The 3 Core Pillars of a Successful Business (Ep 41)

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3 Core Elements

Dawn:

Welcome to episode 41 of Digital Marketing Made Easy with myself, Dawn McGruer, speaker, author, and strategist. I am the founder of Business Consort Academy, and I am proud to say we are now in our 18th year. We started the academy in 2005 and we have trained and certified over 30,000 clients to date, and we are still growing. And the amazing thing is that we are an online business serving clients globally in lots of different countries, countries we never even imagine marketing into.

And in this episode today, we’re going to look at, What are the elements that make a business successful? There are three core elements I believe are the absolute, paramount in business today. And these are all centered around the three pains, problems, challenges, pitfalls that clients come to me and talk to me about. Now, what are these three? Customers, cash and consistency. I’ll tell you exactly how we came up with these three.

Because every time I speak to a new client, now this could be someone who has joined our fast-track certification, a qualification, or even the mentorship program. But what is important is that they all have the same issues. They all have the same goals. The issues tend to be that they want more customers. They want to have more profit in the business and that they find it hard to keep their marketing consistent and frequent, and getting the results and driving the results that they deserve. Now on the flip side, when I look at what the goals are from clients, it’s very similar in terms of these pitfalls. They ultimately are looking to grow and scale the business.

To grow and scale the business, it’s not about just building the team. It doesn’t mean that you have to get fancy offices. It doesn’t mean just growth in terms of numbers. It means growth in terms of getting better results. My whole world, my whole business is centered around one thing, and it’s helping my clients really maximize the digital marketing efforts to scale and grow the business. I know that if I help my clients master the world of online marketing and digital and social media, that in turn is going to help them position themselves in a better place for the visibility, for the consistency piece, to drive more customers, to get a sales pipeline in the way, and also to get more cash in.

Customers

Let’s look at these three areas. Now, customer first of all. Customers are crucial because obviously that’s what drives the business. Often I see two things happen. Number one, business is not getting enough customers. They have an amazing product to service, but the bridge from that audience, to that product, to service is not completing. People are not coming over that bridge. They’re not getting enough customers into the business. They want more. Why is this? It’s generally to do with messaging, it’s to do with the marketing. It’s to do with how they are building their pipeline.

The all important pipeline, I would say quite honestly, 80% of businesses that I meet day-to-day, and I meet a lot of people, do not have a solid sales pipeline. What is this? People talk about funnels a lot, this idea that you have a funnel at the top that filters down into your customers. In a funnel, you’re going to lose people across the way and then you will get some customers in the end. I prefer to think about the end to end process as a pipeline so that from the left to the right, you are feeding in leads. Those leads are getting nurtured and then they’re turning into paying clients.

What often happens is that marketers, business development, business owners, entrepreneurs get stuck in the doing. They literally build the digital to-do list and plow your way through instead of thinking about only focusing on the activities are going to drive customers. For me, you do not want to be focusing your efforts on vanity metrics. When I see businesses that are super busy, marketing departments, they’re actually killing themselves trying to get through all of these actions, they’re approaching marketing from a maintenance point of view where it’s like, “I have got to go through all of my different channels today. I’ve got to do my SEO. I’ve got to do my social media. I’ve got to do my email marketing. I’ve got to do my content marketing. I’ve got to do my advertising.”

It’s just absolutely exhausting. But it’s also crazy because there is no way, even with a vast team, that you could focus your efforts in that way. What happens is, you end up diluting your efforts. You end up absolutely burnt-out, but you’re not getting results. Why? Because your actions are not aligned to your actual business goals. What are your business goals? Well, they’re all about getting customers in to the business. You want to be thinking not about, “I want more followers. I want more web visitors. I want more people in my email list.” You want to think about it like, “I want more leads. I want more of those leads to turn into customers.” Yeah. You want to be thinking about how do I reach more people?

Those are the things I feel will drive business into your pipeline. Because if you are doing actions that take you one step closer to that, then it’s very difficult not to achieve amazing results. The disconnect often happens because you’re taking it from an action point of view where you’re thinking, “I’ve got to do all my channel marketing,” opposed to thinking, “What are the three commercial goals right now? What is it that I need to make my business successful?”

And to be fair, if you focus on getting customers in and feeding that pipeline and looking at only the activities that actually get you more leads, the activities that turn those leads or social connections into paying clients, those are things you need to be doing more of. So customers are key. You have to build in a focused action plan that aligns to building your pipeline.

Second thing is with customers, is that customers are the most important aspect. But so often in business, and I see this all of the time, there’s not enough time spent dealing with inquiries. There’s not enough time spent onboarding customers and off-boarding them. Those are the things that are absolutely the most crucial, most pressing task in your business. Do not let them slip to even number 2, 3, 4, 5 on the list. Every single day, everyone in your business should be focused on the customers and customer-centric businesses do well. It’s simple. You have to look after the people that scale your business, the people that drive profits, that make it sustainable. And every activity you do, and every process, every system has to be around supporting this whole pipeline.

Word of mouth

Number two, which is cash. How do you get cash into the business? Again, it’s focusing on efforts that drive money. If you look at where your customers come from right now, one of the most successful ways of generating new clients into business is word of mouth. Does that cost you money? Not necessarily, but even if you added in a customer referral scheme, a customer loyalty scheme, something that is going to get you repeat business, retain business and get you new business referred on, even if you put a commission basis in here, it means that other people are doing work for you. Other people are driving that in and often the acquisition cost of that customer is far less than you would have to pay for advertising or other activities.

You have to focus on, where do your leads and clients come from right now? What are the most cost effective and time effective ways of doing that and do more of them and not just always think about, “We need to do new stuff.” I see so many clients focused on getting new people in every single day. What about focusing on your amazing customers that spend on average 33% with you more than someone else? Why? Because they trust you. Yeah. There’s no acquisition costs there. They’ll spend more because you’ve already worked with them. You’ve hopefully exceeded their expectations, delighted them, and they want to work with you again.

So focus on customers, focusing, upselling, cross selling, increasing the average order value, increasing the purchase frequency with you, and then focus on the increasing the customer database once you’ve exhausted those activities. Again, in your business, you’ll probably have an array of suspects, array of prospects in there that you need to work on nurturing through to becoming paying customers. When you think about it, if you’ve got an audience on social media, you’ve got web visitors and you’ve got people in your email list, you need to think about how to convert them better, so conversion optimization, looking at ways that you can move these people through the pipeline. And to me, that needs to be an activity that is done every day because these people are already in your world.

And then when you go to reach new audiences, and this takes me onto number three. Consistency is showing up and being visible. Consistency in your actions, you don’t have to be consistent at everything, and this is where people fall down. Trying to do channel marketing, where you do SEO, social media, email marketing. It just doesn’t work like that. You have to be consistent in your approach to the three objectives, the three things that you need in business, leads, clients, and reach. If you’re consistent in doing those three things each and every day, aligning every activity to achieving those, then you will start to see that you have a winning strategy, and you will spend less time, less effort and less money on your marketing.

But guess what? You will get even better results, most likely 10 times better results because you are consistent. You are focused. You have clarity. Everybody is working to a common goal. Everybody knows, “Today we are going to be focused on our customers. We’re going to be looking at turning those customers into money to drive profitability. We’re going to be looking at the consistency of achieving those objectives.” And when you break it down like that, it becomes much simpler.

Overwhelm in business

My suggestion to you is that if you feel overwhelmed in business, if you feel like you are marketing to do list is just out of control, take a blank piece of paper and work backwards. Look at where your leads come from. Look at where your customers come from. Look at the cost for each of those activities and do more of those, and center your focus on the three objectives. Keep remembering that the three success factors to a successful business are, customers, cash and consistency.

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode and I will see you on the next one. Don’t forget to come and connect with me personally on LinkedIn. I love to hear from people. Just come and send me a little message and tell me that you’ve listened to the podcast. I would love to find out more about who you are, what you do. For me, this podcast is not about us. It’s for my audience. If there are things you want me to cover, let me know. There is only one Dawn McGruer, thankfully, in the world. If you find me on social media, you will know it is the right person.

And again, you can come and follow us at the academy, Business Consort. You can download a course guide on the website. Just search for Business Consort in Google. We come up top in the tree and you will see digitalandsocialmediaacademy.com. Once you click on that button, you will see that we have a course guide that tells you about our fast track certification. Also, it tells you about the CIM Diploma in Digital Marketing, our professional, worldwide recognized qualification and our mentorship program.

We have an amazing Marketing Mentorship & Mastermind Program that runs for 12 months, as well as 1:1 digital marketing and coaching programs. I hope we can welcome you on a course in the near future. If you have any questions or any feedback, let me know. And don’t forget subscribe to the podcast so that you get notified for each and every episode. And it’s all about keeping digital marketing and making it easy. Take care and have a super week.

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