Focused, Targeted Marketing
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
The 80/20 Rule
In his book 80/20 Sales And Marketing, Perry Marshall tells the story of a friend who decides to go to Las Vegas as a young man to make his fortune as a professional gambler.
A teenager on the streets of Las Vegas needs to learn a few tricks very quickly to survive, and an important lesson for this young man was to find himself a mentor. Someone to teach him the ropes as it were, if he was going to make any money playing cards in Vegas.
His mentor took the young man to a cabaret. There he took a sawn-off shotgun out from his coat and pretended to load it under the table. This action makes a distinctive noise and a few of the patrons turned around to see where the noise had come from. The rest didn’t react at all.
This is what the mentor called “Racking the Shotgun” and he said to our young man, “The people who turned around are NOT marks. Do not play poker with them. Your job is to play poker with everyone else.”
Racking the shotgun in this case was used to disqualify the street-smart few and to qualify the many. There’s an 80/20 rule for every situation, and all the time people you’re dealing with will be identifying themselves as either the right target or the wrong target for your particular venture.
Selling to the right target market is more important than all the sales methods, copywriting or negotiating tactics in the world. It doesn’t matter whether you are dealing with customers, products, web pages, opportunities or whatever it is that causes money to change hands, everything involved in any transaction is sifted and sorted by the 80/20 rule.
Your job is to pay attention
No matter what level of marketing you are at or what level of success you have achieved, there will always be leverage points hiding within your business or career. It is almost always possible to work less and earn more. When you think about it, you’ll probably soon see that 80% of your job is menial non-productive stuff. If you’re in sales, you are probably trying to sell to everyone, rather than focusing attention on the prospects you know are going to buy. How do you know? Because you have “racked the shotgun” to find out who your top 20% of prospects are.
Whatever you sell, you must have a system for weeding out the “tyre kickers” so that only the truly interested prospects make it through the process. Many will say this approach is wrong, but it’s not. It is about laser-targeted focus on your market. Knowing who your market is and targeting your marketing efforts to attract them and repel all the others. This approach will very quickly position you as an expert in your field and people will be lining up with questions about their options to buy. These are the people you spend your time on because they already have their credit card out of their pocket and in their hand looking for a reason to use it.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” – John Wanamaker. In fact, John was wrong. 80% of his advertising effort was being wasted.
Imagine if you could take 80% of your advertising budget and spend it on the 20% area that was effective. It would improve your results by 16 times. That’s the power of the 80/20 rule.
80/20 Is Everywhere
Remember 80/20 applies to all areas of business. Almost everything you can count is affected. The effect of the rule can be multiplied exponentially as 80% of the 80% comes from 20% of the 20%. In other words, 80/20 squared and 80/20 cubed and so on and so on until you run out of things to count.
In my marketing I use Empower Network to utilize the 80/20 rule for me; it only sends me leads and prospects that I can convert to sales. Once those customers are in the system, I know they will want more products because they know why they are there.