Paul Lemberg (@Paul_Lemberg) is a business coach who, simply put, helps entrepreneurs make more money 

• Paul has consulted with Fortune-100 companies like Cisco, Adobe, IBM, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan/Chase, Mass Mutual, and Accenture, but his real and true passion is helping small business owners and CEOs double and triple their profits, and sometimes grow their companies more than 10-fold
• Check out his website

This old product of Paul’s is a 5-step recipe for business success:

• 1) Improve lead generation
• 2) Improve conversion
• 3) Improve margin 
• 4) Monetize the customer
  • Most businesses sell 1 product to 1 group 1 time. That’s it! They’re missing out on a lot of money!
• 5) Master systematization, prioritization, and use of time
  • The main premise: gain more leverage so you can execute the first 4 steps

Let’s dig deeper:

• Before worrying about leads, just like Reid Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) has famously said – “In the beginning, you have to do things that DON’T scale”
  • AKA you have to do things that don’t systematize
• Step 1: Get leads any way you can
• Step 2: Figure out your closing process (which then allows you to go and get more leads)
• Step 3: Once the money starts coming in, begin to think about raising prices 
• Step 4: Figure out the overall monetization strategy
• Step 5: When all of the above is working, implement a system

Then he’d examine monetization

• Every business needs to constantly be asking – “Are we doing the most to create value for the customer”
  • Creating that value often involves upselling, which many salespeople don’t like to do because they view it as sleazy 
    • Paul recalls this line from Jay Abraham – “What you’re doing when you’re upselling is helping your customer get the full value of the thing they were trying to get that they’re typically too cheap to buy”
      • Paul adds – Most people don’t get the full value (utility, fun joy, satisfaction, etc.) of what they’re looking for and they don’t get it simply because there’s a part of every human being that tries to conserve resources (AKA $)
      • As an example – If you’re buying a new suit, the salesperson’s job is to help you figure out what it is you’re trying to achieve by buying a new suit in the first place and help you get there
        • If a new suit costs $5,000, your survival instincts will lead you to believe spending that much money on a suit is utterly ridiculous – the salesperson’s job is to help you overcome that through an upsell

“People talk about LTV… lifetime total value or lifetime customer value. Lifetime is a really stupid measure. How long does that lifetime take?”

• “If lifetime is 6 months and then the customer’s out, that’s fine. I can count to 6 months.”
• But on the off chance a customer will be a 30-year buyer (or even a 5-year buyer), there’s just no way to forecast that 
• So… Paul thinks of the “L” in LTV as “long-term” – NOT lifetime
  • “Long-term is how long you can afford to have the money out”
  • For example – If you have 6-months of runway capital, then your long-term perspective should be 6 months (so you’d ask – “What’s the value of my customer in 6 months?”)

If the customer’s dreams are already satisfied, the corollary question is – “What else does a person who’s thinking about X need that I can also help them with?”

• Here are some possibilities:
  • Package some sort of car service with the car purchase (i.e. free oil changes)
  • If it’s a luxury car, upselling a set of designer bags
  • If people who buy a certain brand of car enjoy going tailgating, why not upsell a complete tailgating package?
  • Packaging a year of Uber/Lyft rides with the car purchase
  • Securing a discount on your next car purchase (or a car purchase for a family member) with the current car purchase
    • Why are car dealerships not asking if you want another car for someone else in your family when you buy a car for yourself???!!!

Always be testing a different conversion path (AKA how you turn someone who indicates interest in the thing you have to offer into a customer)

• If you have a 5% conversation and you discover a different conversion path that results in a 6% conversion… that’s 20% more money!
• Where do you start?
  • Look at the space where you’re losing the most customers in your process
  • Expanded: Attack the step in your sales process where you’re losing the most leads by volume – start by testing this area
• What do you test?
  • Test anything you can think of. A few examples:
    • Changing the background color of a sales page
    • Changing the font
    • Altering the headline
  • Related to the above, Paul highly recommends Always Be Testing by Bryan and Eisenberg
    • Bryan is also the co-author (with his brother, Jeffrey) of Be Like Amazon (which Roland recommends) and Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?
    • (Certain people, like Bryan, prefer not to test anything they don’t believe has the potential to result in at least a doubling of sales)
• One thing to realize:
  • You DON’T have to test just one thing at a time (many prefer to do this as it’s easier to see what specifically made a difference)
    • Instead, create a whole new sales page – if it works better, who cares what made the difference?
    • Go for impact, not the excitement of knowing what made the difference

The two requirements for scaling a business:

• 1) You want consistent and predictable results so that no matter who’s running the process/system in your business it works out roughly the same way 
  • (Make it so the business can run without you)
  • But what if you’re an artist?
    • Perhaps you can have other people paint certain parts of your paintings?
    • Ask yourself – “What can be outsourced or delegated?” (there’s always something)
      • Then systematize those things
    • Lastly – only do what you’re great at/what you enjoy doing the most 
• 2) You want your expense for operating a certain process/system to go down with higher levels of revenue (or at least stay flat) 
  • (As you grow your business, the costs should go down)
  • Anything that’s not based on individual people or rare/scarce raw materials should drop in cost as the business scales
  • “Anywhere you have a process you can repeat, test, and make better… all of this automatically makes things more efficient, reduces costs, and allows you to do more without applying more input”
  • Whenever Paul helps someone scale a business, he’ll ask – “What is the capacity of this business to deliver more of what it’s got without investing more in?”
    • The fact is: most things CAN be scaled