The #1, Single Most Important Question A Goal Setter Can Ask All Year.

This post is for online and offline professionals who are sick of chasing their tails.  It’s for people trying to market their business.  It’s for job hunters.  And it is for employees who want to get ahead at work.

You know who you are.  You try the next big thing trying to get sales or subscribers.  Little tricks and techniques to get you ahead of the game.

But many of these produce little or no results.  We’re still confused.  We’re still not getting what we want.

This isn’t an indictment of you or anyone else.  I jump on many of the “latest techniques” as quick as the next guy when I am searching for answers.  But more often the techniques end up as interesting diversions when all is said and done.

In the past two weeks I’ve had 2 companies contact me for help with their marketing.  One had read an online affiliate through Adwords e-Book.  The other was a stand alone business.

In both cases their questions went something like..

I am struggling with my business, how can I market it so that I am making money?  My web site is popular and gets decent traffic.  But few people buy.  Lately, however, I am making no sales at all. 

A quick visit to each of these sites revealed the main problem with both.

Both company sites were nice.  Created by professionals.  The designs were slick.  The graphics were eye-popping.

But they lacked one important feature.  The feature itself can be summed up in a question.

Before I tell you the missing piece of the puzzle, let me tell you about a recent chat session.  Rick contacted me about his goal to make more money.  He professed good computer skills equal to or greater than others in his industry.  But he was making less money than the others.

He wrote:

I keep contacting these companies to set up job interviews.  I go to the interview and think I make a good impression.  But they never call me.

Rick, like the companies above hasn’t asked himself the most important question anyone should ask before marketing anything…

BTW, marketing can be any promotion.  You promote yourself at work.  You can promote a book.  You can promote your church to other churchgoers.  It doesn’t matter, it’s still marketing.

By making that connection, you’ve won half the battle. 

A universal problem in all marketing

Which problem?  You are thinking.  Yes, there are many problems in marketing.   You can have bad breath one day.  You can say the wrong words the next.  But there’s something else that outweighs all the others. 

The problem all marketers face, be you a job hunter, shoe store owner or web affiliate is action. 

Action decides it all.  Someone takes action and you win.  Someone doesn’t take action and you lose.  Could it be any more simple?

Ahh.. but it’s not simple.  It’s a struggle.  Getting other people to take action is hard.  Heck, sometimes it feels I fight tooth and nail just to get people to sign up for my motivational articles via RSS which is only one button click away!

Or how about when I try to persuade dieters to take up walking and eating more veggies?  Some people will take action, others won’t.   But that’s ok.  I learned a long time ago persuading others to take action is tough.

The point being as a marketer you want someone to take action.  If they don’t, your message is flawed.

The #1 Question for Marketers

If your message is flawed, then what? 

You’ve been marketing up a storm, but the action response ain’t happening.

Do you quit trying to sell your products?  Do you stay working at a job you hate?  Do you deed a Kindle over to me?  By all means. On the last option anyway.

Instead of quitting, consider the #1 question.

By answering this question, you will be far ahead of your competition.  After years of doing what I do, I’ve come to realize very few people ever ask this question.

When I tell you, you’ll probably see it as being obvious.  I did when I first learned it.  I took it for granted.  I didn’t apply myself.

Only when I realized how important it was did things start to turn around in my work advancement, my software sales and my subscriber numbers.

Since action is the main result you seek from any marketing, it begs the obvious question.

What 1 action do you want your potential client to take?

The Power of the #1 Question

Let me break down the #1 question and explain why it’s so powerful.

1 Action - I stress only 1 action because you’d be lucky to get someone to take 1/2 an action if it were possible.  See the examples above.  A positive action – however small, opens the doors. 

If you throw more than 1 action at someone, statistically, they will do nothing.  People get confused.  They get overwhelmed by alternatives.  Sure there are those enthusiasts who sign up for everything.  But the key to marketing success is in the one action realm. 

What action do you want them to take? - Wow, here’s where you get your say.  What do you want a visitor to your web site to do?  What do you want the interviewer for that hot IT job to do?  Choose the action carefully.  You’ll almost always get what you want.

Hopefully a light is going on about the power of this question.

You can see what a disadvantage someone is at who seeks a second job interview or a phone call.  Shouldn’t she put first and foremost in her mind that she wants the company to offer her a job? 

When I first started marketing my software, I wanted people to take the action of downloading it.  So people downloaded it.  But what is critical to a business?  You have to make sales.  Since I focused so hard on getting people to download, I let things slip on the sales side.  Often times the sales link was broken.  Other times, I’d get emails telling me the sales page was missing entirely! 

It was Michel Fortin who got me to take a hard look at how I was running things.  Although he didn’t start out with the #1 question, he pointed me to the answer anyway.  The answer being that my business (or any business) could not survive on downloads alone.  I needed sales in order to survive.

Asking will change you

The second you know what one action you want others to take, a light bulb should go on.  When you set your sites on the action, your message will more effectively persuade others to take that action. 

Contrasting examples from a job search:

• A job candidate who doesn’t know what action they want the company to take.  He asks if they need a copy of his resume.
• A job candidate who wants the company to take the action of hiring her. She asks for the job.

Contrasting examples from an small business selling an e-book:

• The business owner who doesn’t know the action she wants her customer to take asks visitors to bookmark the site.
• The business owner who knows the desired action, places a special 1-time offer on the book for an immediate sale.

Contrasting examples from the world of work:

• An employee who doesn’t know the action he wants his boss to take works hard, keeps his head down and waits for a raise.
• An employee who does know the action also works hard, but makes it clear to the boss that he is working to one day run the company.  Therefore, the hard work is always in the context of him one day taking over the operation.

I know this is a subtle difference.  But if applied, it will make enormous changes to your results. 

Exercise for today:  Write down your top goal.  What bothers you most about this goal?  And what 1 specific action (if you could get someone else to take it) would help you reach that goal?

 

P.S.  Again, I’ll stress how important it is for you to subscribe to my my motivational articles via RSS.  You don’t want to risk missing content like this in the future do you?

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