How To Be “Oversubscribed”
On my flight to France a few weeks ago, I read through a book called Oversubscribed: How to Get People Lining Up to Do Business with You by Daniel Priestly.
I knew I needed the principles from that book for a particular project, so I sat through the entire audiobook in one sitting.
I've had a chance to put that book into action with a couple different clients, and I wanted to share with you what I've been learning.
The idea of Oversubscribed is that the most resilient and successful businesses are “oversubscribed”: meaning they have more demand than supply.
At first, that might sound like building pointless "hype" around your business.
But it's really about giving people a space to think “I hope I get to work with them” or “I’m really excited to buy from them”…
Versus “It seems like they want me to buy from them.”
If you want to be oversubscribed, you have to bring "oversubscribed energy" to your marketing.
What does that mean?
When you plan and write a marketing campaign, don’t dwell too much on what you need from this promotion (ticket sales, sign-ups, donations, etc.).
Instead, write with the mindset that the right people are seeing your content and that they will take action if the offer and timing are right.
I’ve put this into practice with a couple clients recently:
Client 1: A well-known leadership training and personal development company.
This client is planning an event for early next year and wanted me to help them promote it to their email list of about 25,000 subscribers.
They’ve never done this event before, but need to sell a certain amount of tickets to make it worth it.
The easiest thing to do would be to write a long, persuasive sales email and dump all the details on their audience at once:
“Come to this event! You won’t want to miss it! Look at all these speakers! Tickets are only $199! We’ll even give you lunch!!”
Instead, we started with a short email to validate the idea and generate some interest.
This email was basically “Hey, we’re thinking about doing this thing, let us know if you’re interested. We only have room for 200 people.”
Then we made it really easy for people to indicate interest.
I just heard from them today that over 700 subscribers indicated that they wanted to come. And 250 of those took the time to fill out an entire interest form.
They can only sell 200 tickets. That means they're oversubscribed.
Now that we have those numbers, we can write a sales email that's not desperate to sell 200 tickets...
But instead says "700 people want to come, but we only have room for 200. And this email is going to 25,000."
By next year’s event, there will already be a waiting list of people who missed out on this one.
And the ones who do make it to this event will enjoy it that much more knowing that they're with a close group of this company's most dedicated fans.
Client 2: NYC real estate company for expats moving to the US
Another client of mine is a real estate company that finds homes for corporate transferees moving to the NYC area.
This client’s big industry conference was a few weeks ago. There are (at least) two ways to approach networking at a conference:
Get as many meetings as possible and meet with anyone who will take a spot on your calendar, hoping it turns into a sale
Strategically reach out to people you really want to meet with
This client chose the second strategy.
Instead of spending his time jumping from one person to the next, he got to spend concentrated time and energy on the people he wanted to connect with the most.
That’s the whole point of building an “oversubscribed” business.
If you can successfully build an oversubscribed business, you'll have people lining up at your door as soon as you launch something new or have a gap in your revenue.
You may even have:
A waiting list of clients
More volunteers than projects available
A waiting list of investors
More donors than you need to meet your goals
It’s not about making people miss out, or even building hype.
It’s about giving your undivided attention to the people who want (and need) it the most.