The one about why people don’t buy

Dean: I’m Dean Jackson, he’s Joe Polish, and this is the I Love Marketing podcast. Hey, everybody! It’s Dean Jackson.

Joe: And Joe Polish.

Dean: Welcome back. That was good, and Joe Polish.

Joe: It’s been exciting. So, the last episode, Dean, was you talking with Dan Sullivan, which was really cool.

Dean: It was pretty cool, wasn’t it?

Joe: And then, we also put up a bonus video of me interviewing Peter Diamondis and his co-author, Steven, for their book Abundance. It’s been pretty exciting things happening at ILoveMarketing.com.

Dean: It really is. I don’t think I’ve talked to you, really, in the last couple of weeks, have I? We were together like nonstop for a week there, and then when we left, what happened since then? I know you went…

Joe: Well, me and a real dear friend of mine went to Sedona. We were going to originally go to Hawaii, but instead, we went to Sedona and did a 6-day cleanse at our friends’, Puma and Morgan’s retreat center in Sedona, which is called Grace Grove. Visit GraceGrove.com if they want to see some of the freaky stuff that I do. I drank basically juice.

Dean: Morgan’s a cool guy. That’s the first time. I met him at 25K, when we were together, and that’s the first time I’d met him.

Joe: Morgan’s a new member at Genius Network mastermind. By the way, let me mention this, while we’re recording it. I’ve had to relocate into an office in my building because, for some reason, there is a tree company downstairs that happened to choose this particular hour to be doing my building, and there’s noise like everywhere. So, if you hear like background, buzzing or whatever, it’s because there’s people out there with all kinds of different devices, blowing leaves everywhere and chopping off branches, and nonsense like that. And, I’m in this really cool office area. My own actual personal office, which I hardly spend any time in, that’s really kind of tiny because the floors have a cool wood laminate. So, it’s probably not the most conducive recording environment. But I figured I would just mention that. So, going back, I went to Sedona, did a 6-day cleanse. People probably don’t want to hear how that works, but it’s basically we did a liver and gallbladder flush.

Dean: Do you feel clean?

Joe: Do I feel clean?

Dean: Do you feel clean?

Joe: Of course.

Dean: Okay, good.

Joe: I always feel clean. I’m a clean eater; I exercise all the time. But yeah, this was crazy. Oh, my god. You pretty much do everything you could imagine to clean out your digestive tract. It’s pretty crazy. But yeah, it was pretty spectacular. I highly recommend that place, especially for people that have health challenges, digestive problems, fatigue, the works. They do a really good job there. That was at Grace Grove. And then, I just got back from Los Angeles and San Diego. Again, went up there with a dear friend of mine. We went to the Paul McCartney lifetime achievement dinner, and saw Paul get this award. Everyone was there. Tom Hanks was there. Richard Branson was there. We sat right next to Hugh Hefner. That was interesting. The Foo Fighters did a remix of the song Jet, which was awesome. And Katy Perry sang, Tony Bennett, Alicia Keys, James Taylor. It was pretty much a star-studded lineup. It was pretty awesome. I’m sure they’re going to show it on VH1. So, that was cool. So, me and you spent 4 days straight…

Dean: 5 days straight together.

Joe: No, no. I’m not talking about the time together. I’m talking about just simply doing the events. We did our 25K group, which was the biggest 25K group meeting ever. We had 35 people there. We had Peter Diamondis Skype in. And speaking of him…

Dean: It was awesome. Video link.

Joe: What’s that?

Dean: By video link. We’re living in the future.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. It was crazy. And then we had Mark Goodman, from FutureCrimes.com. He actually presented. He’s part of the faculty at Singularity University, which is where I first met him, and talked about all of the insane things that are happening with cybercrime and Internet hacking, and threats. And that scared the hell out of everybody but, at the same time, gave people a lot of solutions to things that they never, in a million years, would probably think about. That was super cool. And then, we did our first Platinum 2.0 meeting, with me, you, Tim Paulson. People loved it. We got so many killer comments, feedback, videos. I would really like to say, to everyone that has even been thinking about our Platinum group.

We did talk about it a little bit here, and we made some pretty cool offers and explained it on a couple of the past episodes. You did the interview with Tim, Tim Paulson, who I do it with, who also is my co-author on my Nightingale- Conant program. Everyone who was there, I didn’t hear not only like, “This was good,” everyone that I spoke to there was just like, “This is the most unbelievable event!” So, people were stoked. I want to put a special recording that I did several years ago as kind of a bonus on the ILoveMarketing.com site. I’ll ask you, Dean, to put that up for me. And maybe put it up along with this episode, underneath it or something, wherever you decide to put it on the ILoveMarketing website. But it’s called “Barriers To Success.” Several years ago, my dear friend Dan Sullivan, who also spoke at this Platinum meeting.

Dean: Yeah, we had a great time.

Joe: Yeah. We had some really, really killer presentations. Dan actually did this thing for all of these objections he’s heard with why people would not sign up for Strategic Coach, and it was called “Going Against Gravity,” because Dan’s whole premise is like, “Well, a lot of times, in order to be successful, you go against gravity. You go against that which seems to be…”

Dean: Pulling you back, holding you down.

Joe: And he really covers some great kind of psychological objections that people have for bettering their future. I’ve listened to all of his different Going Against Gravity recordings that he’s done on a variety of different topics, from taking time off to using certain types of entrepreneurial tools and habits and thinking processes, to flat-out people saying, “Well, I can’t join Strategic Coach because of this, this and this.” Several years ago, I’d sent out a letter to 100 people that I thought would give me really good feedback, that had attended one of my conferences that I had several hundred people at, and I actually pitched Platinum. This was before Platinum 2.0, which now applies to pretty much everyone. But this is for people that were just in the cleaning and restoration industry. I sent a letter, FedEx, with a $100 bill attached, saying, “I don’t want you to just tell me what you think I want to hear. This is not just a normal survey. I’m literally bribing you with $100. Tell me your most honest, real reasons as to why you would not join a program that I feel would change your life and would change your business. Why wouldn’t you do it?”

So, we compiled all these responses, and I came up with all of the real and all of the psychological barriers that people had for joining Platinum, and I created an audio with like 35 reasons. I think people would find it really useful to listen to it. It’s not a flat-out pitch. It’s not like a total pitch for Platinum. What it is, is it’s people’s reasons why they wouldn’t joint this group, and my responses to it. And a lot of my responses were influenced or came directly from a lot of conversations with Dan or out of his Going Against Gravity thing. But I put my own take on many of them. Then, of course, many of them are just original ones that came from the feedback I got by bribing people for $100. But I was listening to that recording again. I’d not listened to it in a few years. And I was like, “Wow, this is just as relevant today as it was back then, if not more. Anyway, that’s one thing, and I just wanted to throw that out there. I think everyone will find that kind of interesting.

Dean: As I’m listening, though, what a great strategy for anybody. What you just described there, how many times have you ever gotten a $100 bill attached to something that came in a FedEx envelope? How many times has that happened to you?

Joe: Yeah. The only time it happens to me is when people actually use our own marketing strategies on us. Me and you, we’re starting to get lots of mailings and stuff, with people proposing things to me and you, because they hear us talk about it on I Love Marketing, which is great. I love that. It shows implementation and execution. Some of the people, we’ve actually started doing some stuff with. And other people, it’s just not a right fit. The point is, yeah, it’s theater.

Dean: I’m going to give a little shout out to Kevin Deal, from Hawaii today.

Joe: Why?

Dean: Because he’s been mailing me letters. He mails me just these handwritten letters, asking questions or wanted to know about my top 3 books. So, maybe we could talk about that a little later. But the other day, I got one that was just a little handwritten note. It said, “Hey Dean, do you like pineapples?”

Joe: That’s great. That’s great.

Dean: It was kind of funny. So, I’ve gotten probably like 4. Think about this. Here’s a guy who’s handwritten, mailed 4 letters, and he shows up on my radar, and I know who he is and I remember his name, and we’re mentioning him on a podcast. So, there’s something about the impact of getting something in the mail like that.

Joe: Totally. I’m still a big fan of real snail-mail. So many things get missed via email. People glance at emails.

Dean: Well, you can’t send a $100 bill attached to an email…

Joe: Right. Even if you sent a $100 gift card, it wouldn’t be the same.

Dean: And have that same visceral response. No, it sure would not have the same impact. You’re absolutely right. You get a FedEx envelope, there it is, you open it up, and there’s $100 inside. Now, how many people, how many things would there be, how many people are listening, right now, that would have something that that would be applicable to? How many people did you send those $100 bills to?

Joe: 100 people.

Dean: So, you sent it to $100 people. So, you spent $10,000, plus the FedEx stuff. So, you probably spent another $1,000 or $1,500 on that. And what happened? Did you send like a printed survey that they could fill right out, with a return envelope that they could mail it back?

Joe: You know, I think we put an additional application. I’d actually have to pull the exact letter, which we have. We sent an app, as far as I can remember. What I do remember, though, is that I didn’t want this to be overly pitchy, because I really legitimately wanted to hear the reasons, because my thing was not send a $100 bill with a sales letter. My thing was to send a $100 bill so I could get real, honest feedback. I was wanting to fully understand the mindset of people that didn’t buy. One of our methods, which we’ve talked about on past I Love Marketing episodes – because, frankly, all of the episodes we’re always talking about psychology, we’re always talking about what causes people to be attracted, how do you attract them. We’re creating master fishing techniques in the world of business acquisition.

Dean: That’s why I wanted to break this one down, because it’s so powerful.

Joe: One of the things that we’ve talked about on past episodes, it’s one thing to find out why people buy from you; get testimonials, why do they love you; why do they think you’re so great; what are all the benefits that they derive from doing business with you. You can learn just as much, if not more, from asking people who haven’t bought from you, why did they not take you up on the offer. Why is it not resonating with them? What is it that’s causing them to not say yes? One of the things I talk about on the Barriers To Success recording is there’s real barriers, and then there’s psychological barriers. Real barrier, the example I use is you’re 70 years old, you have chronic arthritis, and you want to play professional basketball. That is a real physical barrier, not a psychological one. The only way you’re probably going to play professional basketball is if you own the team, if you’re in that particular state.

So, that’s not a smart career path to go down. A psychological barrier, on the other hand, would be “I don’t know how to make any more money,” or “I don’t have enough time,” or “I can’t take free days.” These are all psychological things that have more to do with skills and habits and stuff than they have to do with reality. The thing is, for all of our listeners right now, you have people out there who don’t do business with you for legitimate reasons and for psychological reasons; that if you knew what they were or how to address them, you would have more buy-in. That’s the point behind kind of understanding why people buy and why they don’t buy. A lot of the reasons why people don’t buy, until you really get into it, doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. But everything makes sense, if you spend the time. And sometimes, it’s not worth spending the time.

I want to make it clear that there are certain forms of paralysis by analysis, where you can get so caught up into trying to figure out everything, that it actually keeps you from taking any sort of action whatsoever. My point, though, is if you really get into the mindset of the person that you’re trying to sell, you have the best advantage ever. One of the greatest things that I discovered in marketing is you need to understand, as much as possible, the mindset of your prospects and your clients, and determine why they’re buying, why they’re not buying.

And having that sort of information makes all the difference in the world. When I sent out that mailing, I was simply looking for the truth. I was looking for the real reasons, to the best that I could get them to express it to me. And as a result of doing that, I not only got incredible feedback; the whole point was I just spent that $10,000 because I wanted to create that CD. I wanted to create that audio. I wanted to can and clone my communication to people that I felt, and still feel to this day, would greatly benefit from what it is I was offering, to take me up on it.

Dean: You were willing to spend the equivalent of one member for the feedback.

Joe: It’s a $1,000-a-month program. Exactly. So, that’s what I did. And I got that feedback. Sitting here right now, I know it worked, in terms of did it convert people. Yeah, of course, it converted people, because an uneducated person, once I educated them and got them to really think through… Once someone listens to the audio, I would recommend, it sounds like we’re setting you up to listen to a pitch for Platinum. And this wasn’t even for the Platinum 2.0 program. This recording was done several years ago. I think if you listen to it, though, you’ll learn a great method to actually communicate certain things to your clients. I think you’ll actually learn about yourself.

Dean: I always laugh, though, when you say like… It’s so funny, because sometimes people make you feel like you should apologize for pitching people. I take the approach that, “Listen, we’re not charging you any more to watch our very best pitch in action. We’re including that for free. You’re getting to see our very best efforts to pitch you on joining us. We’re not charging you for that. It’s free.

Joe: Yeah. You do make a good point. I tell people that go to seminars, occasionally they’re going to go to like a seminar, and you know people are going to be pitching them at a marketing seminar. And you’ll have people be like, “I don’t want to go to a seminar where they’re going to try to sell me something.” And my whole thing is like, “Well, do you want to go to a seminar on how to be a better golfer, but you don’t want to see them play golf?”

Dean: Right. That’s exactly my point. That’s the whole thing. It’s kind of funny.

Joe: What’s even more funny is I totally kind of address that in the audio recording, just in different ways. But not that specific objection like that, but just in general. People do things for their reasons, not for mine, not for yours. Every person listening to us, if we were going to try to sell them anything, they’re going to interpret whatever we say through their own filter. They’re going to make decisions through their own lives. Sometimes, it’s a money obstacle. If you simply don’t have the money to buy something, that is a real physical barrier. But if you do have the money to buy something and you’re not buying it, it’s a psychological barrier. And the whole thing with going and apologizing for it, part of it is just simply to disarm people.

I really want people to listen to the recording. Why? Because, for one, someone may actually say, “Yeah, this actually does make sense. Joe and Dean are offering something,” although I will say this recording was not done for our current program. This was done for something else. The current one is actually a better version of that something else; a more recent version of it; a version that, at the time, didn’t include you in it; a version, at the time, which was really more designed for people in a specific niche. Now, we have this available to everyone. I want people to listen to it from the standpoint it might actually help them overcome some of their physical or psychological barriers.

Secondly, I think it’s just a great way for people to see how I actually successfully addressed people that I wanted to sell something to, and they didn’t buy it, and I asked them, “Why didn’t you buy it?” so I could get their feedback. And then, the beauty of that is who do you think I sent that audio recording to? I sent it to all of the people that I sent the $100 mailing to, in order to say, “Okay, I addressed the questions you gave me.” So, all of a sudden, some of those people are like, “Oh, okay. It makes sense.” People support what they help to create. I think Brendon Burchard, who’s a friend of mine and yours, he’s in my 25K group; I think Brendon’s actually writing a book around that. But basically, people do support what they help to create.

And if you have people that aren’t buying from you, ask them, “Why are you not buying? Why are you buying? I’m thinking about putting together this product, this service, this seminar, this book, this website. What do you think would be cool?” Get their feedback. And then, once you utilize whatever feedback they give you, you then notify them that, “Hey, by the way, here’s the question you asked me, here’s the feedback you gave me, and I have this thing set up for you now. Would you read it, look at it, buy it, whatever?” And all of a sudden, people will. People support what they help to create. So, those people that I sent the $100 bill, mailed to 100 people, plus, like you said, the FedEx and everything, it wasn’t just $10,000. It was actually over that, not even including the time. But what I did was they helped me create and mold that recording. So, that recording literally cost me, financially, over $10,000 to put together, but it was a great…

Dean: Did anything surprise you? Was there anything in the responses that people gave you, that was like a real insight that you got?

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. There were several. One thing that always struck me as interesting is like how many people are like, “Well, I’ve already got all your stuff, so I don’t need anymore.” They would really use terminology like that. Like, “I’ve got all your stuff.” It’s like if someone was to buy one of your marketing programs, Dean, that you created say 5 years ago, and several years later you send them an offer. And you just happen to talk to them, and they say something like, “Yeah, I got your stuff from before, and I haven’t used it all.” Lance Armstrong wrote this book. One of his earlier books was It’s Not About The Bike.

Dean: Not about the bike. What a great quote.

Joe: Yeah. When I read that book, I really loved it, and I actually bought like a couple hundred copies, and I sent them out to some of my best clients and friends. I just thought it was a really good book. The point behind it, there’s another guy at Merrillville Spa, which I’ve been to many times, his name’s Wyatt. He actually does the equine experience at Merrillville, where they actually take horses and groom horses. We should put up the video of me actually doing the equine experience thing with the horse. That would be funny. But we’ll only put that up there if people actually request it. I even spent a few minutes talking with Oprah, the first time she went to Merrillville, because I was there that day. I told her to go do the equine experience, because I thought that was one of the coolest things that they did at Merrillville Spa.

Basically, the guy wrote a book. I think it might have even been written before Lance Armstrong, called It’s Not About The Horse. The whole thing, “It’s not about the horse,” the horse just happens to be the mechanism of how you experience the process they take you through there. And Lance Armstrong’s thing, “it’s not about the bike,” just a great analogy. The marketing stuff that we’re teaching people, going to seminars, joining a coaching program, it’s not about the stuff, especially for like Platinum. One of the things the stuff does is it defines the game. In a lot of ways, the book, the course, will define the game. Ongoing coaching actually teaches you how to really play the game, how to be consistent with it. We can use sport analogies all day long. There’s not a professional person, typically, not just in sports but in the entertainment field, from plays to singing, to bands, to athletes that do not have one or many coaches, support structures, agents, you name it, people that are helping them continually hone their skills. At least the people that are the best in the world have those sort of individuals.

It constantly surprises me, how many people that are entrepreneurs don’t avail themselves of the same sort of methods, although they are continuously surrounded by it. And not only do they not avail themselves of it, they don’t even think of it. So, to answer your question, “Did anything surprise me,” yeah. Lots of people like, “I got all your stuff,” they wouldn’t say, “I got some of your stuff,” they would literally use terminology like, “I’ve already got all your stuff.” What’s all my stuff? If you had all my stuff, you’d freaking be in my office, with my million-dollar library. You’ve got nothing close to all my stuff.” “And secondly, even if you had all my stuff, you wouldn’t be able to use 1/100th of all my stuff, nor should you. You don’t need 1,000 tools in your toolbox; you need one or 2 or 3 that you really kick ass with and take names.

And if you’ve already got those one, 2 or 3 best tools but you’re not fully leveraging them, or you’re not fully maximizing it, then it has nothing to do with the stuff, it has to do with your skills and your habits using it.” So, the thing that surprised me the most was just the levels, the degrees that people delude themselves into thinking that getting better in business has to do with, “I’ve got a free recorded message set up. So, therefore, I can’t go to an event or get any coaching on something on how to better use this or other marketing strategies, because I might learn something else, and that’s going to completely throw me off, and I’ll be distracted, and I’m not going to be able to do this. So, I need to wait until the right time is there.” One of the things I say on the recording is, “If you’re waiting for the right time before you can implement something, you’re going to be waiting a very long time, because the right time never shows up.

I say the cliché, “The road to someday leads to the town of nowhere,” which I’ve heard many people say, including your friend Tony Robbins, and that sort of stuff. Yeah, there’s a lot of things I discover whenever I ask people why they do something or why they don’t, if you really listen. Part of the thing was really listening to what your client’s saying. There are 2 types of things that you’ll hear: things that actually will make sense to address, to do something with, and that would apply to not just one person, but many people. And then there’s other things that will come where someone has some individual request that would make zero sense whatsoever, in terms of trying to make it happen in your business or to address it, because it’s only for this one person. “Joe, I really would like you to have a bubble machine at the conference or something, because I really feel comfortable when there’s bubbles flying around, and maybe an ant farm in the corner.” Of course, I’m exaggerating. But we all occasionally have clients that will have requests that wouldn’t make any sense.

So, I’m not saying you should listen and address every single thing that people tell you. But what you should listen for is what are they really saying. Really, why are they not buying? What are their barriers? Because at the end of the day, I really want anyone who buys anything from me to be super-happy, to feel like we understand them, that we’re addressing, to the best of our abilities, helping them. And I know we do that, because every single person that’s ever joined our Platinum program, that utilizes a smidgen of what it is we’re selling, not only makes all their money back, most of them make multiples of their money back. And that’s why we have people that have paid to be in Platinum year after year, after year, after year. And people are like, “How could you spend that much money on a program?” And they’re like, “I’m not spending anything.”

Dean: It pays for itself. That’s one of the things that we talked about at the event. I showed people that my concept of escape velocity, that you’re thinking about something like Platinum, where it’s $1,000 a month. So, people quickly do the math and think, “Well, that’s $12,000!” When we were in the room, in January, when you think about it, I asked the people in the room, right there, how many of them thought that they had an idea that they got in the room, from the exercises that we did. That would make them at least $10,000 in the next 3 months, and there wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t raise their hand. So, when you look at it, that starting from scratch, if they started in January, they would have paid $1,000 in January, and then they would pay another $1,000 in February, and another $1,000 in March. So, there’s $3,000 that they would have paid in the next 3 months there. I think that if anybody in that room didn’t have an idea that immediately going to get them at least that $3,000 before the end of the 3 months, that it’s like that’s not the place for them.

Joe: Right. Right. Right.

Dean: But most of the people in there, if they apply one thing that we talked about, if they did one thing and made the $10,000 that we were talking about there, from the moment that you start making that $1,000, a lot of the things that we’re talking about are things that somebody can apply right away. So, you might only be $1,000 or $2,000 in before you’re in profit on that, where it’s paying for itself. That’s the way I look at everything, whether it’s an investment in a marketing program, like an actual advertising or postcard mailings, or a Facebook ad campaign, or a Google AdWords campaign, I look at it, and I always chart that escape velocity chart. If you look at it, if I’m going to spend $1,000 a month on something, I’d chart it out. By the end of the year, looking at that, on probably a 20% angle going across the year, $1,000, $1,000, $1,000, $1,000, and at the end, you’ve spent $12,000. And how many months in is it before your extra money is above that line and starts to go exponential, because you’ve multiplied. You’ve made multiples of what you’ve invested.

Joe: We have one person that just sent me a Facebook message, that I forwarded over to you, that made $15,000, like a week ago, from one idea he got from listening to a single episode on I Love Marketing, let alone immersing someone in 2 days of training and stuff. That’s why, in the carpet cleaning industry, by taking people through the process, I’ve created millionaires. And it’s simple because how much is an idea actually worth?

Dean: It’s funny, because somebody emailed me this week, who said they had been an I Love Marketing fan right from the beginning, and they’ve been listening all along. And, “Can I get a discount on the DVD’s?” I sent them back a message. I said, “Listen, you’re asking the wrong question. If you’ve been listening, if you’ve been a fan right from the beginning, and you haven’t gotten an idea that is at least worth $1,000, then the DVD’s aren’t going to be for you. It’s not going to help you.” We’ve given them 55 hours of our very best stuff, stuff that we’re using right now, practical, tactical, usable stuff. And just like you said, somebody’s saying they did one idea and made $15,000, just from something that we talked about on the podcast. So, I said, “You’re asking the wrong question. Go do something and create the money for the DVD’s from the free stuff that we gave you.”

Joe: Yeah. There’s one thing I address on there, “Does it come with a guarantee?” And the way that I address it, I won’t even say it here. I’ll just leave that as a cliffhanger.

Dean: Da, da, da… Tune in to the next episode.

Joe: It’s true, though. See, like a lot of the things that people come up with. One of the greatest things that I loved about doing it, though, is it allowed me to actually see how much, in my own mind, my own brain, comes up with the same bullshit excuses that other human beings come up with, as to why not getting off my ass and doing something. There are times where I will not want to actually do something that’s going to take me out of my comfort zone. “I’m going to read this book first. I’m going to do this or that.” People constantly will come to my office – and you’ve been there many times, Dean, and I’ve been to your house in both Toronto and in Florida, and we both have pretty expansive libraries. I know very few people that, other than maybe Jay Walker, who has this gigantic, freaking killer library, the owner of TedMed and founder of Priceline. I’ve got a pretty awesome entrepreneurial library. I’ve got a giant swipe file of 5 drawer file cabinets filled with multimillion-dollar sales letters. I’ve got massive, thick binders filled with every single fax back and forth between me and Bill Phillips before email was the thing back in the late 1990’s, on how he built EAS, through all of the consulting we did, from $60-million to $200-million. I’ve got amazing stuff.

People come over here, and they’ll see all of this. They’ll see I’ve read over 1,000 books, they’ll go into my conference room that has that library just filled with books, and they’ll look at all of the binders I’ve got in the archive room and all of the videos, and they’re constantly like, “Why do you go to any seminars? You’ve got all of this stuff!” My response is always, “Well, for one, it’s a different sort of learning environment for me. Secondly, it keeps me up,” meaning it keeps me in a good state of mind. It keeps me engaged. I’ve always loved the saying that school is never out for the pro. You don’t quit going to school; you just create your own version of really great schools as you become an adult. For me, I literally not only attend school by going to Strategic Coach and doing the things that I do, and going to events that I do and hiring certain people, subscribing to certain things that I subscribe to, but I also create my own schools. That’s why I Love Marketing, in a lot of ways, is kind of a self-created school that me and you use to continually talk about and remind ourselves about the types of marketing strategies.

Dean: And here’s the thing, too. This is really just that we’re letting other people in on this right now. But you and I have been doing this for years, without anybody listening.

Joe: Right.

Dean: That was the whole idea behind doing the I Love Marketing podcast, is doing it just the way you and I would have conversations in private. We’d talk all the time, and talk about ideas and talk about marketing and all of this stuff. And we do that with other people. We’ve always got these private conversations going on, always to continue growing.

Joe: Yeah. People that have not listened to the very first episodes of I Love Marketing; I would encourage you to do that. I think you can pop on any episode of I Love Marketing and learn something, no matter where you start. The original ones, where we actually explain how we started this, was me and Dean were on a phone call, and the conversation I had with Dean was like, “Everything we just talked about, imagine how valuable that would be if other people heard this. If they actually were able to eavesdrop in on the conversation we just had,” part of our original strategy, which we’ve now been very successful with. Right before we started recording, you told me, “Yep, now the episodes of downloads per day on I Love Marketing – every single day – is now hitting right around the 2,500 downloads a day mark that people are downloading I Love Marketing.” So, we’ve got just thousands of people listening to us right now. This all started from, “Hey, what we just talked about with each other was really good stuff. What if other people heard it?” Part of our thing was, “Let’s do it in a way to where even if they never buy anything from us, they’ll still find our conversations really valuable.”

Dean: That was so funny, because when I shared this at 25K, our conversation about it initially was how cool – not to compare ourselves to Claude Hopkins and Joseph Kennedy and these guys, but to say, “How great would it be if we had access.” Claude Hopkins and Joseph Kennedy were getting together every week and talking about marketing. And here we are, 100 years later, we could listen in on that, how cool would that be? That’s kind of the conversation that we had, where we were talking about even if we don’t sell anything, what if it was just 100 years from now, people are listening, and they’re getting the state-of-the-art, the latest stuff that was happening in 2011 and 2012.

Joe: That’s how my ego would allow me to stay historically relevant.

Dean: Exactly. We’re cryogenically frozen, and we come back 100 years from now, we’ll be able to pick up right where we left off.

Joe: Right. Right. You know, as an aside, what you just said, cryogenically, they don’t call it frozen, but they call it suspended. I actually did. That was one of the most interesting marketing consultations I’d ever done, was for the company Alcor, which is in Scottsdale. That actually chronically suspends people after they die, in the hopes that they will bring them back to life later in the future, when technology and science would allow someone to do that. I’m not going to go totally into this, right here. I will suffice it to say that we had this meeting with all of the people on the board, and we’re having dinner, and I was introduced to that. It was very weird. I was sitting there thinking about everything that I know about testimonials and offers and sense of urgency and compelling copy. All of that is important, education-based marketing.

The best idea that I told them, I said, “You know, guys, there is so much public disputes and controversy related to the religious and spiritual aspects of what happens to a human body, to the scientific thinkers in the world,” and I said, “The very best thing that I would know how to do, if you want to promote this, is celebrity endorsement. You find someone that really credentializes this, and says, ‘This is what I’m doing when I die,’ and that’s the best marketing technique.” I just had to throw that in there, because I heard you use that term. I actually did a consultation for a company that cryogenically suspends people. What do you think of that?

Dean: That’s fantastic. I want to talk a little bit more about the survey that you did, and getting the real feedback on why people didn’t buy. That was the primary intention of what you were doing. I’m going to let people in on one of the most profound lessons that I’ve ever learned, and it was in a book by Steve Scott. Do you know who Steve Scott is? Do you remember?

Joe: Yeah, the infomercial guy.

Dean: The infomercial guy. There’s a book that he wrote years ago called A Millionaire’s Notebook. I don’t even know whether it’s still in print. But if you can find it on Amazon, there might be some copies still available. In there, he’s got the entire script from a Lori Davis hair care infomercial, and he breaks it down and talks about his process of how he creates a script, how he basically creates a pitch. One of the most profound lessons in there was one of the things that he does is he lists every single reason he can possibly think of why somebody would not buy what it is that he’s selling. Then, individually, he answers those objections, similar to what you were just saying. You did this, basically. You got real feedback. He goes and makes up, thinks, in his mind, all of the possible reasons why somebody wouldn’t, and then he writes his answer to it.

Here’s what I really learned from that: he embeds the answer to that objection into the pitch, into the script. It’s not as overt as, “Well, I’ve got dry hair, so this won’t work for me,” and then answering that overtly, like doing a Q&A sort of section, where you’re kind of posing the question. What he does is he will answer the question, answer the objection, without even bringing up the objection. He’ll say to something – and I’m going from memory on this, but let’s say it is about dry hair. “My hair is too dry.” Or some other people might say, “My hair is too oily for this.” He’ll put into the script that, “Lori Davis hair care is completely pH-balanced and will adjust to exactly the dryness or the oiliness of any hair, to bring it into perfect balance.” So, he’s essentially answered that objection without overtly bringing it up. It’s an elegant, subtle distinction in the way that it’s done. But if you can really get to that, and you can answer somebody’s silent objection before they even get a chance to bring it up, it’s a non-issue.

These are things that are going on in the back of their mind, all of those reasons that you can think of, why somebody wouldn’t do what it is that you’re offering them, all of those things are floating around in their head, and if you can answer those without appearing like it’s overtly a Q&A. Most of the time, I think frequently asked questions are really sort of miss executed and poorly done, because they’re so clearly and obviously slanted in their approach. They’re asking completely set-up questions, so you can answer. You know what I’m saying? I think if you take that FAQ or whatever it is that you’re trying to do, and you more elegantly embed that into the pitch in a subtle way, that you’re answering that objection, but you’re not doing it in a way that it’s even posed as an objection. You’re talking about it as if it’s one of the coolest things about Lori Davis hair care, is that it’s pH-balanced. So if your hair is oily or dry, it completely balances it. You’re answering that without it being an objection.

Joe: That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.

Dean: That is what you’re trying to say, isn’t it?

Joe: That’s huge.

Dean: It is huge. And that’s why I really don’t want to downplay it. I have that book, that section of the book completely dog-eared and gone through. It’s kind of a rare book. It’s not something that a lot of people have. But that one portion of it, this guy, Steve Scott, has been responsible for some of the greatest infomercial successes ever. That has been a really, really valuable tool in my toolbox here, to have access to that. Remember Marty Chenard’s Marketing Analyzer was essentially based on that, those questions, and it created a software program that would allow you to fill in the answers, and stuff like that. But it was essentially based on that.

Joe: Yeah. That was called Profit Market Analyzer; I think it was.

Dean: Right. Exactly. Steve Scott, A Millionaire’s Notebook, that’s the book on Amazon.

Joe: You know the interesting thing about this, too, with Steven Scott, as an example. He actually created a whole program around how he successfully did stuff. It was videos of him talking with a group of people about goal-setting and how to be successful. As far as I know, it never really took off. He had a lot of success with products and different things, representing different infomercials. The guy made millions of dollars. Basically, it was interesting just watching how certain things resonate with the public. So, if a guy like him was to take all of his methodology and to put it into a video program, you’d think, “Oh, then I can successfully sell that, too.” I don’t think it ever really took off. Then, he got involved with some multi-level companies and stuff, and I remember seeing that one of the bonuses was that actual product that he had not been able to successfully sell with the infomercials.

But it’s interesting to see how people that have been very smart, very successful, re-purpose stuff. But it goes to show you that the American public, if you teach them how to actually do what it is you’re doing versus just do what it is you’re doing to sell a particular product or a service, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy to sell how-to stuff. A lot of people will come to our events or something, and I always love saying that everyone always does the arithmetic, but no one does the subtraction. They just count how many people are in the room, and they just assume that all of these people fell there out of thin air and we get to keep 100% of the money. The selling of how-to advice, for those that are in the info business, it’s a really interesting sort of business. Let’s say you’re selling courses that are printed. A lot of people think, “What are the tools of the trade?” You write, and you print. The tools of the trade are really marketing. The tools of anyone’s trade, to really get skilled at, is the selling and the marketing of it, because there are some of the best books in the world that I’ve ever read that have never become best-sellers, that the authors never made anything from. Because they’re lacking one essential ingredient, which is the ability to sell it and market it to other people.

Dean: That’s so funny, because we were talking about that at 25K. We were talking our friend who did a great program, put all of the effort into it, it was ready to go, and he said, “I’ve already done all of the hard work, 95% of it’s already done, all I’ve got to do now is the marketing.”

Joe: Exactly. It’s funny, as you’re sitting here talking about this, I look up at the bookshelf, and I see this big, thick book in the office where I’m in, the 7 Steps to Freedom by Ben Suarez, who I interviewed Ben over a decade ago, when my Genius Network interviews were, at the time, called the Joe Polish Superstar Audio Tape of the Month Series. Basically, he has this book, and I have it completely dog-eared because there’s some great stuff in here. Gary Halbert actually taught Ben how to write copy. Ben built a $100-million-a-year company with 1,000+ employees, and just has done a lot of stuff, and has an interesting reputation in the business world. He has a thing in the beginning of the book. It’s “The 21 Myths That Will Keep You Broke.” I’ve read this at seminars before. I think I even read it at an I Love Marketing Meetup group. Basically, the myth is “Selling is easy and not that important.”

And he writes: “Fact: nothing starts in business until a sale is made. Selling is a difficult task requiring a great deal of skill, knowledge, and guts. Salespeople are looked down upon by the public as annoying.” “The average person who works for a business is unaware that if selling did not take place in the company, he or she would not have a job and food on the table. The sales and marketing entities of the company are always the first to be attacked by politicians, bureaucrats, and the media. They are unaware they are attacking a very fragile and critical life support system of the economy. The failure of this system would bring on disastrous consequences beyond the farthest stretch of the imagination for all of us. Selling is such a difficult and unpleasant task, that knowledgeable people in the business world place the highest premium on this task. In most cases, 50% of the price you pay for the product goes towards the cost of selling. Sales resistance from the buying public is so strong that it’s impossible to describe. You have to experience it to fully understand it.” Those couple of paragraphs are just filled with wisdom.

One thing that he says, towards the end, is, “In most cases, over 50% of the price you pay for a product goes towards the cost of selling it.” So, think about that next time you’re in a store, and you’re looking at batteries, and you’re looking at all kinds of different things, or you’re online, and you’re looking at all of the different things that are being done. Most people that are not marketers don’t even factor in that it actually costs money. Even free websites, like ILoveMarketing.com, all of the episodes, we have to pay transcribers, we have to do audio editing, we have to pay a designer to set the stuff up. There’s cost involved in everything, even in stuff you give away for free. I always chuckle at the whole Facebook thing, “Free, and always will be.” We’ve talked about that on the episode we did on Facebook advertising, with Perry Marshall. How does Facebook make money? They sell advertising, because they’ve got to do something in order to pay for all of the investors that are hoping to become multi-multi-millionaires, which they will as a result of a “free” social network. Everything in your business world is going to have a particular cost.

One of the most expensive is the actual selling it to people. I think one of the number one reasons that people do not succeed in business – there’s all kinds of reasons, from management to all kinds of stuff – I simply would say the number one reason is lack of the ability to market it and sell it. Most people do not go out of business because they have too many customers. Not that that doesn’t happen; because, of course, it can, and it does. However, what I love telling people is, “When you come into one of our programs, one of the problems we want to create for you is management problems. Because we want you to have, so many people wanting to buy your stuff that you have to figure out the logistics of how to better deliver on greater demand.”

But if you don’t have the demand, it doesn’t matter how good it is. The point is, another reason I wanted to read that, was the marketing that we’re actually teaching on I Love Marketing actually, in many cases, makes selling easy and ideally unnecessary. What marketing is, the type of marketing we teach – direct response – is selling in advance. If you have a free recorded message, if you have a video, if you have all of that stuff, you don’t have to go through the grueling task of doing selling in the traditional sense of face-to-face or on the phone or starting from scratch. And not having any collateral materials in order to help position you properly before you actually ask people to give you money. That is the beauty of this type of marketing and all of the strategies.

Dean: We just had this happen today – just today. I talk about our program for realtors called the “Getting Listings” program, GettingListings.com, sending out postcards to people, to an area. So, right here in Winter Haven, we’ve selected a single target market: lakefront homeowners. There’s 2,100 lakefront homeowners. So, we send out the postcards that offer them the February 2012 report on lakefront house prices, so everything is completely matching. It’s the compelling offer that would be the very first thing that somebody wants to know. And then, we send out and educate and motivate them. In profit activator 3, we send them out an initial package with a cover letter, with a little booklet called How To Sell Your House For Top Dollar Fast, a copy of the Get Top Dollar newsletter, and all of the info on what’s been selling in lakefront properties in the last 12 months.

So, we send out this package, and Julie gets a call today from somebody who says, “Yeah, we’d like to list our house. Can you call me this week to come out and do that?” Now, she’s never talked with him, never had to make any kind of phone call to him, just doing the compelling marketing that made selling unnecessary. It’s so funny, because one of our clients who was doing this program had 2 or 3 of those calls in one week, and ended up sending a video that showed this fisherman going down this river at night, with a flashlight or a spotlight, and they’re shining the light, and the fish are just jumping into the boat. Have you ever seen that video?

Joe: No, no. Actually, yes, I think I have. I think I have seen that video. But you should send it to me again.

Dean: Actually, I’ll put it up. I’ll put it up on I Love Marketing. When you’re doing the marketing right, that’s exactly what it feels like, is that the fish are just jumping in the boat.

Joe: Yeah, exactly.

Dean: I get so psyched about it. It’s so funny. I get psyched about this kind of stuff, because I know that, like we always talk about, you articulated it, that marketing makes selling unnecessary.

Joe: I first heard that line from Denny Hatch, who used to be the editor of Target Market magazine. He wrote a great book called Million Dollar Mailings. He’s written a bunch of books. He’s assembled things on direct marketing quotes and whatnot. I interviewed him many years ago. He was doing a presentation, and it was marketing makes selling easy and ideally unnecessary.

Dean: Makes selling easy and ideally unnecessary.

Joe: Yeah. Not in 100% of all cases, but many cases. Me and you, Dean, and many of the people that have adopted our I Love Marketing strategies. You look at the Platinum meeting we just did. We have all kinds of different business owners representing from Jeff, who’s in seafood, to all of the cleaners and restorers, to Chris Frederick, The Stretch To Win business, we have people that have yoga businesses, Pilates instructors.

Dean: Realtors.

Joe: Realtors, information marketers. We have one client who is in the drug-testing business, a handful of different industries. And they are people that, every day, are making sales from people that they physically never even have to talk to. People call up and say, “When can you do the job?” if it’s a service business, or online marketers just making sales because all of the marketing methods that we teach are being utilized, and positioning them, so it makes selling unnecessary. The best way to sell is to people that are already converted. I want to preach to the converted. Let me share something, which I think is kind of funny. I’ve always tried to figure out how to come to grips with this; because, in a lot of ways, I wish there was a magic way to get up to speed with rapport for certain people.

If someone has listened to every single episode of I Love Marketing, as an example, up to this one today, you’re talking about 55 hours that they have listened to me and you. If we don’t know these people at all, but we meet them for the first time, they know tremendous amounts about us, but we know really nothing about them, comparatively. So, part of it, though, is think of the positioning. I’m constantly amazed. I deal with certain celebrities. There’s one celebrity who is world famous, been in a bunch of movies, and has a hit show on HBO, back-and-forth emails with this guy, world-famous actor. He’s kind of short and curt, and kind of a pain in the ass. I basically sent him a blow-off email, based on something that I was going to invite him to, because he has a foundation, and I raise millions of dollars for foundations like Virgin Unite and Make-A-Wish, and stuff like that, that I’ve done in the past.

I wanted to actually help this guy, because the person who met him, who’s a 25K member, actually made an email introduction. The guy is kind of a jerk. Not a full-blown yet, but I’m going to have a conversation with this guy after our phone call here today. It got me thinking about people in the celebrity world. I don’t work in Hollywood, but I go to a lot of events where there’s world famous people, and I have lots of clients that are well-known business icons. I’ve done a ton of work with Paula Abdul. A bunch of stuff. She’s in my 25K group, and stuff like that. I’ve hung around a bunch of interesting people, but nowhere near like if I was an actor or a famous athlete or something. From the eyes of a marketer, I am constantly amazed by the perception that people have of the artificial God-like status of certain celebrities. I was talking to my friend JR, who is a former Make-A-Wish kid, earlier, before this call, and I was talking about how it’s amazing to me that there’s people that work – mothers, people that work at hospice centers, businesspeople that do things on a daily basis that are more noble, more interesting, more a lot of things than a lot of famous actors, celebrities, musicians, artists. I’m not doing a slam on those industries.

What I’m saying is obviously there are many individuals in all fields that do incredibly awesome things that are amazing. And there’s a ton of people that do amazing, awesome things that no one ever sees. The main reason is because of the media. When someone is positioned and plastered all over television or magazines or radio, you name it, the internet, have a giant Twitter following, whatever, people tend to think that these people are absolutely incredible because of all of the social proof. Now, the lesson behind that is there are a lot of people that frankly, in my opinion, don’t deserve a damn bit of recognition but get a shit-load of it because they’re “famous.” In a lot of ways, a lot of them are scoundrels. And there are other people that do amazing things that aren’t positioned well at all, but it really is a marketing lesson.

The marketing lesson is it’s about positioning. It’s about setting things up so by the time someone comes to you; they’re pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and pre-disposed to give you money, pay attention to you, watch your movie, whatever it is. It is still simply a marketing thing. Going back to selling, marketing makes selling easy and ideally unnecessary. There are certain people that, if they get the right sort of media or they position themselves, look at Jersey Shore. You don’t need to be a highly-intelligent person, although many people that look stupid on television and have huge shows are not, some of them are very smart people, although the way they’re portrayed may not be in the best light because of the sound bites and the editing and everything along those lines.

But, the fact of the matter is if you just sit and think about the conversation we had with Dan Kennedy – remember, we interviewed Dan Kennedy – if you’ve not listened to the episode that me and Dean did with Dan Kennedy on I Love Marketing, listen to it. He talks about you start off getting paid for what you do, and then you get paid for who you are. So, you spend a lot of time doing the whoing versus the whating. There’s so much to be learned from just thinking about that. Both me and you, for instance, going back to my original thing, and hopefully, my tangent here is making sense, if someone listens to 55 hours of me and you, they actually, in their minds, consider me and you a who, because they’ve listened to 55 hours of us.

Then, when they meet us, they have a certain level of knowledge and, in many cases, respect or, in your case disrespect, because most people don’t like you because of your personality, your corrosive personality that you give off, versus my pleasant, non-judgmental, non-opinionated. You know what I’m saying here. When they actually meet us, or you, or me, there’s a certain positioning that exists. Why? Because we put out a podcast, and we talk about marketing things. If people resonate with it, they like it, and most people we meet treat us differently if they’ve listened to a bunch of our stuff versus if we ran into someone in a grocery store or ran into someone in a gym who doesn’t know who the hell we are. What does that have to do with your life and your business? It has everything to do with it. Hopefully, that made sense.

Dean: That’s great.

Joe: What are your thoughts on that, Dean?

Dean: I think you’re absolutely right. You want to recap some of the big takeaways from this?

Joe: Yeah, yeah, yeah. By the way, what do we have for time?

Dean: We’re done.

Joe: Are we over time?

Dean: Yeah.

Joe: Oh, I’m sorry. I’m just rambling here.

Dean: That’s okay.

Joe: Because I had to relocation in this office, I didn’t know what the heck time it was.

Dean: It’s all included. We’re not going to charge anybody extra for the extra 6 minutes that we’ve gone over their one hour. There’s no charge to the listener for us going over with the awesomeness.

Joe: Here, just to get it out of my system. To recap from my end, and then you’re going to put a nice cap on this that’s going to be awesome. We’re going to put up the Barriers To Success audio recording, so you can actually hear the recording that I did the test that I spent $10,000 on doing. Maybe I’ll even put an intro onto that one, so that people get it and understand it. Secondly, if you’ve not watched the bonus episode we put on with Peter Diamondis and Steven, type in “Abundance” at ILoveMarketing.com. Watch that video. It’s been getting great feedback. Peter’s going to be here this week, at my 25K meeting. If you want to go get a cleanse in colonics and various things, you can go to GraceGrove.com.

As far as a recap, the strategy of thinking to ask your clients why do they not buy from you, determining what their barriers to success are, their barriers as to why they’re not doing business with you and addressing those barriers in different ways. You can even create your own version of an audio like you’re going to hear, that we post up. Other than that, Dean, you put some cool postcards up from the last episode. I think you should remind people that those are on I Love Marketing.

Dean: That’s the thing. If you are just a listener on iTunes, there’s so much cool stuff that we put up on the actual ILoveMarketing.com website, in between episodes or along with episodes, that it’s worth you going there just to see the stuff. In last week’s episode, we talked about the idea of more cheese and less whiskers, and I was sharing about a birthday postcard, so I put up the sample of the birthday postcard. And then, and on the inside, in the comments section of that, I outlined the whole process of the landing page, what people saw when they go to the website. That’s a great resource for you. If you have a local business, like Perry says, that has a door that people open to come into; then this would be a strategy that would be very valuable for you. I’ll put up the contact information for the company that does the actual postcard, the digital variable printing and everything, for you, so you can use that as a strategy.

The other thing from today, I really love the idea that Joe shared with you about really putting a lot of value on collecting the reasons that people don’t buy, and using that to create a message that overcomes all of those things. I highly recommend reading A Millionaire’s Notebook by Steve Scott. You can get that on Amazon. I just saw there’s lots of copies there for one cent, plus $3.99 shipping. Some of the used ones, they’re there for a penny. So, gobble those up. As always, go to ILoveMarketing.com. And if you haven’t downloaded your breakthrough DNA report, you can do that right there on the site. There’s also a link to where you can get the DVD’s of our live event that we did in Phoenix, which would be a valuable part of your marketing library.

Joe: For sure. Also, we are going to be doing – as soon as we can get him scheduled, because he is busy as can be right now with his new book – Ivan Misner, who is the founder of BNI. We’re going to do a follow-up interview. If you’ve not heard our first interview with him, listen to it. It’s on ILoveMarketing.com. And then, we’re going to put another bonus up with Laurel Langemeier. I did an episode with her for Genius Network, and we’re going to put that up there as a bonus, and that will be popped up there shortly – in the next week or 2. Beyond that, please make comments on ILoveMarketing.com and on iTunes. We appreciate everyone listening, and look forward to hearing the success that you’re having using our I Love Marketing methodology. Have a great day, and we will talk to you next time.

Dean: Bye.  

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