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From Mark Ford, editor, Creating Wealth: Bill Bonner, legendary copywriter—and one of my biggest clients—is a constant articulator of powerful, business-building ideas.
Recently, in a memo to his senior executives, he discussed the difficulty of starting and growing new businesses. He offered a brilliant synopsis of “what it takes to make (such) businesses work.”
“There are four P’s of salesmanship: promise, picture, proof, and payoff,” he wrote. “These are essential to creating sales packages that produce.”
To that, Bill added his list of the four P’s of building a business:
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Program: You need a business model that works—one that can produce reliable, long-term profitability with an acceptable level of investment and risk.
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Product: You want to sell products that are easy to sell the first time, and even easier to sell thereafter. In other words, you want to sell products that give people what they’re looking for at prices they can rationalize.
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Prospects: You need people to sell to. And you need a sufficient number of them to meet your business’s long-term goals. They have to be plentiful. And they have to be profitable. Finding potential buyers is a big part of any business.
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Proposition: Every market is unique. So is every product. Figuring out the optimum way to sell your unique product to a given market segment is your first, most important priority. Until you do that, you can’t produce profits.
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I thought about that list for a long time and realized it wasn’t quite complete for me.
There are five more P’s we needed to consider:
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People: Every business, no matter what it does, where it’s located, or how automated its processes are, depends on people to create and maintain its profits.
Taking a business to the next level—even to keep it from falling backward—is most easily accomplished by hiring, promoting, training, and nurturing a team of key people who can work skillfully and efficiently. You have to find them, motivate them, and hold on to them. |
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Promotions: Discovering the right proposition for your business is the first—but only the first—priority of selling.
To keep your business profitable, you have to produce a continuous flow of successful, customer-grabbing promotions (sales offers that attract attention, offer benefits to customers, and persuade them to buy your products). A business that can’t produce breakthrough promotions on an ongoing basis is a business doomed to mediocrity… or even failure. |
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7.-9.
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Procedures, Protocols, and Processes: If you get the first six P’s working right, your business will never suffer from a lack of sales.
But if you don’t have effective operations—order taking, fulfillment, accounting, and customer service—your profits will always be half of what they should be. And your stress will be double what it needs to be. |
