Chapter Two
The Hot Dog Theory of Marketing
How do you get started? What do you do if you're facing a challenging budget or a tight cash flow? There are multimillion dollar businesses that have tight cash flow and are looking for ways to market for less money to acquire customers just like you are. Anyone can succeed, even without experience or money.
If you're just a start up and you're boot strapping, if you're an author looking to promote your book and you're self publishing and you don’t have a publisher behind you, then you're in the right place.
What could you accomplish if you had a magic wand? How much business would you like? What problems could you eliminate? What processes would you take care of that you didn’t necessarily want to do, maybe direct selling, especially cold calling, those types of things?
I'm always excited to hear about what heights people think they could hit if they worked from the ideal and then went backwards from there. How would you serve others? What good would you bring the world?
Strategy and how it applies to your marketing is very important. You need to keep things simple. If they're not simple, they're not executable in a rapid way and they're also pretty hard to measure. How many times have you tried to do something and you're not quite sure if it worked or you're absolutely sure it didn’t work but you don’t exactly know why?
Let’s review the definition of P.U.M.P. P is for positioning and packaging, very important. What's your first impression that you give your customers?
U is for uniqueness. What are you about? What's the uniqueness that you bring either in your benefit, in your application or in the results that you get?
M is a pretty big one. We're going to spend a lot of time on that in the rest of this book. It's for what's your mission? What are the messages that you come up with and what are the different media, both publicity and format wise, that you're going to use to get your message out that are cost effective, especially free and especially ones that work. We're going to have fun with that.
Then finally P, pricing, profit, and prosperity, that is, how do you price yourself? How do you make sure that you make the most money you can and live the lifestyle that you want so that you feel prosperous and you live prosperously?
“He who lives and runs away lives to market another day,” refers to the fact that a lot of people spend their way out of business before they actually do anything of significance. So we want to avoid doing that.
The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are first, hard work, second, stick-to- itiveness and third, common sense. This is from our friend, Thomas Edison, who obviously did quite well in his life with General Electric and creating the light bulb. He certainly capitalized and monetized it as well as his other inventions.
The three great essentials to achieving anything worthwhile are hard work, stick-to-itiveness, and common sense. The real core of the P.U.M.P. Marketing System is common sense.
Some people are biting at the bit and wan to get going. “I want to do my Web site and I want to do a brochure and I want to do this and I want to do that.” That’s tactical thinking and it's great to have tactical thinking, but first you need to have a strategy.
We're going to do a S.W.O.T. analysis.
S is for strength. Look for the hidden resources that you have and how you can leverage those to get more customers. Aren’t you delighted that it's going to be possible for you to get more customers without spending more money? I think that’s really powerful.
Strengths are things that you know you're good at. Are you a good public speaker? Are you well organized? Do you document your time sheets well? Are you a great author? Have you written books that people enjoy reading? People get lots of benefit from a nonfiction book teaching them how to do a certain thing.
What are your strengths? Is it networking? Are you great at connecting people? Are you great at meeting people? These are the things of which you need to take an inventory.
Write down all the things that you're good at. Are you good on the computer? Are you technically adept? Are you good on the telephone? Are you a great sales presenter, not necessarily a public speaker or a motivational speaker, but a sales presenter?
Are you creative? Do you have an artistic side? Do you perform or do any specific skill whether it's playing a musical instrument or typing letters well or writing copy, any of these things. Write them all down even if you think they don’t apply. Write down all the strengths you have.
If you're a business owner write down the strengths in each of your departments. Write down the strengths of each of your employees. You can go as deep as you want on this and really, why you need to be doing this is to make sure that you don’t miss anything.
Often when I go into a company on a consulting contract, I find that they have hidden resources. They have hidden talent within their employees and staff that they're not leveraging. They have hidden opportunities that they're not taking advantage of.
They have a list of people that they haven’t been e-mailing. They aren’t doing anything with the list. Are you guilty of that? Are you building a list but not communicating with them because you're not sure what to say? Not using the resources you already have is a bridge to the next point and that’s W.
Isn’t it fantastic to realize that if you know what your weaknesses are, you can adjust or not even worry about them? Write your weaknesses down, the same as you did for your strengths. List them out. Isolate them and then come up with alternatives.
Customer Catcher Tip: You don’t have to fix all your weaknesses. If you're not good at putting up a Web site, I don’t think it's worth your time to start learning HTML. That’s the code for putting up Web sites. There are so many resources that are affordable. You might have the ability to barter for some of those services.
You don’t have to think about specifics right now. Just remember you don’t have to fix them all. Concentrate on the strengths that you’ve already written down and move forward from there.
Make a little money. Hire some people. Use templates at first. This is guerrilla marketing mode. Just move forward with what you’ve got. Sell what you’ve got. Use what you’ve got.
You don’t have to fix everything, just move forward. Some of your weaknesses might be telephone skills, presentation skills and sales skills. The good news is a lot of those weaknesses can easily be strengthened with some training whether it's reading a book, attending a teleseminar, attending a live seminar or getting some help from somebody that you bring into your business. If it is Internet related, it could be an apprentice from a local school.
There are lots of solutions. If you know what your weaknesses are, then you can adhere to the saying that a wise person knows what they don’t know. There are lots of stories of people like Henry Ford who would call in people smarter than he was when he was at the helm. He recognized where he needed people to support his business and grow it to the size and strength that he wanted to and you can do the same thing.
When people will actually take the time to sit down and analyze their strength and weaknesses, they are pleasantly surprised at the list of the abilities, strengths and skills that they have.
Sis for strength. W is for weaknesses. O is for opportunities. Make a list of your short term or now opportunities, your near term opportunities and your long term or future opportunities, but also create an opportunity list called whenever.
So if an opportunity comes along from Dell computers, Amazon.com or EBay, and they love your company and want to buy it, that might be very good news. Or they're going to promote you on their Web site or they're going to have links. That’s a whenever.
What are the whenever opportunities? Don’t forget those, but in the meantime let’s look at the now. What can I do to make money today? What's a burning desire or problem that people have that I can solve today?
The near term opportunities, what are things that I can go after but I need to do a little bit of work? There are some people online who don’t have their Web site live or they don’t have it the way they want it yet. Again, don’t let perfectionism stop you. It’s about progress not perfection.
The future is larger relationships. Some people make the mistake of going after the big fish or the big prospect too soon. They drive people to their Web site or give them a brochure. It's not as professionally produced or not as full or rich in content as you’d like it to be and you're judged on that. Then you lose the big opportunity because you went too soon.
Often in professional sports you will see a younger player brought up to the pro leagues when they're not quite ready. They play a game and then they get sent back down to the farm leagues to mature and nurture them a little bit more to pick up their skills and get a little more experience. So there's nothing wrong with timing. Take timing into effect with your now, your then and your future opportunities.
The T in the S.W.O.T. analysis stands for threats or pre-problems. I don’t like to think of threats as a purely negative thing. Because I'm an optimistic guy, I call them pre-problems.
Pre-problems are questions that you ask yourself. “What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go wrong and what would my reaction be? What can I do now?”
One of the mistakes we talked about in chapter one was relying on one channel of marketing. If you only rely on the Internet and the power goes down for three days, which is not unheard of recently. If the power goes down and that’s the only way your customers can buy from you or contact you, then you have an issue. You need to have online and offline ways of doing business.
If you're building an e-mail list, you still should be building a snail mail list. You should still have the postal addresses of all your clients and prospect. Even if you need to make up a free CD and ship it out, it's worth the investment to get those real names and addresses of people.
Competition can be a threat or a pre-problem. If your competitor’s marketing is better than yours or if they come up with a different angle or a new product or solution, it may negate your marketing or make it seem inferior.
There will always be industry shifts. We’re not using outsourced companies anymore. We are not using consultants anymore or whatever the trend in the industry is. You need to be aware of those tidal waves when they’re way off on the horizon, not when they're ten feet from the shore.
Government regulation, tax issues, industry regulation, reporting, employee benefits, all those types of things affect you especially if you're a business owner. Natural disasters, flooding, hurricane, fires, all of these things can become a problem.
Do you back up your computer data? Did you know that if you back up your data just on a CD or a DVD, those CDs or DVD files and disks can also fail? When I back up on a DVD I make two or three copies. I have them in different locations.
It's not if something disastrous is going to happen on a computer, it's when it's going to happen. Make sure you duplicate your data at the very least.
Another threat to your business can be your personal health or that of your family. You are the business, the consultant, the coach, the speaker. If something happens to you, what are the risks involved since you are the sole provider of information and the sole contact with your customers?
What if your business explodes, not literally but with success? What if you suddenly get 100,000 orders? I mean, what if the miracle happens that you were praying for? How are you going to handle it?
We did a launch where we did over six figures in sales in 48 to 72 hours and it was a challenge. We had partial systems in place. Some of them weren’t complete yet. It was a matter of how do you provide the service? What happens when e-mail addresses are blocked? What happens when credit cards don’t work and receipts don’t go through?
You need to have support systems and processes in place. We talked about automation in chapter one. How have you written that into your plan or process?
Do a S.W.O.T. analysis of yourself, your business, your product. Apply this S.W.O.T. system to a department or employees. You can drill down as deep as you’d like, but make sure that you, at the very least, apply it to your business.
This is an introduction to the sort of business management analysis that you can do for yourself. Sit down with someone else and get them to give you an outside perspective. In the business management consulting industry, this is called a 360 degree review.
A 360 degree circle turns all the way around in front of other people like your suppliers, your friends and your family. Your family will tell you what your strengths and your weaknesses are. Listen with an open mind and then make any needed adjustments.
This is going to help you build your business and move things along. You can apply anything that I'm talking about to the Internet and to offline business.
If I use an example of a pool company but you're a baker, just insert your business model. If I talk about an author and you're a speaker, do the same thing. Put yourself in that situation.
We're going to talk about “The Hot Dog Theory of Marketing.” I came up with this metaphor to help people understand how to get started without a budget or experience.
I learned the hot dog theory of marketing from a grey haired president and CEO. I was very young. It was my first marketing job. He called me up to his office so I had to go up the stairs to the corner office with the windows and the shades and the big black leather chair which was facing the window. The chair slowly turned around like Darth Vader in Star Wars.
The man, looking at me over the top of his half glasses on a chain around his neck, was the stereotypical classic successful business man. I asked him, “What's the marketing budget?”, because I was moving from sales to marketing a new software.
He looked at me over his half glasses and said, “Zero.” I just deflated to about two inches tall. Then he clarified it and said, “Look, I don’t want to spend a dollar if I don’t have to and every dollar I do spend I'd like you to justify to me that it's going to make me at least a dollar back if not ten.”
It's zero based budgeting. That’s what the “Hot Dog Theory of Marketing” is about. Can you get excited about growing your business without spending money? Some of the tactics that I'm going to teach you in these strategies are going to make you money.
You might have heard some people talk about Internet radio which I also teach. If you're new, you can check that out at www.IWantMyOwnRadioShow.com.
I recently had Microsoft sponsor a series of shows. They paid $40,000. They paid for the air time. They contributed prizes worth at least $5,000 for the series of the show and I got $100 recreation money to boot for marketing myself and having my friends, clients and networks on the radio show as guests, because who arranged the guests? Me, because they were too busy.
It is possible to make money at the same time you're marketing your book and your business.
Let's get into the "The Hot Dog Theory of Marketing.” Doesn’t it make sense to leverage other people’s money, other people’s customers, and other events that have lots of energy that you can become part of just by being near them?
I'd like you to picture the hot dog stand. You're going to a ball game. You're outside the stadium. There are throngs of people. It's game day. People have their game shirts on and their faces are painted.
The kids are excited. The adults are excited. The fans are called fans because it comes from fanatical. There is lots of energy in the air and that’s what marketing is about. How do you create enthusiasm, interest, excitement and passion about your product or service, whether it's about your book and what a great story it is, or it's about your business system and how the results come in quickly with profits and accolades.
If you're a nonprofit and help organizations, or whatever it is that you do, how can you get your product or service, your company or yourself to be viewed with the same excitement and enthusiasm that’s revolving around that stadium. There are different hot dog vendors. Some of them have attractive carts. Some of them don’t. What's the difference between them?
Your Business Strategy
Well, let's break it down. One of the first steps is to have a business strategy. The hot dog vendor can have a strategy. The first strategy is considered foundational in business and that’s the four P’s; Product, Price, Promotion and Placement.
What's the product? It's pretty simple here. It's the hot dog. It's convenience food. It's fast food. What's the price? A couple of bucks for a hot dog; it's cheaper than the food inside. It's fast to cook. You know? It's an impulse decision for people. We’ll talk more about that.
Promotion, it's having a sign on the front of the cart. It’s having a colorful umbrella attached to the cart. Hopefully, it attracts attention. What are the different ways you can promote?
And placement, where do you want your hot dog cart? Do you want it near a certain gate or do you want it near the intersection? Do you know the most popular parking spots and where most of the traffic flows between the parking lot and the stadium? Where people funnel in? Where is there a bottleneck so people slow down and they can't help but see your cart?
Now what do hot dogs and baseball and arenas and stadiums have to do with marketing? Well, where can you put your book where there are lots of people walking by? Obviously at the end of an aisle in a book store. Great, but where else is there traffic? Where else are there people who are going by in large numbers, but are slowed down and you can put your book amongst other well known people?
If you sell services, it's the same thing. Some of the more traditional marketing methods include trade shows. There are people from all aspects of an industry being in a certain city at a certain time under certain circumstances. Trade shows are okay.
In general, I view trade shows as a retail opportunity and I don’t generally get a lot of business from the traffic going by in the aisles. I do get a lot of business from the other vendors at the trade show, but that’s a whole other strategy.
The first strategy in "The Hot Dog Theory of Marketing" is to think about the four P’s related to your business. Next is location and obviously the Internet is the virtual place to be thinking about location.
Virtual real estate on the Internet refers to your Web site, how many Web sites you have, how many landing pages you have, how many other Web sites you're on, how many links there are back to you, and how many pictures there are of you on the Internet.
Have you Googled yourself to see where you are on the Internet? Subscribe to news services that will tell you when your name or your business name or your product name is posted on the Internet by somebody else.
A sea of prospects; when you set up a hot dog cart by a stadium and I'm talking on game day here, there is a sea of prospects and they are looking to buy your products or services.
Actually maybe they weren’t even looking for you when they got there, but they smell a hot dog cart. They walk by the first one and they don’t buy, but now it's in their brain. They're starting to get hungry. So you don’t always have to be the first hot dog cart that people go by.
Very often I talk with clients and they're nervous because, “Well, someone else is selling this. There are other women hosting women radio shows and there are other men doing single dads.” That is a great indication that there is a demand for your product or service.
If there are at least five other people doing what you want to do, that’s an indication that there are customers out there who are paying them.
They're making a living from it, so you can too. But apply your own methods and marketing to doing that.
The last point on strategy is what's your lifestyle plan? I met a gentleman named Andrew fourteen or fifteen years ago. He’s from Toronto, Ontario. When the weather isn’t freezing, he is working diligently outside. He has a hot dog cart.
Now, his lifestyle plan is to work three or four months of the year and then go back to Europe with his family to spend time with his extended family.
Andrew is amazing. During the day he is in the northern part of the city but in a sort of secondary core financial district. So he gets a lot of the lunch time people. He gets a lot of the people coming out of the office buildings and people coming out of the subways across from the subway. He isn’t right on the main intersection. He’s a block away so there isn’t a lot of traffic and people are stopping on a curb.
He has a very good location. He doesn’t just work during the day, in the evening he’s outside one of the most popular pubs where university and college people mainly hang out. They come out of the establishment around midnight, one o’clock and they are hungry. He’s got lots of business in a concentrated zone and he runs his business essentially twice a day, if you will.
His lifestyle plan is to take most of the year off. He is very successful at doing that. To this day he remembers my name because I would go to that pub when I was younger. And now we're both married. We both have three kids.
I will actually drive an extra ten or fifteen minutes to go stop by his hot dog stand because we have a relationship and that’s what he sells. He doesn’t sell hot dogs. He sells relationships and you're in the same position. You sell relationships, not hot dogs.
Let’s Talk About Marketing
Now, the next important point is marketing. We're talking about "The Hot Dog Theory of Marketing" and again, this is a metaphor for your business. What is your hot dog cart? What are your hot dogs? What are you selling?
How do you get the most leverage? Andrew gets the most leverage by putting his cart in high traffic areas where he knows people are hungry. He knows his potential customers are in the business district every day, at least Monday through Friday. Even on Saturdays, there are stores nearby so if he wanted to he could work there.
Andrew could leverage his cart by moving it to another spot about a ten minute drive north outside a popular entertainment district area. So how are you getting leverage from your hot dog cart?
Listen closely to this next point. Use other people’s money to reduce your marketing cost. The hot dog vendor outside of a stadium does not spend a million dollars to bring 70,000 people to a football game or a baseball game.
He doesn’t spend 250 million dollars to buy the team. He doesn’t spend half a billion dollars to build the stadium but he or she is seeing the results of other people’s money invested to grow their own business. How can you leverage other people’s money, other people’s stadiums, other people’s events that create excitement?
Look for local community events that are fairly well attended such as a pancake breakfast or a Sunday pie bakeoff. If you're an artist and you're selling necklaces, handcrafts or clothing and things like that, where are there events where people are gathered? Marketing is about creating events that lead to discussion, that lead to relationships that lead to sales.
Too many times people go for the sale right away. They don’t have the energy. They don’t have the enthusiasm and they don’t have the relationship because why? They don’t have a reason to talk to the people to sell them something.
That’s when you don’t like being sold to, when someone just walks up to you and says, “Hey, do you want to buy a recipe book?”
“Did I say I was looking for one? Do I look too thin?” Hardly, not me these days, but I'm working on it. So, use other people’s money to reduce your marketing costs.
How can you use other people’s money? Again, sponsorship is an example of that. Somebody can sponsor a television show, a live seminar you're giving or Web pages on your Web site. Get creative around sponsorship.
Next are other people’s customers. Who buys from you? What did they buy before they came to you and what do they buy after they come to you? If I sell carpeting, customers who come to me and buy carpeting may have just purchased a new house. They may have just moved their business.
So who did they buy from before me? They may have bought from a general contractor. They may have bought from a real estate agent. They may have purchased from a commercial real estate contractor.
Why am I saying this? Those are all marketing relationships that you want to have because you know that there's a high probability that prospects and customers can come from people who sell before you.
Now whether you just start a relationship and they do it out of the kindness of their heart, or you give them a commission, you can do this just by picking up the phone or walking into their store or location or going to their Web site. You have the ability to do this.
Using our example of the hot dog cart outside the stadium, those are the customers of the stadium, of the sports team. They’ve already purchased tickets. They are yours if you put your hot dog cart in the way and they happen to be hungry.
It's partially a numbers game, but it's also putting your product or service in the path that is predictable. You know where the customers are coming from. You know where they're going to. They're coming from a parking lot.
You could even have somebody hand out coupons as people come out of that popular parking lot. You know they are in the parking lot mainly to go to the game.
It's game day. If you hand out coupons at those locations and tell people where your cart is, then you’re competing against the other carts because you’ve given them a coupon. When customers walk by your cart, they purchase. They may or may not come back after the game, but if you have a relationship they’ll look for you next time they are there.
"The Hot Dog Theory of Marketing" increases the probability of success. Many businesses spend $500, $1,000, $5,000, even $10,000 on a full page ad in a newspaper and they don’t know what the probability of success is. They just feel like it's the right thing to do. They feel like they should budget money for it.
If you're the hot dog vendor, you know you’re going to have a probability of success. But if you set up your cart at the stadium on Tuesday morning and there's no game, what's your probability of success?
What's your probability of success for every marketing action you take? Are you phoning clients and prospects that are really too big for you and you couldn’t handle the business if you wanted? Are you phoning people who are too small and don’t have money or budget?
How are you increasing the probability of success in your marketing? How do you identify proper prospects, customers and clients for your business? You want to make sure you're doing that correctly.
An important area of marketing is signage. Again, using our analogy, I've seen some hot dog vendors put a sign on the front of the part of the cart where they cook the hot dogs, but I've seen other vendors put a sign 20 to 25 feet in front of the cart. So it's a miniature billboard that says, “Hot dogs are coming.”
You may see farmers do this with vegetables and fruits at the side of the road. You want to put your sign far enough in front so that the people driving by slow down. They will be more likely to stop. If the sign is too close to the vegetable stand, people will be driving too fast and they won’t have enough time to make a decision.
You want to put your signs out far enough in front so their brain has time to be set in motion. You need to get them to imagine the sweet smell of freshly boiled corn with butter and salt. All of those cravings get them to slow down the car, put on the brakes and pull off to the shoulder of the road safely.
How far ahead you put out your marketing will determine if people will decide, or at least stop, to make a decision about whether to buy your products or services. So signage is very useful.
Create an Emotional Experience
The hot dog vendor’s umbrella is very important, if it catches the eye, it's clean and if it's got a brand on it. Visual appeal is very important. That umbrella even protects people from the sun. If the vendor has extra umbrellas, people can step out from under the sun or out of the rain if they need to. But hopefully on game day it's a nice bright day and everyone’s outside.
Very often people don’t look at the challenges their business creates for their customers. If you get ten customers at once and they all want to put relish on their hot dog at the same time, the customer experience isn’t up to par. I’ve seen vendor’s extend their cart by setting up a table with extra condiments on it that allows their customers to spread out and not feel pressured in decorating their hot dog.
Because everyone’s got their own style you know, “I've got to put my ketchup on this way and the relish on that side and the mustard this way. I like it in dots instead of a straight line.” Whatever it is, that’s fun. People decorating their hot dog the way they want is an experience and it's fun and that leads to our next point which is the emotional experience.
How do you create an emotional experience? Starbucks is fa