This video by Daniel Priestly is well worth watching.
If you haven't read any of Daniel's books, you really should:
- Key person of influence
- Oversubscribed
are two of the best.
Work out your total demand capacity
In this video, Daniel talks about how businesses should not worry about the current economic climate and instead should focus on their own demand capacity. This means that business owners should think carefully about the number of customers that they could delight with their services over the course of the year and this represents the total demand capacity.
So say a company has a total demand capacity of 30 customers, if they can attract say 100 highly targeted leads, then they shouldn't need to worry too much about the wider economic climate!
Your 4–7–11 plan
He goes on to discuss theories such as Dunbar's numbers and explains that familiarity with your company and your own personal brand are great ways of attracting new business. From this, it looks like prospects need to spend approximately 7 hours "with you" either via videos, podcasts or any other social media before they will sign up as a customer. You should also be looking for 11 interactions with your prospects. Across 4 different social media platforms.
This is an interesting way of looking at it and I have found this to be true both from a personal buying perspective and also in selling to customers.
It is also interesting how many leading brands, such Virgin Group, have fewer followers than the founder (in this case Richard Branson).
Nobody cares about your business brand. They only care about your personal brand.
Your quarterly spotlight initiative
Every quarter, you will find a platform or influencer who has more followers than you, but who has the same target customer-base as you, to hold some joint event e.g. podcast, webinars etc.
40-week plan
Have a consistent repeatable plan that you can carry out for 40 weeks of the year that will then generate the leads that you need to convert into your total demand capacity number of clients.
These are called LAPS:
Leads
Appointments
Presentations
Sales