MBA2317 Focusing on Marketing vs. Focusing on Product + Free Ride Friday

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. No fluff, just the good stuff with our short form business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company. I started with my co-founder back in 2014. And today's episode is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. If you want to win a free ride to one of our programs, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review, and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday, just like today, to see if you won.

0:41It's that easy. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on Apple Podcast. In today's lesson, we're going to discuss how do you balance focusing on marketing versus your product and making your product better? This is a dilemma for a lot of builders. They're obsessed with making their product great, and that's awesome, but they spend little to no time on marketing and selling their product, which makes it hard to have a thriving business. So how do you balance marketing your product when you think it could be better, but at the same time, not spending all your time on marketing and sales and not improving your actual offering?

1:14This is a challenge we all will need to face in our journey as an entrepreneur because you need both. You can't have one without the other. So in today's episode, I'm going to give you my strategy to know how to balance the two, how to know if your product is good enough to market hard and how to improve the product so that you can make it easier to market. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I love the concept of good, better, best. What does this mean? That means understanding that there is a spectrum of good. There are products out there in the world that are good enough, and we buy them, and they're a thriving business.

1:55They're not the best thing in the world. You don't rave about them. You don't tell everybody and their mom about it. They're fine. And then there's products that are better than good. They make you smile. You remember them a little bit more. And then you have best products, products that are just the market leader. When it comes to smartphones, this is Apple with the iPhone. When it comes to the theme parks, it's Disney. It's just the market standard and everybody understands it's the best out there. And it's important to understand this concept because when it comes to your product, you have to understand that your product will evolve.

2:26It will be good at first. It'll get better. And then hopefully it'll be the best. But it can't do it without funding. It can't do it without money. It can't do it without sales and marketing. So along the way, you need to fuel the fire with more customers. Why? Because you can't get better or best if you don't know what's working, what's not with your product. And in order to do that, you need actual paying customers to get feedback, to learn from them, to be on the ground and understand how to make the perfect product for them, your actual customers. This is why I recommend always making sure that when you start a business, that your product is good enough.

3:10It doesn't have to be great. It doesn't have to be the best, but it definitely can't be horrible or doesn't solve the complete problem. It has to be good enough. Once it's good enough, and you'll know because customers will tell you, and when it's good, they won't leave you. They won't cancel. They won't refund. They're content with your product. Once your product is good, this is when you have to market the product. You have to spend a good amount of time marketing and selling so that you can get more customers to give you feedback and to get more money so you can invest in your product. This is why I recommend if your product is at the good stage, you should be spending 40 % of your time on marketing and sales.

3:5340 % of all your resources, in fact, your staff, your money, your time, your attention. because through marketing and sales, you're going to have conversations, you're going to refine your messaging, you're going to understand who your target audience is, and then you're going to be able to build something for that target audience that's perfect for them. You're going to get better. And it becomes like a flywheel. It becomes a feedback loop where customers give you feedback about the product because they just bought it. You then take that feedback and you build a better product. And that product then gets marketed again to customers, new customers or your current customers, and you get more refined detail, more refined feedback.

4:31Then you get to the better product. Now you're going to spend a little bit more time on marketing and sales, a little bit more resources, and then eventually you get the best. You will see that the best companies in the world, and you can look this up because a lot of them are public companies, you can see what they're spending on marketing. It will shock you. Some big companies like Apple are spending billions a year because they understand that once people consume the product, they will be printing money. What does that mean? That means they know the product is so good that they just need to market and get it in the hands of people and the rest will take care of itself.

5:04They've gotten their product to that point. So in the evolution of a business you really should spend a lot of time refining your product in the beginning making sure it's good enough for the market. You start marketing it. You start selling it and then the momentum starts. You get better and better. The product gets better. The product sells itself. You get the point. Now a lot of people, they skip steps. I've done this in the past as well, where you maybe market too much and you didn't work hard enough to get your product to a good state. This will cause you to lose customers, to get refunds and to kind of be spinning your wheels.

5:38And in the meantime, you're ruining your reputation as a business because people are not happy with the product. This might mean going back to the drawing board and improving your product, investing more of your resources into the product, relaunching or kind of remarketing. And I've done this and it will pay dividends. Your product is everything. It's what people actually are spending their money on. So if it's not good enough, you're in trouble. You got to get it to at least good, but don't skip steps. Meaning get it to good, market, sell it, get it to better, market, sell it, get it to best, market, sell it.

6:13You see a great product that customers rave about, they can't live without is a whole lot easier to sell. It's so much easier to sell a product like that because it's a no-brainer once people are aware of it. They know it, they understand it. A business with a product like that is so much easier to manage. You get team members that are excited to work in your company because they're working on something amazing. It's so much easier to get financing and investment because the product is mind-blowing. But a poor product, a product that really is not worth its money, will have short-term success with some good marketing and sales, but won't last long because people will be disappointed.

6:53They'll tell others. And it's really just a quick cash grab. And we don't want a business like that. We want a business that's going to be around and earn us money and have value for the long term. So my advice to anybody who's starting a business is you have to always market and sell your product. You should never shut that off, unless, of course, you don't have a good product yet. but you should be ramping that up, your marketing and sales, as your product gets better and better. One of the easiest ways to make sure your product is better while selling and marketing is to talk to customers directly, is to actually do direct sales, is to call up or email the people that you think are perfect for your product.

7:35Easiest way to do this is just subscribe to their newsletter, their business, their thing, and now you have their email address. Now you can email them and ask them, hey, what do you love about this thing? What do you hate about this thing? I have a product that might be better than that. Can we jump on a call to show you my product? Or I can learn a little bit more about your pain points so I can build the product that you want. And one by one, you'll get more and more sales by just doing direct sales. And you learn a ton and you improve your product because you're talking to customers directly, your ideal customers, because you're getting incredible data to be able to inform your product improvement.

8:08I learned this strategy from Nathan Berry, who grew his company to over$34 million in annual revenue, ConvertKit, and he all started out with direct sales. It's not a lot of fun, but you get used to in the beginning, having these calls, having these conversations. It's a little bit intimidating because maybe you're not used to sales, but it's essential. So you can talk to customers and get the critical information and the language that they're using to describe their pain point. All right. Now, remember, your product has three phases in its lifespan, the good, better, best. Get your product to good, market sell it, learn from your customers, get it to become better, market sell it, and then, of course, get to the best mark where your whole idea is my product is great.

8:52I'm going to market and sell it as much as possible because as soon as they get in their hands, it's going to be a no-brainer. Notice we don't stop marketing and selling along the way. Get your product good, and you have free range to market and sell so you can bring in cash and customers to improve your product. Thanks so much for listening to The 100 On BA Show. Today's episode's not over, though, it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Humanities Team Worldwide. That's the handle on Apple Podcast. Humanities Team Worldwide says, bite-sized inspiration, five stars.

9:21We love how informative each episode is from a wide variety of areas and expertise. Something for everyone, business, nonprofits, solopreneurs alike. Well, thank you. And it's signed off as Steve. So thank you, Steve, for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me at omar at 100mba.net so I can make sure I hook you up with the lifetime membership to the$100 MBA program, our six module course on how to improve as an entrepreneur, 100 % guaranteed. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday.

9:54Listen in on Friday, just like right now to see if you won. It's that easy. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. My advice, if you don't like to market and sell and you can't afford somebody to do it for you is to change your liking, okay? Start to learn to love it because it's what's gonna help your business grow. I know that sounds like tough love and weird, but you have to. You have to start to love it because it's what's gonna allow you to grow your business, have a better product, have dominance in your market, and spread your message around the world. So learn to love it. And as you get better at it, you will start to love it.

10:29Trust me, I'm a product of that. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.