Market To Your Team First

I'm Alex Charfen, and this is the Momentum podcast, made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off, and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average, and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few, who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future, and instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters. Clearly, the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

Market to your team first. When we are growing our businesses, one of the most exciting things that we do is sell stuff. We put out marketing, we put out promotions, we get on the phone with somebody, and we are able to actually make a sale. When we first start our business, that is the goal. Let's make sales. Let's bring in revenue. Let's actually sell something to someone that creates a positive effect. As an entrepreneur, I think selling a product to someone that moves their life forward, or that changes the condition they're in, or stops pain for them, is one of the most exciting things we do. As we grow our company, we get more and more of that excitement, because inherently in growing our business, we're selling to more and more people.

However, as we grow our business, and then, we grow our team, we pick up a different constituency we have to start marketing to. In fact, our market is not the most important group we're marketing to anymore. I know that sounds so counterintuitive, but when you're growing your team, and when you have people with you, the new group that you must market to first becomes your team. I work with entrepreneurs that have crossed the million dollar mark and are building teams, growing an organization around them, trying to make an even bigger impact, growing towards from seven figures to eight figures, and one of the biggest challenges I see repeatedly is that entrepreneurs at this size want to just be able to market, like they always have, especially when the entrepreneur who grew the business is also the marketing expert for the business.

If you're in that situation, this podcast applies to you specifically, because here's what we want to do. I know this feeling. I know this feeling. I'm with you. I've done it before myself. Here's what we want to do. We come up with a great idea, just like we did when our company was small. We have an awesome idea for a promotion. We want to put it out there, get it out there, see what it will do. We think about it for an afternoon, and then, ah screw it. We just go on Facebook Live and start promoting this new thing that we know we can sell, that we really want to put out there, or, we whip out an email to our list and send it out to see what will happen.

Only we don't stop first and let our team know what's going on. So the team, that we are now building, the team that we're building trust with, the team that's helping us, supporting us, helping us put our products out into the market, is not only caught off guard, they find out about a promotion that we're doing after our clients do. If you haven't done this to your team, congratulations. If you were on my team when I did this to you multiple times, I am sorry. Because I know just how damaging it is now.

See, here's the challenge. When you market to your team, everything changes. When you market to your team, they know how to support you. When you market to your team, they can help make your marketing bigger. They can give you feedback. They can show you what you're missing. When you market to your team, they can help you make it even more successful by being prepared and knowing exactly what's going on, and they can prepare to be able to answer client questions, to maximize your promotion, to make it as big as it possibly can be.

Here's why we don't. I know, for me, it's impatience. It's when somebody says, "Hey, you have to tell your team first," I don't like that constraint. It makes me feel like I'm being held in place. It makes me uncomfortable. I want to say back to them, "Hey, this is my company, I can do whatever I want." When I think about marketing to my team first, I think about slowing down the promotion and it drives me nuts. I'm like, "I don't want to slow it down, I want to get it out. I'm eager to get results. I want to see what it's going to do." But here's the fact, and this goes without saying. Overall, as entrepreneurs, we get far greater results when we tell our team about the promotions we're going to run first. When we market to our team first, and get their buy in, when we tell them what's going to happen so that they can prepare, and they know what's coming, our results are exponentially larger. But it's so hard for people like us to take the self-imposed constraint of slowing down and marketing to our team first. I know.

I've done this so many times, I've lost count, but I don't any more, because what I realized was the promotions that I ran, the sales that I put out into the marketplace, the discounts that I did, the Facebook Lives that I did, the way that I hijacked promotions within my company and didn't tell people what was really going to happen, left my team feeling like they were reacting instead of being able to be proactive, like they were losing instead of like we were winning. What would happen is, we would sell a ton of stuff, but they would be frustrated with the fallout, and I wouldn't understand. It took me forever to figure out. I mean, I remember thinking, "Come on guys, we sold stuff. Stop complaining."

It wasn't until I started looking at it from the other side, and really started examining it carefully, and realizing that the more impatient I got, the more it damaged my team's ability to really support me. The more I took promotions out to the marketplace without telling them about it, without getting their feedback, the less they were able to make me and our company successful. Probably most importantly, the more I put stuff out there that they weren't fully prepared for, the more I made my team feel like they were losing, like they were reacting, like they were fixing stuff, like they were making it better, instead of like they were winning. Like I've said before, if you make your team lose, you'll lose the most important people on your team. If you make your team lose, you'll lose A players. If you make your team lose, you'll lose the people in the company who can actually grow the team, because they'll go somewhere else where they can win consistently. Human beings do not like to lose. When we don't market to our team first, we put them in a position to do just that.

Depending on the size of your team, start marketing to your team first, and then put the marketing out to the market second. If you've grown a sizeable team, it depends on the size of the team, if it's a smaller team, say under 10 people, maybe you tell the whole team at once and then you go out to the market. If you have a larger team, if you're fortunate enough to have grown a multi-million dollar company, you have leadership teams, you have people who work for your leaders, then it's a two-step process. First, you introduce your marketing and your ideas to your leaders, so that they can support you in introducing it to the rest of the team.

When you do this, when you take the step of letting your team know what's coming, when you take the step of letting your team know what promotion they're going to be reacting to, when you take the step of getting them involved up front, they feel like they're participating, helping, and helping you grow, rather than reacting. Because when you cause A players to react consistently, when you cause A players to be caught off guard consistently, they'll leave. If you want your marketing to be bigger than it ever has been, if you want your promotions to grow multiplicatively from where they are today, if you want to get to that next stage of growth, market to your team first, and then take everything to the market second.

If you haven't yet, do me a favor. Take a minute now, subscribe to this podcast, and we would really appreciate it if you would leave a review. I read all of them. I can't tell you how much I appreciate them. My team and I watch for them, we share them in our daily huddle. We discuss them. Let us know what you think of the podcast, I would really appreciate it. If you're ready to win with your marketing, and have promotions bigger than you've ever had before, make sure the population you market to first, make sure the population you share it with first, make sure the people you get excited about the promotions first, are on your team.