Discover the gold you’ve always had
Concentrate on your existing relationships and discover a way to broaden your service.
Claude Hopkins is a name you should know but don’t. As the first and greatest copywriter of all time, he is almost single-handedly responsible for creating the modern advertising industry. The original Mad Man Albert Lasker discovered him through his ground-breaking Schlitz beer ad.
Feel free to look into the details of that famous advertisement, but it was the process Hopkins used that will prove most valuable to you.
When Hopkins toured the Schlitz brewery, company management couldn’t wait to show off all the bells and whistles of their new technology. Sound familiar? The ad man, however, was fascinated with the simple mechanical dishwasher. When he asked about it, his hosts scoffed at the question. “Oh, that. Everyone’s got one of those.”
Related: 100 sales & marketing tips: 2020 edition
The genius of Hopkins was he realized the customer didn’t know every brewery cleaned their bottles the same way. His Schlitz ad revealed this steam cleaning method for the first time. Hopkins ad copy proclaimed that steam cleaning made Schlitz the “purest” of beers. Beer drinkers bought the idea and then proceeded to buy mass quantities of Schlitz beer.
Hopkins’ “inside the box” thinking isn’t limited to advertising. You can do the same thing in your own business.
Here’s a simple example:
Let’s say your business focuses on retirement plan participants. That’s a good steady business, but you might be experiencing a plateau in growth since everyone and his brother wants in on this lucrative market. What’s worse is that with MEPs coming down the pike as early as next year, competition will only intensify.
So you want to explore new markets. Maybe vertically, by focusing on a single type of employer. Maybe horizontally, by expanding your service among all high-net-worth individuals.
Each of these represents “outside the box” thinking in that they direct you away from existing relationships.
But what if you think “inside the box”? That implies you concentrate on your existing relationships and discover a way to broaden your service to them. In this manner, you’re not prospecting new territory, you’re mining deeper into what you already have.
Here’s one way to do this:
No doubt a sizable portion of your relationships have children approaching their teen years, when they can start working in earnest. What if you dug deeper into those relationships and offered yourself as a Child IRA expert?
Chances are, no one else has laid claim to this unearthed vein of growth, because the accounts are so small. If you place yourself as the first to fill this void, you’ll anchor yourself deeper into that relationship by showing parents their teenagers can become millionaires before they graduate from high school.
How? If they contribute the maximum into a Child IRA from age 13 until high school graduation, that $30,000 will grow to $2.5 million by the time they retire at age 70.
What parent wouldn’t want that for their child?
And you’ll be the hero just because you took the time to think inside the box.
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