Adam Force: Boost Your Brand’s Revenue With The Enhance Then Advance Strategy

Boost Your Brand's Revenue With The Enhance Then Advance Strategy

There are hard ways to make money with your business, and there are smart ways. Most companies struggle, not because they can’t get any new customers, but because they don’t focus enough on the customers they already have.

“Love your new customers. However, do not forget to appreciate your already existing ones. That’s 7x more expensive to gain a new customer than to retain an already-existing one.”
– Bill Quiseng

You’re more likely to get your existing customers to purchase your products and services than convert your prospects into new customers.

In this episode, Change Creator founder, Adam Force, will discuss the Enhance Then Advance strategy that will help your brand boost revenue NOW and in the long term.

Without further ado, let’s dive straight into the summary.

Throughout this Episode, Adam Force Sheds Light On:

  • The power of storytelling for your brand
  • How does storytelling tie in with your customers’ journeys?
  • How did Albert (Adam’s Mentor) use storytelling to close high-ticket deals and clients?
  • Why does storytelling matter? Despite building countless slide decks and spending hours on research, finding stats, and numbers, you’ll fail if there’s no storytelling involved.
  • The art of storytelling. Why is it important to convey your message in the form of a story?
  • Despite adding relevant stats and facts, none of your marketing collaterals will be memorable if you don’t present it in the form of a story.
  • How has Adam used storytelling to close high-ticket clients and at the same time deliver value to them?
  • As important as attracting new customers is, why is it important to focus on your already existing ones?
  • Attracting new customers vs. old customers.
  • What is the Enhance Then Advance Strategy all about?
  • Why is it important to enhance your already existing operations and then switch to advancing?
  • Adam’s personal experience with the Enhance Then Advance strategy – think of the long term game
  • How is the Enhance Then Advance strategy a game-changer for eCommerce businesses? Why?
  • How did Rob Walker, an eCommerce store owner, use storytelling to generate a staggering 6,300% ROI?
  • How is your brand story related to all your customer touchpoints?
  • The power of storytelling for your eCommerce brand.

Conclusion

Storytelling is an art. And if you really want to ace your marketing and advertising efforts, you need to master it. If you are getting a 200% ROI without a story – trust me, by conveying your story and putting it in front of your customers, you’ll be taking it to 2,000% and even more, especially if you run an eCommerce business.

People love stories. They connect to stories. And they would love nothing more than to hear yours.

If you run an eCommerce business and would like to double or triple your revenue, we’ve put together a value-adding report titled “3 Bulletproof Strategies to Double Your eCommerce Biz Revenue.”

Download it today!

Learn How to Strategically 2x, 3x or 5x Your eCommerce Business

Schedule a strategy call with us today.

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Episode Transcript (unedited, will likely have typos):

Adam G. Force  0:00 

How do social entrepreneurs and small businesses create an authentic brand people love so they can get the edge they need to stand out, create Predictable Revenue and compete against the big guys. That’s what we’re here to discuss. I’m Adam forest, the founder of change creator, and this is the authentic brand mastery podcast.

What’s going on everybody, welcome back to the authentic brand mastery podcast. We love branding, we love design, we love connecting with customers and making a difference in the world. And we have to be good at marketing. In order to get that done, we have to actually have brands that can connect and speak to the world. But then we have to have actual sales systems that turn visitors into customers, okay. And last week, we talked with Rick Wilson, we cover off on some marketing strategies for long term wins. If you’re not thinking about long term, you don’t understand how to think about long term for your marketing, then you won’t get the most out of your ad spend, you won’t get the most out of your upfront marketing. Alright, so this is how we really capitalize and optimize. And that’s something that I want to share today. And I’m going to be talking to you about a strategy I like to call enhanced in advance. This is like a mantra here. Okay, really helpful, and has been instrumental in revenue generation, okay for change creator, and how we actually operate and think about business. And I think this is going to plant some seeds for your brand’s development. When it comes to revenue generation, and plugging holes, right, you can imagine picking up a bucket full of water, and there’s holes, that means these are all the customers that you’re missing out on, you need to start plugging some of those holes. And so today’s conversation is going to help you do that. Alright, guys, last but not least, we are still interested in working with some more ecommerce entrepreneurs, guys, we will set up the your sales system, make it profitable, alright. And if it’s not profitable, we will keep working with you until it is at no cost. That’s how confident we are. We’ve had some incredible results. And we can help you crush it and get this done. Right. So guys, if you’re looking for a little support, just go to change creator.com, you can book a call through our services. And we’ll chat we’ll see if you’re a good fit outside of that, guys. So let’s get into this strategy. Let’s talk about enhance and then advance for your brand. Okay, show me the heat No, you go. Hey, what’s going on everybody, Adam force here, founder at change creator. And today I want to talk about storytelling for your brand. Specifically, what it means to your sales. You know, the power of story for your brand is something we’ve been talking about for a while we ran a course called Captivate it was about putting storytelling at the heart of your marketing. So what does that actually mean? You know, storytelling is something that throughout all history, all progress has been made because of storytelling. This is how human beings Connect. This is how we communicate and understand each other, right? Because it creates an emotional spark. Right? And that emotion drives our actions. Without it, we can’t get people on board with our ideas. This is important to understand. So when you put it creates a value for people. And that’s that’s going to be part of what we want to kind of what I want to touch on today. And you know, the when I was working back at WebMD, this was a while ago now. But I was there for 10 years, I was Director of Strategic Marketing. And when I started there, my mentor was able to sell, you know, deals that were over a million dollars. And I always wondered, well, how the heck is he doing that? And I wanted to know the secrets, right? I mean, this is literally somebody who I think we were at a company like Merck at the time or something. We actually were there in front of a room of maybe 30 to 40 C suite executives pitching a really large deal. Now my mentor, his name is Albert was a master at selling these deals. He actually went in front of the room. He he pitched everything went through the slides, all the stuff that we put together. And this is a strategy that I helped put together. And at the end this is what’s interesting. One of the team leads the top executives from the other company came over to Albert and asked him right there on the spot to come and work for him. He tried to literally poach him from our team to his right in front of everybody, I’ve never seen that happen before. So that was really shocking. But it is a testament to the skills he had, they were so taken back by the presentation, that they wanted to just get him on board because they saw dollar signs in their eyes, if they can get him on their team. And so I would always say, Albert, you know, like, what, like, what

is the secret here? You know, he’s a very personable person, which always helps, but there is a skill in how we actually present ideas. And we can create slide decks and spend a month putting things together and preparing numbers, research, statistics, whatever it might be about the market, the customers and all this data. But if we can’t wrap the data, in a way, in stories that people can remember, it’s not compelling, and they don’t talk about it with their teams, they don’t have something to share, because it doesn’t stick in their minds. Now, he would always tell me, you know, planning and preparation is a key factor, which means, hey, it’s like a, you know, a 3040 minute pitch. But it’s a couple months of planning and strategy work. But then the golden ticket was his ability to tell stories. So he took these ideas and wrap them in stories. And what he always taught me was, even when we’re putting together pitch decks and other things like that, web pages, you name it, any asset, we were always telling a story, right? You’re not just putting things on a page, there’s a there’s a cohesive story to tell. And he was always able to get the room laughing. And, and because of his way of wrapping things, and stories and examples and metaphors, people were were impacted deeply. And in what happens is, you’re able to actually demonstrate what the idea actually means. So it’s more significant, right? You know, you could tell somebody, here’s this data point, XYZ. But when you tell a story about a person or a potential customer and what their day looks like, and then how that plays out, you get a different level of clarity about the point you’re trying to make. And when the meaning of that data, a data point means almost nothing, it’s not memorable enough. But when you put it into a circumstance that’s relatable, and has an emotional pull to it, it hits you in a way that now you can remember the story that hey, remember that remember when Albert was talking about this, right? So it stands out a lot more. So this is very powerful. And that emotional side is really important. So you know, there was a quote from Joshua Glen, and it says, stories are such a powerful driver of emotional value that effect on objects subjective value can actually be measured. objectively. Right. Then there’s another one I wrote down here from Edward Gorey, who says, when people are finding meaning and things be were, right, and that’s what we’re doing, we’re giving things meaning and context and emotional value. Okay, so the so Okay, so that’s my background in storytelling. And what I did there is I worked on any deal that was $500,000. And up, and my job was to create marketing strategies that would get clients like Microsoft target, you know, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, whatever it is a return on their investment. So I had to come up with strategies that would really connect with the customers create great user experiences, you know, we were creating web properties, explainer videos, whatever the tools were that I recommended, and then how they need to feel look and the theme, right, we I always had to come up with a theme that we were wrapping the strategy around. Alright, so that was a really important part of the expression of the strategy. I can’t remember. I think I did one for Cigna, I had it in one of my webinars. And I think the theme was something like this, I might butcher this but healthy hearts, more memories. Okay. And you can just see like a story can be told in just a few words. But the theme there was about heart health, because when we have healthy hearts, we have more time with our families, more memories. There’s a lot of emotion tied to a statement like that. So now the entire theme is built around that for a marketing strategy. So this is part of what I call the and I just put together something that I talk about this and I’ll tell you about it as we get towards the end of this conversation, but this is important. So it’s part When we’re trying to enhance and grow revenue in our business, something that happens is we are always looking for new business. But if we’ve been in business, we’re making some sales, one of the most neglected areas is the business we already have, right? And that the high hanging fruit, the more difficult and expensive part of marketing is the new business. It’s more cost.

Heavy and time consuming and difficult, man. But when we have customers already in our database on our email list, and our invisible lists on Facebook, or whatever it might be, we, we have access to people that are more what we call low hanging fruit, right? And that’s because they know us, they like us, and they’ve worked with us, and selling to them meaning like, if we care about them, we get reoccurring revenue, we get loyalty. And remember, word of mouth is not just people talking at a conference in person, word of mouth is every screen in someone’s hand. Right? And they are going to tell a story about you. Okay, whether it’s the one you want or not. Alright, so the strategy I like to call is the advance then enhance strategy. All right, this means that we are actually looking at the resources we have what we already are doing, and all that kind of stuff. And we’re optimizing them in a way that helps us enhance our revenues, right? Without having to go after new business. But then when we do go after new business, everything is optimized. So we can let’s say we’re running ads, then our ad spend goes a lot further. Right. So that optimization, you should always enhance what you have first before you advance. And, you know, I like So years ago, a couple years ago, not too long. We were running a webinar to sell a $2,000 course. And you know, that was our storytelling course Captivate. So we were, we were, we were new to the webinar game. And we were we were testing out some things. We ran some live webinars, and we sold like 30% on on these live webinars. And that was awesome. A lower price point, we always started lower around $500. And then we bumped it to 2000. Once we proved out everything bah bah, bah. So what happened was we joined a $20,000 mastermind program. And we this was specific to Evergreen webinar marketing, we didn’t want to do live launches every like, you know, half year quarter or whatever it is not interested in living that that model, okay. And so what we learned, though, in that $20,000 mastermind was how to think about our long term strategy, which allowed us to look at the sales system and the customers we already had, and optimize them in a way to get the most out of the ad spend and things we were doing, right. And so we were actually able to for XR revenues. And and with sales to the people we already had on our email list. Right? So looking at the people we already had, meaning we’re not paying for new leads, we had free marketing there to our list, but how do you engage them? How do you do that? So we were able to force revenues to the to the people already on the email list, which case it gave us a cash injection. And then that’s a strategy that was replicated over and over, right. So it is not just a one time thing, it’s as we get new people now they would be optimized with that same strategy. So that that’s compounding revenue. It also allowed us to three XR results with that same ad spend. So I talked about optimizing ad spend. So when we think long term, we are able to get more out of the ad spend. Alright, and here’s the sexy part for new leads. Right? Once we were really dialing into all this stuff, we had a 50 to 70% conversion rate, which is really powerful as we get into things like our path to purchase, which is another conversation for another day. But that that revenue optimization that that experience is something that really got us into the mindset of the enhanced in advance, right? We want to keep the customers who fall in love with the customers we have. And there’s a couple questions I’ve talked about in this report that I put together and I’ll tell you what that is and all that stuff in a minute. So for example, things to reflect on it’s important to journal and reflect take some time away from just sitting at your screen and trying to go go go and think okay, This is how we become more effective with our time. So one question would be, how would you run your business? If 100% of your future business was based on referral and repeat business only? Alright, I’ll give you one more example question. And there’s a third one which you can get on your own. How can I double my income with the current customer base I have now?

Right? How can I double with the current customer base I have right now. And when you start journaling and writing about these things, you’re looking at ways to plug leaks, I always call it leaks when we have gaps and people that could be buying from us or become reoccurring revenue or new offers like that low hanging fruit. And we want to optimize that as much as possible. And you have to remember, when we start thinking about the entire sales process, from head to toe, from marketing, to reoccurring revenue, we make small changes through these out these touch points and small changes to together will compound over time, and create big impact, right. And now the only limitation of how we enhance and tweak and do things for our own business is just our own creativity, right. So that that would really be the only limiting factor. So you do have to get creative. And I have some other examples and thoughts in the document the report that I put together, and again, I’ll tell you about that in a second. So and it’s it’s so you know, the the next thing that’s really powerful where I want to dial into E commerce is well, how does this what is the storytelling factor. So part of the Enhance advanced than enhanced strategy is what for E commerce is products. Right? Now, if you’re a coaching company or something else, or you have courses, storytelling is an important part of it, too. Because you have to really understand the how to express your story to connect with customers. And also use storytelling to sell your services and stuff like that. But as far as E commerce goes, this is really powerful. Because stories are told in three ways visual, contextual, and through experience. And E commerce is a very visual game. Okay, the products have to look sexy. This is one way that we express the kind of company we are. And it’s a it’s a visual expression of our story, right? So the, the products, I want to share a story about products and how story has that impact, because they can create a substantial difference in your sales. So if you don’t know, there was a guy, his name was what was his name? So he Robert Rob Walker. And he was in his he worked with the New York Times Magazine. Alright, so he did a project that always stood out to me. When I learned this, I was like, This is amazing, great example, for EECOM. And this was back in the day, I think, or maybe around 2006. So he ran a test, okay to just to see just how powerful storytelling was when it comes to selling products. And so what did he do? He got 200 thrift projects, the average cost of these products was $1.25. And he specifically made sure there was really nothing special about them. I mean, I mean, I wrote down a couple of these examples in this report, which is, you know, it’s like a plastic banana, wooden mallet, just things right. It’s, it’s, it’s what most people would see is pretty much garbage. Okay. And so, what he did was he had a bunch of authors, professional authors, write a story for each object that he had. Alright, a few paragraphs, you know, stories can be short, but you know, we’re talking about a few paragraphs that really gave some context about this object. And so in total, he spent $197 for all 200 products. Okay, now, he ended up selling these products. Now in your head, guess how much did he get an ROI on these products? All right, I’m gonna tell you right now, he sold them for about $8,000. That’s a 6,300% markup. And that’s all because the stories transformed boring objects, right? Which really weren’t worth anything. They’re garbage

into something that people felt an emotional kind of touch. too, it gave it context, it gave it value made it interesting. And he was able to sell these products. Right. And this is what this is just an example of how powerful storytelling can be. I spoke to Bernard Schroeder, he’s the guy that launched Amazon, Pura Vita, Yahoo, different brands like that. He’s on the podcast, you can listen to it, okay. And he told me that when he worked for pure Aveda, you know, they were struggling, bah, bah, bah, bah. And they learned to master their brand story. Right, this is something that we’re really dialed into here at change creator. So I love hearing this. And when they did, and it’s not just here’s my brand story, I put it on about page, it’s when you have your branding, and you understand your brand story. It is part of everything you do at all touchpoints. Right? Remember visual, contextual and experience. But their story, built them up to become $100 million brand. This is a company that sells bracelets. And it was a really cool story about how that all started and why and all that kind of stuff. And so that is just another example of the power of storytelling for business. You just can’t, you can’t you just can’t make this stuff up. And so I I talk about this stuff, and more in what I put together, and it was a report. And I called it three bullet proof strategies to double your E commerce business revenue. Alright. And these are three core strategies that work together. And all great brands do it. They’re these are time tested strategies, right? They’re not, here’s a new fad that’s going to work on Facebook for six months, it’s it’s none of that stuff. These aren’t gimmicks. I mean, there’s there’s a place for all these little tactics and stuff, no doubt about it, you know, a whim on tick tock that gets you whatever views and sales, all that stuff. But these are business strategies that are powerful for any kind of company. But we dial into E commerce here with some of the key points that are made, because we’ve been working with a range of companies over the past year. And we’ve had lots of good success, building up brand identities, strategies, all these things that are really important. But when we worked with the E commerce brands, we ran some sales systems, what I call a path to purchase system. And it was unique, a little bit weird. And it worked really well. And so we’re seeing phenomenal results, like adding 1000, email, emails to your list and getting paid for it. Right. So you can really turn up the dial, it could be 5000 10,000, whatever you want to do, right. But this requires, you know, getting traffic to the sales system. And they had an 86% opt in rate. Now that’s important. I always go high volume on the front end, because and I talked about this in the free report, you can download it, you can hear about it, read about it. We had an 87% opt in rate, I said 86 is 87. Which means we get a lot of people up front. That’s how you know we hit that 1000 people we’re getting paid for it. This is building the business at a very, very rapid rate. I mean, John already reached out to me, and he’s like, dude, let’s scale this thing to seven figures this year. And that was just our sandbox test at the end of 2021. So, you know, we’ve also helped other ecommerce brands that we worked with, you know, increase their cart values by 100% more.

And that’s even with them not even running ads yet. But I’m a big fan of running ads, I think, you know, what happens is we have a lot of commerce, they get into wholesale, which is a great channel, you want to be making money on wholesale, but then the websites are, you know, templates on Shopify, or whatever it might be, and all this stuff that really isn’t set up to get results. or They did it themselves or a designer put it together who’s just a designer, they don’t know anything about marketing. They don’t know anything about conversions and sales and systems and all these things. And so we’re really interested in helping ecommerce brands who are doing something special, right? Something good we like social enterprise, get their products out to people, right? So we want to sell more we want to put get them out there good products for good people. So you can get the free report. If you go to change creator.com It will just pop up when the when the site loads, you’ll get a little pop up for the new free report, three Bulletproof Bulletproof strategies to double your E commerce. It’s totally free. You can download it. It’s your typical drop me an email and get the free report. You could check it out. Alright. Lots of good stuff in there. But the power of storytelling for your business is critical and I hope those stories about enhance the enhanced in advance and how part of that enhance events is looking at your business and powering it up with your stories right this is going to help drive sales and then when you do your marketing to the current customer base all these things this it’s just low hanging fruit guys all right so you know really get that stuff optimized before you start spending all your time, energy and resources on new business thanks for tuning into the authentic brand mastery podcast don’t forget to stop by change creator calm for more information, fresh articles content and our services if you’re looking to build a brand that people love, and please stop by iTunes us a five star review. We appreciate your support

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