Why You Make More Money When You Stop Trying to Sell to Everyone

Good morning. Okay, here's what I'm going to recommend for you for the next seven days. Mark off this time wherever you are watching this video because this week is going to be a whole series on what is the crown jewel of all of the ideas that I've ever had over my entire career. This is the summation of it.

And I wasn't calling it the eight prophet activators yet. In fact, there's seven of them, but it was a process that became the eight prophet activators. So, I'm going to break the fourth wall. I'm going to go and I'm going to refer to these as the eight prophet activators because the seed of everything was here.

And if we do this right, this is going to be a foundational shift in the way that you approached your business. I'm going to do one of the profit activators every day for the next eight days. And we're going to start with profit activator number one, which is select your single target market. Now I started thinking about this and what what I have is on in this journal journal number six summer of 1997 just starting summer and on each page I was going through how do we apply this or how do we work through selecting a single target market.

Now the big thing, the biggest insight in this is that the only person making a broad term for who you serve is convenient for is you. And so I see it all the time that people talk about both in the area that they serve, the the tri county area, which is very broad and it includes everybody or people who are buying or selling homes or health services or whatever it is. People make up a category to describe what they do. And I've seen enough and had enough conversations with people to know that one of the reasons that they do it is because they mistakenly feel like they need to pull uh get as broad a oneword thing that can encompass everybody so they're not leaving anybody out out.

But selecting a single target market is exactly about leaving people out. leaving everybody out except this very specific person. And so I've adopted or adapted select a single target market as profit activator number one, but I always put in brackets at a time. So it's not about limiting yourself forever to one target audience.

It is about picking one at a time and dominating that one category. So the very first exercise that I have people do when we're talking about selecting a single target market for you is to make an exhaustive list of all of the possible people that you could serve. So we're not leaving anybody out. Knock yourself out.

make a list of of everybody that you could help. And that may be, you know, the that may be the single first best step that you could do is to look at them and then we're going to evaluate them and we're going to say, okay, so who's the most abundant prospect for this? And if we're looking at, I'll use the real estate example. If we're here in Winter Haven, that you could say that it sometimes people would say Central Florida, serving Central Florida home buyers and sellers, right?

That covers it because you're licensed to sell in the entire state and you don't want to leave anybody else because you'd be willing to go to Lakeland or you'd be willing to go to Orlando or whatever the thing is. But that's not a single person. The individual people know exactly what they want. Somebody who's looking for a lakefront home is a very specific person and very different than someone who's looking for a condo, an inexpensive condo or a mobile home.

And when you make this list, when you kind of go through and see in your market, what are all the possible segments of the market that you could serve? Maybe a lot of times people think, well, the most abundant one is the best target audience. But we have to do it. We have to also compare it to who is the most profitable prospect.

So, I'll give you an example. One of the things that we help realtors do is to get listings. Now, one of the great things if you're trying to get listings is that you have visible prospects. You can point to homeowners and say, "There's a prospect.

There's a prospect." And you're going to treat them very differently depending on the kind of home that they have. So, somebody might look at what has the most sales or what has the most turnover rate and they look at the condos and see that the condos have a 10% turnover rate of all the things. That's where all the action is.

So, let's target them. But they don't take into account that the price range of the condos is a fifth or uh less of what the lakefront homes are. And even though the lakefront homes have a 4% turnover rate, the total yield from that market is much more profitable than all of the the condos. So knowing who your audience is can make a big difference.

And by the way, there's, you know, thinking about these as a uh as an example in niching down. You've heard those words, the riches are in the niches. It's not just a saying. It's absolutely true.

They're the best company in the world at this is Proctor and Gamble. And Proctor and Gamble, it's worked pretty well for them. They have 23 individual billiondoll brands that all operate independently. Around this time, I was reading a book called the PNG99 and it was written by a Proctor and Gamble executive that was listing kind of the principles and the things that he learned being at at Proctor and Gamble and the things that stood out to me.

the the one that still resonates the most with me is number one is plan to dominate. Now those words, you can't you almost can't say those words without changing your physiology. It changes the way that you think when you're going into something with a plan to dominate. They're never going into a market to dabble or to just capture a little bit of market share or to go in there.

They treat it like they're going to be the number one brand in the category by a large margin because they know that there's a premium for being the number one brand in any category and it's about 28% premium on being the leading brand in a category. So that's why instead of treating laundry detergent as one category, let's get in this laundry detergent market. They have at least five individual billiondoll brands just in the laundry detergent category alone. And each of them serves a very specific niche, a very specific attribute of the market.

So if you think about of all of the people buying laundry detergent, they're not all interested in just laundry detergent at a low price. Some of them have very specific needs. So, if you want to get your clothes as white as possible, you're going to use Tide. If you want to get out tough stains, you're going to use Era.

If you want your clothes to smell great, you're going to use Sunlight. If you want them to be all soft and and smell good, you're going to use Downey. And if you just don't want to ruin it, you want to just put stuff in and not worry about getting pink underwear, there's all temperature cheer. So, they've got the entire laundry detergent attribute market completely covered and each of those brands is over a billion dollars.

Now, you contrast that with grocery stores or department stores or somebody coming out with an allpurpose laundry detergent that they're just saying, "Oh, let's let's get in the laundry detergent uh market," but they're just putting an entry in there and it's frustrating. So when you think about narrowing your market to the very specific people that have very specific needs and being the best solution for that one person, sometimes just focusing on that is a big thing. One of my favorite examples right now is there is a company called My Metal Business Card. And guess what they have at that website?

That's right, metal business cards. But would you be surprised if they had another website called My Wooden Business Card and another one called My Plastic Business Card. all independent but focused on specifically that segment of the market. Somebody that wants a metal business card is going to feel so much more in the right place if there's a specific website that has exactly what they want.

And that's the same thing for the lakefront house winterhaven lakefront house price report is very different than just the central Florida real estate report. That's not at all the same thing. Or if we're trying to get listings in lakefront homes, sending postcards specifically to lakefront homes or specifically to a named community. You cannot get too narrow.

And there's so many examples of rewards for this. Sometimes even the same product can be packaged in a way that makes it seem like it's a specific thing. For example, there's a uh eedrin migraine. I have a friend from Canada who would come down to play golf and he would always stock up on eedran migraine cuz they didn't sell it in Canada and we were playing golf one day we went to the pharmacy to get the eedrin migraine they didn't have any in stock so I my friend was the pharmacist I asked he said oh yeah no just get the eedrin extra strength it's the same thing and I said no no they have a specific like eedrin migraine is.

Yeah, but it's the same pill. It's the same ingredients, the same amount of caffeine and whatever the active uh ingredient is. The identical pill in a different box that is specifically labeled eedran migraine costs a 30 cent premium for the same product because it's exactly what somebody with a migraine wants. So, there's lots of of those ways for you to really think about one target market at a time and pick one that you can take all the way through these eight profit activators.

And then we can go back and do it again and build this collection of little prospect vending machines that vend exactly the types of prospects that you want. So narrower is better. Plan to dominate on this and then we'll come and we'll talk tomorrow about how do we compel these prospects to call you. I got a funny email the other day from Rick.

It says, "Dean, question. Are you saying you can teach me to make fat stacks by hanging out at a pub drinking coffee like you?" And I laughed to myself because I was thinking, you know, yes, I I can do that. That's what I do.

is the funny thing. What I really realized is that every idea that I've had, every dollar that I've made over the last 30 years has gone through my brain, through my pen onto a piece of paper in my journal before it went out into the real world. And if I can turn people on to that activity as a driver for what to do, what to think about, what to ask yourself to draw out, what the next most valuable action is for you, and how to find the most profitable things that you can install in your business. I'm all for it.

m. I'm going to do for the first time a 50inute profitfinder workshop and you're going to join me live on Zoom and we're going to go through a 50inute exercise. Bring your pen. Bring a notebook or piece of paper.

And I'm going to guide you through a thinking process that will help you identify where the lowest hanging fruit is in your business and maybe some fruit that you didn't even know was there. But I'm going to show you where to look for it. So, it's free. It's for you.

m. this Friday. Just watch. Go to What did we call the website, Josh?

>> 50inut profitfinder. m.