by Sabri Suby
Are you trading time for money and not earning your true value?
Are you stuck in a state of feast or famine?
Are competitors with inferior products and services seeing more
success than you and stealing your market share?
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above, then you’re likely so busy working
‘in’ your business in a reactive state that you never get time to work ‘on’ your
business – and you’re making a fatal mistake.
Now compare that type of business to a successful, thriving business
grounded in a lead and revenue-producing system like I’m going to show you
in this book. A wildly successful business is a business where:
Customers chase you, and not the other way around.
Predictability and consistency generate new leads, clients, and
revenue.
You speak only to highly-qualified prospects you can actually help.
You have an automated lead-generation system that delivers new
customers on demand with minimal human effort.
You focus only on the Highly Leveraged Activities that produce
revenue.
So, here’s the bottom line: Being busy is not the same as being productive.
Our lives are full of distractions, and it’s hard to stay focussed when your
world consists of hundreds of tiny tasks and millions of voices screaming for
your attention.
As the founder of a business that you’re looking to scale, your focus needs to
move from doing the everyday work to producing revenue for your business
and steering the ship.
If you don’t aspire to scale your business and you’re content with simply
practising your craft, that’s fine; however, this book likely isn’t for you. The
selling system outlined in this book is for business owners hungry for growth.
You see, just like the chef we spoke of above, the money in business isn’t in
your product or service, it’s in the selling of your product or service.
What I mean is, no matter what industry you’re in, once you’ve got a few
team members, and you’re looking to scale your business, you’re no longer a
builder, baker, or business consultant. You’re a marketer.
The fate of your business lies not just in having the best product or service
but in your ability to market your products or services. While this might be
difficult for you to accept, it’s true.
I’m not saying you don’t want to have the best product or service in your
industry, I’m saying the money is not in that – because if you can’t
effectively communicate that to your market, it doesn’t matter.
The market doesn’t pay you to have the best products or service. It rewards
you for solving problems. A transaction takes places where, in the mind of
the consumer, the value of the solution you’re selling outweighs the price
you’re asking.
In other words, you’ll be compensated on the basis of how you market and
build value around your solution to the pains and desires of your customers.
The bigger the problem you solve, the more you will be compensated.
Your focus should be on intimately understanding your market and your
prospects’ deepest desires, pains, fears, hopes, and dreams. You need to
know them better than any of your competitors, and then craft marketing
messages that effectively communicate how you can solve these problems.
This exercise is the single most valuable activity you can do in your business.
I refer to these Highly Leveraged Activities as the 4% of activities that move
the money needle. In reality, 20% of activities bring in 80% of your
company’s revenue.
The 4% Rule For Moving The Money
Needle
This really became clear to me when I learned about Vilfredo Pareto.
Pareto was an Italian economist who became famous for his 80/20 rule. This
is now commonly called the Pareto principle.
He first discovered this rule when he found that 80% of a nation’s wealth was
controlled by 20% of the population. As he studied this phenomenon more
deeply, he found a disproportionate relationship between cause and effect in
other areas of life, including real estate, growing crops, and all sorts of
things:
20% of the input creates 80% of the result.
20% of the workers produce 80% of the result.
20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue.
20% of the roads cause 80% of the crashes.
And on and on…
In my deep dives into marketing psychology, I’ve found his 80/20 rule to
hold true for almost all areas of business, including…
Popularity of products.
Sources of incoming leads.
Customer service problems.
Reasons customers buy.
Activities in your business that produce revenue!
And while you might have heard about the 80/20 rule, most people never
truly apply it to their business let alone other areas of their life.
In business, the little stuff kills the big stuff. What I mean is that there are lots
of small, nit-picky things in your business constantly screaming for attention,
but these aren’t the tasks that produce revenue.
When I started to apply this in my business, revenue skyrocketed. To give
you an example, here are my business activities:
All Business Activities
Checking emails
Writing copy
Speaking with clients
Having meetings
Creating Facebook ads
Checking stats
Creating systems & processes
Coming up with offers & promotions
Training/On-boarding staff
Creating sales funnels
Sending emails
Shooting videos
Recruiting
Running errands
Making webinars
Creating proposals
Scheming & plotting
Setting up systems
Looking at analytics
Public relations/Interviews
The 80/20 rule demonstrates you can and should disregard 80% of your
business activities. They should either be delegated or outsourced so you can
focus on the top 20% that produce revenue.
Once you’ve done this in your business, you need to take it one step further
and truly become a high-performance entrepreneur. You see, you should
apply the 80/20 rule to the 80/20 rule itself. That is to say, 80% of the 80% of
the revenue comes from 20% of the 20% of your revenue-producing
activities.
To put it more simply…
4% of your activities create 64% of the revenue in your business
In my business, after cutting out the 96% of my activities that produced little
or no revenue, this is what the top 4% revenue-producing activities looked
like:
Revenue-Producing Activities
Writing sales copy
Coming up with offers & promotions
Creating sales funnels
Shooting videos
Doing webinars
Scheming & plotting
Because these 4% of activities literally bring in 64% of all the revenue for my
business, I hired an operations manager and other team leaders to do all the
other things that don’t move the money needle.
Sadly, here is where most entrepreneu
rs and top employees mess up. Instead
of investing their time exclusively in their super-productive 4%, too many
business owners and salespeople get caught up in the minutiae of the day-to-
day 96%. All day long, they go from putting out one fire to another, never
having a chance to invest time working on the 4% that moves the money
needle and propels their business forward.
So what are your top 4% revenue-producing activities?
Are they creating new offers? Motivating sales staff? Increasing lifetime
customer value? Whatever it is, you need to figure it out.
And once you’ve put together a list of these vitally important revenue-
producing activities, it’s time to get to work and start automating and creating
systems for just about everything else.
You shouldn’t invest your time in boring, low-value tasks. Because every
minute you spend on low-value tasks or putting out fires is time taken away
from the areas of your business that have the most leverage and the largest
potential to make you money.
This goes well beyond business activities. You see, you want to audit your
time and where it is being spent and where you are getting the most leverage.
For example, are you still cleaning your house, cooking your meals, doing
laundry, and running errands?
This life admin work is nothing more than a collection of low-level activities
that can easily be outsourced. But how do you know when it’s time to hire a
cook or a cleaner?
The very first step is to figure out how much you’re earning per hour right
now.
Value Of Your Current Time
I work____hours per week and I make $_________per week.
_______hours ÷ $_______ = hourly rate
Once you have figured out how much your hourly rate is, you don’t want to
complete any tasks that you could hire someone to do for a lesser rate. Let’s
say you make $3,000 per week and work 40 hours, resulting in your hourly
rate being $75 per hour.
You can hire a cook or cleaner for $20 per hour to free up more of your time
to work on your business. You do it. Immediately. Because it’s not costing
you $20 per hour to clean your house or to have your meals cooked, it’s
saving you $55 per hour.
That’s right, if you were to do those tasks yourself, you would be actually
losing $55 per hour, if not a lot more. This is because if you clean your house
for an hour, you’re not able to earn your rate of $75 per hour. You’re
essentially hiring yourself at $20 per hour when you could hire yourself at
$75 per hour.
Download and complete The King’s Audit worksheet to get a better
understanding of where you should be spending your time.
Remember my 4% rule.
Only 4% of your activities each day drive your business forward and move
the money needle. The other 96% of the things still have to get done, but they
shouldn’t get done by you.
Action Points
Download ‘The King’s Audit’ worksheet at:
https://resources.selllikecrazy.co/
Make a list of all of your business activities.
Conduct an 80/20 analysis of these activities.
Create an action plan to help you delegate, automate or outsource the
80% of your activities that don’t produce revenue or move your
business forward.
Then take it one step further and invest your time only in the 4% of
activities that bring in the most revenue.
How To Sell Like Crazy
Let me be brutally clear and not mince my words about what I believe
to be the single most important rule in business.
It is this:
As the owner, your number one responsibility is to sell.
Selling is not something you do on the side. It’s not something you can
outsource or completely delegate. It’s the single most important job of any
business and consequently any founder or owner.
It doesn’t matter whether you have a great product or service… Your entire
existence as an entrepreneur lives and dies by how effective your sales and
marketing is at producing new revenue.
Your business success is not based on your motivation, your team, your
passion, or your desire to help people.
If you have a marketing and sales machine that predictably brings in hordes
of new customers every day like clockwork, owning a business can be
phenomenal.
If you don’t, owning a business can be unpredictable, unreliable, and
incredibly stressful. This is because the destiny of your company, your
income, your family’s income, and the income of your employees and their
families rest in whatever ‘fate’ drops in your lap.
You can choose to ignore this fact, turn a blind eye, and tell yourself that
‘everything will work out fine’. Or you can read this book from cover to
cover and ensure your business doesn’t become a depressing statistic.
Either way, you must understand that all the latest shiny marketing tactics,
hacks and tools being peddled will not solve the number one problem
business owners face: ‘How do I get more customers – and therefore more
revenue?’
More tactics are not the answer. And you likely already know this deep down
inside. Because if you’re like most business owners, you’ve gone through
countless CRM software programs, landing page builders, all the latest
gizmos and gadgets and you may have even hired marketing agencies, only to
find very little success.
The reason for this is because these are all designed to treat the symptoms to
low sales and not cure the systemic cause of the problem.
You need something different.
Are You Ready?
In this book, I’m going to tell you things you won’t hear anywhere else. The
methods I divulge in the following pages are highly controversial.
Not because they’re untrue. It’s because they are truer than anything else
you’ve likely ever been taught about sales and marketing.
What you’ll discover in this book is going to change everything for you, and
especially the way you think about business and your income.
You see, after working with thousands of business owners and entrepreneurs,
I’ve realised most business owners don’t really understand the business they
are in.
What I mean is the baker thinks they are in the baking business, the builder
thinks they are in the building business, and the dentist thinks they are in the
dentistry business.
When in fact they are not.
They are in the business of selling those particular products and services.
You bake bread. You build homes. You fill cavities. This part of your
business, the product or service, is likely the reason you got started in
business, and it’s easy to get wrapped up in this kind of thinking: ‘I’m a
builder, so I must spend my time building homes’.
The fact is, most of the business owner’s time should be spent on the real
business that every business owner is in – selling.
As a business owner, selling should be your number one priority – and you
must act accordingly. This means spending the bulk of your time on
marketin
g and sales-related activities – or as I call them, revenue-producing
activities.
This doesn’t mean you have to be the one on the phone actually doing the
selling yourself. Nor does it mean you must write every piece of sales copy
on your website. However, you must be very much involved in every step of
the sales and marketing process, so you understand the problems intimately
and can identify the opportunities.
Because it doesn’t matter what sort of expertise you bring to your business –
whether you’re a problem solver, a great manager, a numbers person, or a
systems and processes person.
To be a truly effective entrepreneur, you must become your business’s
number one expert at selling.
There is only one way to do this, and that is to invest most of your time,
attention and energy in revenue producing activities – or the activity of
selling.
The ratio of time, effort and money spent on selling as opposed to other
aspects of business should be 80/20, with 80% of it going toward revenue-
producing activities and only 20% towards all the other management
activities in your business. Or, if you have a team in place, you should apply
this 80/20 analysis again, and only be focussed on your 4% of activities that
move the money needle.
You see, there are five major functions of business—product development,
customer service, accounting, operations, and marketing.
The one function that should always be given top priority in any business is
marketing.
The other functions are clearly vital to a well-functioning business, yet
without marketing you will not have sales and without sales, you will not
have cash flow and without cash flow your business will die from lack of
cash, which is the oxygen to any business. Without it you will not be able to
pay for all the other functions, and you will go out of business very quickly.
Sales Trumps All
I believe this to be the number one rule in business. Sales trumps all.
Sales are the ‘tip of the spear’, and everything else stems from this point.
I hope by this point I’ve convinced you that, as the business owner, selling
should be your primary job.
I’ve seen this to be true from working with thousands of clients in countless
businesses of all different types, sizes, and industries. Establishing a selling
system like the one outlined in this book is up to 90% of the battle in running