Every few months, somebody asks me about the name. Usually politely, sometimes with a raised eyebrow. “Alpha Club? Isn’t that a bit... much?”
I understand. “Alpha” has had a rough decade. It now belongs to men on podcasts who talk about cold showers and dominating the room.
That’s not what I meant. I named it Alpha Club because of an idea about power, not dominance. And because I believe the idea, I paid for alphaclub.com. Let me explain both.
The formula on a coffee mug
Blair Enns has spent decades teaching experts how to sell. He has one formula he calls the first principle of selling expertise, and he prints it on the back of his coffee mugs.
P = db / D
Your power in a sale is your desirability divided by your desire. Whoever wants the engagement more has less power.
You’ve felt this. Think about the last time you really needed a client. The diary was empty, or the EMI was due, and you said yes to the first number they suggested.
You answered emails at midnight. You took a request for a discount as an order. Your desire was high, so your power was low, and the client could feel it.
Now think about a client who came when you were fully booked. You were relaxed, you asked better questions, and you named your fee without flinching. Same you, same expertise. A smaller denominator.
Enns is careful here, and so am I. He isn’t telling you to act aloof or play hard to get. He says to let your enthusiasm rise as high as the client’s, and no higher. (source)
The point isn’t to fake indifference. It’s to not need the sale so badly that it shows.
What alpha actually means
Here’s the part I love, given that our logo is a wolf.
The alpha wolf, the snarling dictator who fights his way to the top, turns out to be a myth. The idea came from studies of captive wolves, unrelated adults thrown together in an enclosure. One leading wolf biologist compares it to life in a human prison.
In the wild, wolf packs are families. They’re led by the parents, and when food is scarce, the parents feed the young first. (source)
The biologist who made “alpha wolf” famous in his 1970 book, L. David Mech, spent decades asking people to stop using the term. He even got his own book taken out of print. His view of the so-called alpha male is simple: “He’s just the father of the family.”
That’s the alpha I mean. Not the loudest animal in the pack. The one secure enough to look after the others, because it doesn’t need to win every fight.
In my next book, Deep Selling, I put it in one line. Alpha status means you need other people less than they need you. Enns got there with algebra. The wolves got there first.
Why I bought the .com
When you name something, it’s easy to hedge. You add a word to the domain: alphaclubhq, joinalphaclub, alphaclub.in. Plenty of good businesses live on names like that.
I didn’t want to hedge on this one. alphaclub.com is a premium domain, and premium domains cost real money. I paid it, because a name is a promise you repeat every time somebody types it.
It was also the formula, applied to me. A desperate business grabs whatever name is free and cheap. I wanted Alpha Club to stand on ground that says we didn’t cut a corner to get here, and we’re not going anywhere.
Our members are experts learning to stop discounting themselves. It would be odd if I’d discounted the name.
There’s a practical reason too. Experts recommend Alpha Club to each other the old way: over dinner, on a call, in a WhatsApp group. A name that needs spelling out loses some of those recommendations. “Alpha club dot com” doesn’t.
What the name asks of you
So Alpha Club isn’t about learning to dominate anybody. It’s about changing the two numbers in Enns’s formula.
The top number is desirability. You raise it slowly. You become useful in public, narrow what you do until you’re the obvious choice for it, and build an offer instead of improvising one.
The bottom number is desire, and almost nobody talks about it. It rises when you’ve had one client conversation this month, when the diary is empty, when the EMI is due. You lower it by having enough: enough pipeline, enough clients, enough reserve to say “I don’t think this is right for you.”
That’s why Alpha Club is a community, not a course. A pack. Twelve people in a pod, every week, who tell each other the truth.
It’s hard to feel desperate with eleven people in your corner. And it’s harder to underprice yourself when they’ve watched you do the work.
The name, in one line
Alpha Club is for experts who are good at their work and tired of needing every sale. The name is a reminder of the formula: become more desirable, and need it less.
If that sounds like you, the door is at alphaclub.com. Every application, at apply.alphaclub.com, starts with the Alpha Blueprint, a paid diagnostic of your business.
We’ll look properly at your numbers, and we’ll tell you honestly whether Alpha Club is the right place for you. Sometimes it isn’t, and we’ll say so.
Which is, when you think about it, the formula at work.
Sources
For reference while editing; remove before publishing if you prefer.
Blair Enns on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, on P = db / D and the coffee mugs
Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth?, Scientific American, on wild wolf packs and L. David Mech
Where are the Customers' Yachts? Or, A Good Hard Look at Wall Street
Book by Fred Schwed