Strategies for Market Domination and Finding 3X the Profit

Eric Eden: 0:59

Welcome to today's episode. Our guest today is Brian. He is the CEO of Profit Finders. They are a revenue operation strategy firm. Welcome to the show.

Brian Carmody: 1:12

Thanks, eric, I appreciate being here.

Eric Eden: 1:15

Why don't we start off by you sharing, just for a few minutes, a little bit about your background and what you do with the Profit Finders? It sounds pretty cool, like treasure hunters.

Brian Carmody: 1:30

Thanks, eric. Yeah, it's funny. I get a lot of nice compliments about the name of the Profit Finders. People like the mystique of it. I think it was a good pick. I did one thing I used to own a manufacturing company for eight years, so I come to this from business ownership perspective. A couple of years back I decided to take what I've learned the good and the bad, the mistakes and the successes and help other small businesses hopefully make fewer mistakes and less costly mistakes and learn from the things that I did. And that's really what drives me I just very rewarding and I approach it from a revenue operations perspective. Like you said, I really believe in breaking down the silos between marketing, sales and customer support. So that's one of the ways I help companies is really getting marketing, sales and customer support all really talking to each other and collaborating, getting on the same page so that everybody has a very clear understanding of the value that their company brings and are sharing those stories back and forth to each other so that they can continue to enhance customer support in serving their customers and finding new customers. And then the one thing I add into that that most people don't do in revenue operations is I always look at learning and development as well. I think that's a critical part to the piece, which is, if marketing, sales and customer support are doing all this discovery and client support and so forth, how do we train, how do we keep people trained so that they have all the skills they need to continue to try different strategies, to continue to enhance customer value and capturing more leads and customer lifetime value enhancement and all that kind of stuff.

Eric Eden: 3:20

So that's what I do. That's awesome.

Brian Carmody: 3:22

Yeah.

Eric Eden: 3:23

I think the one thing that I think is great about it is for marketing, sales and customer support professionals. Really, what they're doing is they're acquiring skills as they go on their career journey. Right, there's a lot of skills to acquire in each of those functional areas, so that training aspect of it is quite cool, helping people along that journey.

Brian Carmody: 3:49

I try to save them some time, ramp up the speed so that they can acquire the skills faster Because a lot of people do come to those jobs with, let's face it, a history degree, a political science degree, an English degree it's just the way it is in the United States and to be able to expand their understanding of hey, there's a lot of other strategies that are out there that you may not know about. I can speed that up. For people and for companies. It ends up results in the bottom line.

Eric Eden: 4:22

Yeah, absolutely. So let's jump into your story.

Brian Carmody: 4:26

Sure Bottom line up front. I helped a company triple its revenue and take it to nationwide sales. The way we did that is when I came to them, they had no what I call a market dominating position, which means that they just didn't have a real clear picture or message to the market about what made them different and they were being treated like a commodity. They were being judged on price within their category. So the first thing we did is spent some time looking at okay, let's figure out, let's get real clear on the advantages you have in the marketplace and let's see also, let's get real clear on what the gaps and pain points and hot buttons however you want to call them that your target customers have. So when we identified those hot buttons especially, we were able to actually coach the company into building itself or positioning itself to respond to those hot buttons in a very dramatic way. And it's more than just verbiage, it's more than just messaging. They literally had to position, make moves within the company to support the message that they were now pronouncing. I'll give you a quick example. So they made office furniture and the market their target market was very frustrated with the long lead time of six to eight weeks waiting for furniture, and that was because most manufacturers do what's called just in time manufacturing and that means they don't make anything until somebody places an order because they don't want to carry the inventory. That's great for the company, for the manufacturer, but this manufacturer was the David in the David and Goliath story and they needed to do something different. So they invested upfront in the inventory to create next day shipping delivery, so now they could go to market as the company that could ship the day after they got an order. So they were able to really steal business because of the way they positioned themselves. That's why we call it a market dominating position. Second pain point that they did, or that we uncovered and then built the company around to support. It was more of a modularity story. Their competitors typically were shipping larger assemblies to their customers and we were able to uncover that what a lot of the target buyers wanted already had certain parts of those assemblies. So they needed to, or they wanted somebody to come to market with the ability to just be able to buy and receive just parts and pieces that they needed for the furniture to enhance their way their office worked. So they did that and since they. So now they had an in stock model, they had a modularity piece that they could ship just what the customer wanted instead of the larger, higher priced assemblies. So all that went into this market dominated position that nobody else was willing to match, because, again, that's part of it. The company had to make real investments, and they weren't super expensive. It was just that they had to make a decision to go this route, and most other companies weren't doing that, didn't think of doing that, not sure, this company did, and it made a big difference. So you add all that together, and what do you get as a result? You end up getting a compelling, irresistible offer to the marketplace that you could put your money where your mouth is, so to speak. You could make a bold claim, a bold offer, and deliver on it every day, and it was exactly what the market wanted. So that ended up taking the company to nationwide distribution and sales and triple their revenue, and I guess, actually the thirties of the stool, though, is how did we get that compelling offer or that message out to the market? But we did it through joint ventures and affiliates and then incentivizing those affiliates and joint venture partners out there, so we were able to take advantage of other people's audiences, other people's relationships and trust that they'd built up over the years across the country and just became a nice, easy sell, because then those people could then go to their local market and introduce this new product solution to them and they already had the trust built up, so it was easy, so that all we got that product out there from being unheard of to one of the national leaders and hitting the 5,000 list three times and all that and getting in front of thousands of buyers that previously they didn't have access to.

Eric Eden: 9:13

That's a brilliant trifecta. Some of it is a little bit unexpected in terms of the strategy because it's a bit counterintuitive to come up with that market dominating position. You wouldn't think that people would want things fast more than they would want to have the right product, but the reality is a lot of people they don't plan far enough in advance and if they need their furniture they can't wait months to get it. It's interesting that a lot of people would say, even if it maybe isn't exactly what they were planning on buying, that they would buy it because they can get it right away. Tapping into that as part of the three pieces is an interesting way to dominate.

Brian Carmody: 10:05

In some cases, it gave them more specifically what they wanted, though, too, because, remember, the standard was they had to buy these furniture assemblies and they really forced them to have to get rid of some of what they had in order to get that new piece. Now we were able to get them just exactly what they wanted. It worked with the furniture that they already had. They just enhanced it in certain ways that they needed. This really sometimes gave them more of what they needed more specifically for less price, so in a sense, it was a more cost-efficient way to buy for the buyers.

Eric Eden: 10:50

I see what you mean about. It wasn't just about messaging for market dominance. It was about coming up with the right offer, the right formula that was different enough than what the competition was doing, that it let them go nationwide and triple what they were doing. It wasn't just changing how they described who they were. It was coming up with a very different and interesting approach that other people hadn't taken Exactly.

Brian Carmody: 11:22

The key to it working was doing the fundamentals. We figured out what were the hot button pain points of the buyers the target market, and then we built the company's capabilities around that. I make that sound like it was a massive undertaking. It wasn't. The company had good bones in place and we just had to make some decisions at the executive level that, look, there's an opportunity here, let's shift the way we've always done things and see if we can address the buyers more directly, more quickly for less cost.

Eric Eden: 11:57

What I saw on your website is that across sales, marketing and customer success, you look at at least 12 different things to come up with strategies like this and you help people think about it in a different way. It's not that they couldn't have come up with that, but you look in those areas and you say what would create a market dominating strategy across those 12 areas? Is that sort of the process that you have?

Brian Carmody: 12:28

There's 12 areas of the business that, if you were to make just a 1.5% impact, you can double your profit in a company because of compound growth. Everybody's familiar with compound growth as it relates to savings accounts and investment accounts. But you can apply the law of compound growth to your business. If you make enough small incremental impacts across different areas of business, they all pile up on top of each other, they compound and literally can double the profit of a company. Those different areas of your business all have strategies that you can implement into your business to try to grow. That's what I was talking about before, where I try to help companies understand that they've got more tools in their toolbox than just the standard three go-to strategies that they've always used. There's actually quite a few. I teach up to 40. As a matter of fact, it depends on the company's industry whether it's just a good fit.

Eric Eden: 13:36

Hard-kitting back to the beginning of the episode, when you were talking about training and we were talking about people acquiring skills. I worked for this company and the founder had a great view of the compounding benefit of people acquiring more skills is. At the end of every week, he would say if we just do it 1% better next week than we did this week, and we do that every week all year long, then we'll be 50% better at the end of the year. And so at the end of the week every week, he would say and next week we get to do it all over again, but just a little bit better, just a little bit better. You don't have to do it like 20% better every week, just 1% better.

Brian Carmody: 14:21

That's achievable. He was spot on or she was spot on and the math is there to support that. That's exactly right. Just getting a little bit better. And that's why I like the corporate training piece that I do too, because I can train all those people that the managers can't get to anymore. They just don't have time because all the reporting they do and I get to work and develop these people so that I can build this small special ops army of people within their company that are all grabbing additional skills and different knowledge about how to market their company. And that really adds up and it becomes a massive, a massive compound effect for the company. That's how you get 1% better every week.

Eric Eden: 15:05

That's amazing. So you also have seven books you've written, Is that right?

Brian Carmody: 15:11

Yes, yeah, all different. Each one's packed with some of the strategies that we've been talking about, or at least have referred to in this conversation. So people who want to get a deeper dive into some of those things they're filled with case studies and success stories, that kind of thing and explaining the concepts I'm offering them for free. So all of your listeners can go to my website at theprofitfinderscom forward slash books and they can request a free copy of any of those books. They're all listed right there and from there I'll also offer them a chance to schedule 45 minutes with me. I will help them either test or create their market dominating position for their industry. I'll do that for free for your listeners.

Eric Eden: 16:00

That's amazing. Thank you so much for that, Brian. People need to figure out their market dominating position for sure. That's something you've got to have, so I encourage everyone to take advantage of that offer. Also, share this episode with your friends so they can learn how to dominate the market. We appreciate your time today, Brian. Thank you for sharing these insights.