How leverage marketing gives you a real market advantage
If we had to sum up Jay Abraham’s business acumen into one core concept, it’s leverage marketing. Leverage marketing is about understanding how much more can you do with what your business already has. In other words, leverage marketing allows you to find underutilized space for explosive growth and requires little or no extra expense or risk. The key is to understand leverage and make it work for you, not against you.
Here we’ll cover what makes up leverage marketing and take you through the process of how it can grow your business.
What is leverage marketing?
Jay calls this concept leverage marketing because you look at everything from the maximum ethical vantage point of where the biggest leverage lies, then figure out how to use that leverage to grow your business. Leverage has to do with getting more from what you already have on hand. In other words, getting more from less. That’s the power of leverage, for both Tony and Jay. And every element in your business has leverage, but many business owners don’t fully understand how to optimize them. Leverage marketing allows you to create almost unlimited profit power by multiplying and magnifying the performance yield of everything you do.
Jay’s definition of marketing is also simple: it’s educating the marketplace that your business can solve problems, fill voids, or achieve opportunities and goals in ways no other businesses can. Because marketing is often an unexplored void – businesses frequently throw money at their marketing without measuring their return on investment – it’s the perfect place to engage leverage to your advantage. As Jay says, “If you spend money on marketing, it’s not marketing. Marketing is the greatest return-on-investment (ROI) activity a business can ever do.” In fact, he’s found that the ROI for good marketing strategy can be 100% or even higher. So if you’re losing money on your current marketing strategy, leverage marketing can help turn that around.
Why your business needs leverage marketing
When a business starts to stagnate, often owners think the best solution is to pour money into marketing. However, they do this without measuring their current ROI on the marketing investments they’re already making. Where’s the sense in spending more money on processes that you don’t know even work?
Instead, break down your business’s current revenue system – that’s everything that happens that leads to making a profit. Leverage marketing requires challenging the status quo and assumptive thinking, where you assume you can’t improve what you’re already doing. You can. Get granular about what the elements in all your current processes are: these are your leverage points. You want to understand what sub processes are not yet standardized or optimized as well as what’s already working well. Then you can start to make the small, deliberate tweaks that will lead to geometric growth.
How to find your leverage points for the market (and beyond)
Identifying leverage points requires taking a thorough look at your current processes; you’ll identify and then analyze what’s happening. You want to measure everything because without measurements, there’s no way to be sure you’re growing.
1. Figure out what you know
When you get granular, you’ll see the sub processes that you’ve probably never questioned, let alone standardized or optimized. For example, take a business with a sales staff: maybe every salesperson has a territory, a category, a product line, or they call cold. But what happens within what they do? How do the salespeople target current buyers vs cold call prospects? What are the elements of their openings? What is their effectiveness of securing an appointment, either over the phone or in person? How does pre-appointment communication help reach the target sale? How many items are being sold? Who are the most effective people at getting potential clients to the next step of the process in a multi-level sales situation?
2. Go through all your revenue system’s leverage points
Break apart all the parts of your sales system, question each element and quantify how it’s performing and suddenly you have a host of leverage points to work with. You’ll see how much variation already exists and which strategies seem to be yielding the best results. With this context, you can start using leverage to finesse these elements into the most effective and profitable for your business.
Here’s an example: Marcy sells widgets through a range of distributors. Her business is fine, but she knows it could be better. So she starts to break apart everything that’s happening in this part of her sales system with these questions:
- How much does a distributor buy?
- How much do they sell per quarter?
- Which distributors sell more?
- Which ones buy more?
- Who buys more because of a specific salesperson?
- Which distributor buys more because they have a better sales system?
- Who on the sales team sells specific products or to specific industries better than others?
- Who opens accounts better? Who’s best at closing nervous clients?
3. Identify and separate out elements
With your answers, you can now identify all your leverage points. Here’s where you want to start organizing and separating out the processes from the people. Is the process fine but not the people doing it? Or are quality people making up for a subpar process? Understanding what’s actually happening means you can start to standardize and optimize.
4. Experiment with your leverage marketing
Next start to experiment and test out possible improvements. Borrow a higher performing process from one area and see if it helps another; this stage of leverage marketing is ever-evolving and on-going. Even finessing five or ten internal impact points can result in incredible gains.
For example, take your website as a way to gain client leads. Have you tried different kinds of opt-in methods, from type to placement on the screen? Do clients leave a query for a quote or make a request for a phone appointment? What keywords are you using? Calls to action? Or if you go to tradeshows, have you optimized your signage? Instead of having the company name as pride of place, subordinate it to elevate your proposition: people are more likely to stop at “The bit that lasts 5 times longer, drills 5 times faster and 2.5 times more accurately” booth than the “Squit Drill Bits” booth. The bottom line: Test, test, test!
5. Start internally
Work on yourself before bringing in outsider assistance. In other words, optimize internally before going externally. Internal optimization costs $0 but can double your yield.
About Jay:
Jay Abraham is a proven business leader and top executive coach in the United States, and a close friend of Tony Robbins. Jay has spent his entire career solving complex problems and fixing underperforming businesses. He has significantly increased the bottom lines of over 10,000 clients in more than 1,000 industries, and over 7,200 sub industries, worldwide. Jay has dealt with virtually every type of business scenario and issue. He has studied, and solved, almost every type of business question, challenge and opportunity. His principles can be the difference between mediocrity and a business that generates millions of dollars in additional revenue.
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