In this episode of the Zero Noise Marketing Podcast, we’re talking about Flagship Products and Flagship Customers and how focusing on those two things can have an enormous impact on your bottom line. This is the Zero Noise Marketing Podcast.
Episode highlights
00:40 The 80/20 rule: 20% of anything in a system is responsible for 80% of the results.
01:19 This imbalance occurs everywhere in nature and you can use it to your advantage.
03:18 The flagship product is very much the same thing. It’s the thing you do the best.
04:00 Emphasize the important products and de-emphasize the ones that are not important. But doesn’t mean that the de-emphasized products are not going to be sold anymore or that you’re gonna stop delivering that value to customers who are already buying it from you.
05:09 The flagship is the core product. The core profit driver for your business and so as such you put most of your emphasis there.
06:36 The Long tail principle.
08:59 Those flagship products are made saleable by an enormous legion of people who are coming to consume our products from the long tail.
09:44 Many of these individual niches and sub niche products that you get support for the best seller.
11:16 Once we kind of identify a product that we would characterize as a flagship product could be responsible for great gains if we sold more of them we can start to explore the characteristics of the customers who are purchasing this kind of product and it’s fairly easy to make some educated assumptions once you’ve sold a few of these.
12:01 You could do a very simple thing to reach out to them that wouldn’t cost a lot of money and would have the best chance of reaching exactly the right kind of customers.
13:21 One of the characteristics of this ideal customer is that they may already be thinking about the solution that you’re offering. So it may be enough to just agitate the problem that they have or the aspiration that they have.
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Jaeson: A brochure is just a bunch of paper with words on it. But what words do you want to have or should you have on your website? Well in my opinion, the opinion of other marketers, you want to get the biggest bang for the attention that you’re getting from the prospect in that moment. There’s a thing that Perry Marshall talks about in his book 80:20 Marketing called the 80/20 rule and it propers the concept that 20% of anything in a system is responsible for 80% of the results. So in a sales organization you might have say a hundred salespeople and of that hundred, twenty percent of them are responsible for 80% of the results. 80% of the revenue this can flip backwards into something negative as well. So for instance if you have a hundred customers, 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your headaches. This imbalance occurs everywhere in nature and you can use it to your advantage. So when you’re looking at the products that you sell just like those salesmen, 20% of your products are responsible for 80% of the results that or the profit that you have within your business. So when we’re conceptualizing the content for a new website, one of the things that we try to do is help our customers to identify what 20% of their products on their product list would or could be responsible for 80% of their profit.
[ctt template=”8″ link=”3bA4O” via=”no” ]” 20% of anything in a system is responsible for 80% of the results.” -Perry Marshall [/ctt]
And it’s not theoretical if a business has been around for a little while they’ve got a pretty good idea of what parts of their business if they doubled or tripled would have the largest impact on their bottom line for whatever reason. There could be a large ticket item, it could be something that’s very easy to deliver based on the assets and talents and market position or even a unique process that they have. So for whatever reason it represents the most amount of possibility and we colloquially have called this kind of a product or the set of products a flagship product. I like the term flagship product because like in the Navy, just because you have a flagship product or a flagship in a navy sorry just because you have a flagship in your Navy doesn’t mean it’s the only boat you have, it just means that it assumes a kind of a cornerstone or key role in the strategy of your Navy. In that case, the flagship product is very much the same thing. It’s the thing you do the best. We see that Apple started out with the flagship product it had one or two products after Steve Jobs came back. He was kicked out of Apple and then returned. And one of the first things he did was he De-emphasized in a very severe way most of the products that they had there. And by de-emphasized I mean in their case you just got rid of them all together and they put all of their emphasis on the things that had the most amount of potential in the marketplace. So how do we emphasize and de-emphasize? Emphasize the important products and de-emphasize the ones that are not important. But doesn’t mean that the de-emphasized products are not going to be sold anymore or that you’re gonna stop delivering that value to customers who are already buying it from you.
[ctt template=”10″ link=”bfcw6″ via=”no” ] “Emphasize the important products and de-emphasize the ones that are not important.” -Jaeson Tanner [/ctt]
I have a landscaping customer for instance, who while he does not actively advertise lawn cutting on Sunday afternoons, he drive his riding lawnmower down to his neighbor. This little old lady he knows and cuts her lawn. It’s not something he goes out of his way to advertise. He doesn’t make much money on it but it’s something he still does. And he does that and a couple of dozen other things. But the flagship product for him is landscaping on shorelines for cabins and for high-end homes and that kind of thing that have property on the shoreline. So again, it doesn’t mean that you’re not going to spend any time with the rest of the boats in your fleet. It’s just that you understand that the flagship is the core product. The core profit driver for your business and so as such you put most of your emphasis there. All of the marketing doors on your building all lead into the same room ultimately bringing someone along to this inevitable flagship product. How that might play out in in the example I mentioned earlier? The landscaper, maybe he has a landscaping customer who he’s done five hundred to a thousand dollars’ worth of work for in the past say every year or so. That customer brings them back and has them do the same things every year. But in his marketing on his cards on his website and on all of his marketing communications, it is clearly stated that he is the expert in shoreline landscaping and so eventually that customer may become a consumer of that flagship product. And so just like the Amazon example, perhaps you’ve heard of the Long tail principle. On amazon.com they have, I wouldn’t even be able to guess, hundreds of thousands if not millions of products or SKUs and of those products there are bestsellers which are responsible for most of their well a large chunk of their revenue. But the long tail right that is to say the little transactions, these thousands and thousands and millions and millions of little transactions that bring the mass audience and their attention to bear at Amazon why everyone uses Amazon for some reason these people that are buying all of these very specific things for themselves from their massive catalogue will probably also avail themselves of the best sellers. So when they go to buy a best-seller, the kind of product that maybe millions of units are sold they’re already on Amazon because what’s for instance they’re into oil painting, one of the long tail customers is an oil painter and he buys a little tube of cerulean blue and he does that every six months or so and then maybe he buys some paint brushes and he does that every couple of months because he’s always wearing out his paint brushes. Maybe he buys some linseed oil and that’s just one of the you know thousands of little niches and sub niches that are drawn to Amazon and that may be responsible for all those little occasional sporadic one-off transactions. But while our friend is there buying his tube of cerulean blue or his double zero Windsor Newton paint brush, he happens upon the fact that the best-selling movie Avengers Infinity War is available on Blu-ray and he becomes one of the people that purchase one of the hundred thousand two hundred thousand you know 1 million units of that bestseller.
So those flagship products are made saleable by an enormous legion of people who are coming to consume our products from the long tail. So the rest of the, to go back to our battleship analogy, we have the rest of the boats are supporting the flagship. And the flagship success isn’t some part a product of the attention that comes from all of these secondary or tertiary or whatever comes after tertiary products they’re not you know what sell as many of them but you sell so many of them. So many of these individual niches and sub niche products that you get support for the best seller. And you don’t have to have millions and millions of SKUs to experience this effect, this happens at Amazon not Amazon I was going to say that happens at Starbucks. Starbucks – sells lots and lots of cups of coffee and of those coffee drinkers who are always in there buying coffee spending $2 here $5 there whatever lattes scones what-have-you muffins, there are a one or two percent who will purchase their espresso machine which is a couple of thousand dollars maybe. I don’t have actual numbers on the cost of their espresso machine so don’t quote me. But they have a flagship product that gets sold once in a while and it could be possible for more revenue potentially. But it’s made possible by the support of all of these smaller transactions that that bring attention to the flagship. So back to our landscaping idea, so we have the flagship product and that’s interesting. And we have a flagship customer. So once we kind of identify a product that we would characterize as a flagship product could be responsible for great gains if we sold more of them we can start to explore the characteristics of the customers who are purchasing this kind of product and it’s fairly easy to make some educated assumptions once you’ve sold a few of these. In the case of our landscaping customer, the kind of person who is purchasing a shoreline landscaping obviously has to live on a body of water.
So you could do a very simple thing to reach out to them that wouldn’t cost a lot of money and would have the best chance of reaching exactly the right kind of customers. So you could get a stack of Flyers printed up and they don’t even have to be all that great that talked about your services starting with your flagship product and then some of the secondary services that you might be available to them. And has a coupon along the bottom for say 50% off their first lawn cutting if you want to lead off with an offer like that that gets them dealing with you. Or say a free estimate on shoreline landscaping or have your paperwork for the conservation authority done for free when you sign up for shoreline landscaping before the end of May. Actually that’s not a terrible idea. I’m gonna have to give them a call and tell them about that. So you have an offer that your ideal customer would find intriguing because they’re already thinking about that. One of the characteristics of this ideal customer is that they may already be thinking about the solution that you’re offering. So it may be enough to just agitate the problem that that they have or the aspiration that they have. For instance, you might say: “would you like to be able to get down to the water more easily this summer?” When you’re spending in people who own cabins and cottages or maybe only spending a few weeks out of the year down there, so they want to make it count. They don’t want to be spending all their time wrestling the boats up and down the bank or there may be accessibility issues in their life, there may be older ones in their family who would like a nice set of stairs, perhaps they’re getting older perhaps there’s little children you don’t want them tumbling down the hill. So you can agitate the potential problems or aspirations that they have for the thing that that you are potentially in a position to help service. So those are just some basic principles. I’ve talked a lot longer than I thought it was going to here. Here’s some basic principles that can be used to make bigger gains in your business whatever it happens to be. Starting out with identifying a flagship product and then analyzing the consumers of that product that may have existed in the past or if it’s something new that would make a big difference to make some educated assumptions and then test those out to see how close to reality that they are. So try those out. If you want to talk more about identifying flagship products and reaching out to flagship customers, that is the area of our business that we bring the most value to our customers with. That’s where we can make the biggest impact on your bottom line and that is where most of our thinking and our strategy is focused on being able to do that more effectively.
If you want to reach out to us you can find us at Jaeson.com and I hope you have a great day! This has been the Zero Noise Marketing Show, connecting with the right prospect in an authentic way doesn’t have to be complicated. If you think authentic Zero Noise Marketing might be right for your Business, find out for sure by contacting us for a free consultation session. I’m Jason Tanner thanks for tuning in.
