3 Strategies on Driving Sales
Value | Touch | Hiring
GM, happy Monday.
Another week granted to you to do hard things. A reminder that if you’re doing that feels hard right now, that’s a good thing. You likely knew at the onset it would be challenging and what you’re experiencing today is a manifestation of what you knew going into it. Keep going.
Want to congratulation Ryan and John, subscribers to this newsletter and listeners of the show for winning the giveaway. This was the final haul of just the physical products with a few digital and things to come. If you left a review or contributed to this giveaway, thank you.
I want to talk through some of the takeaways I had from my conversation last week with Joey Mac Dizon, the chief smoking officer. Joey launched a Mobile Cigar Lounge business, focusing on catering weddings and events. Since his launch in September of 2018, Joey and team are on track to close out out 2022 with over 1 million dollars in sales, a 234% annual revenue grow CAGR.
If that caught your attention and you missed this episode, here you are.
Joey and the Mobile Cigar Lounge do a few things extraordinarily well that I want to call out. Here are a few things we can learn from MCL which is on track for 3 million in sales next year.
Know theVALUE you offer
I pointed out in our conversation that offering cigar services to weddings is not only unique, but speaks to very specific emotions. Happy emotions.
Look at the google search results for wedding cigar photos.
From a business perspective, speaking to emotion is one of the most powerful things you can do. Ironically, as a consumer, emotional decisions are generally bad for us because the things we feel are always bigger than our wallet.
Joey equated the mobile cigar lounge business to that of the smoke pit at any military installation. If you’ve visited one, you get this immediately. If you don’t, imagine a place where you get to not think about the fact that you signed away your life for four years for like 15 minutes of absolute bliss. A place of no judgement, deep talks, and peace. Extremely similar to a wedding, only slightly more (or less) drinking (depending on what base you lived on).
Joey hammers this home on his sales calls with clients.
One of the things he said he mentions to customers:
Think of the pictures you’ll have.
Everybody plans to marry once (I think) and so the value of selling someone based on how they can remember that is hands down ruthless sales. This is obviously powerful to the customer, but shows how well Joey knows where he falls in the value chain. He’s tugging at the emotional strings because he knows that there’s no way a bride and groom will sacrifice that.
The question you need to be asking yourself:
How do I position my value to the customer.
People buy things for typically one of two reasons: pleasure, and pain/inconvenience avoidance. The more clearly you can articulate why what you sell brings pleasure or helps them avoid something, the closer you are to pitching to emotion.
HIGH touch
Last week I talked about how in marketing to potential customers, you need to have multiple touch points that require more and more commitment. If you offer a premium product (>$1000), it will be near impossible to make that sale if you haven’t had any connection, or touch point, with that customer before. That’s why you need frequent touch points with increasing degrees of commitment required.
One of the lowest commitment touch points that expresses some form of intent is email. If someone is willing to give you their email address, they want to hear more from you based on the messaging you’re providing. And you can do a lot with that.
Let’s take a look at Joey’s website - Mobile Cigar Lounge.
I’m not even on his site for 2 minutes and this popup comes up.
This is great for a few reasons.
It gives the customer long enough to explore the page and gain curiousity. This is key. If you have the popup come up too early, it seems scammy and people don’t want that. Any website builder that offers this should allow customization on time so be sure to allow for adequate discovery.
There’s an offer. People love free shit. Offering a free product in exchange for an email address is a great way to bring people into your ecosystem with a sign of good faith. This is also a chance to showcase your best work.
It’s a chance to get to know your customer. In this popup, you get the name, contact info, and the event the customer is looking to plan. This only feeds the email sequence you can create based on this input. I guarantee Joey has an automated email that sends to this person saying “Hey Sarah, I heard you were looking at planning a wedding and I’d love to chat with you about it. Is there a time this week we can hop on the phone to talk about how a cigar lounge will make your wedding fantastic”. Use popups with email forms to gain intent from your customers, just don’t overdo it. Name, email, and maybe one other question is appropriate.
Improvement
If I could offer some feedback on this form.
One of the big things this form could improve on is the copywriting. All of the messaging is “download this” and “enter your info”. Those could be improved because they sound like they’re asking the customer to do something. You want to make these so easy that its a no brainer for the customer to give up their email.
Download the look book is appropriate for the button, but I’d change a few things.
Title should read: Start planning your event.
This gets them thinking about about them, which is what this is about. Download a look book doesn’t mean much to me, but envisioning and planning my own event does.
The follow up sentence should read something like: Our 2022 Look Book style guide has 150 pages of wedding and event inspiration to ensure your special day is unforgettable.
Being ruthless
One of the things that scares people about sales is being afraid to talk to people over and over again. Joey addressed this so well
“If you see how aggressive we are in the sales process, think about how we’ll be when we’re working for you.”
What will someone say to that? I promise you they won’t know what to say. That’s the power of positioning.
Hiring
One of the last pieces Joey covered in the conversation is how he thinks about hiring. He mentioned a framework used by special forces and he applies that to his own talent selection. This video from Simon Sinek explains what he was talking about.
This video emphasizes that especially in difficult situations, someone who lives with high integrity and therefore trust, is more valuable than someone who performs at the highest level. I believe this is because many (not all) high performers sacrifice integrity and trust in order to reach certain performance goals.
*Bernie Madoff has left the chat*
You can always teach performance. If it’s between the two, high trust wins as an indicator because it’s intangible and difficult to measure.
Last thoughts.
“You can always get better”.
Now would be a great time to quote one of those 1% better a day things, but I won’t. I’ll instead harp on the value of intangible goals. Set a BHAG for this upcoming year if you don’t have one yet (big hairy audacious goal). My BHAG for 2022 was 50,000 podcast downloads. Didn’t even come close to that, but had I set a lower goal, I likely would have achieved less.
In other words, don’t let your mind play tricks on you. Aim big. Do big. And in the words of one of my favorite podcasters who i quote too much, “no small boy stuff.”
🤘🤘🤘
B