How to Increase Sales With Buckets

Many businesses serve a core audience of people in a particular industry or niche.

And within that broad audience, there are likely to be subsets, or buckets of people who are on the same path, in the same situation, or facing the same problem.

The most effective way to reach each bucket is to customize the way you communicate to them. Speak directly to their most urgent challenges, and show them that you understand what they are facing.

Now, when I talk about customizing…

It’s not just about tailoring your products and services; it’s about tailoring how you communicate them. 

Don’t overwhelm yourself with customization. Instead, pinpoint key elements that can make all the difference.

Let’s establish the sweet spot: addressing 80% of your market with three to five buckets. 

Why? Too many buckets create unnecessary work, and too few miss out on the power of The ASK Method.

Now, let’s dig into the four ways to create these magical buckets.

1. Journey Bucketing

Journey bucketing makes sense if you’re in a market where there is a linear success path for your customers to follow. 

For example, if you’re in the relationship market and you help single men meet women and marry their soulmate, there’s a clear linear journey that your customer must make. 

The first step in the journey is learning how to approach a woman. The second step in the journey is learning how to carry on a conversation with that woman. Then, how to ask her out on a first date, etc.

As you can see, there’s a clear linear journey with key milestones along the way. 

And knowing where someone is on that journey can help you put them in the most appropriate bucket to better sell and better serve. 

2. Challenge Bucketing

Now, in some markets, you don’t see the same clear linear progression. There might be different challenges that people run into that aren’t correlated with one another. They don’t happen in any particular order.

An example of that is in the orchid care market where there are four main challenges that people run into:

1. Getting an orchid to rebloom after the flowers have fallen off. 
2. Knowing how and when to repot your orchid.
3. Saving an orchid that looks sick or dying. 
4. What to do first with a brand new orchid. 

So the best way to bucket in this market is to identify the specific challenge that someone is running into right now and target that need.

3. Situation Bucketing

The third way of bucketing is based on situation. An example of an entrepreneur and student of The ASK Method who buckets based on situation is Jeff Walker. 

Jeff is the creator of Product Launch Formula, a program for helping entrepreneurs launch new products online. 

Jeff found that there were five distinct buckets in his market:

1. People who haven’t sold anything online before.
2. Entrepreneurs who have an online business.
3. Experts who work one-on-one with clients. 
4. Authors or artists who want to launch their work. 
5. Marketers who run online marketing for others. 

Each of these people are likely to run into a different set of challenges based on their situation. 

For example, an artist is going to face different challenges than an entrepreneur with an online business.

4. Hybrid Bucketing Approach

In some cases you might be in a market where it makes sense to combine more than one of these approaches together. 

For example, you might have one or two journey buckets and one or two situation buckets, which don’t quite fit within that journey. 

In fact, we were faced with this exact situation with our buckets here at The ASK Method. 

We launched a program and the first two buckets were based on journey:

• Entrepreneurs who were just getting started.
• Entrepreneurs who were already making sales.

And our second two buckets were based on situation:

• Professionals who serve a small number of clients in a deep way. 
• Consultants, agencies and freelancers who specifically do marketing for others. 

This is an example of the hybrid bucketing approach in action. It’s a methodical, systematic way to replicate success in a variety of markets.

Conclusion

Remember, it’s not just about the products and services you offer; it’s about customizing the message you use to sell them.

If this new concept is sparking ideas and opening your eyes to new possibilities, keep in mind that you don’t have to implement everything right away. 

Start by pondering the ways you can use this strategy to grow your business.

And, if you find yourself short on time, consider using our custom AI tool that’s uniquely designed to implement The ASK Method more quickly than ever.

See it in action when you join our next workshop for free: