Lesson 5: Marketing: The Parthenon

“If you’re attacking your market from multiple positions and your competition isn’t, you have all the advantage and it will show up in your increased success and income.” — Jay Abraham

Welcome to Lesson 5 of the B-Tribe Business Mastery Program.

In an earlier lesson you learnt the 3-ways to grow your business: increase your number of clients; increase the average transaction value; and increase the frequency clients purchase from you.

You also learnt that increasing your number of clients is a function of the number of leads multiplied by conversion rate.

The focus of this lesson is specific strategies to get more qualified leads for your business.

Diving Board or Parthenon?

You learnt from the Business Growth Formula that leads are the foundation of your business. Without a healthy, constant flow of leads into your business, you will not be able to survive.

Regardless of this fact, many businesses view lead generation (and sales and marketing generally) as a secondary activity. They apply little effort and attention to it, regardless of the fact that without it, no other activity of the business would exist. Clients pre-exist every other function your business performs. And leads pre-exist clients.

Businesses often fail to focus on lead generation due to the owner coming from a technical background and having little understanding or interest in sales and marketing.

Resultantly, most businesses set up one or two lead generating strategies. These are usually the most obvious, most frequently used in the industry, most susceptible to diminishing returns, and often not the most effective.

A common lead generation strategy looks something like this:

This approach is referred to as the Diving Board Philosophy.

Even if this approach works reasonably well for a period, what happens when it becomes less effective? For instance, when competitors start using the same strategy, or when the medium itself becomes less effective? The whole business model starts to fail.

Build a Parthenon

Rather than building your business on a single lead source, imagine what would happen if you formalised your marketing profit centres, combining a wide array of approaches.

Now your business has multiple profit centres from multiple lead sources.

Each and every one of these sources provides your business with a constant flow of leads. Your business becomes more profitable and less susceptible to market force changes.

Monitor Your Metrics

As you expand your profit centres, it’s crucially important you monitor your metrics. You must know which profit centres are working and which are not. Just because you add a pillar to your Parthenon, does not guarantee it will be a profitable pillar. Our objective is to add and maintain as many profitable pillars as possible, all the while eliminating unprofitable pillars.

Actions

1. Identify your current lead sources.
2. Brainstorm additional lead source options.
3. Establish a system to implement and monitor your Parthenon.