This is Shaun Goethals our ideal customer and my little self in our new video (coming out this week). Shaun does amazing IT we do amazing marketing. He believes in our business and we believe in his. The whole thing works well.

There are two types of people – you have the person who has the rough idea and who starts working on it. Then you have people with finesse and execution who make the idea shine and who can remove the gaps in the idea and in the presentation.

Rarely do you meet people with both – I am lucky that my team is mostly comprised of people with both – we now set out to find people with similar type brains because it’s the best type for marketing. Nathan our head of business development is a psych major (& marketing & PR) with a fine attention to details and who understands words like he understands people, he also enjoys beautiful things and design. I have a logical but creative brain. Gemma our head of design is very commercial but very good visually as well. Aldo our BD drone is absolutely impeccable at all times and is possibly one of the most detail – OCD people I have met. Somehow we were attracted to each other and now there we are working together. Everybody else on the team has been exposed to this – through my vision of linking effective strategy and strong visual marketing.

In our jobs, we see people with awesome ideas and businesses BUT average execution who settle for a crap site, crap design and crap systems believing that the idea would be enough to get people to buy and ‘that these things aren’t important’. ‘Built it and they will come’ type stuff – NO they won’t they are busy shopping elsewhere and falling in love with other businesses. Some of the things we hear are ‘but people love my site, they just don’t buy’,'I know the site isn’t great but I spent {insert $ value that is a lot less than market average for quality work}’I don’t really want to review the whole design thing’ ‘I don’t really like the clients I have now because they are bargain hunters’.. JUSTIFICATION- OF- NEGATIVE-BELIEFS-that- prevent-progress galore. A lot of the SME marketing work we do is getting people to THINK differently about their business – it’s a coaching approach and it works.

Now these problems are legitimate business problems that we set out to solve but why are they there? Because people miss the point of positioning : the battle for the {right} customer’s mind. And in that space – crap work ISN’T worth it as it will bring you CRAP customers.

To explain this I like to use our office coffee machine – one day I was standing there and I pressed Cafe Latte but then on the screen it said ‘ MILK COFFEE’. Basic day to day stuff right? But it’s powerful stuff because it illustrates the POWER of words and positioning. Milk Coffee made me feel like I was having instant – Cafe Latte projected me to the social ranks of coffee ‘connaisseurs’. Mind you growing up in a tropical place like Mauritius – I have NO idea about coffee but you get it. Right?

It is absolutely possible to UNLOCK your business’ potential by targeting the right customers through effective strategic and visual positioning. You know that feeling of walking past a Prada or LV store and thinking ‘Completely overpriced’ but still looking? It’s because these guys are the CHIEFS of positioning and execution. Impeccable windows, presentation, messages – you are buying the damn expensive experience of Prada – what it says about you and your status in society. Prada WANTS you to feel like you can’t shop there because they want the woman with a black Amex, a Porsche Cayenne and a Ferrari pram to think ‘THIS IS FOR ME.’ If you are a woman – you want to be able to swing that little bag around like it costs you nothing – it’s an expensive affair but it makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside. There are proven positioning techniques which CRACK the code and make your IDEAL customer fall in love with you. Mix it up with hard work and delivery and they will never break up with you.

Do you find yourself having to do MASSIVE life draining energy ruining objection handling all the time? Do you find yourself overwhelmed with the despair of not having enough customers? Do you find yourself servicing CRAP customers not respecting your processes and not giving you good return? Do you find yourself justifying your credentials all the time? Then this post is for you Milk Coffees of the world. It’s time to grow and to re-invent your business to achieve better, stronger and more credible position. I am not saying be the next celebrity entrepreneur or the next Wolf of Wall street – despicable fraud – I am saying be the Prada of your ideal customer and cut the crap.