Leverage Your Retail Success

Hey, it’s Bob here, and in this blog entry, I am going to continue my train of thought about how important it is to make sure that you write down what you’re doing so you can build upon your successes. This is another strategy to build upon your successes, and it’s about leverage. 

I went online and I looked up some definitions, and here’s a definition that I found that best suited our conversation today.  “Leverage is the application of limited resources through a tactic intended to create magnified consequences.”

Let me read that again for you:  “The application of limited resources” – you don’t have very much stuff to work with – “through a tactic intended to create magnified consequences.”  In other words, how do you do more with less?

Several years ago I read an article in the Harvard Business Review about resource poverty.  And almost every independent retailer I know, almost every small business owner I know, including all of us here at WhizBang! Training suffers from resource poverty.  And resource poverty is not just money; it’s creativity, it’s time, it’s energy, it’s all of those things.  We’re not big organizations.  We’re trying to do a lot with a very limited amount of stuff.  We don’t have unlimited resources.  We’re resource-poor.

So what we have to do is we have to leverage everything we do, and this is particularly true in marketing.  And let me give you a couple of examples of people leveraging their marketing efforts and getting a lot more from what they’re doing.

One of the tactics you can use is to duplicate successes to the point of diminishing returns.  I have this conversation a lot.  I ask in a program, “How many of you do customer appreciation events?”  And people raise their hands.  And I say, “Are they successful?”  And they say, “Yeah, they’re slammed.”  “How often do you do them?”  “Oh, once a year.”

Well, if you have an event that’s a success once a year, it’s standing room only, maybe you should do it twice a year.  And if it’s successful twice a year, you should start doing it four times a year.  Again, do it to the point of diminishing returns; clearly, you can’t have customer appreciation events every day or every week – or maybe you can.

I just talked to a guy who owned a skateboard park, and he said once a month they have a customer appreciation event.  And the kids, his customers, absolutely love it.  It’s their special day.  Kids skate free; they have huge volumes.  And it started out as once every six months and became more and more often.  Taking what you’re doing if it’s successful, do it more often.  You can also do the same thing with classes and clubs.  If you have a class that’s successful, if you have a club that’s successful, apply it to another product, to another service.

We used to do yo-yo clubs at the Mackinaw Kite Company.  And if our yo-yo day was filled to the rafters with kids, we knew it was time to add a day.  All of these things, if they fill up, it indicates there’s a need for more.  Duplicate it.  Expand on it.  Leverage your knowledge, leverage your success, and get more from it.

Another example of this would be the product of the month.  If you’re a gourmet cookware store or a gourmet food store and you have huge success with a hot sauce of the month, you may want to consider adding a pasta sauce of the month.  You see, you spent the time figuring out how to get the system going, why not just replicate it; don’t invent another wheel when you can take one wheel that you’ve already done and put it on and use it again.

Let’s talk about amplifying an existing idea. This is another way to leverage something that you already have in place.

I’m going to give you an example from my friends at the CigarBox in Pennsylvania.  I was doing a sales training for their team so their sales people would be better during the holidays (by the way, if you need a sales trainer at the holidays, call me; it will be worth it) and part of what they sold was lottery tickets.

They had these sheets of tickets and I said, “Do you sell very many of those sheets?”  They said, “Oh, yeah, we sell a lot of them.”  So we started talking about it.  “How much do the sheets cost?”  “They cost $20.00.”  “Well, why don’t we have a $100 sheet?  Why don’t we have a $500 sheet?”  And so we kept going like this; we kept leveraging the idea.  When it was done, they decided to have a $5000 wreath made out of lottery tickets.  So that’s leveraging it, right?

We took the idea and just exploded it from $100 to $5000.  Now, it turns out that they couldn’t make a wreath out of 5000 lottery tickets, so they made a giant gingerbread house.  They leveraged it one more time – rather than just trying to sell a $5000 gingerbread house, they decided to give 10% — essentially, all of their profits from this sale of this house to the charity of the purchaser’s choice.

And since they made it a cause-marketing event, all of a sudden then they could do publicity.  Do you see how we just took this simple idea, $20 lottery ticket bundle, essentially a stocking stuffer, and all of a sudden made it press worthy.  That’s leverage.

So they sent out press releases.  Guess what?  Here’s the article, half page.  The television stations came and covered it.  They created a giant buzz.  Of course, that drove people into the store and somebody bought it.  Here’s a picture of the store owners and the guy who bought it.  The guy who bought it is the guy who looks like Elvis Presley.

This is huge stuff, folks; you have to keep thinking that way.

Now here’s what happened; they had so much momentum from this first one that they created a second lottery gingerbread house made out of lottery tickets.  This time they didn’t make it a cause-marketing event, but this time what they did was they sold chances.  So for $20 you could get 20 chances, and they made a significant profit selling chances to their second gingerbread house.

Do you see how what they did was they kept thinking, “How can I make this better?  How can I make this bigger?  How can I tweak it for maximum publicity?”  And they took a very simple idea and turned it into something very significant during the last holiday season.  So that’s amplifying an existing idea.

 
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