Aaron Hoos

For this week’s sales funnel challenge, I had you choosing a competitor and writing out THEIR sales funnel. It’s challenging work to try and dissect someone else’s sales funnel, but it gives you a distinct competitive advantage if you take the time to do it.

Here’s why: There’s a good chance that your competitor hasn’t dissect his or her own sales funnel. Therefore, you know their business better than they know it themselves! You can figure out who their target market is, where they are losing contacts, and how you can do it better.

Start a binder or a file on your computer labeled “Competitive Analysis” and add this to it. You’ll use this file (and any additional competitors’ sales funnel dissections you decide to do) in future challenges.

The Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is a week-long challenge for business owners to focus on a specific aspect of their sales funnel for one week. It’s a fun way to keep you focused on one of the most important parts of your business. A new Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is published every Monday and a wrap-up post is published every Friday.

Okay, last week’s Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge was a real challenge! It was a lot of work for you to squeeze into your already busy days.

So I’m going to go easier on you this week. For this week’s challenge, we’re going to choose a competitor and we’re going to write down THEIR sales funnel. Knowing your competitors’ sales funnels will help you keep tabs on what your competitors are up to so they can’t blindside you, and you’ll find ways to differentiate your business.

Writing down one of your competitors’ sales funnels doesn’t have to be complicated:

First choose one competitor. Be specific about who it is. (Don’t generalize by saying “most of my competitors are similar).

Second, list “Audience”, “Leads”, “Prospects”, “Customers”, and “Evangelists” down one side of a paper.

Third, write down all of the elements in each stage of your competitor’s sales funnel that you’re aware of. Maybe do a bit of digging to discover any additional channels or products or tactics that you aren’t aware of.

Email me to let me know how it’s going! I’d love to hear if you find this week’s challenge enlightening.

Have fun!

Great article about the importance of brands in Google’s search algorithm. If there’s a major brand in your industry, read this article! If there’s opportunity to BE the major brand, read this article!

How far should Google go with its ‘brand’ boost? | Econsultancy.

When you strip away all of the techniques and strategies and bookkeeping and SEO, a small business is ultimately about earning a profit by solving someone’s problem or fulfilling a need or want. Pretty simple, really!

So if you’re an aspiring business owner looking for an business idea, or if you have a struggling business that could use a little reviving, or if you have a successful business that might benefit from a product or service extension, here are 8 ways to discover what customers need. I recommend following these 8 steps in order to find out exactly what your target market is eager to buy.

1. MAGAZINES
This is my favorite starting point. Magazine editors need to sell magazines and they do so by addressing the top concerns and problems of their target market in each and every issue. Go to your local library, find a magazine (or two or three) that speaks to your niche and go through the last 6 months of issues. If you just write down the headlines, you will have a really valuable list of the top problems, buzzwords, and potential solutions that your target market is looking for.

If you don’t have time to go to the library, go to www.magazines.com and find the magazines that serve your niche. Then go to that magazine’s website and scan for headlines.

2. GOOGLE KEYWORDS
Armed with a list of potential problems, you need to broaden your search. There might be related problems or needs, and you should also be aware of different ways that those problems or needs are communicated. Check out Google’s Keyword Tool and search for some of the top terms you identified. Then, sort by Global Monthly Searches to get an approximate idea of what key terms are most popular.

3. SEARCH RESULTS
Next, take the top ten or twenty terms from your Google Keywords list and Google them. (Or Bing them, if you’re so inclined). Check out the following things:

• How many results were found? Some topics will return results in the billions. Others might only have a few thousand.
• What about advertisers using Google Adwords? Are there a lot? Are they selling aggressively? What are they selling?
• What are the top ten search results? Are they information-heavy, sales-heavy, or random? (Information-heavy could mean that there is room for you in this market; sales-heavy means that you’ll need to be really creative and competitive if you want to survive; random results suggest that the market isn’t well defined, there aren’t a lot of active competitors, or your target market isn’t looking here).

4. POPULAR ARTICLES
Popular articles is next on my list of things to read. I would hit many of the online article sites — Squidoo, Suite 101, HubPages, ArticlesBase. These articles are afast glimpse into your target market and the articles highlight the problem while the writer will often have a solution at their website.

Check out the most helpful (not necessarily the most prolific) writers on the topic and bookmark their sites. You’ll visit them in a later step. This step should round out some of your discoveries, although you probably won’t learn anything new if you spent the time reading the magazines articles back in step 1. You will, however, start to meet some of your potential competitors and see how they are solving problems for your customers.

5. NON-FICTION BESTSELLERS
Next on the list: Amazon.com. Find books on the subject and check out the following things:

• The back-of-the-book blurbs
• The Table of Contents (and any other internal pages they might show)
• Customer reviews and feedback (is it helpful? Is it fluff?)
• Related books

Also, take note of the author and bookmark his or her website. You’ll come back to it later.

6. GROUPS AND FORUMS
There are groups and forums for everything. You’ll find them on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Groups, or just Google “forum + [your niche]” to find a relevant forum. Then go in and read everything you can. If you don’t want to get involved, that’s okay; that’s not really the point of this exercise and you’ll have plenty of opportunity to do that when you are building your business. Right now, just listen to your prospects and how they talk about their problems and how they support each other and work through their problems.

7. TWITTER SEARCH
Twitter’s real time search engine search.twitter.com is one of my favorite sites to see what people need… because they’re talking about what they need right now. I find that I can’t use Twitter Search until this point (and not earlier in this 8-step process I’ve been describing) because I don’t always have a good grasp on what problems my target market are really facing: I might not know the buzzwords or the key players or be able to articulate the problems. But by this point — step 7 — I’m confident enough with the information to make some informed searches and see what people are saying.

Now, I should point out that not everyone is going to talk about their problems on Twitter. They only have 140 characters and they may not want to share their problems with the world. But if your niche is open enough, and if their problem isn’t too private, you can find some helpful insight.

8. WHAT ARE THE GURUS SELLING?
Now it’s time to see what the gurus are selling. Earlier in this process you’ve already collected some information about who the market’s go-to people are. Visit their websites and blogs and check out some of the following things:

• What do they sell? A product? A service? Packages? Individual offerings?
• How are they priced?
• Where are they positioned in the marketplace? Are they a location-specific solution? Are they web-based? Do they serve a certain sub-niche?
• Do they give testimonials? Who are the testimonials from? Anyone noteworthy?
• What is their sales funnel?
• How have they established their credibility?
• How are they generating business?

YOUR BEST COURSE OF ACTION
So here’s what you should do: Choose a particular niche. Then work through this list in order, starting with a broad niche and slowly narrowing through to a specific set of problems. Then create a compelling, effective, high-value solution to solve that problem.

Or, if you don’t want to start with a specific niche, try mixing a few of the above methods together but start at a different starting point — perhaps start with something you’re comfortable doing or an industry you have a lot of experience in.

Verizon and AT&T are locked in a battle for my mind. Every TV show I watch seems to have a commercial in which one of them talks about how they are better than the other. One of them (but I’m not sure which one) shows two side-by-side color-coded maps indicating national coverage of their phones. That way, if I ever think I’ll be in Timbuktu Utah, I’ll know which phone company will provide coverage.

Cell phone companies aren’t the only guilty party who feel compelled to spend valuable marketing time comparing themselves to their competitors: Car manufacturers frequently point out how their car is more [whatever] than competing brands; insurance companies talk about how their rates are lower, their coverage is better, or their agents are smilier than their competitors; and politicians frequently invest in mudslinging ads during campaigns.

It’s important to be competitive in your marketing and to point out how you are great. But do you notice something about these organizations? They’re so similar! And, that similarity creates a lack of loyalty. And these competitors feel that the only way they can win your loyalty is by showing you how much the other guy sucks.

When you spend most of your time pointing out your competitor’s flaws, there’s a very good chance that you are too similar to your competitor.

Take another look at your marketing. If you mention “the other guys” or, worse yet, you mention your competitors by name, then you need to go farther back up your value chain and create more differentiators into your product or service. Aim to be so differentiated that you have no competitors.

[Photo credit: Arenamontanus]