Archive for July, 2010
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Sitting here looking at the yachts in the harbor, each one worth millions more than the next I can’t help wondering how each owner made his money. Having studied the biography’s of hundreds of the world’s most interesting people I suspect that most of these fortunes were fueled by the power of a single great idea!
One of the interesting parts of being a marketing consultant is trying to get people to pay you for great ideas. For while people will gladly pay you for designing stuff, writing stuff or building websites few people truly understand the value of a great idea!
A single great idea can launch any business or turn any business around, but instead of searching for the great idea, most businesses (especially golf clubs) are resigned to looking only at cutting costs and incremental growth at best!
Where are most great ideas found?
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A change in positioning, going up market, down market or better still finding a USP that no one in your market can touch.
With the stroke of a pen, you would instantly have number one positioning, plenty of PR and an excess of potential members.
In a similar move to attract red-blooded males, Battle Lake Golf Club in the heart of the Texas Bible Belt has “Birdie Girls” think Hooters! The difference they made to his business was, according to the owner, staggering!
If either of these fine examples are a little too bold for your taste how about an ethnic play? Like the several courses that added Korean pages to their websites and put Kim chi on the menu to successfully attract a growing and affluent Asian population in several major cities!
The Only Gay Golf Club In a Major City – it’s bold it’s audacious and in a place like San Francisco or Houston, Texas (strangely the second largest gay population in the USA) it would work!
- Switch Media from say print to direct mail or web 1.0 to 2.0! Although I have built my success on the back of our Golf Marketing Commander websites, my most successful campaigns ever have come from direct mail. Few clubs try direct mail because it’s expensive and they have most likely done it in the past and failed, but they did it wrong.
They had tried and failed with direct mail before but they had never tried Thunderbolt Marketing. This simple change in marketing approach had a massive impact on their business. It’s an approach we have had tremendous success with in selling all kinds of outings, vacations and even memberships but few clubs use the approach because it scares them! They don’t understand why it works so they avoid it!
Get ahead by adopting web 2.0 and social media now. It will be ten years before the golf industry catches on!
In the five years I used direct mail at Garland we produced over four million dollars in sales (More than seven million including onsite spend) from a mailing list that was never larger than 1148 people and at a total cost of less than $100,000 for all the campaigns.
- Change Pricing- Few people ever consider going up in price, but going up and adding value is almost always more successful than discounting, yet few clubs ever try it! At one club we doubled the dues and added 198 members by throwing in a bunch of free gifts!
Add a lifetime or VIP category to get big bucks up front, pay off debt or re-model. Last year I came up with a new pricing plan for my largest client that included one option 300% higher than his current membership options. The result – over one million dollars in additional membership income!
- Change in Sales- The foundation for my first small fortune in the karate business was made on the day I bought my first marketing book! It went into overdrive the day I bought my first sales book and I never looked back!
http://www.cunninglycleverselling.com/
What you and your staff don’t know about selling is most likely killing your business! A single sales book or audio can easily increase your business by 25% or more!
- Triple or Quadruple Your Prospect List
There is NO quicker way to increase your business than to tap into the list of people you know at least play golf, in your area! If you can instantly grow your list from 500 to 5,000 that’s a massive leap. Even just getting another 50 people on your mailing list can be worth several thousand dollars a year!
The better the offer the better the chances they start a relationship with you.
We no longer sell lists but here are a few companies that do that we have heard good reports about data quality http://www.golfmarketingassociation.org/ list or you can try these guys http://www.golfclubservices.com/
Buy, rent, trade or form alliances with other clubs or businesses to reach more prospects instantly!
- Look Outside Your Industry. The next great idea will most likely be something that you adopt from another industry. All of my financial breakthroughs have come from looking outside my current industry.
People in the golf industry all tend to do the same thing, always look to do things differently.
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A Change of Staff. Sad to say but many clubs are held back by the outdated ideas of their manager or management company. It’s said now that if you do not double your business knowledge every five years you are falling behind. Few people come even close to doing that. One person who does is Bob Devitz, CEO of http://www.legendarygolfmanagement.com/ He is full of new ideas to invigorate your staff and we don’t even charge if we don’t increase your business!!
Now that sounds like a great idea, pay for performance golf management why don’t all the management companies do that?
Brainstorm the GREAT IDEA in your next staff meeting and let me know what you come up with!
Posted in General Marketing, Success | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 21st, 2010
Most people over complicate marketing with talk of image, brand, feel, look, style, and culture. These are all important, relevant factors if you are a multinational company and all are of little importance if you are not!
What is important is the simple fact that there are only three ways to grow your business.
- Increase the number of clients. This is where most businesses focus their effort, although it’s very often the hardest of the three ways to increase income. Large growth in number of clients usually comes from a change in pricing or a change in marketing strategy. For example changing a client’s focus from direct sales to building a database of prospects, backed up with multiple follow up campaigns, always increases business significantly. www.cunninglyclever.com
The amazing thing is that while you rack your brain to come up with a killer idea the chances are, the idea that will significantly increase your business will be simple and easy to copy from someone outside of your industry. You just have to do a little research.
- Increase the average transaction value. How can you get customers to buy more of what you sell each time they call, visit, or click? If ten people stand at the counter to buy a widget for $15, the 80/20 rule says that if all were offered the chance to buy six widgets for, say, the price of five, two people would do it, increasing your transactional value by over 53%!
Simple, but most customers rarely receive the offer. While the person is standing in front of them, daily-fee golf clubs sell one round instead of five. Shoe stores don’t add socks or polish to a sale. Hotels sell that night’s stay in the summer without trying to sell a return stay in the fall, and so it goes. There’s no cost other than the few moments of time to make the offer:
Mr. and Mrs. Jones, have you ever had the pleasure of being up here in Vermont when the leaves are changing? It’s stunningly beautiful. Our fall packages just came out this week but they sell out very fast. Shall I go ahead and reserve yours while you are here today?
Most companies can increase transactional value astonishingly quickly with 15 minutes of sales training a day!!! See CunninglyCleverSelling.com
- Increase the frequency of repurchase(or the length of time they stay as a customer). How do you get the customer to buy more often to get more residual value out of each client? Recently I helped a software company massively increase its income by simply changing to a residual pricing model. Instead of charging $4,000 plus a small annual fee for maintenance, they now charge a set up fee of $1,500 and a $400 a month license fee. Since their average customer stays seven to ten years, you do the math! A simple change of marketing strategy that turned a struggling business into an extremely profitable enterprise.
Of course in an ideal scenario you do all three and enjoy exponential growth by increasing your number of clients, increasing the transactional value and increasing the frequency of purchase!
Make this the topic of your next staff meeting and see how many ideas you can come up with!
There are a thousand things you can do in the name of marketing. Focus on exploring these three, in detail, first!
Posted in General Marketing, Sales | No Comments »
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Every time I come to Monaco I marvel at the wealth. Two room apartments that start at three million. Boats worth more than a city block and it’s the only place in the world where you’ll see a traffic jam comprised entirely of Ferraris Bentleys and Lamborghinis. Every time I come here I think, “Where does all this wealth come from?” It’s a question I which I have done a vast amount of research.
In Felix Dennis’s book (one of Britain’s richest men) entitled, How to Get Rich Quickly, he states getting rich quickly is in fact easy! You just have to focus on making money!
My friend and bestselling author Brian Tracy also ranks focus highly on his list of the traits it takes to get rich.
The key of course is not just focus but focus on the right things.
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You can’t make money without a large and targeted database of well-qualified prospects. If you do not accomplish this first, you are doomed to failure.
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You can’t make money with out a solid USP Unique Selling Proposition, to attract these prospects to your door.
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You can’t make money without an irresistible offer to get them to take the first step towards doing business with you.
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You can’t make money without a solid sales system to convert leads to money. Almost NO ONE in the golf business actually has a written sales system & training to back it up (See http://www.cunninglycleverselling.com/)
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Do these five things well and the rest will take care of it’s self, YOU WILL MAKE MORE MONEY! It does not matter weather you are selling memberships, vacations, golf lesson, green fees, range balls or equipment!
Notice I didn’t talk about quality, service, course conditions, product superiority, brand or image, although they could be part of your USP. The fact of the matter is in the hundreds of books I have read on business and personal success a company succeeding on quality, superiority or service is the exception not the rule!
Very often the clearly superior product makes far less money than a lesser product where the focus is on the five sales and marketing traits I mention above.
Something to think about!
Posted in General Marketing, Golf Marketing, Success | No Comments »
Monday, July 12th, 2010
Just enjoyed a wonderful ten days of golf in France, although my golf was far from wonderful! France is much like the UK in that its well behind the times in terms of marketing the game. No one took my e-mail or address, not even when we bought a Normandy golf pass! Nor did they ask for it at any hotel either. But there is much we could learn from the French that would improve our operations state side or heaven forbid in the UK.
- While the food at most clubs in the US is average and plain bad at most UK clubs the lunches we had in France, at every club were nothing short of spectacular! Why does food have to be so average at most clubs?
- The French were unbelievably friendly at every turn; everyone from members to staff alike greeted us with a polite “Bonjour”. You are made to feel VERY welcome by everyone, even when they know you are a tourist and you butcher their language.
- The atmosphere even at higher end clubs is much more low key. There are people in jeans, people in T-shirts, and people on cell phones although they generally move to a quiet corner. It’s a much less stuffy atmosphere. Which may be why I noticed so many younger women, children and families playing than I ever see in the US!
- Every club had a great, grass range and in most places a dedicated chipping area as well. There were definitely more people taking lessons than I ever see in the US or UK. Every single time I hit balls there were lessons going on. More lessons can only help everyone enjoy the game more. Market lessons for all you are worth, it’s a major key in growing the game and indeed keeping people involved in the game. See How to make $150,000 a Year or More Manual and DVD. Talking of which, many thanks to noted French, Golf Instructor, Claude Brousseau, at the Golf Court (short) Academy for his excellent lesson, which resulted in me hitting my driver like a champ instead of a chump! And my one and only good round of the trip!
http://www.golfcourt.fr/
- Play was fast, it never took more than four hours and in many cases it was closer to three, NICE!
- Some Cunningly Clever Marketing. Prior to visiting the US Cemetery, (Very moving) we played Omaha Beach, which is actually no were near Omaha beach, in fact it’s several miles away in a different town. The brochure had a picture of a great looking hole on a cliff, which as it turned out was the only hole on the ocean. The rest was totally parkland. Now don’t get me wrong, this was a fine and beautiful course I would recommend you play if in the area, but there is no doubt either that we would NOT have chosen it originally without the name or the cliff top picture.
The course that Bills it’s self as Grandville, “Mont San Michelle” was a great links that’s a must play, even though it’s 30 miles from the famous Mount!
Au Revoir,
Andrew Wood
Posted in Golf Marketing, Golf Travel | No Comments »
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