Rob & Kennedy – What you do when your start-up is about to run out of cash

“You can’t make someone laugh with double entry bookkeeping ” 

Key Takeaways

• If you’re a speaker, entertainer or someone that has to travel a lot for work the majority of your time is spent travelling – use that time to learn how to market yourself effectively so you can position yourself to get a good price and also outsell your competition.
• Marketing is essentially problem solving and processes – you’ve just got to find a way to enjoy it.
• Marketing gets a bad name because people think of it as all the pretty stuff – it’s actually lots of spreadsheets and lots of data and micro improvements to get a better result.
• Change your mindset around marketing because it’s really the Make Money Department – if you don’t market yourself you’re not going to make any money.
• Rob & Kennedy started our tech company because there was nothing on the market that did what we wanted to do and we were spending a small fortune on assistants who would do the manual processes for us.
• Our MVP was called the ugly little brother – it was horrible but we knew we had to release something even though we were mortified and embarrassed by it.
• We approach our marketing in two ways – one for immediate revenue right now – ads, joint venture partnerships and affiliate relationships and the other to build our own audience and database through relationship building and content.
• We started a podcast as our main means of content marketing because we’re both presenters, we enjoy speaking and presenting our thoughts and ideas and prefer doing that to writing blogs.
• Find a way to market your business that you enjoy because if you try and do something you don’t it won’t be as good as it could be.
• No one is a good marketer to start with you have to find something you’re good at, keep doing it and keep improving.
• Segmentation makes addressing the challenges and objections of different target customers much easier when emailing them and running email campaigns and marketing automation.
• Address market objections in a really positive way to get maximum response – this is only really achievable when you can segment your audience and be really targeted about the messages you’re putting out there.
• You can’t make someone laugh with double-entry bookkeeping
• When you’re marketing to an audience that doesn’t know they have a problem or need the solution you’re offering you have to meet them where they are right now and offer them a solution to a problem they know they have.
• You can’t pay the bills by being nice – you have to sell and focus on sales
• When you spend a lot of time traveling for work you can use that time to help your business:
  Learn how to market yourself effectively
  Set up an online business
  Teach others how to do what you do

Rob & Kennedy’s tips for speaking for people that have never done it before and aren’t typically confident speaking in front of an audience:

• Know your stuff – talk about something you’re confident talking about and don’t try and talk about something you’re not sure about
• Do your reps – don’t expect to be good at it first time round but practice and do it more often
• Look inward and not outward and look at the skills you already have and use them more
• Don’t compare yourself to others

What to do when you have a tech start-up and you’re about to run out of money?

• Create a product you can sell at a profit that will give you an audience of targeted prospects for your software.
• Make sure your product will serve the growth of your business.
• Segment everyone who joins your email list and database so you can be very targeted in how you talk to them so that you are better positioned to sell your main solution as and when they need it.
• Sell through education and use your entry product to educate your market and create demand for your main solution.
• Don’t keep self-funding your start-up so you have a safety net. Challenge yourself to think of solutions that don’t require you to keep putting money in yourself.
• Don’t do the things you’re supposed to be doing and instead focus on the things that are going to help you get to your goal.

Mentioned Links and References:

About Rob and Kennedy:

Rob and Kennedy are the most unlikely entrepreneurs you’ll ever meet.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a hypnotist and a psychological mind reader used their skills for sales and marketing? No? Of course you haven’t. But that’s the unusual recipe for Rob and Kennedy’s success.

Sporting hairstyles that look like comic-book characters and backgrounds in psychology, hypnosis, and show-business – it’s hard to believe they’re serial entrepreneurs with an uncanny knack for building businesses by getting inside of customers’ heads.

Hosts of The Email Marketing Show podcast, founders of the revolutionary survey platform ResponseSuite and two of the most dynamic speakers on email marketing in the world.

About ResponseSuite – Surveys that make you sales: