W11.01 Accurate Thinking – How You Teach Is Also How You Run Your Business

So this is what we have covered since Jan 1^st: with a clearly defined purpose you have found your niche; decided your location; figured out your Service – genius Alexander exercises related to your niche; developed your product – with a sweet price point; created a graduated progression into your back-end business; steadied the boat with good coaching advice; written your stories and created a USP; built a list to read your content; undone any self-hate that would cripple you; invented a “brand” to confer you legitimacy; created a POV for your celebrity status and so now, finally, you are ready to sell!

The Best Selling Happens When You Gather Accurate Information

Alexander Technique teachers spend years developing the skill to accurately collect information about their students. Some specialize in kinesthetic information, others in visual or auditory information, still others in psychic information. The best teachers use them all. Why?

Because Alexander Technique doesn’t work as proscriptive system – although there are certain principles, you need to shape these into a form unique to your individual student. The clearer your information about what your student is doing, the better you can deliver what will most help your student in that moment.

Your business also doesn’t work by just following a proscriptive system – although I have laid out my 12 steps, you need to shape these into a form unique to your individual business. Therefore, you want to relate to your business with the same care for details and accuracy that you have when observing your students. In business, co-ordination is understood through numbers. Certain numbers help you construct and maintain an intelligent and effective Marketing and Sales Funnel…

What Does Your Marketing and Sales Funnel Look Like?

First off, even if you didn’t know it, all working teachers already have a Marketing and Sales Funnel, but like a camel looking at the snow, you may not know what you are looking at! Your job is to recognize your Marketing and Sales Funnel – then re-construct, maintain and continue developing it.

The image of a funnel implies that you draw a large number of people in to the top of the funnel, but only expect a small number of people to come out the other end as regular students. This is a fact of life – you can not capture everyone. No-one can. In fact, in business, there is a strong school of thought that predicts the number of people you will get is based on simple math. I blogged about this last year, but here is a description of how this works:

1% of Your Niche Market

These are the devotees, the fanatics – probably you were once one of these? This person will have one lesson, then turn to you and ask “How can I become a teacher of this?”

5% of Your Niche Market

These include the 1% people, so as a whole this group is dead easy to enroll as students. As long as you have your product right, there will be little resistance from them. In market terms I have referred to them as the “innovators” - the people who love leading-edge activities. Often a bit eccentric, they do not necessarily inspire others to follow them, but they make wonderful students.

Most Alexander Technique teachers who struggle have only managed to capture this 5% of their market, because with a website and a half-decent sales pitch of a reasonable product - these people will convert themselves.

20% of Your Niche Market

This includes the 5% people, but the additional 15% are the people you will need to spend hours/weeks/months gently persuading, inspiring., frightening, shocking, cajoling, comforting, reassuring – doing whatever you can that is moral, ethical and legal to move them from their complacency into a position of wanting to act.

This is a time consuming business, so you want to automate this process as best you can. A great sales letter will do it all at once – but that could be 60 pages long. No kidding. That is why you need to build an effective Marketing and Sales Funnel to effectively roll out this extended sales letter over a long period of time.

80% of Your Niche Market

These are the people you will never convince, they will never come, they will not act and often they will take up a lot of your time, waste your resources and distract you from the 20% who will deliver to you the income you need to be an effective and empowering agent of transformation in your selected niche.

Be careful of the 80%ers – they will come and ask questions, look interested and never book a lesson. If you are a teacher – you all have come across students like these. As a trainee, be aware that sometimes it is Ok to stop giving your time to people who distract you from those that are already serving your business.

80/20-5-1 Formula Applies To All Data Sets

These numbers work at different orders of magnitude like magic – call them biological numbers. For example, when you are calculating the total number of people in your niche available to buy your products - expect to capture only 20% of these to your mail list. Or on another order of magnitude: expect that of all the people you capture to your mail list, 80% of your business will come from 20% of your list.

Another example: expect that of all the people who come to your lessons, only 20% will graduate to your back-end business. At BodyChance we have not achieved that: our current conversion rate from BC Basic to BC Pro is currently at 14%. Therefore I can guess I’ve got another 6% I could capture, which in turn tells me I need to smarten up our marketing and sales process. We recently took on CRM software to do just that.

When I am not writing this blog, that is what I am doing: developing our Marketing and Sales Funnel. It is a vast, complex, multifaceted machine!

This blog is actually part of that machine. BodyChance’s final 6% need to know that if they are going to spend all this money and time to be teachers – that at the end of that process they can make a real living. If I can offer hope for that, by creating a culture of genuine success at BodyChance, then I know our conversion rate will creep up and eventually reach 20%.

These numbers are great at letting you know what you need to do. So tomorrow I will be giving you some simple numbers that you can easily start collecting and analyzing. The aim of this analysis is to build an effective Marketing and Sales Funnel.

TOMORROW: Accurate Numbers First That Shape Your Marketing and Sales Funnel.

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