Daniel Priestley - Oversubscribed

Finally you send an email letting people know that the conference will have 60 tickets available and already there are 93 people pre‐registered. You include a link to a podcast you've recorded with the guest speaker and an article they wrote for Forbes. You let pre‐registered people know they can get a 20% discount on Monday and then the tickets will go on sale for everyone else on Tuesday at the full price.

On Monday you watch as 47 of the tickets are snapped up. You make a few phone calls on Tuesday and sell another six tickets to the people who pre‐registered but didn't buy on Monday. Over the following week, the remaining tickets sell and you email your list letting people know the event is sold out and they can pre‐register for next year's conference if they wish.

In the first example, a binary option was promoted with no warming up, no signalling and no indication of capacity. Tickets are on sale – take it or leave it.

The second approach offered value at every step, warmed people up to the speaker and the topics covered and asked for small signals of interest along the way. This put the organiser in a position to communicate the capacity of the event was oversubscribed and genuine reasons to buy a ticket upon release. It also allowed the organiser to follow up with people who had signalled interest but didn't buy.

In all other ways, this conference could be the same but the number of attendees would be vastly different.

Signal to the market what you're doing slowly and elegantly, adding value and intrigue as you do. Let them signal back to you their interest, concerns or input. Although it seems more time‐consuming to engage in this drawn‐out courtship dance with your potential clients, it's a surefire way of actually achieving the desired results.

The way to being oversubscribed is to achieve an imbalance in which there are more buyers than sellers in your market. There are four drivers of market imbalances where you'll often see more buyers than sellers:

Innovation – You offer something new and shiny that no one else offers. There's only one seller (you) and a niche of new buyers who want it. There are therefore more buyers than sellers by virtue of the fact there's only one supplier and more people who want it.

Relationships – You build such a powerful relationship with buyers that they ignore other sellers. There are more buyers than sellers because buyers aren't interested in other sellers.

Convenience – You are answering the needs of the market with the most frictionless expression of what they want. This is about being in the right place, at the right time, with something that meets consumers' unmet desires. This creates more buyers than sellers because buyers are reluctant to invest time, money and energy finding alternatives.

Price – This occurs when you're able to create an imbalance based on price. You've invested into an asset that creates an efficiency others don't have. Crucially, you're still able to offer your products at a price that is profitable but that price is lower than other suppliers can achieve.

If you look carefully at large and established markets you'll see that there are often four big players who each occupy one of these market positions. You can see it in hotels, airlines, banks, telecommunications, cars and computers. Essentially, the big brands focus on dominating one of these four market imbalances and let other brands fight for the alternatives.

You'll also notice that each one of these positions makes it hard to compete with the others. You can't be highly innovative and also convenient; it doesn't work because innovation takes time to roll out with consistency. You can't be super cheap and also compete on relationships; it costs money to build relationships. So you'll have to choose one main market position for your business to focus on.

Let's look at each one in more detail to help you determine which will work best for you.

The first way to create more buyers than sellers is to create something new that the market hasn't seen before and they now want. An iPod in 2002, a Furby in 1999, a geometric perm in 1963. On a local level it could be a new style of Reiki massage, the only organic cafe in the area, a new marketing strategy.

Have you ever noticed that the top movie of the month is always a new movie? It never goes backwards to Titanic or The Godfather . Even if it isn't anywhere near as good as some of the classics, people love experiencing new things. The new and shiny thing you create doesn't need to be an epic blockbuster and it doesn't need to be for the mass market.

An innovation can be subtle. It can be the way you package something up with other products and services. It can be something new you've brought in from a different market. It can be something people have seen before but with a new feature.

My team and I created the “Key Person of Influence” programme in 2010. It's a fresh look at leadership and entrepreneurship combining elements from a Silicon Valley growth accelerator with training and development programmes. That innovation has become a global business serving thousands of entrepreneurs and leaders from several countries.

There are three main types of innovation:

Product innovation – You invest in a new product that people haven't seen before or modify an existing product in a new way. For example, George Lucas invented a galaxy of characters and products when he unleashed Star Wars on the world.

Systems innovation – You deliver an existing product in a new way that makes things faster or more reliable. For example, Facebook is an innovative system for people to keep track of all their friends and it's a great system for advertisers too.

Brand innovation – You make something boring a lot more desirable with a new way of packaging it for the market. For example, Ralph Lauren popularised the standard polo shirt through high fashion branding.

Owning the relationship with buyers in your market leads to a market imbalance. If people don't shop around they eventually cluster and the business becomes oversubscribed. Have you ever stopped to think whom you might use as an alternative to your accountant? Is your accountant even number one? Does he/she charge a lot more than others, is he/she about the same as others – or is he/she a lot cheaper?

If you haven't actively considered these questions before – and most people haven't – it is because your accountant owns the relationship with you and you have stopped shopping around for alternatives. If accountants can build up more and more clients like you over time, they will earn a very good income from their oversubscribed practice.

You can turn yourself into an influencer in the market or you can align to an existing influencer whom people listen to for advice rather than shopping around. This is the reason that Roger Federer gets paid millions to endorse products, why restaurants bend over backwards for food critics or why mutual funds court the favour of financial advisors. All of these people have an existing market listening to their advice.

Why shop around for tennis gear when I know what racket Roger Federer uses? Why try all the restaurants in London when I could just go to the one that was rated five stars by a famed food critic? Why try to understand financial markets when my trusted financial planner has all the answers?