Musts On Your Growth Checklist – Forecasting 50

(0:00 – 0:52)
And so I’m fresh off of a few of these exercises and I came home with some of the questions and some of my responses. And so I figured I would put out a couple chunks and here we go. So throughout the day I had a number of people at the table, but one gentleman came down and I said, so what is your industry and what is your current business challenge? And he said, well, mine is very simple.

We sell mattresses out of a retail location. That’s my industry and my business and my current business challenge is I want to sell more mattresses. And I said, wow, that is very simple.

You just simply want to crank up the volume and tell more and sell more. He says, you got it. I said, well, it is a simple situation and it has a very simple answer.

(0:52 – 2:37)
And he had a pen and paper and he was pretty excited to start writing. I said, so let me start with a couple of questions. Number one, how is your competition advertising today? And you should have seen his face.

He gave me what I call the who farted look, which is where you kind of turn your head sideways a little, one eyebrow comes up and like, you’re like, huh? So bottom line is he did not know how his competition was advertising. And I strongly urged him to either hire a couple interns or hire some family members and friends and people that work for him. He can’t do it because he’s going to be blind to it.

He’s going to be looking for certain things like direct mail and this and that. And the reality is the larger competition is probably online in 10 to 20 different ways that he’ll never find. So I challenged him and everybody else at the table listening that if you sell a physical product today, you have to know how your competition is advertising because some of these competitors, these physical competitors have very large research and development budgets and they may have done some homework that you could take advantage of.

So then I flipped the scale, made it a little bit more comfortable and I said, okay, so now how are you advertising? And he said, well, we do Yelp decks, things like the Val pack, direct mail. And then we do a lot of like sales where we put people by the street, sometimes in costume or sometimes waving signs back and forth. And I said, why do you do this? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, you just named me six different things.

(2:38 – 4:01)
Why do you do each one? And he says, well, I think it works. And I said, you think it works? And he goes, oh, wow. Okay.

I’m getting your point. So we, we just worked out a little exercise where he’s going to go back home. He’s going to write those, those mediums down Yelp decks, Val pack, direct mail.

And he’s going to write down how much it costs. And can he track how many sales he’s getting from each one? And then I said, do you have any online orders? And he says, yeah, 10% of our business, they go on our website, they order a mattress, especially the ones that want to reorder exactly the same mattress. I said, I just want to clarify.

There’s no question. You, you can, and currently do take orders online. He says, yeah, no problem.

I said, okay, great. So let’s go down a different path. So I said, what is in front of folks when they’re hunting for you? And he says, I’m, I’m not sure what you’re saying.

I said, well, you know, at one in the morning, when people are, you know, thinking about getting another mattress when they’re in their own bedroom, quiet time. And, you know, they finally look at their mattress and there’s two humps in it, one from them, one from their spouse. And they go, geez, we got to get a mattress.

What do they type in? And he says stuff like, well, maybe, um, best mattresses in St. Louis, uh, cheapest mattresses, things like that. I said, good. That’s a good start.