80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall 🔗

This was recommended to me by several people that I know, one of whom found it so valuable she immediately started making changes to her life and business from it.

I think the measure of a good business book is the amount of actionable changes a person can make to their life/business after reading it. So here is my review, the things I’ve implemented, and I’ll update the post in a couple of weeks with on further implementation.

To give the 80/20 rule in a nutshell, 80% of results come from 20% of the variable, or to put it another way, in any given system, the results are disproportionally dependent on a handful of a variables.

In this book, Perry Marshall shows how this rule applies to marketing, giving a good balance of theory and examples.

Review 🔗

This book by Perry Marshall is all about finding the little things that can make a big difference in your business.

Here are a few key points that resonated with me:

• You need to have very expensive products for your ultra valuable customers.
• You need to reach the right people to buy.
• The way things are done may not be the right way to do things. Sometimes a sales strategy can take time to pay off, but pays off big time in the long run.
• A great product can be a complete, all inclusive experience, that solves the problem with as little fuss, and as much ease to the client, as possible.
• You should be constantly improving your USP.
• The 80/20 rule applies to marketing, and requires testing. Write 50 ads. Test them. See what does best. Do more of that. Most people won’t even test five ads - they underestimate how much testing finding a great ad takes.
• A gourmet version is always possible, no matter how bland your industry.
• You have to apply 80/20 to your time. Most of your time is probably taken up with low value jobs, and a small amount of your time is applied to the high value jobs. But, the low value jobs have to be done. Hire out the low value jobs and spend more time on the high value jobs.

Some of the above are a bit redundant, and I’ve condensed the best-of:

Expensive products for valuable customers 🔗

I have two rules of business:

1. Make it easy for people to pay
2. If someone bought your most expensive product, you need a new “most expensive” product.

Perry seems to agree with my second rule. 80/20 states that 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your customers. So you need something expensive to sell to them.

This expensive product/service must deliver real value to them - you can’t just take a product you’ve been selling and jack up the price by a factor of 10.

With a service based business, this top tier will be all-inclusive, done for you, don’t lift a finger services.

For a product based business we’re talking about gourmet versions of your product. For example, you can get cheap sausages, and more expensive sausages with spices and herbs in them.

You have to reach the right people 🔗

It’s no good having the greatest product in the world if you can’t get infront of the right people to sell it.

Tools like Facebook and Google allow you to advertise to an enormous amount of people. The machine learning in the algorithms behind how these ad platforms works are incredible and very helpful, but, you need at least a broad idea of who you are wanting to target.

What are their demographics, interest? What are they searching for?

Knowing the answers to these questions will help you send an ad to the person most likely to buy.

It’s also worth noting that these two platforms aren’t the only platforms available for running ads, and that some old school methods can work great. For example, for a local service business, door to door flyers can be highly effective. Some businesses will benefit from advertising in certain journals or periodicals.

Perry gives an example of how he started writing articles in a trade journal that placed him in a pre-eminent position among prospective clients.

Ads need to be tested 🔗

It’s no good writing a few ads and hoping for the best. You need to write 50 ads and test them out against each other.

80/20 needs data to work! If you write 50 ads, one of them is going to outperform the others by a wide margin.

The testing doesn’t stop with your ads.

Your landing page and offer also need to be tested. The angle you take in your copy needs to be tested. Fortunately, there are plenty of tools available for split testing your landing pages.

As a note, in his book The Millionaire Fastlane, MJ DeMarco recommends split testing once you have 1000 positive results (e.g. opt-ins, sales etc) to get enough data for your test to be statistically valid. Anything less than this and you’re not sure if you’re measuring a real effect or statistical chance.

80/20 applied to your time 🔗

The way you spend your time is very important. In fact, it’s probably one of the most important decisions that we make.

Some of our daily tasks are productive. Some are unproductive. Some have a low productivity, but are necessary for the high productivity tasks.

Some tasks are unproductive and unecessary, for example, the amount of time you spend on social media or going down a YouTube rabbit hole.

It can be hard to place a “productivity value” on some tasks, such as spending time with your kids, but you should be doing it and want to get as much of it as possible.

Note: When it comes to distractions and things that are a total waste of time, Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism has some fantastic recommendations.

It’s also worth noting that this doesn’t mean eliminating leisure - leisure time and rest are vital for being healthy, thinking clearly and enjoying your life.

In this section of the book, Perry Marshall has two main recommendations:

• Hire out household tasks that are not important
• Hire out your low value tasks at work

Perry recommends starting out with hiring out the tasks at home, as these are often the easiest (and cheapest) to do.

Hire out the household tasks 🔗

Cleaning the house, getting the shopping, washing your clothes etc all need to be done. They enable you and your home to function. But they’re quite low value tasks that anyone can do, so get someone else to do them. Hire a cleaner. Pay the kids to do it. Hire an assistant to take care of a few things.

This will free up your time so that you can focus on more high value tasks - working on that next advert for your business, or spending time with your family.

Perry gives the following list of things you want to outsource at home as quickly as possible:

• Washing your clothes
• Cooking
• Cleaning
• Shopping
• Putting gas in the car
• Mowing the lawn / shovelling the snow

Hire out low value work tasks 🔗

When it comes to your work, you have high value tasks that “move the needle” and low value tasks that keep things moving. Hire an assistant for yourself, out of your own money, to take care of some of the low value tasks at your work (you may need to clear this with your boss first).

This is similar to what Timothy Ferris talks about in one chapter in his book, The 4 Hour Work Week.

Implementing These Ideas 🔗

Reading a book like this without taking action is a great way to waste your time.

The first step I took was to think about some of the tasks I’m doing (in business and at home) and seeing what I can get rid off.

Task 1: Cleaning. The cleaner is coming on Tuesday and I’m very excited to not have to do this anymore.

The next task to find a better way to do the weekly shop, so I’ll move from walking to the local Lidl to getting a biweekly home delivery from Tesco. I take a walk in the evenings, so I’ll get fresh fruit and veg once a week on my evening walk.

Task 2: Running ads on Google Search and YouTube. Currently, I’ve only been using ads on Facebook. I’ve started running ads on Google Search and YouTube today (16/7/2023), and will see how they do over the next few weeks.

Task 3: Premium tier offerings. My business needs a higher tier offering. Currently I have a low value item I sell for £7-£15. I’m in the process of creating a couple of different formats for the product, swell as a high tier product I can add in addition to this.

I’d like to start testing my landing page, but it currently isn’t generating enough sales for a split test to give reliable data. However, I know that as soon as I cross that threshold of 1000 sales/mo, running split tests will be of vital importance.

Conclusion 🔗

Perry says that at any one time, there are only a few small things you should be focussing on with your business. This book is a great way to get focussed and figure out the things that are going to make a big difference quickly.