🎩 Elon the Magician
🏆 Win the Ties; Repeat the Buys
👷♀️ Sales Is Blue Collar
🎩 Elon Musk, The Master Distractor
Elon Musk declared Tesla will debut its robotaxi on August 8th. He’s like a magician distracting the market with a sleight of hand.
Let’s talk about the real issue: Tesla has a brand problem. The company hasn’t given its customers a reason to come back again and again. The company is losing brand loyalty, and you can see this in its sales numbers.
For the first time since 2020, Tesla’s sales declined. First quarter delivery results were a disaster! The market anticipated deliveries of 425,000 to 455,000 vehicles, but Tesla delivered 386,810. Sales dropped 8.5% year over year.
Tesla’s drop in sales is bigger than high interest rates and inflation. Customers aren’t buying, and Tesla deliveries will continue to decline because there is nothing new to buy.
Tesla’s success put it in a rare position where customer demand outpaced the company’s need to regularly release new products. It also let it get away with poor build quality and delayed feature releases.
That lack of innovation has an impact on customer loyalty. If you’re a Tesla owner, are you going to buy another Tesla or try a different brand with more modern features? Maybe the Porsche Taycan?
This is a critical lesson for our businesses. The time to innovate more, sell more, or market more is when you’re achieving your greatest success. The moment you stop innovating is when things start to decline.
One Stat to Watch
93%
Trust-building improves profitability. A recent PwC survey found, 93% of business executives agree that the ability to build and maintain trust with customers improves the bottom line.
🏆 Win the Ties; Repeat the Buys
A Sticky Brand delivers two key results: Win the ties; Repeat the buys.
Win the Ties: Customers have choice, lots of choice. When customers can’t distinguish one option from the next they tend to default to one of three positions:
- They will go with what they already know,
- They go with what’s cheapest, or
- They go with what’s available.
A Sticky Brand provides competitive immunity. When customers clearly see what makes your products and services unique, they will beat a path to your door and choose them first. Your brand helps you win the ties.
Repeat the Buys: Winning a customer once is great, but there is something wrong if your customers are not coming back again and again. A brand isn’t sticky without repeat customers.
A disproportionate amount of sales and marketing dollars are invested into customer acquisition, but you may find even more growth with your current customers.
It is far more efficient and effective to serve a loyal customer than to constantly be hunting for your next one.
👷♀️ Sales Is Blue Collar
Jerry Seinfeld is a comedy legend, but he worked for it. Seinfeld says the key to his success was taking a blue-collar mindset to writing new material every day.
Comedy is a job, no different from doing construction or working in a factory. Seinfeld explains, “I realized construction workers don’t want to go back to work after lunch. But they’re going. That’s their job. If they can exhibit that level of dedication for that job I should be able to do the same.”
Sales is the same. It takes hard work to be successful!
Sure, marketing can make things easier by reducing the time a salesperson spends cold calling and prospecting. But if your marketing isn’t firing on all cylinders, salespeople have to put on their work boots and sell.
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