A supply-driven market is a market when the economy is going well. Everybody has a lot of money. They want to go out in the market and figure out what to spend on just because everybody has money. What happens is, if you put your product out, your company out, or yourself out there saying, hey, I have this degree, and that’s my work experience. Could you give me a job? That works because people in the market are looking to spend money. Throw your message out; someone will connect to you, somebody’s going to buy from you.
However, in a slow market, the supply-driven approach doesn’t really work in the market we are seeing today. You must have a demand-driven approach, which is how to generate the demand. Generating the demand is a game of psychology. You cannot throw your product out and expect people to connect.
How does the whole thing work?
Let’s talk about something recent that has happened. Elon Musk has been launching rockets. Not only launching rockets into space but actually bringing these Rockets back to the Earth and then reusing these rockets, which has helped his company SpaceX cut costs on building rockets. So they’ve become so efficient with their program that the US government, in the last 40 years were not launching any rockets into space, have started launching their new satellites into space using Elon musk’s technology.
How does an earth landing happen?
How does the moon landing happen? Why is it so difficult to get a rocket back to the Earth? The Earth got the gravitational pull, which is pulling everything inwards. That’s how it keeps the atmosphere intact because it pulls all the air inwards, so it doesn’t Escape. So it’s got this whole atmosphere around. What happens is that when a rocket is going out of this atmosphere, all it needs is a little fuel and some escape velocity. That helps a rocket escape. But when it’s coming back, it becomes hazardous because the moment it comes into this outer gravitational pull of the Earth, it gets pulled in so fast and so hard that it’s going to crash. Even if you land it in an ocean, the rocket is going to break into pieces. If on land, then there is no chance that the rocket is going to survive. So this whole gravitational pull has to be managed.
How were they able to do it?
The key is when the rocket approaches the Earth or any other planet at an angle, so it’s not actually going in; it’s going by. And then what happens is that it should have enough speed that it doesn’t go in directly when it touches the whole outer gravitational pull. It has to manage its velocity so that the thing pulls it inside. It goes around the Earth and slowly approaches the Earth. It takes a couple of rounds. It has to maintain its speed in order to maintain stability. So that over a period of time, the atmosphere is pulling it inside, but it wants to take a couple of turns before it can land safely at a slant so it doesn’t crash into pieces.
Why am I telling you all of this?
Customer psychology is just like this. These days, people don’t have a lot of money because the slowdown has hit everybody financially in some way or the other. Businesses have lost money, so everybody is short of money. So the Earth is your business, and you’re throwing your message out, which is pulling them in. The customer is scared because they don’t want to come inside. They don’t have the trust. Once they want to come inside, you’re going to pitch them a product. Then it’s going to be a problem for you all.
That’s a problem because what you do is when the customer is passing by, you throw your product name at them. What they do is they take that product name and then Google it. What happens next is when they Google your product, Google confuses them even more. They’re not going to come again to buy your product if they Google it because they’re already confused enough.
So the exercise I have for you is you try and put a product name in Google and what happens is Google doesn’t take you to the website anymore. Google provides everything that’s inside their website on the search page itself. They will provide all of the information on anything on the search page itself. Below that, you have 40 other links and options.
So they don’t even want you to go inside the website. All of the information is on the search page. They expand their search results to whatever is inside your website and show it on the search page. The customer doesn’t even click inside because Google wants them to stay on the search page. They don’t want them to go inside and lose the customer.
What’s going to happen is, the moment you put your product name, customers are going to Google it, and then whatever they see there is going to pull them away from your product. Whether they see a competitor in competing products and options or whether they get all confused and then don’t want to decide at all.
So you never provide your product, service, your company name, your name, and your credentials up front. Never do that.
What do you do?
The Earth is your product, and you’re going to get the customer in step by step. First, you throw a little message out that interests them. Now, they don’t want to go straight inside because they’re like, no, I don’t want to go straight inside. I will check out your product because my time is too valuable. I want to stay on Google.
Once they connect with the message, say, I understand your pain. This is probably a pain if you’re out looking like that. I probably have a solution to your pain, and I understand that pain. Then describe that pain in two or three lines. Now, they’re interested in solving the problem or that pain. So they want to take a wise and stable decision. Now they come inside, and they check out your world a little bit. There’s another message. They talk in detail about their pain. The first message was maybe three minutes. This one is maybe 10 minutes.
They are kind of in your orbit, but they don’t want to land yet. They just want to keep going. They’re like, let me see at the slightest touch of boredom or any selling tactic you use, which is so cheap. Don’t be cheap on your way to greatness. If you use any selling tactic or boredom talking, they will go straight out there going to say, let me just speed up my engines and get the hell out of this gravitational field. But what you do is keep focusing on the message, which is their pain, and then you give them a few options.
Why don’t you be the Google for them? And you say, hey, I add these options that you can actually check out, and none of these options are your product. There are like seven options. They get pulled a little more into the gravitational field. You let them browse through the options; you let them hang around for a bit. Towards the end, one of those is your product. By this time, they’re very close to the surface and wondering maybe I want to land. They go through your options.
Now, you don’t talk about the product, but you talked about the promise, you say, I have tried out all these options and what I found for myself is one of them works better than the others because it saves you time and it is just about the right kind of budget, and you don’t waste a lot of time. We don’t waste a lot of money and get the job done in a very short while. Then you make them take action.
What is this action?
It could be meeting you. It could be taking a phone call with you. It could be attending a webinar or something. They have to set a time and agree to meet you in an environment where there is no Google. It is just you and them. The first part is called message. This is layer one of the startup frat model. The second part is called outreach. It is layer two of the startup frat model, and the last one is when they’re very close to the surface. It’s very difficult to escape from this gravitational field because that will mean losing all of the time and energy
If you could do all this to solve their problem with your product, then whatever you’ve done is during the outreach, you’ve taken something called feedback.
What is feedback?
Feedback in the four essential questions you need to ask your customer before ever bringing your product into the game.
The Four Essential Questions
Four essential questions will keep you in the game. If you don’t have the answers to those four questions, you don’t know the sale is going to happen or not. And if you do have the answers to those four questions, you will know for sure whether you do have the sale or not.
Now, all of those sales will still not convert, but you would have up to a 50% conversion rate, which is more than 10 times that of the market average. You go and talk to any sales and marketing person, and they will tell you that their conversion rate is between 2 & 4 percent. You got a conversion rate of more than 10 times that of the industry average.
Crafting your message does not take any money. It’s free. It’s free today and is free forever. The outreach stuff costs little to no money. You don’t need to build a building. You don’t need to hire people. You can use the internet as your servant to do all of this stuff. Today, you don’t even have to pay the phone bill. Zoom is free if you do a one-on-one meeting, or if you do a meeting for up to 45 minutes, it is free. If you do 20 people and do a webinar within 45 minutes, the whole thing is free. There is no money involved. This entire thing is free all the way to the landing. The only thing that costs money is producing a product.
This whole thing, this whole gravitational field, and the pattern and how much gravitational force versus how much velocity versus escape velocity, is called a product ecosystem. You can craft this whole thing for inside of maybe 20, 30 thousand rupees because most of the stuff belongs to your product ecosystem. And your product is one among three, so you got to build two other on top of it. And it’s free to build. Just to keep this thing together to give your customer a good experience. It costs maybe twenty to thirty thousand rupees.
The benefit of this product ecosystem is that it puts you right at the top in the five layers of influence.
How do you build this product ecosystem?
It takes 30 to 90 days. What are the components of the product ecosystem? Your personal consulting, a digital downloadable product, and your actual core product or service you are trying to promote. The customers don’t want to engage with you in a digital downloadable product, but they still want the information. There should be some format to do that. This whole thing is put together into a community where people can come, and there is no pressure to buy.
So most of the stuff is free, there is no pressure, but they have their own time to take their own decision except that they don’t take that decision in a Google ecosystem. They take the decision in your ecosystem. If you give a customer exactly what they want. They are passing by you throw out your message and say this is what you want? Here’s what I have, come and get it. They don’t want to take it. They want to Google you first. They want to check different competing things on Amazon or Google etc. And anything that they find over there is going to take them away from your product.
So what you got to do is throw out your message. The startup frat model is a three-layer model that says message first, outreach later, and then comes your products/services or your product ecosystem. This is the third layer. The message forms only 2% of the game and is free. Outreach forms 10% of the game and is free, and your product ecosystem forms 90% of the game. It is almost free except for producing your product. How much cost does it take to produce? But it is less than the cost of hiring one driver, and with that, you can create a whole product ecosystem and work in that format.