Business and marketing!

How do you think about business and marketing and that’s why do you think that your thinking has helped so many companies over the decades because it’s helped a lot yeah well I mean the answer is probably grounded founded in what I’m the strongest at I’ve had the unexpected good fortune of of being involved in over a thousand industries   worldwide not businesses and it’s given me an enormously broad deep and uniquely  expansive understanding of all that’s possible   all that’s possible in business strategy business models marketing advertising value creation strategic alliances a lot of things that most people who spend a life in one or two industries wouldn’t fathom and I’ve gotten to try out an enormous amount of hypothesis and and beliefs into the real market and I’ve had to do it through translation on worldwide sort of  forums and it’s given me an understanding of things that  transcend the way most people think about it I’ve got a much more expansive sense of what you can do how you can do it where you can do it why you can do it what all is possible and most people just don’t have the they don’t have the empirical experience to understand and appreciate more possibilities so one of the things that you talk about   is to look for solutions to business problems but within other like industries you know so why is that so important well it’s important for a number of reasons first of all if you study breakthroughs throughout history the majority of them did not come from inside the industry they came from outside people would look at something and realize they could translate it or apply it to a totally different application easy examples fiber optics re-define telecommunication but it wasn’t created in telecommunication it came from aerospace and somebody borrowed it and adapted and adopted it federal express created a whole industry by borrowing from the united states the hub and spoke check clearing process that the federal reserve bank our bank our banking system used to make sure people didn’t bounce checks,  Medicine viagra came from art medicine,   Ballpoint pen I don’t have with my pen I’ve lost my pen temporarily or roll-on deodorant was borrowed from each other so that’s the first distinction the second is the concept of best practices is frankly and actually flawed because usually you’re you’re learning the best practices from a a vertical industry and by and large they’re going to be incremental they’re going to be incremental they’re not going to be explosive practices they’re things that everyone else is doing a little bit better worse best practices they’re not the best breakthrough practices they’re not the highest best safest fastest most profitable efficient effective   they’re just the best practices that an industry has discovered when I got started I realized excuse me I’m on a air airport and right on the runway and a lot of planes take off I learned that there’s a lot of higher better faster safer more powerful profitable productive ways to do things that other industries do commonplace but people in a different industry are never even exposed to so it’s much it’s so there’s the basis for it and so you talked about   explosive growth right and you know you have to talk about   the fact that companies are successfully stuck with above market performance yes but but the order of magnitude   like  and like significantly higher profits is frequently possible right so what do you mean by that well i mean it’s it’s exactly that if you are making money and you’re making more money than most of the other companies people professionals you’re competing against you’re a happy camper but it’s very probable not even possible that the way you’re doing it the the the market you’re targeting the way you’re targeting them the offers you’re making the   ways you’re monetizing it the what you’re doing or not doing to extend or expand or perpetuate that that monetization is a fraction of a fraction of what’s really possible from the time the opportunity market access advertising interaction and when you realize how many better ways you can do it it’s very possible to make ads produce I mean there’s plenty of research I have lots of case studies you can make an ad double redouble redouble it’s either quantitative or qualitative or both quantitative and qualitative result meaning you can get an ad to do up to 21 times more more yield more results more response more numbers if you know how to do headlines risk reversal positioning changes credibility value creation proof elements bonuses you can convert more people when you get a prospect you can get people to buy more at the point of sale you can get them to buy longer you can get them to buy things from you if you don’t have more than one product to sell by making partnerships you can penetrate lots of different markets you can not just go to media or not just knock cold on doors you can find all kinds of companies influencers media organizations associations that have access to the same market and partner with them you can take methodology that you have perfected that you only use in one market or in one application and license partner profit share savings share with us I go on and on and on but those are a few yeah and so liz what do you think I guess is the reason that like quite a lot of companies aren’t like thinking like this or they don’t even consider this like is it because of like they’re stuck in their vertical and they’re having a look at their competition and they’re going for kind of incremental improvements mostly and and most people are trained to default towards one source of revenue they’re trained to accept results as given a lot of people in business they focus most of their time on bringing a buyer in not on how to make the buyer more profitable or find a lot more residual value ongoing profit from that relationship most people are trained in very in very traditional revenue generating thinking they don’t look at alternative ways to accomplish it most people don’t realize you can have multiple approaches going concurrently most people who get a lot of their business from things like   word of mouth or referral don’t recognize they they accept it as organic reactive episodic intermittent they don’t realize they could have up to 125 different strategic proactive systematic ways to get a lot more referrals I mean just a lot of things out and so what do you like are there a few things or like what does it take for a company to become truly great like the fedexes of the world right you know so what does that take for a company well it takes it takes a lot and it takes a little you have to understand what i call the strategy preeminence which is to establish your product company people in the eyes of the target audience is the only viable solution the most trusted advisor for life the only source they could possibly go to or choose in order to deliver on that you have to be willing to give them advice that is different and more relevant you have to be able to understand and express and articulate and verbalize what they really want more of less of the reason why they’re trying to really get what it is you offer your product or service does for them in a better clear more powerful way that resonates other than other people you have to   see yourself as somebody who has a moral responsibility an obligation and the privilege to try to help everyone in the market that you can serve better than your competitors not because you want to be the most successful but you want to be the most impactful and make and create the most value for your audience market you’ve got to look at your role in the market on many dimensions I think I tell people you have to see the relationship you have with the buyer and have them be seen as a client not a customer and the reason why I think in Australia they do more of that actually but if you look at a definition of a customer it’s somebody who buys a commodity or service if i call you a customer I’m saying hey alex I’m no better than a generic commodity or a service if you look at somebody who is a client the definition of that is somebody who’s under the care the protection the well-being of another  if you’re going to be preeminent you have three categories of clients you have to serve the first and the and the primary one are certainly the ones who pay you the other two are the people you pay your employees your team members your colleagues and your advisors you have to be committed to grow and develop them and their success you want everyone to be collaborative you don’t want to just squeeze everything you can out of people you want to grow and develop everything you can within them so their value their contribution their passion their  collaboration  is off the charts but those are a few things