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Keeping Your New Year’s Momentum Going

Believe It Or Not, You’ll Reach Your Goals When You Learn To Do Less, Not More.

Believe It Or Not, The Key To Reaching Your Goals
Is Learning To Do Less.

That’s Right—Less, Not More.

By Rich Harshaw

Note: About once a month, Monopolize Your Marketplace takes a break from marketing advice and focuses on personal development topics. We call this ongoing series “Personal Edge.”
Enjoy!

Ever notice how nobody ever talks about New Year’s resolutions after about January 10th or 15th?

That’s because it normally only takes a couple weeks for our collective resolve, willpower, and determination to melt away like butter on a hot stove.

Or more accurately stated: our will to improve ourselves gets overpowered and drowned out by the routine rat race of life. Going to the gym sounds great until you have to decide between an hour of exercise or catching up on the twenty-seven unreturned phone calls sitting on your phone. Earning extra money is exciting until you realize that you barely have enough time to earn the money you’re already supposed to be earning anyway.

The problem always comes down to time. There’s never enough of it.
Read More

Know When To Hold ‘Em, Know When To Fold ‘Em

The First Step Is To Realize You’re Holding The Poo Poo Platter. The Second Step Is To Do Something About It.

The First Step Is To Realize You’re Holding The Poo Poo Platter. The Second Step Is To Do Something About It.

You’d Never Tolerate A Terrible Salesperson.
So Why Put Up With An Underperforming Website?

Don’t Do This: Contractor Websites

By Rich Harshaw

Note: This article is part of Monopolize Your Marketplace’s ongoing “Don’t Do This” series. Sometimes it’s just as helpful to know what to avoid as it is to know what to do.

Imagine for a moment you were in the market to hire a new salesperson.

After checking around, you luck out and hear about a guy who’s been in remodeling sales for fifteen years. He recently moved here because his wife got a promotion at her job, and he’s looking to get back to work. He comes in for an interview and says all the right things; he looks the part; he clearly knows the industry. You call his former employer and get a good report—this guy knows how to close. You negotiate a modest base salary and generous commission package and he signs on. You put him through your closing methodology training and he quickly absorbs everything.

In other words, everything is perfect.

After a few weeks of training and shadowing your top producer, you hand him ten home improvement leads… and he comes back with one sale. Your company’s historic closing ratio is 32% first-call close, and 40% after reeling in stragglers.

Yikes.
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Right Message, Wrong Time: Part 2

If You’re Saying The Right Things In Your Marketing… But At The Wrong Time… Your Results Will Stink And You Won’t Even Know Why.

The Best Marketing In The World Will FAIL If Your Prospect
Isn’t Ready To See It.

By Rich Harshaw

If you haven’t already read Part 1 of “Right Message, Wrong Time” please do so now. This posting picks up right where the other one left off….

What we want to learn today is how to make the Educational Spectrum work FOR you, not AGAINST you. To do that, you’ve got to understand who’s going to be seeing or hearing a given marketing piece or ad, and where they’re likely to be on the Educational Spectrum. And that’s going to depend heavily on where the ad is placed and how much familiarity that group of people have with your product or service.

Let me run you through a few examples to bring this principle home for you. First of all, a really easy example you can relate to in your contractor marketing: The internet. If somebody is looking for something online, then we know one thing about them for sure: they already know what they want to buy, they just need to find somebody to sell it to them. Therefore, websites (including home improvement websites), by definition, should always contain Vendor Selection hot button information. You should be telling people why you’re better than the other 169 companies that have websites a couple clicks away. The same thing is true for pay-per-click internet advertising… people are searching based on keywords they type into Google. That means they are serious—you’d better be ready to tell them why to choose you, both in the ad itself and in the landing page they see when they click through.
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Right Message, Wrong Time

If Potential Lasik Patients Are Terrified Of The Procedure, They Won’t Care How Good The Doctor Says He Is.

If Potential Lasik Patients Are Terrified Of The Procedure, They Won’t Care How Good The Doctor Says He Is.

The Best Marketing In The World Will FAIL If Your Prospect
Isn’t Ready To See It.

By Rich Harshaw

Me: “Nobody cares that you’re the best. Seriously. Nobody cares.”

Lasik Surgeon: “Yea, but we’ve done over 40,000 procedures. Everyone knows us. We’re the best.”

Me: “Then why are you coming to me asking why your advertising quit working?”

Lasik Surgeon: (awkward silence)

Me: “Let me put it to you this way: If 90% of your potential market is scared to death by Lasik, then the fact that you are the best at doing what scares the heck out of them doesn’t really help much.”

Lasik Surgeon: “But… we’re… the best.”

Me: “You have to convince people not to be scared; that there is no danger; that there is no pain. Once they start to believe THAT… then they might care if you’re the best.”
Read More

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