Almost everyone with a smartphone go to the internet for almost everything today. With that, having your business completely prepped to appear on searches is a must. In this episode, Ken Courtright points you to the one place to go if you want to make money and get referrals constantly. That is the place called RFR, Ready for Research. Know what this all means as you uncover what Ken has to say about it, how you can separate yourself from the rest of the results, and why you should annually do an RFR checkup of your own company and name.
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Ready For Research
This is going to be a cool podcast because we did a four-part podcast series on motivation. Now that we’re all motivated to act, ready to rock and roll, ready to get into the business, where do we go next? Let’s assume you’re in business, but you want to fine-tune things. You’re in business, but the numbers aren’t quite there. You’re in business, you know you should have done 2 to 3 to 4 times more business in 2018. You cannot figure out why the numbers aren’t where they should be. This show is called Ready for Research. This is going to be taking a look at business on a psychological level. There’s only one place to go if you want to make money and get referrals consistently and that is the place called RFR, Ready for Research. People should annually do an RFR checkup on their own company and their name.
It is what it is. It’s exactly what it sounds like. You’ve got to get your name and your company name ready for research. I want to start with a story about when I was at someone’s home and they were telling everybody the story that the day before, they had set an appointment for a Kirby Vacuum sales rep to come in. They had always wanted a Kirby. Their neighbors and parents had a Kirby. They had no idea what they cost and they did not know or understand the process at which the Kirby sales reps operate. They were telling the story and it was fascinating because it got me thinking, “This is the way of the future.” The husband and wife were sitting through the Kirby sales rep presentation and all of a sudden, the husband, while the sales rep was demonstrating the product, went onto his laptop and he googled this sales rep’s name. He also googled the sales rep’s office, their local division in Joliet, Illinois.
Lo and behold, as the guy was doing this ten-minute demonstration, this gentleman that was watching the demonstration in under five minutes was able to find evidence of exactly what the raw costs of that Kirby vacuum could be. Meaning what is the lowest he’d be able to pay for that vacuum? If I remember my numbers correctly, the sales rep was trying to sell the vacuum for $1,700 or $1,650. For those of you that know how Kirby sales reps make money, it’s a very large commission pay structure where the Kirby rep, the manager and branch manager get a lot of money. A good chunk of money does go towards the vacuum because they are one of the best vacuums ever made. We have one.
The key is when the sales rep was holding firm at $1,700 or $1,650 whatever it is, the guy that was sitting through the presentation said, “Are you telling me right now, as you’re looking me in the eye and you’re telling me you cannot sell that vacuum for less than that?” He says, “Not necessarily. There’s a couple of things that we can do and this and that.” The gentleman turned his laptop around and the Kirby sales rep went white as a ghost because he saw exactly what the gentleman was looking at. It was the internal price sheet from the Joliet office saying that the vacuum could be sold at $1,030 or $880. It was significantly less. When it was all said and done, they did strike a deal at the best price available where the sales rep only got an $80 commission.
What I’m trying to say here is, the sales rep when he went into that account and went into that potential sale, he did not check his name or his company name online. He was not ready for research. Here’s a key couple of quick notes about this show. It’s going to be a longer show and there’s going to be a lot of depth and detail in a couple of homework assignments. Number one, if this podcast hits you, I want to recommend three other podcasts in the following order. Episode 22 is on Present Competition. Episode four is on Trust Trumping Everything. Episode seven is on How Google Ranks a Website. They are critically important to this show. I don’t want to repeat them so this is a three-part podcast. I’m not going to do part two because part two would be repeating episodes 22, 4 and 7. I recommend that you hear them in that order. They’ll make more sense.
The internet is cloudy that people's trust factor is on high alert. Click To TweetLet’s get started. I want to start with the psychology of selling and the psychology of buying. Why do people buy from you? Why do people buy from your company? Do they maybe like your product or your service? Do they maybe know you? Where are they referred to you? What are they desperate? Meaning you were their first choice and it was a time situation. When you wash every reason together, the number one dominant reason that sits on the top of hundreds of reasons why people buy from anybody in the following phrase. At the moment of purchase, they trust that the value they will receive from that item far outweighs the cost they will part with. There are two critical words, trust, and value. You, as the salesperson, cannot guesstimate, quantify in any capacity what you think the person’s value is from your item. You might think it’s one thing and the person buying the item finds it a completely different value. That’s something you’re going to have to wrestle with.
At the moment of purchase, the person trusts that the value they’re going to receive from working with you outweighs the cost you’re asking them to part with. There’s an old saying, “Value equals two times the price.” What that meant in the old days is if you were going to try to sell a vacuum, a lawn maintenance service, a haircut or whatever, you need to build the value to the potential client to the point where they think it’s worth twice what you’re asking for. When you get the value built to two times more than you’re asking for, they’ll write a check and do business with you. That’s about a 100-year-old statement. They made the statement because of the fear of loss far outweighs the desire for gain. Meaning, people have worked hard for their money. The fear of them losing their money to gain the perceived value of your product, there’s a balance there. It’s like a tug of war of your value for their checkbook.
Now, we in the marketing world are thinking because of the internet, that value equals three times the price today. The question is, “What has changed?” Why did it go from the statement and marketing that value equals two times the price to value equals three times the price? A lot of us think it’s because the internet is clouding a lot of quality. The internet, 80% according to Google of all content is plagiarized to some degree. Eighty percent of what you read, somebody else wrote it somewhere else first and somebody decided, “It’s easier to steal it from another website.”
You take that and you cross-pollinate that with the gazillion amount of ads, retargeting campaigns, cookies that could drop that every computer. Even the Fortune 500 do this. This is nothing new. It’s nothing illegal outside of the plagiarism. The internet is cloudy that people’s trust factor is on high alert. This brings us directly to ready for research. Are you and your company ready for research? When people google your name, what comes up? Do you even know? When people google your company name, what comes up? Do you even know? Do you want to know? We know a lot of people that are afraid to google their name and their company. They don’t want to know what’s coming up.
There are three areas you need to consider if you want to keep every potential sale. If you want to keep every potential sale, meaning you don’t want to lose any sales, there are three things you have to focus on. I stated once from some stage that there is close to $100 billion if not $1 trillion of business that has been lost because companies were not ready for research. This is going back to the inception of the internet. When people want to buy something, they need to trust that the value they’re going to receive will outweigh the loss of their cash. They have to trust first before they’ll consider the value. Let me say this again. That would be what I’d call the Anchor Statement of this podcast.
Number one of the three areas you need to consider, the first area of consideration is your name. Your personal name has to dominate at least the first two pages of Google. It has to. Ghosts don’t take credit cards. You’ve heard me say that a couple of times on the show. Ghosts do not take credit cards. If they can’t find you and you’re in business, if they want to buy your vitamins, lawn maintenance service, carpet cleaning service, whatever your company does or have, if they google you and they can’t find your person lame, are they going to do business with you? If you are going to buy from someone, let’s say an insurance man and you google their name and they didn’t come up at all or they came up in one spot, would you do business with them? I wouldn’t.
I need to trust that the next amount of time I’m going to take out of my life to do business with somebody is worthy of my time. Ghosts don’t take credit cards. You need to consider that. Second, you need to consider your company website. In episodes 22, 4 and 7, I crushed this I’m not going to spend any time on it. The third thing you have to consider is your brand, mission, and why is like a person. It’s its being and you’ve got to understand that the world needs to know what your why is. They need to know what your brand stands for. They have to buy from the company and the person not based on the logical merit of the product. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, our society bought items logically first and emotionally, second. Now, we’ve flipped it. Now, we buy emotionally first, logically second. Let’s go back to number one. Here’s your simple homework assignment. You have 72 hours to dominate page one of Google for your name. Here’s a strong recommendation. When you guys get home, I want you to google my buddy, Greg Reid and see what comes up. What you’re going to notice is, you’re not going to notice my buddy Greg Reid in many places.
I want you to google is Greg S. Reid and I want you to see what comes up. You’ll notice my buddy Greg S Reid comes up on the first three pages of Google. Every one of the first 30 results is my buddy, Greg. Why did Greg do this? The answer is simple. Greg has a fairly common name. There are a lot of Greg Reids. There are a professional football player and this good businessman. He got mixed in with everybody. From a marketing standpoint a few years ago, Greg realized, “I, Greg Reid am my brand. I am part of my company culture from a branding and marketing standpoint. How can I separate myself?” By simply adding the letter S and making sure that on his website, every time he writes for another website and signs a post and on his business card everywhere, he is known as Greg S Reid. Once you go home and do this exercise and you look up Greg Reid, but you look up Greg S. Reid and look at the stark dramatic difference between the two results pages.
Here’s the question, “How much business might Greg have lost without adding the S?” You cannot appreciate this until you see the Google results. In my opinion, most people reading this haven’t added their S to their name and their business. Most people are floating around, “I’ve got a Twitter page, I’m probably good. I’ve got a Facebook page, I’m probably good.” No, you’re not good. You need to dominate your name. If you want to dominate business and your company name if you want to dominate business today.” I want you to notice every single section of the first few pages of results show Greg S. Reid stacked on top and stacked underneath. Nobody looking up Greg S. Reid would doubt Greg runs a real big company. By simply adding the letter S and making sure that he went into every major social media account and website and built the platform of his dominance for his name, he looks like a massive business owner. Greg does run a fairly large company.
What did Greg do in the early days to dominate for his name? I recommend everybody do this. He opened up a Facebook page, Twitter page, LinkedIn page, Google plus page, he did a YouTube channel, jumped on Instagram and Pinterest. Now, the rest of these have come into more popularity since he started. I would recommend to Greg that he also jumps on Tumblr, Vine, Snapchat, Reddit, Flicker, Periscope, etc. If you’re not sure what of the top 20 to 25 social media sites you need to dominate for your name and your company, google the top 25 social media websites and look at the results.
We buy emotionally first, logically second. Click To TweetIn seven days, if you don’t dominate for your name, shame on you. You might want to consider getting a job or keeping your job. Number two, you’ve got to pay consideration to your website. In previous episodes, I covered something called RTLC. I recommended TLC. Those four things stand for something dramatic in our opinion. We’ve got our 700 revenue-generating websites. Those are 700 independent businesses making money. We wash them all together and said, “Why do some of these succeed? Why did some of these not succeed to the same level?” We found out the ones that were kicking tail had RTLC. The ones that didn’t, didn’t have RTLC. What we now do across 700 websites is RTLC. If you want to figure that one out, check out episodes 22, 4 and 7.
Having crushed that topic and proved you can’t succeed today probably, without making those changes. I want to move on to number three because number three is awesome. Number three, the third consideration you’ve got to focus on is your brand, mission, and why. How many times have I mentioned Tom’s Shoes on this podcast? Dozens. Why? Let me reread you why people buy. At the moment of purchase, they trust that the value they will receive from that item far outweighs the cost they will part with. Tom shoes as we all know on this podcast, if you buy a pair of shoes from Tom shoes, he will take part of that money and put a brand new pair of shoes at a kid that’s never worn shoes before.
Won’t some people pay anything to put clothes on a kid with no shoes? Of course. Toms doesn’t market the product. They market the why. Why is that? Let’s look at it from a psychological standpoint. What’s more emotional selling shoes or clothing children? Remember, we buy on emotion first, logic and price second. Although the Digital Footprint or the Working Moms have been around on display for years, I see many small businesses, I’m going to say 200 employees and under are either not supporting a cause at all or they’re supporting a cause but they’re simply not telling the world about it. Let this show be the wake-up call to everybody in the business. People now buy cool people and companies. They do not buy products and services.
Your why, mission and purpose is your purple cow. I’ve had on a number of podcasts where I talked about Seth Godin’s Purple Cow. The Purple Cow has a whole book. It is tremendous. It’s based on the story that Seth Godin one day saw a purple cow on the side of the road. He touched it. There was no ink on his hands. He physically saw a purple cow. This was before cell phones. He’s driving down the highway. He cannot wait to get to a gas station or a hotel because he has to tell someone that he saw a purple cow. You can’t hold in that you saw a purple. He makes the metaphor jump that seeing a purple cow is remarkable. It has to be remarked, restated and retold.
For the majority of products and services, most products and services cannot be purple cows. They’re not remarkable. Maybe one to 2% but everybody’s worthwhile cause, purpose or mission can be. I’m going to go back. Won’t some people pay anything to put clothes on a kid with no clothes? You’ve got naked kids running around with no shoes on and getting germs. Toms Shoes goes, “If you buy a pair of shoes here, we’ll put shoes on kids who have never worn shoes before.” That is emotional. We buy on emotion first, logic and price second. The Digital Footprint has been out there for a long time. I don’t know what the numbers are exactly but almost every single Fortune 500 company is now displaying and promoting their worthy cause. I don’t know exactly what the numbers are but it’s almost every one of them.
Maybe 1% to 2% of products out there hit the four Cs. Things that are cool, cutting edge, comedic, and controversial. 80% of what goes viral hits the four Cs. Since only 1% to 2% of products could be hitting the four CS, isn’t it possible that a potential client could find your website and see that a percentage of your money all company revenues goes to your worthwhile cause your charity, whatever? Isn’t it possible that 100% of people would think that’s cool? It is. We live in a society that instead of being anonymous about our tithing, giving and donating, it’s time we come out of the closet because the world needs us to. The world needs to know that we have a soul, heartbeat and we’re cool people. That’s the bottom line.
Let’s say you’ve established your why, your worthy cause and your purpose. The world sees you’re not only out there making a buck. I recommend you devote no less than 10% of your homepage to that cause. We learned from Dan Kennedy in the book No BS: Marketing to the Affluent that the number one reason that the wealthy and affluent make a buying decision is, they did some homework on the company when they were about to buy three different $40,000 watches. They googled the company history and they ended up buying the watch from the company that most resonated with their personal business story, personal story, and their personal family story. When the guy was playing poker with his buddies and his buddy said, “Nice watch.” He goes, “Let me tell you about that watch.” He could tell the company brand’s story was a worthy cause.
My wife and I got back from Italy and one of our friends, Clarissa Burt said, “Let me get you into the Bulgari jewelry store. Maybe they’ll give you a tour and show you around.” Kerri and my mom and dad got a tour of the Bulgari jewelry store. They got the history of their company. They took us upstairs to the office is basically that nobody sees and we looked at Mr. Bulgari’s original drawings in 1897 of his very first pieces of jewelry and even the deed of sale from his very first sale. It was cool. We get downstairs back to the main floor and in the main area of the main floor, there’s a glass case taking up about 10% of the room. A very large amount of space and it is dedicated to Save the Children’s Foundation. In eighteen months, they raised $40 million. They take $75 from every piece of jewelry and they send it to the Save the Children Foundation. It took my mom and my wife ten seconds when they saw that the big display case. They go, “What rings did you have in here where that portion goes to the kids?”
My wife and my mom walked out of there with rings and $75 from each ring going to the Save the Children Foundation. Why? It’s because it’s awesome. It’s the right thing to do. If you’re going to buy a piece of jewelry, isn’t it cool that you fed a family for two months or part of the money went to clothing the kids? It was awesome. Let’s review, number one, dominate your name. The first two pages of Google dominate your name so when people are about to buy from you, they can comfortably trust you with their money. They’ve got to see your name in lights for them to trust you. Number two, you’re going to listen to episodes 22, 4 and 7 and you’re going to get ready for research on the highest level with your company name. Number three, you’re going to show the world that you’re not only about making money and you as a person and your company is cool to work with that they can trust you and you’re not only about making money. You guys are awesome. See you.
Important Links:
- Present Competition – previous episode (Episode 22)
- Trust Trumping Everything – previous episode (Episode four)
- How Google Ranks a Website – previous episode (Episode seven)
- Digital Footprint
- Working Moms
- Purple Cow
- No BS: Marketing to the Affluent
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