Happy Monday folks, crazy week up here with all of the wildfire smoke and pre-summer busy-ness.
Let’s jump in:
Update from last week
It felt like a short and hectic week because we were coming back from a conference last week, that went all day Friday and Saturday. Which meant that I didn’t have much of a weekend last week, and got right into playing catchup.
And since we’re still heads down trying to make more sales, and had a lot of follow-ups to send from the conference, it was a busy one.
Suffice to say, this past weekend was a nice and relaxing one.
The last few weeks have also really helped me refine both our target market and sales process.
It’s funny, how like almost anything, a sales process can be a real rabbit hole. You can get very granular on every step of the process, from exactly how you do cold outreach, the words/text you use, the funnel you create, the way you run sales calls, your pricing/packaging/upselling, and more.
I also think we’re really zeroed in on our ideal target customer. It’s funny because you may think you know who it may be at first, but it’s only once you get into the grind of selling and analyze results that the leader will show itself.
For us, now that we’ve got a bunch of b2b clients, it’s become clear who it is and who we should focus on.
Even though I had a few target segments – 2-3 different types of buyers I thought could be a good fit – 1 is clearly converting at far better rates than the others.
So we’re going to triple down on that segment, the one that’s clearly working, and forget the rest for now.
Key takeaway
The more time I spend in business and the older I get, the more I realize that the key is usually one thing: focus.
They say diversification is good, but some of the greats like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger say the opposite – specialize. Get really freakin’ good at one thing, or one area, or one whatever, and ride that into the wind.
Now that we’ve got some good feedback, indicators and sales, our CTO Alex is focusing 100% on continuing to improve our product, and I’m focusing 100% on selling to 1 type of buyer that we know is working.
I think Alex Harmozi said in one of his videos, that to get any business to $1 million per year, you really just need to get good at selling 1 product/service to 1 type of customer.
In reality, most of us think that business should be more complicated than that – but it isn’t. So take a step back, and if your biz is doing less than $1 million/year – or you’re just starting out – put all of your energy into selling 1 product/service to 1 target market.
And ignore the rest.
Books
I just finished The Greatest Business Decisions of All Time: Apple, Ford, IBM, Zappos, and Others Made Radical Choices that Changed the Course of Business by Verne Harnish.
It’s not the best book I’ve ever read, but it was a very good read. I’d give it a solid B+.
And the title is really all you need to read to get a sense for what it’s about. The book spends each chapter analyzing and explaining what they believe to be the best business decisions of all time, and it’s definitely interesting. They go into detail on how and why certain companies/people made these decisions, and why they were so good.
For example, the decision by Zappos to offer free returns. In the early 2000s this was an insane idea – but now it’s almost a requirement to survive in e-commerce.
It was fun to read about decisions that were revolutionary when they happened, but now are often commonplace.
Recent Content
The next episode of the Grind Mastermind podcast will go out tomorrow, but not live right now. In the meantime:
- you can find the latest podcast episodes, including episode 10 that just dropped, here
- make sure to follow SG on Youtube and Tiktok to catch the highlights of those episodes too!
That’s it for me – have a great week, sign up here to get these weekly updates right to your inbox, and keep grinding.
– Josh
