task is. It’s a huge productivity enhancer.  I use a mind mapping software (FreeMind) to maintain all of the task groups and tasks. It’s very easy to see what is next and we are pretty good at staying focused until it’s done.

We still get distracted, and make mistakes, but overall we are mostly working on the next step with good focus.

Conclusion

I hope it helps to see how these operating principles work in my business. As you can see, with these for elements of focus in place, we stand a much better chance of success in our plans.

Just by focusing on these four elements we can avoid common problems like… making a product that isn’t suited to the audience, spreading focus so thing among multiple projects that nothing gets done, getting distracted by shiny objects.  If we constantly re-visit these four elements, we generally stay on track and headed the right direction.

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Tip 1: Break expectations. Your audience will walk in with certain assumptions about your message. If you believe those assumptions are mistaken, you’ve got to confront them directly. Effective teachers do this well. Imagine an eighth-grade science class: “The earth feels pretty solid, right? But it turns out that the surface of the earth rides on large moving plates, and if we understand how they move, we can understand the shape of the continents on the globe and we can understand how mountains and volcanoes are formed.”

Tip 2: Create a “proverb.” We tend to look down on soundbites, thinking that “shortness” must mean oversimplification. But use proverbs as your inspiration. Proverbs are short phrases that carry profound meaning — think of the wisdom that is packed into a short sentence such as, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.”

Tip 3: Be concrete. Being concrete helps people make decisions and take action. The Saddleback Church in California has defined a fictional couple, Saddleback Sam and Samantha, who embody the prototypical traits of the kind of community member that the church wants to reach. It’s easier for the members to plan outreach activities when they have “Sam and Samantha” in mind, as compared to a more abstract description, such as a “dual-income, upper middle-class, professional couple.”

Tip 4: Use stories. People will remember your stories, not your pontifications. Aesop’s Fables have endured for centuries, but Aesop’s Thesis Sentences wouldn’t have made it 10 minutes. Choose your stories carefully, so that after the fact, your audience can reconstruct your core meaning, just like we can do with “The Fox and the Grapes.”

Tip 5: Use an analogy. You can get across complex ideas quickly by making use of what people already know. That’s what analogies do — they create links between new ideas and ideas that people have already learned. Movies in Hollywood, for example, are pitched in terms of analogies to other movies. The movie that became Alien was pitched as “Jaws on a spaceship.” That pitch conveys a tremendous amount of information in four words.

Tip 6: Allow people to test for themselves. People love to try before they buy. The same is also true with your ideas. Give people a “test” that allows them to confirm, for themselves, whether your idea is credible. For instance, the Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” campaign depended on the customer’s ability to see that Wendy’s meat patties were larger than those of the competition.

Tip 7: Create a curiosity gap. Research says that we feel curious when there’s a gap between what we know and what we want to know. You should tease your audience with what they don’t know. For instance, think of how your local evening news programs promote themselves: “There’s a drug sweeping thru high schools — and it may be in your medicine cabinet!”

Tip 8: Focus on individuals, not the “big picture.” Mother Teresa once said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” Many charities attract our support by focusing on specific human beings — “For $20 a month, you can sponsor Rokia, a 7-year-old girl, in Kenya” — rather than huge abstract causes, such as African poverty. This phenomenon works just as well in business contexts. Don’t talk about “improving customer service,” talk about how specific people should behave differently.

Tip 9: Use human-scale statistics. It is hard to make numbers stick, but when you must use statistics to boost your argument, make sure to frame them in a way that they can be understood. For instance, it’s hard to picture the scale of a $300 million government program. But it’s easier to picture the scale when you describe it as a program that spends about a dollar annually on every man, woman, and child in the United States.

Tip 10: Say 1 thing, not 5 things. A famous trial lawyer said, “If you say five things, you say nothing.” It’s vital that we strip down our idea to its core. A famous example of useful simplicity was the theme of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, written by James Carville: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Copyright © 2009 Chip and Dan Heath co-authors of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Author Bios Chip Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a professor of organizational behavior in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He lives in Los Gatos, California.

Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, is a Consultant to the Policy Programs of the Aspen Institute. A former researcher at Harvard Business School, he is a co-founder of Thinkwell, an innovative new-media textbook company. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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Have you ever noticed that some highly qualified Prospects just don’t seem ready to buy?

For all outward appearances they seem the perfect Prospect. Your product could help them solve a significant problem, they can afford it, and all of the other qualifiers exist, but they still don’t buy. It feels like you just caught them at the wrong time.

And actually you probably did “catch them at the wrong time.”  Or rather, you tried to catch them at the wrong time … and they got away!  This frustrating experience is something with which every infopreneur can identify.

What most people don’t understand about Prospects is that there are three different conditionss that they must be met before a prospect will buy.

Prospects are “ready” to buy when three conditions exist:

1. They must have enough information about a possible solution to be able to decide if it is right for them
2. They must trust that the proposed solution will actually fulfill their need as promised
3. Their need must be a current one.

The most important of these three conditions is the current- ness, or urgency of your Prospect’s need.  You can sell as hard as you want, but if your Prospect doesn’t feel that they need what you are selling right now, they are very unlikely to buy anything from you.

Maybe “need” should truthfully be classified as a “desire” or a “want,” but the effect is the same.  People only buy when they think it is in their best interest to buy, and the biggest factor in that formula is urgency, or having a current need.

So what does one do about this?  After all, we have no real control over the urgency or ‘current-ness’ of a prospects need.

This is where your email list, newsletter, blog, mini-courses, etc. come in.

As you publish valuable and informative content, you are really addressing all three conditions. You are providing information, building trust, and positioning yourself so that your product is the first thing that your prospects think of when their need becomes a current one.

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An assumption is a proposition that is taken for granted, as if it were true based upon presupposition without preponderance of the facts. (From WikiPedia)

I used to base almost all of my decisions on assumption — business and personal. And I still base most of my decisions on assumptions because assumptions are necessary if we expect to get through the day.  I don’t need a “preponderance of facts” to decide where to stop to get coffee in the morning or to decide what podcast to listen to first because these are not high-value decisions. On the other hand, critical decisions (like what to prioritize in my marketing activities) should never be based on assumption.

You don’t have to base every decision on “a preponderance of the facts,” but important decisions should not be based on assumption.

Here’s the problem with assumptions — they are often wrong.

Of course, right? If you make a decision based on little or no facts, your decision stands a good chance of being “wrong” (or as I prefer to think of it, ‘not optimal’ because a decision can often be OK, but sometimes OK is the result when the result could have been ‘fantastic’ given a slightly different decision).

Assumptions are basically gambles where you hope for winning hand even though you can’t really see the all the cards.

Now making the ‘wrong’ decision about where to pick up a latte in the morning isn’t a big problem — so what if the line is a little longer than you expected or they are out of cinnamon chip scones?

But if you are talking about planning your marketing activities, then it pays to see as many of the cards as you can.

Think about it… in the absence of facts the only way to know if you are on track or not is to wait and see what happens.  The problem is, with some decisions it may be months or years before you know you’ve made the wrong decision.

Take, for instance, the big decision of which niche to target.  If you make your niche decision based on assumption, you might spend 6-24 months working at building a presence in that market, building a list, creating products, developing JV relationships, etc. before you know if that niche is profitable. But with just a few facts (niche size, competitive analysis, etc.) you can greatly increase your chances of making the right decision about what niche to target.  The wrong decision can, in this case, put you out of business.

For every one fact you acquire relative to any decision, your chances of making a serious error decline dramatically.

Like in a card game, a single fact goes a long way. If you are seeking a four-of-a-kind in Kings, and you see another player pick up a King from the discard pile, that one fact will tell you that your strategy is not likely to work out.

If you are trying to decide where to focus your traffic generation efforts, knowing which of your current traffic sources is the most profitable will help you dramatically.

Lately, I’ve gotten much better at forcing myself to make fact-based decisions; especially when it comes to anything that requires my time.  Time is my most precious asset and where to spend my time is among the most critical of decisions for me.

Facts are not always statistics, sometimes they are simply true statements.

For instance, I mostly use ‘true statement’ type facts when deciding what VisiOlo projects to spend my time on.

Here are the key statements that I want to be ‘true’ in order for me to spend my time on a project.

• This project serves the needs of my core audience.
• This project will result in increased profit for my business.
• This project is something that my team is technically capable of doing without excessive effort.
• I have/have not proven the core assumptions of this project through testing.
• This is project is more critical than any other project on my ‘open project’ list.

Now, these statements are usually ‘relatively’ true for my projects — which means they are tru-ER for my top priority projects than they are for my lowest priority projects.  For instance, I may not know (for sure) how much increase in profit I will see for a given project — no one has a crystal ball — but I can know that relative to my other projects, my highest priority project appears to have the highest probability of generating profit.

OK, that is getting a bit too technical, what I mean is when I say “this project will result in increased profit for my business,” what I really mean is “based on what I know today, this project looks like it will generate more profit than other projects I could work on.”

I haven’t really formalized the process, but these are generally the statements that guide my project choices.  When I do get around to formalizing this ‘project vetting’ process, I’ll add a quantitative scale to each statement.  I’ll have something like a scale from 1 to 5 with 1 being false and 5 being true.

Hmmm. That would be a nice feature for VisiOlo too, because the more I think about it, I think the VisiOlo’s true role is to help Infopreneurs make the right decisions about where to spend their ‘project’ time.  We do a decent job of providing data about sales systems, but I’m also interested in helping with the decision making and prioritization process because facts without implementation are useless.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/seier/ / CC BY 2.0

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One of my primary marketing goals for 2009 is to create tighter networks of my JV partners and people who are interested in what I do.  I think I’ve just begun to tap the power of social networking and 2009 will be a year of taking it to the next level.

I have some interesting ideas about how VisiOlo can become a catalyst of a network of JV partners.  Being able to track conversions on both sides (product creator and JV promoter) could actually be a game changer in the way these relationships are developed.  This is especially true if the network effect can be tapped in to.  It’s there now, very informally in most cases, but it’s there.  I see my close contacts promoting the offers of other close contacts. But there are not a lot of very orgazed close JV networks.

I’m not talking about the bid JV sites that have thousands of members, I’m talking about small clusters of complimentary businesses that work together to meet the needs of the same market.

In any case, after reviewing my stats for last year, 90% of the traffic and sales that I did not personally generate came from a handful of close contacts. Anything I can do to increase those results will have a powerful impact on my business.

Start with what’s working and improve from there!

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The more I do — and the older I get — the more I value I put on the power of being able to take small focused steps toward a “Big Idea.”

It’s a constant challenge for me, and every other entrepreneur that I know, to balance our propensity for big ideas against the need to get something done now.

You see, we are comfortable in the fluffy world of our dreams.  That’s where we can let our imagination run wild and cook up any number of creative solutions to the problems we see around us.

On the other hand, the action side of marketing is a nuts and bolts world.  If you aren’t a little dirty and have a skinned knuckle or two, you aren’t taking action.

You may know a lot about nuts and bolts, but until one is mated with the other, spun in a clockwise fashion, and cranked into place with a sturdy wrench, neither has any value.

Big Ideas are a lot more fun than action items.  This, in and of itself, is enough to cause us to favor big ideas over action, but there is another problem.  Big Ideas are, well…. Big.  They are typically the end point of a process.

They require an evolution of your business from where it is now and into the kind of business that can support your big idea.  This is not typically a quick and easy evolution and it takes time and effort.

That’s why small steps are important. Small steps are the actions that connect where you are now to your vision of where you want to be in the future.

As always, I speak from experience.  VisiOlo is a project that I have a clear vision for — it’s a Big Idea.  It takes a lot of discipline to focus on the small steps when you have an exiting vision for a project, but I’m proud of the fact that the team has been able to focus on the right things to take the right small steps.

The cool part is the constant feeling that we are building a solid foundation — that what we put into place today will provide value for years to come. The small steps are starting to add up to a tangible and valuable whole.

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