Seth Godin: 5 Ways to Grow Your Market

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Seth Godin: 5 Ways to Grow Your Market
The world's top marketing guru explains how to innovate your sales and marketing.
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Bestselling author Seth Godin
A few years ago, I heard marketing uber-guru Seth Godin speak about
business growth through innovation at a conference hosted by my
friend and mentor Gerhard Gschwandtner, CEO of SalesOpShop.com.
I ran across my session notes from that conference recently and
decided that Seth's ideas were definitely worth sharing:
1. Invent a New Market Segment
Position your product or service at the "logical extreme" of some aspect of your product category.
For example, if the typical product in your market is expensive but comes with free service, make
your product free and charge a subscription fee for the service. If you're making a commodity
product, go for something either huge or tiny. Seth used the example of Hummers and Mini
Coopers, but I think a better example is the PC market, where most of the growth in the past five
years has been in high-end game machines and tiny netbooks.
2. Exchange Your Sales Funnel for a Sales Network
Traditionally, sales is envisioned as a funnel, with prospects shoveled into the big end and
customers trickling out the bottom. Today, however, there is now so much market clutter that it's
increasingly expensive to locate new prospects. So rather than concentrating on lead generation,
create products and services that are so remarkable that existing customers can't wait to tell their
friends and colleagues about them. Find ways, like contests and special offers, to help your happy
customers get the message out.
3. Market to the Trailing or the Leading Edge
With the Internet, informed customers can always find whatever they want for the lowest possible
price. Growing your business therefore means finding either two types of customer: clueless or
brilliant. Clueless customers don't know what they want and thus can be persuaded to want
whatever you're selling. Brilliant customers are so knowledgeable that they can to be persuaded
that what you have is special and therefore worth seeking out. It's only on the fringes of your

market where there's either sufficient ignorance or sufficient knowledge for your offering to
command a premium price.
4. Create a Story That Shows How You're Different
The old model of mass marketing meant creating a product that appeals to an average buyer,
then interrupting as many prospects as possible (with commercials, direct mail, sales calls, etc.),
hoping to convince a percentage to buy. This is no longer effective because today's consumers
tune out any message that doesn't interest them. You have to "earn" the right to sell to people
and this is only possible if you have a compelling story that shows how what you're offering is
different and better from everything else that's available in the market.
5. Sell the Story Rather Than the Product
Businesspeople make decisions based on logic, right? Wrong! In every product segment, there is at
least one brand that uses a story to convince people to pay extra for that brand. Seth used the
example of office furniture. "A chair is a chair is a chair, but the Aeron chair sells for several times
the average price because the manufacturer has positioned it as the chair companies buy when
they value the health of their white collar employees," he explained. He also pointed out that
people pay up to $5 a quart for bottled water because (so the story goes) it's "healthier" than tap
water.
BTW, Gerhard recently interviewed me on video for his new SalesOpShop.com site. Here's the link!
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Geoff rey James writes the Sales Source column on Inc.com, the world's most visited
sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power
Words and Strategies From the World's Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source