Thread by @tonyOWEI

THE TRIANGLE OF PROFITS

Many ideas and quotes will come from @ronaldnzimora's Triangle of Profits books.

Everyone who starts any venture wants to make profit. You can only make profit when you sell enough to cover your cost of production and still have more money left

#Thread

Many people make sales or earn revenues but do not make profit.

Triangle of profits is basically your market, the message your market needs and the best media to reach them.

Now since we have established that you can only make profits when you sell, triangle of profits will therefore focus on sales:

How you sell,

What to sell, and

Who you should sell to.

Something crucial before we continue.

Let me establish that marketing precedes sales.

To sell, you have to advertise or make your potential customers know you exist and what value you will add to them.

"Marketing is the religion of business. A business owner who does not know how to market is like a soldier who does not know how to handle a gun. The soldier will get killed in the battlefront."

- @ronaldnzimora

Business is a battle
front. All businesses are in marketplace to get their own share of the pie. You must therefore engage in marketing. What to spend, how to spend it and where to spend it depends on our business. I will talk about this subsequently.

But Marketing is not what you think it is.

Marketing is not a cute logo, a nice business card or some attempt at “branding” that you have no money for. Those are good but they are the ones alone bringing in sales.

My friend and mentor @ronaldnzimora defined marketing as the science & art of engineering a process that take unknown skeptics and turning them into rabid fanatics of your business.

Many people have challenges when it comes to sales. Let talk about the why.

1. You are not giving the people in your target market what they want to buy. You must ask yourself if the people you plan selling to will ever want your product. People do not buy what they do not want.

No amount of advertising, persuasion or mind tricks will change their mind. The market is just what it is – the market.

Your job is not to bend the customer to your will but to bend to the will of the customer and you will get all you want to get from them.

A quick example from the book:

Selling a weight loss product to overweight women – Which do you think would do better?

A set of bench press weight lifts exercise equipment

OR

Herbal weight loss tea?

Weight loss tea of course!

Because overweight women have specific dreams, desires, preferences, irritations and mindsets, all of which influences the choice of products the buy.

They hate exercising but love being lazy and chilling. Exercising is painful to them, both mentally and physically, so they avoid it.

They will instead go for products with similar promise of weight loss without the pain of exercising or using the gym.

You see?

2. You are NOT targeting the right customers

Say you sell children toys, you do not target everybody. You target parents who have kids. Then you narrow it down to those who care about their kids.

Take a step further and target more mothers than fathers.

Fathers also care but mothers pay more attention to every little detail about their kids.

Narrow it further to mothers who have kids that need toys.

There you have it. You make selling easier and you are guaranteed more sales if you do your business like this.

3. You are not telling the market what they need to hear in order to buy from you

There should be a catch that will make them want to buy. There are different levels of buying decisions. It's called the buying cycle.

Your job is to figure that out.

4. You are looking for customers in the wrong place

You need to know where your potential market are and target your efforts in getting their attention.

I run @TonyveFarms. Majority of those who buy our eggs and chicken are people who buy in bulk.

Advertising on Facebook or putting up beautiful branded posts on Instagram will not give us the sales and profits we are in business for.

Know where your customers are so that you will not be frustrated targeting the wrong place.

5. You do not have a predictable customer journey part

People have short attention span and are distracted by too many things. There is plenty of content everywhere. A newspaper? hundreds of adverts. TV? Same. On Facebook? Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp? Everybody wants attention.

But as soon as you get it, your job is not to lose it… and that journey part is what is called a sales funnel.

I am a farmer. Birds kept in a battery cage, pen or confined space will do better by giving more meat & eggs than those left to roam everywhere.

Reason is because the energy they would have burnt off roaming everywhere is conserved and applied productively to give more yield.

So you MUST have a sales funnel if not your customers will be scattered around and you might lose them.

How To Get Your Market

There are two markets in the world. The RICH and the MASSES.

Then they are both subdivided into their sex, age, location, religion, race, Income, education, where they work, entertainment they like, among others.

Products sold to masses are lower profit margins with high sales volumes while for the rich is high margins and lower volume of sales.

Classic example is Dangote Group - the masses and Apple Inc - the rich.

An exclusive yacht club founded by Jim Ovia is a classic example. Rich people will pay premium to join as it is a way to meet and network with their kind. The VIP lounge in clubs is another example where drinks and meals are super expensive than the rest.

Presidential and Executive suites in any hotel or First class in planes falls into this category as everyone will arrive their destination at the same time but they pay more.

Who is your own market? Is it defined? How do you find them?

You can do free surveys online and offline. I did for @ePoultryNG, our new agritech company.

I asked if people would want to invest in poultry farming remotely and the risks they envisaged.

I did an online poultry class on my social media channels in January and ran it for 17 weeks to proof to the world I am a king in the poultry business. So if I slap my face on a poultry investment platform, people won't doubt our seriousness.

So Ask questions. Check Facebook Groups where it aligns with your product. If I want to sell something targeting farmers, I would use Facebook groups that has real farmers and not relationship experts. Use Google as well and search for forums based on your niche.

Finally, have a unique selling point. Basically how you promise to take them from where they are now to where they want to be. It goes beyond just selling and collecting their money.

MTN is everywhere you go.

Our newest business @ePoultryNG's USP is "own and move your poultry farm with you in your pocket”.

So you can own a poultry farm and move it everywhere without getting dirty while you make mouth watering profits impossible anywhere else NOW. Let’s talk. 🤔

😁😁😁

THE MESSAGE

This is basically what you have to say. Here you must look for keywords that resonates with your market.

I wrote a copy during Easter to sell our chickens. I was targeting the fairly educated who are on social media who know the implication of their consumption.

I started with a research done by NAFDAC on how chickens imported are preserved, what was used & how it can kill. I then mentioned those it had killed via kidney diseases, regardless of their status/wealth, & how dialysis cost a lot of money just because of chicken less than 5000

We normally sell one for 2500 and so 3 whole chickens will be 7500 but said we will give them 3 for the prize of 2 which is 5500 with FREE processing and FREE delivery within Yenagoa. They jumped on it.

5000 was for the chicken and 500 for transport but we said it was for free.

We gave it a specific period and ran out of stock. People are still asking for it now. When we analyzed our profits for that period, it was 53%. Say wow!

People are looking for good deals not the cheapest prices per se.

Then again, I mentioned about sales funnel earlier.

Now ALL the people we sold chickens too are now our egg customers. I asked for reviews from ALL of them individually, about the quality of the chicken, taste, price, delivery, packaging, and it came 100%.

I knew they were excited and quickly offered to be their egg plugs. So from Chicken, they will go for eggs. Since they are satisfied and they now have my confidence, I will soon offer them another chicken combo we are planning. Then another one that will come after that.

Getting customers is tough. The ones you get, keep them and milk them properly not by cheating them but by offering them more value for more money.

THE MEDIA

This is simply the medium or channels you use to communicate your message to the market. This is largely determined by your target market.

Where they are.

The Internet and social media offers some of biggest, cheapest and easiest marketing channels today but not all your customers are on Facebook and Instagram.
It might be LinkedIn.

Yours could be via E-mail or Google Adwords.

For a photographer, Instagram works better.

For those selling say in Yenagoa, Facebook may work better.

If your target market are professionals, LinkedIn is your to go platform.

Radio still works. So if your audience are more of radio, do just that.

FINALLY

You do not spend all the time, looking for a perfect sales funnel or a sales copy or strategy.

Get one apply it. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, find out why, tweak it again and in a short time, you will smile to the bank.

Many give examples of the ones they did that worked. I have failed before too. I have been broke in business. I have closed down operations for 2 months before starting again. It is not all rossy but when you get the keys and know how to SELL, you just be at PEACE.

If you wait to have it perfect before going out, remember you are not the only business man or woman in the market place.

So MOVE NOW!

Blessings!