The Sticking Point By Jay Abraham

249 Pages·2010·0.6 MB·English

The Sticking Point

By Jay Abraham

Draft: November 10, 2008
Table of Contents

Introduction: Bad Economy? Good News!...........................................................................
Chapter 1: Is Your Business Stuck?.........................................................................................
Chapter 2: Stuck Losing Out to the Competition? ...............................................................
Chapter 3: Stuck Not Selling Enough?....................................................................................
Chapter 4: Stuck With Erratic Business Volume? ................................................................
Chapter 5: Stuck Failing to Strategize?....................................................................................
Chapter 6: Stuck With Costs Eating Up All the Profits?......................................................
Chapter 7: Stuck Still Doing What’s Not Working?..............................................................
Chapter 8: Stuck Being Marginalized by the Marketplace?..................................................
Chapter 9: Stuck With Mediocre Marketing?.........................................................................
Chapter 10: Stuck Still Saying, “I Can Do It Myself”?..........................................................
Chapter 11: How To Get Going and Growing in a Crisis Economy.................................
Chapter 12: Congratulations! You’re Unstuck!..................................................................
Introduction
Bad Economy? Good News!

I love a bad economy. So do my clients. And after you read this book, so will you.
I love poor business climates—like the one we’re in today—not because of the pain
they cause people. Far from it. I love them because when you move beyond the worry and
fear, you discover that areas of growth are actually more plentiful than they are during boom
times.
In a bad economy, you can walk all over your competition, lap the field, run circles—
you pick the metaphor. The main thing is that you can win easily…if you know how to
benefit from bad times. Everyone else is dropping out of the race, and you’re seeing the
checkered flag. You’re looking forward and everyone else is looking backwards. They’re
terrified, and you’re making a fortune. You’re seeing opportunities and overlooked markets,
transactions, and areas of thinking that no one else saw in good times, so they certainly
won’t see them in times of financial struggle.
This book makes a unique promise. Anyone can show you how to succeed when all
the indicators are up. I’m going to show you how to succeed as never before…when the
nation’s and the world’s financial picture looks bleak.
As I was completing this book, the stock market’s gyrations were unprecedented. On
one day in particular, the market dropped more than 700 points. But on that same day, 100
stocks went up. Why is it that even when the news is at its worst, some companies are having
their best year ever?
And why can’t you?
You can, and in this book I will show you precisely how.
Our starting point is to ask, respectfully and reverentially, whether your business or
enterprise might be stuck.
A “stuck” business, whether entrepreneurial in nature or a Fortune 500 company, is
one that fails to grow predictably every year, every quarter, every day. If you’re being carried
along by the marketplace, then the moment the marketplace dries up, your business is going
to dry up, too, because you’re not in control of your destiny. In good times, stuck
businesses don’t even realize they’re stuck!
Imagine that a business made $100,000 last year and $110,000 this year. They could
argue that they are growing, but in actuality they’re only growing because of the organic
growth of their market, not because of any proactive or strategic action they’re taking. So
when the market dries up, it takes stuck companies down with it.
The top four reasons for stagnation, in my experience, are the following:
1 Not incorporating growth thinking into everything a business owner does;
2 Not measuring, monitoring, comparing, or quantifying results;
3 Not having the detailed, strategic marketing plan with specific
performance growth expectations; and
4 Not knowing how to set appropriate, specific goals.
These problems are magnified in tough economic times. First, you’ve got the
problem of lower revenue because the business climate is poor. And second, the concept of
recession or hard times in and of themselves freezes people. They get scared. They don’t
know what to do, so they tend to do nothing, or they tend to do more of things that weren’t
working in the first place.
The good news for you is that your competition probably isn’t reading this book. In
fact, in challenging economic times like these, it’s very likely that your competitor is already
out of business or scurrying to stay afloat.
The purpose of this book is to show you how to make sure the same thing doesn’t
happen to you. In fact, I want to take it a step further—I want to teach you to love
recessions and to embrace economic downturns, to even learn how to profit handsomely
from your business challenges, adversities, and even your competition. That’s because when
the going gets tough, the competition packs up and leaves. And if you know how to be
strategic; if you know how to direct your business, your division, or your department
intelligently; if you know how to grow and sustain great, high-profit clients; and if you know
how to capitalize on the shortcomings of your competitors, you’ll quickly find that you can
enjoy even more success and make even more money than during so-called boom times.
If your business is stuck, I’ll get you unstuck. And by the time you finish this book,
you’ll feel the same way that many prosperous business people feel about tough economic
times—bring ’em on! You may not love the bad times more than good times, but you’ll
have the confidence that you’ll be able to profit, no matter what the economy—or your
competitors—are doing. You’ll see options, opportunities, and profit possibilities that
weren’t evident in the past. You’ll have a highly specific action plan to reach stratospheric
levels of growth. All while the commentators (who aren’t businesspeople!) on the financial
news networks are wringing their hands daily.
As a business owner or professional, you should be anything but fearful in a bad
economy or a recessionary period. In a good market, almost all anybody has to do is suit up
and wait for business to arrive at the doorstep. The “jet stream” of prosperity carries
everyone forward. They don’t have to be good businesspeople. They don’t have to be
strategic. They don’t have to offer their clients unique advantages. They don’t even have to
be growth-minded. They just get carried along, topsy turvy. In spite of all their ineptitudes
or flaws, they will still grow along with the climbing economic trend.
In a bad economy, these people become paralyzed. The music stops, and they don’t
know what to do. They retreat. They stagnate. They spend much more time doing more of
the same truly ineffectual things they were doing before, but their ineptitude is no longer
disguised by the enormous force of the upward momentum of a positive economy. Such
businesses are like hang gliders, hot air balloons, or glider planes. Once they get moving,
they can go for hours. But when they find themselves buffeted by changes in air pressure
beyond their control, their crash landings are scary to watch.
A handful of businesses actually become strategic during hard times. By taking on a
growth-minded strategy, these businesses capture the vast majority of new clients in the
market—people who weren’t already buyers or who weren’t ready to move forward, or
perhaps those who didn’t have the need for a given product or service before. But even
more important, strategically minded companies will capture—“steal” in an ethical manner,
if you will—15 to 20 percent of the best buyers from all of their competitors.
So if you’re attracting all the new buyers in your market and you’re appropriating, say,
15 to 20 percent of the best, most profitable, and most repetitive buyers from half a dozen
of your competitors, you’re doubling—believe it or not, redoubling—what you might have
done even in an up market. Even if the bottom appears to fall out of the economy, or your
industry in particular, you can still grow 60, 80, or 100 percent or more, while everyone
around you is stalling or even failing and collapsing. If you really get serious about
understanding value propositions, the concept of preemptiveness, irresistible offers, and the
other potent concepts I’ll share with you in this book, success will be yours in a most
tangible, thrilling way.
In addition, every business has at its disposal twenty to fifty or more highly “upside-
leveragable” impact points—or (eX) factors. These (eX) factors can create exponential
income if you recognize them and harness them. They make people more likely to call you
or go to your website. They make it easier for you to close sales and deals. They turn one-
time buyers into clients who buy every quarter, and they turn non-buyers into people who
buy something. These are the surprisingly, even embarrassingly, simple things you can do to
bring in more prospects, more sales, more profit, more conversions, more markets, and
more ways to start and sustain a relationship.
If your business has fifty such (eX) factors in it and you increase your effectiveness
in, say, just ten of those leverage areas, you will be poised not just for survival in challenging
economic times but in fact to thrive as never before. W. Edwards Deming recognized these
factors in the manufacturing world and as a result helped develop corporate titans. I’ve
taken this approach and applied it to something far more important—the revenue-generating
process for your business.
Again, no one welcomes recessions because of the pain they cause people. Rather,
highly successful, strategic, and totally proactive business people embrace so-called hard
times because they cleanse the marketplace of marginal competitors who aren’t strategic but
instead are just reaping the benefits of good times as opposed to being really good
businesspeople. That’s why I feel comfortable saying that I’m going to teach you to love
recessions. You can have your best years while those around you are facing disaster. You’ll
come out of a downturn stronger, more prosperous, and poised to grow faster than you ever
hoped, or even imagined.
Business success really is as simple as finding what I call an “under-recognized” or
changing need and filling it in with wisdom, empathy, and understanding that no one else
can demonstrate or display. To put it another way, you are solving problems people may not
even clearly be able to articulate. There are three categories of problems: your own
problems, your competitor’s problems, and your market’s problems. Since time
immemorial, the people best skilled at solving the biggest, most important, impactful
problems have been the best rewarded. That has always been, and that will always be.
Chances are that in hard times, both you and your competitors won’t even know the
problems you yourselves are struggling with. You might not even be able to put the
problems you’re facing into words, let alone find solutions. So if you can get clarity about
what problems you’re confronting and trying to solve, you can become a master at solving
those problems for yourself and for your marketplace. And if you do, rich rewards await
you.
Every once in a while, an entrepreneur or company comes along that totally gets it.
Take, for example, JetBlue, the airline that recognized that businesspeople traveling by jet are
bored out of their minds. So they installed TVs for every seat on the plan. A simple idea
but a powerful one. Or years ago, Howard Ruff recognized that beleaguered middle class
investors were being ignored by high-class wealth publications, so he made a fortune
providing advice to people who weren’t rich…yet. American Express studies your
purchasing habits and tailors its direct mail offerings specifically to your likeliest purchases.
One of the prevailing problems I’ve identified in the marketplace is what I call
“ambivalent uncertainty.” This is where your client is not just undecided about whether to
buy from you—he’s unsure whether he should buy at all. This is like the person who stands
in front of a multiplex, looking at the names of all the movies, unmoved by any of them,
unsure whether he really wants to see a movie in the first place. How do you get him to
commit to buy a ticket to your movie—which then opens up the likelihood that he’ll buy
popcorn and soda once he gets into the theater, and will buy your movie on DVD a few
months later?
Or the consumer in the big-box furniture store, debating whether to replace his
bland, unexciting furniture…with even more bland, unexciting furniture. How do you get
him off the dime and into his wallet?
Ambivalent uncertainty occurs when your prospects aren’t entirely sure that they
need your product or service, and they aren’t completely convinced that you are the right
entity to solve their problems. If you can solve just those two (eX) factors in your business,
removing your prospects’ ambivalence and uncertainty about whether they need what you
offer and whether they should choose you over all the rest, once again, enormous success is
yours for the taking.
I’ll show you how.
So if being “stuck” is the problem, what does it mean to get your business unstuck?
You break down your numbers, not just month to month, year to date, and year to
year, but also into categories like how many leads, how many new sales by product, average
sale, and average product-source. Then, you analyze any and all correlations, implications,
and anomalies this data tells you.
You have a systematic, strategic process in place that is designed in a predictable,
sustainable, and continuous manner to bring in prospects and first-time buyers, and keep
advancing and enhancing them forward to recurring purchases in a predictable enough
manner that you can look at your numbers today and accurately predict what your business
will be like in ninety days, one hundred days, or some other timeframe. You’re able to
engineer specific, predictable growth, year after year, because you’re zigging while your
competitor zags. He’s still going door-to-door but you’re doing direct mail. He’s running
ads that don’t pull and you’re tying in with affinity groups. And so on.
You are producing not just incremental gains but exponential gains year after
year. You achieve this by harnessing the little understood power of business generating to
drive multiplied sales and profits. For example, Costco studied its numbers and realized it
made more money from selling memberships than from selling goods in its stores! So it
tailors its advertising and marketing to bring people back into the stores to buy things on a
regular basis…so they will continue to keep their memberships in good standing. And a TV
show, “The Biggest Loser,” promotes a The Biggest Loser Club, whereby an individual pays
a yearly membership fee to lose weight in the online Biggest Loser Club. More than a