There’s a commonly held belief that “all business-growing strategies work – which one you use is just a matter of preference.”
I’m not so sure that’s correct, though.
Here’s the thing. What does “work” mean?
Said another way… do all strategies work EQUALLY WELL?
In my experience, they don’t.
If you have a really specific goal, there usually aren’t a million ways to reach it.
The number of ways that work to reach a SPECIFIC goal is usually a lot smaller than that. Like, you can probably count them on one hand.
When somebody is talking all about how their strategy “works,” I wish they’d give the following specifics with respect to it “working:”
–How many clients did you get and in what time frame
–How much did the clients pay
–How good a fit were they (where they at the right point in their life business journey to be able to get great results from what you do, what were their results, and did you both have a wonderful experience working together)
–How much time did you spend (this strategy plus all other work – the average number of hours per week)
–How much money did you spend (if any)
–How many people helped you (if any) and how much did you pay them
–How easy were the clients to enroll (how much time was spent on sales, how many questions/objections did you have to answer)
.
Very few people are willing to share these specifics about their results. It’d be a huge service if they did – people could think about what results they want in each of the above areas and then choose the method that’s most likely to get those results.
For example, after trying a million and one methods, I finally settled on the method that has now become known as the Strong Method – which involves making long-form posts and direct offers (in a certain framework) on a personal FB timeline and sending/accepting friend requests.
The results of that method, for nearly 3 years, have been: $20k-$30k months, 4-8 clients per month, 20-25 hours of work per week, no expenses other than about $2k/year for admin tools like scheduling calendars, no staff, no ad spend, and about 99% of clients a great fit, happy with their results and wonderful to work with.
I’ve had a lot of people tell me “paid ads to a webinar to a discovery call would work just as well or better – you wouldn’t have to spend as much time creating your organic content.”
Here’s the thing. I tried that method and while it SEEMS like it should work as well or better – it didn’t.
Clients of mine have said the same thing.
Indeed you do spend less time creating content, but the content is what educates your potential buyers as to what your work is about and whether it’s for them or not.
So when there’s less content, you have to spend more time on the BACK end (sales calls) explaining to potential buyers what you do and what it’s about, as well as overcoming their objections to buying (which they often only have because they don’t understand the offer that well).
And my experience and that of people I’ve worked with was that the back-end work of sales calls took up far MORE time than the front-end work of content creation did in the Strong Method.
We were easily working 50- and 60-hour weeks with all the long sales calls, whereas the strategically written content in the Strong Method allowed us to completely eliminate sales calls and just enroll people over short text conversations because they didn’t have many questions or objections.
I’ve also had people tell me that they have a method of short form content writing and that that “works” too, just as my long-form method does.
But, again, I wonder, how does that method stack up against all the metrics I listed above? What are the results?
I’ve asked these folks for their results, but I haven’t heard anything in response.
I’m open to the possibility that other methods could work as well and in the exact same way as mine (with the same or similar results for all metrics).
Most people don’t share their metrics, though.
That’s what I would like to see change in this industry (well, it’s ONE of the things I’d like to see change ;)).
That when you say your method “works,” you give a definition of “works” with robust metrics.
That would be such a service and would dramatically reduce the amount of time that everyone spends hopping from strategy to strategy with no clue of what the expected results could be.
The same’s true of other topics besides business.
For years I was told that eating vegan “works” just as well as other ways of eating – but specifics were often lacking.
It turns out that if you’re a weightlifter (which I am), you need so much protein from whole-food sources that it’s nearly impossible to make that equation work out with plant-based food and at the same time not eat too many calories (since most plant-based protein also has a lot of either carbs or fat too – unless it’s processed protein which is not as healthy for you – whereas most animal protein tends to be pure protein).
So that way of eating doesn’t actually “work” as well under certain conditions, such as being an active strength trainer (even though I do prefer this way of eating for other reasons).
Defining what you mean by “works” is not only a service to your whole industry, but also works (ha!) to attract your best-fit client, who shares your definition of “works” and wants not only the results your method delivers, but in the particular WAY that your method delivers them.
In my 1-on-1 30-day program I help you to think through your definition of “works” (i.e,. exactly what results your methods get for the RIGHT person) as well as how to define who that RIGHT person is so that you can charge high-ticket fees to that person, enroll them easily without sales calls, and experience all the other goodness of the Strong Method.
In my certification program I’ll also be teaching folks to use my methods with their own clients.
DM me on FB if you’re interested in either program 🙂