MindValleyLabs Internet Marketing Blog

The Tale of a Fortified City

Paris, a Trojan Prince, kidnapped Helen of Troy who was reputed to be the most beautiful woman who ever lived. When her husband discovered that she was missing, all of Greece took part in the ensuing war. They sieged the huge city of Troy for years, but they couldn’t figure out how to get inside the gates.

We all know necessity is the mother of all invention. After 10 fruitless years, they came up with the Trojan Horse. It was a big wooden horse on wheels, big enough for a bunch of Greek soldiers to hide inside. They pretended to retreat and sail home, acting like they had given up and left.

When the people of Troy opened their city gates and the found the horse, they didn’t know what it was. The Greeks planted a spy to trick them into believing it was a gift, so they brought it in. It was so big that it couldn’t go through the gate so they tore down a piece of the city wall to get it in.

During the night after everyone had fallen asleep, the Greek soldiers came out of the Trojan horse, killed the guards on the walls, and signaled to the other Greeks to come attack Troy. The Greeks could get in now because the walls were torn down. Troy was conquered and the war was won.

How does the Trojan horse apply to marketing?

When the Trojans saw the a huge wooden horse, they brought it in. Why? Because they perceived it as a gift of some value. They took it inside. The Greeks used the Trojan horse to win over the Trojans. I’m not advocating violence, but I am pointing out the genius behind the idea of using the ‘gift’ as a way to get to your prospect’s wallet.

An  Introduction to Trojan Horse Marketing

Let me introduce you to a marketing principle called Trojan Horse Marketing. The reality is, when people see a marketing message or a promotion, their walls go up further.

Trojan Horse Marketing is defined as getting your promo message across, past the prospects’ barriers which have been erected to block out those promotional messages to begin with.

Trojan horse marketing works in the real world. Why? Because even if your prospect has strong walls and fortresses, when they see your Trojan horse, they see it as a gift from heaven, and they bring that gift inside the barriers. That’s what Trojan Horse Marketing is about.

It’s about how to position your marketing as a Trojan horse; as a gift; as a welcome distraction from life; as an answer from heaven.

Ask yourself, “Am I a Trojan horse in my marketing?” Down the line, I’ll talk more about how to express Trojan Horse Marketing - in email, in blogs, in different forms of promotions.

This customer delight formula is based on inspiration I got on my trip to Singapore; namely from my trip to Aston’s Grill, which is a budget western food place.

It also happens to be the only budget food place I know with a queue that goes down the length of the entire street – people queue up from end to end to eat steak – and it took us about an hour to get in!

Here’s the question: why do they have such a long queue for a budget food place? The obvious answer is, “yes, the food is great”, but beyond the generous portions and pleasant atmosphere, the first thing people talk about isn’t the steak, nor is it the service.

It’s the SIDE DISHES. The potato chips. The French fries. The baked potatoes. My friends have stories of people ordering 15 side dishes to go with a chicken chop, because the side dishes are just that great.

People are raving about the side dishes! Why? Because the French fries had paprika salt sprinkled on top of them, and people queue up for an hour down the length of the street to enter Aston’s grill. No doubt the portions are good, and so is the food, but when people think ‘Aston’s Grill’, they think paprika fries. Why?

I think this is the answer. First, take your entire customer service process –no matter the field or genre you’re in- and break it down into its components. So, for example, in a steak house, you have the waiters, the menu with French fries and other side dishes.

Next, take the seemingly most insignificant thing, and add a dash of effort to it. When you add a dash of paprika to your fries, it creates a pleasant disruption to your customer’s expectations because they haven’t seen anything like it before. When people eat the paprika fries, the place is elevated in their minds because of the tiny, extra touch. I call this the Paprika Effect.

The main problem is that it takes a bit of effort and a considerable amount of time to add customer delight to your main product items– your big offerings, which are your main course. But, when it come to the small things, the smaller battles, the ‘low-hanging fruit’ as it were, if you tweak the little things first, you will create a domino effect so that by the time you reach the ‘main course’, you already have a line of fanatical customers.

In the same manner, in the US, everyone goes to Gordon Biersch because of the ‘Gordon Biersch Garlic Fries’. It’s a very similar concept, but it’s funnier because Gordon Biersch is a micro brewery and people go there because of what they’ve done with their fries!

Let’s put it this way. When people go to a grill house, they expect good steak and decent side dishes, simply because they’re mostly paying for good steak. They get satisfied, but they don’t get delighted. Just adding paprika to the chips turns customers into fanatics who want to come back, and knock at your door again.

Joe Girard, the world’s #1 retail person, said something very simple: his strategy was to send out postcards that said, “I like you.” For example, every now and again you could send your customers a postcard that says ‘I like you’, and with it comes with a small extra bonus. It can something as simple as an audio, but is has to be totally unexpected. I emphasize on ‘customers’ because we know that if you start by giving things free, people don’t normally value it at all.

You can start immediately after they buy - you can turn people into fans right from the beginning and get rid of all the doubts they may have had. It also gets them to consume more of your products, and that in turn makes it more likely that they’ll come back to buy more. When you add that element of customer delight, your business even has the potential to go viral, a formula that Centerpointe has used quite successfully.

You can do it, too. First, you need to create and put in place a proper customer relations system. For example, make sure you have a separate buyers list. Once you have the basics in place, you can start figuring out how to add paprika because if you don’t have proper customer relationships or a proper back end, doing this might not be as effective.

Then, you can think about the various components of your customer relationship. Where can you add paprika? Think about a small thing that other people ignore that you can make great. What tweaks can you make? Instead of a .pdf file, can you send a video file instead? When you do those little things, you create something for your customers to form a long queue about.

How do you leverage public relations more? Joel Roberts says you should always begin by asking yourself, “What is the problem that I am trying to solve?”

Don’t talk about the solution until you have talked about the problem. Here’s one more secret on how to get attention from the media.

There’s a huge struggle in this area because as a business owner, you have to grow rich in your niche. But, to get mass media attention, you have to broadcast for a reason. That means your message is broadcast to a lot more people than those in your niche. This is where most people get it completely wrong, and here Joel Roberts gave a very interesting example.

“If you have a problem that tackles illiteracy and helps people learn how to read, how do you get on a radio show?” he asked. Nobody in the audience had a clue as to how to answer that question.

Frame It in A Bigger Perspective

The mass market has to pay attention. Joel Roberts’ suggestion was to find research that shows that illiteracy is related to crime.

• The more illiterate people, the higher the crime rate.
• Show that illiteracy is related to income – namely, the class divide.
• Show that it’s also related to taxes because people that are illiterate generally don’t produce a lot of income, therefore they don’t produce much in taxes for your community.

I found this information useful because I had certainly never looked at it that way.

This Gets People’s Attention

You can go on radio and talk about crime. You can then talk about fighting crime by fighting illiteracy. People will listen because everybody cares about crime. If you don’t make those connections, you’re never going to get on the radio; you’re not going to get publicity from any mass media.

No matter what your niche is, you have to figure out a way to frame it so that the masses will listen. If you can grab their attention for an instant, you can then go into the details. But, if you start with the details and the solution, you won’t get anywhere with the mass media.

Michael Masterson has built several dozen companies, all of which are very successful. His first company didn’t do that well, and from there he also learnt what not to do, which is also incredibly important. I could quote his entire book, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat which has hit #1 on Amazon’s best-selling book list, but here’s what really struck me as I read it.

Anybody and everybody in a new company should be spending 80% of their time on selling

That’s a bold statement, because people are usually too afraid to communicate the importance of revenues, profits and sales. Michael Masterson says that in launching new businesses, many entrepreneurs do the opposite of spending 80% of their time on selling. If you’re not doing it, you’re wasting time, energy, effort and resources because that’s what it takes to create a successful company.

If your sales generating model isn’t running well, your core is not right. How will you get anywhere if you don’t have any money coming in? All the books I’ve read lately have communicated that message. I love creating the world’s most democratic workplace and pushing that to the next level, but what comes first is sales.

I’m totally comfortable saying that, and I’m glad that many other successful entrepreneurs articulate the same thing. If you don’t sell, you don’t impact people’s lives. I don’t believe that people who read free lessons have as much impact as the people who buy. Very simply, if we don’t get people to buy, we’re not impacting people’s lives.

I will quote his point directly from his book.

It doesn’t matter what sort of expertise you bring into a new venture, whether you area numbers person, a people person, or a systems person, to be truly effective in a startup you must become your business’ first and foremost expert at selling. There’s only one way to do this: invest more of your time, attention and energy into the selling process. The ratio of time, creativity, and money spent on selling as opposed to other aspects of business should be something like 80/20.

How did he learn this lesson? After his first success with a product idea, he and JSN (his partner and mentor) worked together almost every other day. Because he’s a high achiever, Michael Masterson was driven by a view to improving their product.

“How do you know the product needs any improvement?” JSN asked. “I just know it does,” Michael said.

When JSN asked Michael Masterson whether their customers had actually asked for or complained about any of these things, Michael Masterson said, “No, not yet…maybe they will…well, I’m pretty sure they will –these are obvious improvements…”

JSN’s advice? When they start complaining, you can start talking about their complaints but before that, you shouldn’t think about that at all. You should only be thinking about:

1. The sales you are currently making,
2. How many sales you made yesterday
3. How you will make more sales today

That is something most of us don’t think about all the time. I was a victim – it took me 3 years to learn this. We tend to look at things and think, how can we make it better?

Michael Masterson says it very clearly: if you’re not even selling it yet – don’t think about making it better! Think about how to sell more of it.

As a perfectionist, I know how it feels to have 10 ideas to make something better even before it’s released to the market, but sometimes you have to realize that it’s the last thing you should be doing. It’s not about making something better, but about selling something, selling a lot more of it, making the sales process better, and then improving it based on what your customers say.

It takes a different way of doing things – many experienced people have noticed the lack of emphasis on sales because it’s perceived to be something bad or ‘evil’.

What should you be thinking?

Again, I’ll quote from his book. Just what should you be thinking when you think about the sales you are making?

• You should be thinking about how to make more sales.
• Don’t think about what’s wrong or right with the product –there’ll be time for that later.
• Think about how many units you sold last night
• Think about what you are doing today to improve sales

If you make a habit of that, if and when your customers tell you that they want you to improve this product, you will have the money to make all the improvements that they want.

Most business schools don’t appreciate the importance of selling at any time - whether it’s at the beginning, the middle or the end of a customer or company life cycle

That’s the reason why so many MBAs go into business unprepared to take selling seriously. I totally agree with Michael Masterson - it is hard to take selling seriously sometimes. We’ve all been corrupted.

Although Vishen always had a sales-minded attitude, I have had to be corrected because I’ve developed several bad habits even though I’ve gone to 2 business schools. It was good to finally read these things –that it’s not just ‘ok’ but vital for the growth of your business. I’ve come a long way because just 3 years ago, I didn’t ‘get’ it.

If you are not talking about sales and revenues 80% of the time, you are not doing your job as an entrepreneur. Sales and growth are the ultimate measurement. You cannot build your company or your business without achieving those goals. In short, focusing on sales is not bad; it is not evil – it is almost required.

Joel Roberts used to be with KABC radio in Los Angeles. He went from radio to marketing, and he now trains people on how to become direct marketers.

His list of clients speaks for itself; it includes Harv Eker (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind) and Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), and he is also the official media coach for Chicken Soup for the Soul.

The last insight I shared was from Chet Holmes, and he said to focus on the market data - focus on the problem. Chet’s advice is to build the pain until they can’t stand it any longer and they have to take action.

Joel Roberts has a similar but unique perspective.

How Do You Get The Attention Of The Mass Media?

Joel used to be a talk show host, and a lot of people wanted to be guest feature on his radio station. He shared some key insights and points on things that we don’t usually think of, but it’s useful because you can learn how to leverage public relations.

If you’ve ever seen him speak at a live seminar, you’ll understand why he gets a standing ovation -he’s politically incorrect yet funny at the same time.

When The Stakes Are High and the Moment Is Brief

This is the basis of his positioning, because he knows that you only have a snap-second to either get people’s attention, or not. That’s how he became super successful. His experience in radio taught him that it’s all about cliff hangers and building suspense, otherwise people go to another radio station.

He says that the #1 mistake that people make is that they have the temptation to jump to a solution before they have really talked about the problem. He notices this again and again. To illustrate his point, he had 10 people come on stage, pretend they were on his radio station. They had to talk and try to engage the audience.

He humiliated all 10 of them –it was like stand-up comedy. I tried to get on stage to be humiliated, too, but unfortunately, he didn’t do me the favor.

Define the Problem

Joel really focuses on defining the problem that you are trying to solve. You should not talk about the solution before you have talked about the problem.

He also has a very unique way of peeling things back –he thinks really differently, and that’s what I really enjoyed. He gave this example:

Initially, 100 years ago, there was music…and you couldn’t get it on the go. There was just no recorded music. The problem was recording music, and that gave rise to the gramophone. That, initially, was how you had music in your home. Then, you had radio –although it wasn’t portable, you now had music everywhere, all the time. But it wasn’t your music. So along came the Walkman. And then, the famous iPod.

The iPod focuses on the last problem that hadn’t been solved: recording music had been solved; having it anywhere had been solved; having your own music anywhere had been solved…what hadn’t been solved was how to have 10,000 songs –your entire music library – in your pocket. , That was the gap that the iPod came to fill – that was THE positioning.

It was the last problem that hadn’t been solved.

The most obvious lesson is this: don’t focus on the first problems that came before and have already been solved: focus on the very last problem that you haven’t solved. Why? Because the others are so obvious that everyone is doing it.

That’s how not to get attention - a class I won’t be teaching.