The one about the comments

Dean: Hey, everybody! It’s Dean Jackson.

Joe: And Joe Polish. Welcome to I Love Marketing.

Dean: Yeah.

Joe: That’s right.

Dean: I’m very excited.

Joe: Yeah, this is good. Okay. So, we are here, and we want to let everyone know that as we do the I Love Marketing podcast, you can actually download and get the complete transcripts, word-for-word, of all of our I Love Marketing calls at ILoveMarketing.com, the companion site. For those of you that are only finding us on iTunes, you can also go to ILoveMarketing.com and you can find videos and you can make comments, and all kinds of stuff like that. Dean, what are we up to today?

Dean: Perfect. You said it right there. Comments. People are making comments, and I thought it would be a great idea for us to go through the comments and talk all about the things that people want some help with.

Joe: Awesome.

Dean: Use some of the examples, some of the questions that people are asking. So, we’ll call it something from the comments.

Joe: And I will tell you, because a lot of people think there’s no truth in advertising, so I’m going to be very truthful with everyone right now, literally we’re just going to look at the comments. We have nothing prepared of like, “This is the ones we’re going to respond to.” We’re just going to go through the list of some of the most recent ones, and we’re just going to talk about it, and we’re going to go for as much time as we’ve got available with all of you today, and we’ll talk about it. That’s what we’re going to do.

Dean: That’s good. The comments are ramping up. We’re seeing a lot more comments on each of the episodes. Since we asked people for what they want some help with, I think it would be good to go in and actually give them some help. Just so people know, here’s what’s happening. Right now, we’re logged into the control panel of our ILoveMarketing.com blog, and we’re in the comments, and we’ve got them sorted so that the most recent comment is right at the top, and we’re just going to look and comment on the comments as we go here.

Joe: Yes. So, there’s been quite a few. And we’re going to kind of pick and choose, since Dean is in another location. Now, there’s been a couple of comments about like, “Why don’t you guys go into a recording studio?” Me and Dean would love nothing more to go into a recording studio, however he’s in Florida most of the time and I’m in Arizona most of the time, so we can’t really do that. So, we are doing this over a telephone, and we provide the best sound quality we can, currently. We’ll always work on talking loud. Dean is sort of a gentle giant, so he is soft-spoken and everything. I try to prod him a little bit.

Dean: Gentle giant?

Joe: There’s one comment here from Chuck. Actually, this is going to sound funny because it starts off with almost kind of maybe a negative slant, but Chuck is actually responding to some of the comments where people are maybe not saying the nicest things. And he says, “As I continue to read the comments, I’m amazed at the lazy-ass do-it-for-me attitude. Dean and Joe literally cook the steak, set the table, poured you some wine, and all you need to do is pick up the knife and cut the darned thing. Take 2 hours and brainstorm what a guide might look like,” meaning like a consumer awareness guide, “and if you can’t come up with a few topics, you really don’t know your industry very well. No wonder 80% of businesses fail in the first few years, if that’s the attitude.” Now, I actually haven’t read the most recent comment that he must be responding to, which I’m sure we can find it because it’s down below a few of these. But the point I want to make on that, and I’d like to get your input on this, Dean, is the Internet is very interesting. And when people read stuff, and I think anyone that puts themselves out there, you can get 100 positive comments and you can get one that someone’s kind of negative with, and we can have a tendency to focus on the negative one.

I’m human. I would love everyone to comment wonderful, beautiful things all the time, but that’s not the reality. There’s 2 types of criticism. There’s constructive criticism, which me and Dean will always take very seriously and will look at, “Well, can we constructively do something about it?” And then there’s destructive criticism, where people are just complaining. One of the things about the Internet, especially like YouTube, where people can make anonymous comments, you find that a lot of stuff, especially when you put it out there for free, can attract people that just want to whine and complain. There’s a book by Hugh McCloud called Evil Plans, which is a fantastic book that I recommend everyone read, and he says that, “Whining is not an exit strategy.” Basically, in order to do something effective in your business, yes, you can voice complaints and stuff, but for the most part it’s not going to change anything. You have to go out and actually do something.

What’s interesting about how people make comments, I’ve seen things on YouTube where I’m like, “Where do these human beings actually come from?” It’s the most insane stuff people can write. But then, there’s people that actually have a lot of constructive things to share. So, why am I saying all of this? Well, what we have purposefully done with the I Love Marketing podcasts is me and Dean said, “We’re going to tell our stories, we’re going to share things, and we’re going to talk about very tactical strategies of what’s working and what’s not working, how we got into marketing, why we love marketing, how you can make it work for you.” The comments we’d really like are take the ideas that we talk about here, test them, implement them, use them in your business, and let us know the results.

The real comments that matter are not what you think of the idea, but really what the idea did for you after you used the idea. Emerson has this great line, and I’ll probably quote it a lot whenever I do these, when it seems appropriate, “You ask for a new idea when you haven’t used the first one that we gave you.” I know a lot of people are going to fish for ideas, but we really want you to use the ideas. So, Dean?

Dean: Here’s a great comment. I think we should talk about this, because I know that a lot of people who are listening are probably students and trying to figure out what to do in marketing. Here’s a great comment from Bobby. He says, “Thanks for the podcast. I’m a marketing student, starting out at a community college. I find your podcasts very helpful in my learning experiences. They also keep me motivated to keep going with my studies. I was wondering where you both went to college? Also, what are some good books to read to help expand my marketing advertising knowledge? I think that’s going to be an interesting thing, because although I went to college, I don’t actually know if you did go to college. You didn’t go to college, did you?

Joe: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I went to New Mexico State University for a couple of years.

Dean: But you didn’t finish, right? And neither did I.

Joe: No. I don’t have a college degree. As a matter of fact…

Dean: We’re college drop-outs, essentially.

Joe: Yeah.

Dean: We’re never going to amount to anything.

Joe: Exactly. And I use this whenever I speak, on some occasions. I actually went to Mexico State University for a couple years, and took communications and journalism and criminal law, psychology classes, and that sort of stuff. And then I went to Chandler-Gilbert Community College, when I moved back to Arizona. At Chandler-Gilbert Community College, I took “Owning And Operating A Small Business,” and I failed. And I took “Principles Of Marketing,” and got a C-. I had an ex-girlfriend that recommended, “Why don’t you show your transcript during your presentations?” So, I actually have a slide that shows basically my report card from college, that I failed “Owning and Operating A Small Business,” and I got a C- in marketing.

Dean: And that’s amazing, because, again, another similarity. We both kind of didn’t finish college, but we’re both, I love what you say, just like old Abraham Lincoln, self-taught. When you look at it, it’s like that does not mean that our education stopped when we dropped out of college, because for both of us I know that our education just began when we dropped out of college. Since then, we’ve probably collectively spent the equivalent of 10 Harvard educations on getting our marketing education.

Joe: Totally, yeah. All true education is self-education. Even if you do it in college or if you do it on your own. Orville Wright did not have a pilot’s license. And if he needed to have a degree in order to fly, no one would maybe be flying airplanes today. I don’t know. But the bottom line is don’t ever let school get in the way of a good education. Now, are we anti-college or not? As a matter of fact, I sort of am, as it relates to certain types of businesses. I think if you really want to be good at marketing, I’ve never seen what I would consider amazing, awesome marketing classes taught in college, but there’s thousands of colleges out there and I’m sure some of them have some really great stuff.

But I have yet to see a professor that knows really much of anything about say direct response marketing, that I’ve ever encountered. Not that they’re not out there, but I rarely encounter them. And I tell people, all the time, “If you want to be an entrepreneur, you’re going to learn more in 6 months, either working for a real value-creating entrepreneur or trying and running your own venture, than you will in probably 4 years of college.” I just believe that to be absolutely true. I think at the time when I was going to college, had I stayed in college for marketing, not only do I think it would have not helped me all that much, I think it would have been a handicap. I think I would have had to unlearn much of the stuff that I learned.

Dean: College marketing, especially when you’re talking about marketing, a college marketing education is really equipping you to fit into an organization in the marketing department, probably, in a bureaucratic way; that you’re learning all of that. Let’s hear you talk about our top 3 books each, or the reading list for if we started I Love Marketing University or I Love Marketing College. What would be the curriculum book-wise, if you had to narrow it down to 3 books?

Joe: Well, it’s going to be really hard for me just to say 3 books, but 3 books that no one should literally be in the advertising business or marketing business without reading. And they’re all going to be old books. Many of them many, many years old. Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins.

Dean: My Life In Advertising, a combo.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. There’s a combo that you can get by Claude Hopkins, My Life In Advertising and Scientific Advertising. How To Write A Good Advertisement by Vic Schwab, and Ogilvy On Advertising, by David Ogilvy. They’re 3 amazing books. What about you?

Dean: I’d put all 3 of those on there. When you get down to if I had to limit it to 3, I’d definitely put those on there. But I think one of the most influential books, the book that started me down that path of being aware of money and aware of being self- directed in the getting of money was Think and Grow Rich. I’d definitely put that in there, to get the mindset thinking that way. That was the very first book that sort of awakened my entrepreneurial awareness kind of thing, I think. Was there a first book that you read?

Joe: You know, yes. There were several. And the very first book, and I talk about this when I explained my jet ski story, which I believe was on one of the first episodes of the I Love Marketing podcasts, and I read The E Myth, by Michael Gerber, which was not a marketing book. It was a book, really, about setting your business up as if you were going to have many different franchises, like you’re going to replicate your business. And it was really about systemizing your business. I thought, when I was reading that book, before I discovered direct response from Gary Halbert, because Gary Halbert’s book, How To Make Maximum Money In Minimum Time, which was a compilation of some of his best newsletters, is actually what introduced me to Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy and Vic Schwab. So, had I not read How To Make Maximum Money In Minimum Time, I never would have been introduced to the other one.

So, I guess if I had to go back and reapply my favorite book, I would almost say, “Read How To Make Maximum Money In Minimum Time by Gary Halbert, which probably can only be gotten at TheGaryHalbertLetter.com. So, having said that, The E Myth, going back to The E Myth, when I read that book, I thought, “If there’s any area of your business that you want to systemize and automate. It’s the one area of business that is most responsible for bringing in the money, which is the sales and marketing divisions of an organization. And if you can systemize the marketing and the selling, and you can automate that, that’s the best part of the business to systemize, because without those no money comes in. You can have the most systemized filing system, computer system, how to clean the office system, but if you don’t automate the generating of clients, like Peter Drucker says, “The primary purpose of business is to create key clients. Marketing and innovation produce results. All other business functions are cost.” If you don’t get the marketing down, you’re going to do a lot of manual marketing. So, reading that book gave me the mindset. And then when I first got introduced to direct response, I was primed in very much the same way that Think And Grow Rich set up a mindset for you.

Dean: Yeah, exactly. Every one of these books that we’re talking about, they really are like pivotal. But each one builds on the next. I think that the thing that’s really important, as you go through and start studying, is to realize that just knowing the information is not the same as knowing and applying the information to something, so that you get a depth of awareness about it. I had a friend who said that same thing. He really hasn’t been studying marketing and was asking what’s the 10 books. He said, “If you could just narrow it down to 10 books, so that I could get a fast-track,” like cram a marketing education kind of thing, like he could really become an expert marketer in the next 6 months. And I really started thinking about it. The truth is as I was listing the books for him, I realized, “This one only makes sense if you know and apply the lesson from this other book.” And as I’m reading, I told him, “Dude, I don’t think you can catch up. Like in 6 months, you can’t get that without the experiences that go along with it.”

Joe: Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of people, one of the fastest ways they can learn direct response is simply listening to this podcast and testing and utilizing the ideas that we are recommending. You don’t need 100 tools in your toolbox to do well. You just need to have a couple of them, and you need to make sure you’re using them. Some people can completely change their entire income and their entire business, and their entire relationship with their prospects and clients simply by using education-based marketing. Creating a consumer awareness guide, putting a sales letter together, getting testimonials from your existing clients, going out into the marketplace and educating them in very much the same way that we’re doing this.

A lot of people who are listening to this podcast can probably start a podcast in their industry, about their product or service, or whatever it is that they do. You have this Evil Scheme Hatchery, Dean, which we talked about, and you have your 50-minute focus finder video, and you play GOLF. The acronym is goal, have a goal, create an optimal environment, limited distractions, and a fixed timeframe. You have this office called the Evil Scheme Hatchery, and we even have a video at the ILoveMarketing.com. Hugh McCloud has this book called Evil Plans. It’s about world domination in a good way. But everyone that’s listening, what is your evil plan?

And if you want to read Hugh’s book, go and read that. It’s very much in line with our thinking, as it relates to you don’t have to know everything, you just have to get out there and do something, just like Seth Godin always talks about, “You’ve got to ship it.” You’ve got to get it going. So, “You’ll accomplish more through movement than you ever will through medication,” is something that Gary Halbert used to say. There comes a point in time where you could spend all day reading a book or reading many books, or attending many seminars, but if you don’t take any action you’re never going to get into gear. I talked to a good friend of mine named Steven Pressfield today. He wrote The War Of Art, a fantastic book. It’s one of my favorite books. It’s not a marketing book.

Dean: I’m looking at it right here, on my bookshelf, right now.

Joe: It’s fabulous. He wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance. He’s a great author. And he says, in the beginning of The War of Art, and that book’s really written for artists and writers or anyone that he talks about doing higher-level things in the world. You’re evolving. He said, “For a writer, it’s not the writing that’s the difficult part, it’s the sitting down to write.” It’s getting you to really sit down and do something. In one of the earlier podcasts, we talked about Gary Halbert’s line of,” Almost any problem in the world can be solved with the right sales letter.” And if you don’t have a sales letter or a sales video or a sales audio for whatever it is that your business, your nonprofit, your cause, your mission is about, you’ve got to sit down and create it. Or you’ve got to have it created. All of the prodding in the world is not going to help someone that won’t sit down and actually get it done. So, sometimes the first step is just to sit down and start. And books help. Books help.

Dean: I’m looking down, I was thinking about that list, and one of the most useful skills, the critical skill, is being able to influence people to take action. So, I would definitely put Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence on my list of curriculum for somebody wanting to learn marketing. Because so much of marketing is understanding why people do what they do, and how to present your offer in a way that is going to align with the way people do things. I would definitely put that on that list.

Joe: What we’re recommending, really, is just a course in understanding human behavior and psychology. And reading all of these books are not just about copywriting and marketing techniques and methods, and all that stuff. It’s really about understanding human behavior, why people respond the way they do. Robert Cialdini’s a friend of mine. He actually is a professor. He’s probably one of the few professors that I would say is brilliant. What I mean by few professors, meaning brilliant, there’s a lot of brilliant professors out there. What I mean is it relates to knowing how to persuade and sell. He’s one of the world’s leading, most cited living social psychologists in the world. He actually lives here in Tempe, Arizona, where I live, and I’ve interviewed him before.

The book Influence is unbelievable. He has several books that are all about persuasion and getting people to say yes. Any book that Robert Cialdini has written or co-authored, you will find extremely valuable. And Influence is kind of where it all started. So, yeah, Positioning, written over 20 years ago, by Al Rise and Jack Trout is a great book. All of Dan Kennedy’s books are very valuable: The Ultimate Sales Letter, The Ultimate Marketing Plan, which are of his very first ones, are fantastic. Dan’s an interesting dude.

Dean: He really is, you’re right. And prolific. The thing is all of the value that’s in those books, when you look at their $20 books, or whatever they are in the bookstore, compared to $2,000 programs, which a lot of the programs actually say the same things that he says in the books, but you can get a great basic understanding of them, same thing. I would say that same thing for Jay Abraham, Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You’ve Got is a great Jay Abraham primer for anybody who’s got to be introduced to Jay Abraham. Because all of his programs are very expensive, again. But this book is a pretty good summary of all of his great stuff.

Something you said earlier really struck me. Being successful, successfully running a business, you don’t have to have a ton of marketing ideas. You were talking about your toolkit. The truth is if you figure out one sequence that works, like if you look at the winning formula that we’ve been talking about all these last weeks, especially using consumer education or consumer guides, education-based marketing, it really boils down to just a few basic moves that you have to figure out. You’ve got to have a way to figure out who your target market is. And we’ve talked about, in all kinds of different examples, how to do that. I told you how we did it with realtors, how you did it with carpet cleaners. We talked about it with the Yellow Pages roulette episode.

When you’ve got that target market, the one thing that you need is one ad or one message, one communication, whether it’s a postcard or a flyer or a print ad or a pay-per-click ad, something that’s going to get your prospects to raise their hand, to call and listen to a free recorded message. And when they call and listen to that free recorded message, to leave their contact information, and then your consumer awareness guide, along with a sales letter that is engineered to have people take the next step, which might be getting together with you for a carpet audit, or having a real estate agent come over to their house for a room-by-room review, to tell them what to do to prepare their house for sale. Those are the moves. If you invest enough time to learn that or invest enough time or money to have somebody who knows how to do that do that for you, you can build a tremendous business on the back of just a very simple marketing system.

Joe: Totally. And every person, I think, on the planet could create their version of that, and it would work really well for it. And I’ve never met someone that has not gone through that process and created an educational tool, and started putting it out to the marketplace, that has not improved their conversion, that has not attracted a better client, because people are showing up pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and pre-disposed as a result of education-based marketing, and has just not created more of an ELF business for themselves. That’s my whole thing.

Dean: I think about that like as a curriculum for somebody studying. If we were going to start I Love Marketing University, I think that identifying and understanding target markets and what people really want, I think that would be one key component of it, then lead generation advertising, direct response advertising, knowing how to phrase an offer that’s giving that target market exactly what they want. And I don’t want to downplay the importance of being able to really understand what a target audience really wants, making the ad so much easier to write.

If you really understand what somebody wants, writing the ad becomes so much easier; because you can go through the mechanics of making a direct response ad look like a direct response ad, meaning making it look newsworthy and not putting your big logos in there and doing all the things that make it look like a direct response ad. But if you’re just off-key, if you’re not harmonizing with what their compelling desire is, then the ad’s not going to work. But once you strike that right cord, if you are harmonizing your message with exactly what’s going on in their minds, then that makes your ad that much more effective. The skill of writing that ad really comes from the skill of being able to understand what a target market really wants, how to study that and identify their needs.

Joe: And it’s like fishing. If you’re going to go out and fish, you have to have bait that the fish will actually bite on. And if you try to fish with the wrong bait, it doesn’t matter how good you think the bait is or how well you understand the bait, you’ve got to understand the fish. You’ve got to know what they want, and you’ve got to know if they’re hungry. Because if they’re not, they’re simply not going to bite on your bait. There’s this really funny saying, which is, “The only thing worse than singing the wrong note, is singing it louder.” Selling is not yelling. You look at like the auto industry as an example, some of the reasons they’ve got such a bad reputation is even to this day, and even newspaper ads, but even many years ago, newspaper ads, big prices, big starbursts, all these things, just yelling, yelling, yelling. It’s all price advertising.

I had a guy that actually took a lot of my marketing stuff and converted it over to the auto industry, teaching people, consumers guide on how to buy a used car, or very niche-specific about buying a Corvette or buying a Mercedes. To this day, I give away cars almost every year, in contests that I do in the cleaning industry. So, I go through a lot of different cars. It’s kind of a neat process. And I cannot tell you how inept the auto dealers are with even following-up with a guy like me. There’s one dealership that I’ve bought cars from.

Dean: You’re a whale. You think about how many cars you buy.

Joe: Like 5 different cars, like Land Rovers and Mercedes, and a Jaguar from this one dealership. And they have never once sent me anything that is that brilliant. Obviously, it doesn’t sound like a good example because I keep buying cars from these people, but the dealership’s owned by a big company in Phoenix. But I made the decision I will never buy another vehicle from this dealership because they’re complete idiots. I have bought cars from other dealerships and stuff, but it’s like, “Man, I’m just waiting for a dealership to actually do something really intelligent, for me to broadcast it and drive a ton of business to them, because most of the ones here in the valley – and when I say the valley, the Phoenix area – have never done anything that has been in the least bit impressive for me. That’s that.

Dean: Here’s another comment.

Joe: That’s what I was going to say. Let’s hit another comment.

Dean: Here’s another comment. “Hey, guys, I just want to say I’m really enjoying your podcasts. I look forward to it each week. Just wondering. I work for a car dealership and would love some tips, strategies and case studies to apply to the auto industry. So, here’s your chance to right the wrong of all the car dealers.

Joe: Oh my god, that is so funny! Okay, here’s what I look at, just like Dean’s 3 stages of a business. I’m going to go right into strategy. Is that okay, Dean?

Dean: Why wouldn’t you?

Joe: Okay. You have before, during and after. So, again, everyone thing about the 3 stages of business. What do you do before the sale? What do you do during the sale? And what do you do after the sale? In order to get yourself out of the price game with auto dealers, what most dealerships want is they want a lot of floor traffic, so they can sic their salespeople on them, in some dealerships. And then there’s high-end dealerships that don’t want to do high-pressure selling or anything. But there are a lot of dealerships that that’s their shtick. It’s like that high- pressure selling. So, first off, you should read Joe Gerard’s books. He was one of the most, if not the most successful car salesperson in the world. And he’s written a couple of books on how to sell anything to anyone and how he did what he did, and he would do things like take pictures of everyone that would buy cars from him. And when people would sit down with him, they would see all these photos of people standing next to their car, for no other reason than social proof. It shows people are more apt to buy from you if they know, like and trust you.

So, how do you get people to know, like and trust you if you are selling cars? Well, what do you do before they even inquire? Same stuff we talk about. Drive people to a 24-hour free recorded message on how to buy a car. Pick a car. If you’re selling Toyotas, “Free recorded message reveals how to get the best Toyota at the lowest possible price.” If you want to even use price advertising, you can drive them and explain to them what to do and how to do it. The other option is you simply do a benefit of “7 reasons why you should buy X car. Call and find out.” You can use video, you can use audio, you can have a consumer awareness guide on how to buy a car. Those are some of the strategies you can use before a sale, so that when people show up, you’ve already done some selling in advance. I’m going to let you add your input, Dean.

Dean: The funny thing is I’ve actually got like a real example of this.

Joe: Go ahead.

Dean: I’m going to my bedroom here. I was just looking in one of my journals, that I actually helped a guy when I first was looking at buying a Porsche. This was back in 1997. There it is. Anyway, go ahead.

Joe: The other thing I was going to suggest is the easiest way for a dealership, in my opinion, to sell cars to existing customers is like I typically buy high-end vehicles. Currently, what I own in vehicles is I own a Land Rover LR4, and I bought it in 2010 because it was, at the time, the most technology. It even had more of the cool bells and whistles than even a Range Rover, because they wouldn’t have the same stuff as the brand new LR4’s did until 2012. So, I wanted all the push button and all the cool stuff. Every time I would go to the dealership here – I’m not saying this applies to all Land Rover dealerships all over the country, but the one here – they would give me a nicer vehicle than the one I’m dropping off. If someone is going to spend anywhere from $50,000 to $80,000 on a vehicle, or above, whenever they drop off their vehicle for servicing or getting an oil change, give them either an equal vehicle, and preferably better. Why? Because people that are buying those kinds of vehicles are probably going to upgrade, and you want to get them all excited. Don’t give them a lower-level vehicle.

And I cannot tell you how many times they gave me something that’s not even equivalent to it. And when someone buys a luxury car, there’s a status attached to it. And people, if they buy a Mercedes, they don’t want to get a Ford Taurus as their loaner car when they’re getting the oil changed. And when someone comes in for any servicing, offer to give them a test drive. When they go to book a service appointment, say, “Oh, while you’re out here, would you like to test drive any of our new vehicles?” Even if you simply ask them that question, “Oh, while you’re coming out here,” you train. How many of the phone calls into a dealership are coming from existing clients? There’s either sales calls or there’s service calls. And every complaint or ever problem with a vehicle is an opportunity to not only fix it, but an opportunity to either sell a new vehicle or set the stage. And you don’t have to use high pressure. It’s simply an existing client.

So, I think most dealerships are so consumed with chasing new customers, new customers, net customers, selling new cars, that they don’t think about the gold that already exists. There’s a guy named Peter Convinski, who actually is this really fricking smart, creative, sort of like an idiot savant, because Peter’s so brilliant at writing copy, and he’s also like this clever sort of dude. But he created something, a client compounder, for auto dealers. And it simply is something that they mail every month to their existing clients. It’s a monthly newsletter, the same way that you do the world’s most interesting postcards, the same way for my cleaners, that I do a client newsletter, the Healthy Home Newsletter monthly. If you’ve already sold something to somebody, you should be communicating to them every single month. Either write or create your own newsletter or postcard, or you actually get a direct response one.

I’m happy. We’ve been very careful about what we promote, and we tell people to buy books and everything, but I can give out Peter’s phone number, the work number for the Automotive Dealer’s Marketing Association, which is (413) 594- 6032. He has no relationship with the Unabomber, by the way, although it sounds like the same name. And let me just say that that will probably create harassment for Peter. But nonetheless, you should mail something monthly to every one of your clients. Joe Gerard did that. He was the world’s most successful auto salesperson of his time. And in one of his books, is to not mail anything less than 10 times per year to everyone that’s ever bought a vehicle. So, take it from the guy. That’s right out of one of Joe Gerard’s books, “Mail no less than 10 times per year.” And if you just do that, you’ve increased your chances of repeat business and referrals by 20 times. I mean, really. So, what else you got? Did you find that thing you were looking for?

Dean: I did. So, here it is. It was just funny. I was looking through some of my old journals. I journal everything. I’ve got shelves and shelves of journals. And I just happened to come across this one. This is from September, 1997. That was the first year that I had moved down to Florida full-time, and I was looking for a Porsche. I met this guy who all he sold were 4- and 5-year-old Porsches. He would get them coming off of leases or coming off of trade-ins. People would trade them. He would buy them wholesale, from the dealer. He had a credit line of $500,000 that he paid like 1% a month on the money. But the whole thing is he would buy these cars, then flip them very quickly.

I was talking to him, and he said the only thing that really works is the Auto Trader, and he was advertising all the individual cars in the Auto Trader. And I said, “Dude, you’re selling the same thing. Why don’t you have one really good ad, that you could use to do lead generating, so you’ve got a ready pool of buyers for these Porsches before you get them in. Because a lot of times, a Porsche is not an impulse purchase. Right? It’s something that somebody who is going to buy one has thought about this car for a long time before they buy their first Porsche. I could explain this to him in a way of a guy who that was the car that I had always thought about. That was the one that I really wanted. So, I was doing all the investigating and stuff.

So, he said, “We’ve tried classified ads, but classified ads don’t work. Nobody calls on classifieds.” I said, “Well, would you let me do one for you? Like I’ll show you what I mean.” I was saying, “You should put together a guide, a consumer awareness guide on how to get the best deal ever on a 911. I’ll show you the whole thing. I’ve got it all laid out, right here in my journal. And we actually did this little ad. We ran a little classified ad in the Orlando Sentinel. So, it said, “’92 Porsche 911, because this was in 1997, so a 5-year-old car, “’92 Porsche 911, low miles, excellent condition, zero down, with low monthly payments. Must be sold 24-hour recorded message,” and we had the phone number.

And then when people would call the phone number, I can read the script here for you, the script would say, “Hi, this is Steve.” I’m going to leave out his last name. “This is Steve. Thanks for calling on my ’92 Porsche 911. My specialty is finding low- mileage 911’s from 1990 to 1992, and getting them for even below wholesale prices. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and I know where to get the very best deals. Most Porsche dealers are all over the map, selling cars from the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. But I specialize. I can show you how to get a 1992 911 Coupe with low miles, no down payments, and monthly payments of less than $600. In fact, I have 4 cars right now that you could get with this arrangement. I’ve written a book called ‘How to get the best deal ever on a used 911, which I will send to you for free if you just leave your name, address and telephone number, along with pictures and all the information on the cars you called on. Just leave your name, address and daytime phone number after the beep, and your book will be mailed out today.”

So, we ran that ad one time, and he says classifieds never work for him. He said, “I don’t get any calls on the classifieds.” So, we got 27 calls with name, address, telephone number on that one little classified ad in the Orlando Sentinel. So, I had him brainstorm this out. And the guy just completely was locked into this mindset of doing things the way that he’s always done them, like doing it in the Auto Trader. But we did that, got all of those people. I suggested to him that he put together a monthly newsletter that he would send to those people like for at least 6 months, send them out a newsletter that shows the inventory that he has right now, because he’s always got new inventory. And invite everybody to come on Saturday, at the same time, to see all of these cars, like have an open house for the cars. He had a warehouse that was the coolest thing. It was totally out of like a drug movie or something. These industrial parks, where they’ve got the big garage door bays, and then you open it up and inside there’s like a dozen 911’s in this one little warehouse. It was something to see.

Joe: It’s like Fast and Furious or something, right?

Dean: Something like that, exactly. Anyway, then I thought of how he could better get everything paid for by joint venturing along with other companies, who would love to have his access to people who are just about to buy a Porsche 911. So, he had ads or little inserts in that book that he was sending out, from an insurance agent, from a shipping company, from a loan officer, from a leasing company, from a mechanic, accessories and upgrades for Porsches, a stereo company, a painting company, rims and tires, all of those people. He could make money generating leads of people who were looking for a Porsche.

Joe: Yes. And what I want to say is that I hope that everyone listening saw how everything you just described is applicable to almost any business.

Dean: Well, it really is. And that’s where, when I was talking about the formula, the formula is absolutely in play there. First of all, who’s our target audience? People who want to buy Porsche 911’s. How are we attracting them? Little classified ads. The language in that ad, the only purpose of the ad was to get them to call and listen to the recorded message. So, we said all of the power words that they would be looking for: ’92 Porsche 911, low miles, excellent condition, zero down, low monthly payments, must be sold.”

Every one of those words are amplifiers. There’s not a single filter in that. There’s nothing that would discourage somebody from calling. Right? They’re not going to say, “’92 Porsche 911, low miles? Oh, I was looking for something with high mileage.” “Excellent condition. Oh, I was hoping to get one that was all beat up and dinged.” Everything in there. “Zero down. Oh, I was hoping I was going to have to put $10,000 down.” Everything in there is an amplifier that makes you want to call more. And when they call, it’s easy. Call and listen to that recorded message. When I read that script, everything there, absolutely that formula could apply to any type of business you can imagine.

Joe: I love it! I love it!

Dean: Right there, this episode, for that car dealer, I could have charged him $3,000 for a one-hour consultation, and tell him that same thing that I just shared with you right now.

Joe: And you know what? In a lot of ways, what we’re sharing here is what we do with a lot of our clients. We tell them exactly what we’re sharing here. Going back to the Bill Phillips thing, I explain the model that I used with Bill Phillips on one of the previous podcasts, and Bill made millions of dollars with my advice, and paid me a lot of consulting fees for it. There’s another comment on here. Do you want to finish up anything with that one, Dean?

Dean: That was really, I think, the person who was asking what are some ideas for a car dealer. I think that they’re going to be pretty happy with what we talked about here.

Joe: Yeah.

Dean: Now, I want to hear from them, as it’s LocSpoc. That’s who made the comment there. So, what would be the most gratifying in the comments is to hear LocSpoc tell us how he applied exactly what we talked about, and how he ran an ad, how he created this guide, how he created the monthly newsletter. That would be the fantastic thing. I think it would be great to have in the comments for follow-up, to see that people are actually doing what we talk about.

Joe: Yes. Exactly. There’s one here from Robert Catsill.

Dean: What page are you on?

Joe: I’m on the first one.

Dean: Still on the first page?

Joe: It could be showing up differently on your computer than mine. And everyone listening, this is the first time we even went backstage on the comment section of our WordPress blog, Matt Mullinweg, who actually is the founder of WordPress, is a friend of mine. He actually spoke at one of my past Piranha Marketing conferences. There’s one from Robert that says, “When are you guys going to sell me something? I want to buy!” Of course, I recently interviewed Brian Tracy. I’ve interviewed Brian Tracy several times, for my Genius Network interviews, and he said a comment that, “If you don’t try to sell something every day, you’re not working.”

So, what we want to do with I Love Marketing is just give phenomenal, awesome advice, and we always will. It’s not like some clever setup to only get people to buy stuff from us. Do we have things that we sell? Yes, of course. Dean has knowledge products, I have knowledge products. And the one thing I want to mention is we are going to do – we’ve decided – the I Love Marketing seminar in Phoenix, Arizona, September 28th, 29th and 30th.

Dean: (Trumpet sounding)

Joe: And that will be truly an awesome, amazing event. And we will get more information out to everybody as soon as we put the pitch together. But we’re going to sell this bad boy out, and it’s going to be awesome. And me and Dean are just going…

Dean: Mark it on your calendar.

Joe: Just put it there for now. September 28th, 29th and 30th, Phoenix, Arizona. It will be right outside of Phoenix. It will be about 15 minutes from the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. So, as long as you know you’re going to fly your butt down here, we’ll get you all the details and the information later. And we will charge a fee for that, but that’s what we’re going to have. Other than that, we just want to give people great advice. At some point in time, we’ll probably put together recorded products and maybe specialized seminars. Dean has his own stuff. I have.

One thing I’m really proud of, I do have the highest level mastermind group in the world for direct response marketers that make $1-million a year or more. It’s a $25,000-a-year program. The website is 25KGroup.com. But I’m not going to use I Love Marketing as a place where I’m always going to be pitching that. I will mention that. And the reason I do mention that is that one of the reasons me and Dean have tremendous amounts of insight, I believe, on marketing, and always have cutting edge knowledge, is because some of the top people in the world are friends of ours. Eben Pagan, great personal friends with me and Dean. One of Dean’s best friends. Frank Kern, all the usual suspects. I’m speaking at a Dan Kennedy seminar in a couple of months. I go on islands with Richard Branson. Just did that recently.

I meet with some of the top marketers. Jeff Walker’s in my group, Brendan Bouchard, Mike Koenings, Dean Graziosi, the founders of Beachbody.com, Paula Abdul, Brian Kurtz from Boardroom, these are all people that are in my mastermind group and pay. And as a result, I get to hear the cutting edge stuff on marketing. And Dean Jackson is known as the marketing Buddha within a lot of internet marketing circles. People consider Dean one of the top Internet marketers. Now, that’s cool. That’s why we love the I Love Marketing podcast brand, because not only do we get to share knowledge that we’ve learned through our own studies, our own businesses where we’re tested and tried thousands of things and we know a lot of what works, and we’ve failed a lot with what doesn’t, and we’re going to share with you the best stuff that we know that works. And at the same time, we also interact with a tremendous amount of people.

So, we’re going to start bringing guests on. We’re going to probably be bringing Tim Ferriss on a call here soon, and my buddy Gary Vaynerchuk, Wine Library TV, his newest book is The Thank You Economy, things like that.

Dean: It’s all very exciting.

Joe: Yeah. Do you want to try to do one more, or do you want to just wrap it up?

Dean: Yeah, you got one?

Joe: Let me see. Okay, what about one from Dorthia? “Thank you, guys, for all your absolutely fabulous insights. I look forward to your new podcasts, so I can learn something on my way to work. My son, who is a brilliantly-talented finish carpenter (it’s true, even if I’m the Mom) is a lousy businessman and advisor. So, I want to help since I love marketing. Any ideas on a giveaway for him, when his specialty is crown molding, etc? You can’t really give away a room of crown molding, or what. Thanks so much, Dorthia.” I have a really awesome dude named Steve Nash and another guy named Wesley, who’s a painter, that are in my platinum group for professional cleaners. They’re not cleaners, but one’s a remodeler and the other one is a painter.

So, they can’t really give away a free room of cleaning, either. So, what they rely on is their versions of a carpet audit, where you go in and you evaluate the home or the office, and you basically use education-based marketing and a special way to present it. Steve Nash uses consumer awareness guides, testimonials, valuable tips and information, and puts it in a folder, and he sends it out to people before any in-home evaluation of a remodeling job. And he calls it his silent salesperson, because it’s not a human being. So, whatever business you’re in, if you can’t really figure out how to give away like a trial, so people can try a piece of what it is you do, kind of like they give out food samples in Costco or in some sort of grocery store, just to let you try it, if you truly cannot give away like a piece of your business in order to instill reciprocity, what you still can give away is education. You can still give away people direction, confidence and capabilities on how to make an informed, intelligent decision. And you can offer to present it to them for free, or you can charge a fee, where you’ll come in and you’ll evaluate.

There are some people that sell carpet, as an example, that will come into a home and they’ll charge a very low price to measure everything and give you a quote. And then if you end up buying carpet from them, they’ll apply that cost to purchasing from them. And it’s a good way to get more than a sales pitch, because you’re paying a fee. And you can position it that way. “We’re literally going to come into your home and we’re going to tell you what to do and how to do it, and how to buy from someone. And if you decide you want to do business with us, we’ll apply that fee toward our company. But even if you don’t, your fee covers you knowing how to make a buying decision.” That actually is a really good approach for certain types of businesses. What would you say to that question, Dean?

Dean: I think when somebody’s making a decision on something that is like finish carpentry, like what she was saying that her son is in, there’s a lot of stuff that could help people in the decision process, by educating them as to what their options are. Some of the times, especially with things like finish carpentry or with things that are sort of expensive detail-oriented things, there’s always ways to get the look or to get the feel without spending as much money as you think you might need to spend.

Like if you were to show people how to allocate the budget, how to work with what they have, certain types of woods might be a better choice than others, or certain things might be a good alternative to something. There’s probably lots of opportunities to educate somebody. And maybe even doing something like a planner, like in addition to crown molding, if he’s doing cabinetry or – I’m in my office in my house in Florida here, and that whole wall of bookshelves was done by a finish carpenter, this whole thing. The bookshelves, the day beds, my desk and all of that area there. It was a neat process to go through, to kind of plan it out.

So, whenever you can give somebody something that’s going to actively help them through the decision-making process like a carpentry planner, where they can play around with the space that they have, they can look at the options and kind of draw out what they’re looking for, and kind of educating them about the standard sizes for things, versus off-sizes, all kinds of stuff like that.

Joe: Yep.

Dean: Education. I don’t want to downplay the importance of that, having a planner that can actively get somebody involved in the process.

Joe: Right. Right. Right. What is that weird noise in the background?

Dean: I don’t know.

Joe: Okay. Also, one thing I want to mention, because we’ve got to wrap up here, is we are going to put some illustrations on the ILoveMarketing.com blog, from the absolutely brilliant woman by the name of Nusa Maal. You can check out SenseSmart.com, if you want to know more information about Nusa. But we’re going to start putting these incredible illustrations, where she actually maps visually, and visually communicates what it is we’re talking about on the I Love Marketing podcasts. And we’re going to have Nusa go through some of the podcasts and actually map it, so there’s visual illustrations. This is something very unique. I don’t know another person in the world.

Dean: I’m very excited about this.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. Both me and Dean are super-excited about this. But I spent half a day in the airport with Nusa, a week ago, and said, “Hey, can we start doing this with the I Love Marketing podcasts?” So, if you’re listening to this on iTunes and you want to see a lot of the ideas that we talk about at I Love Marketing actually illustrated into drawings and just really powerful communications from someone, again, I’ve never seen another person on the planet do this, and I’ve had Nusa actually map some of my brainstorm sessions, including the most recent one I did with Richard Branson. She’s phenomenal.

As if just sharing the podcast and the transcripts and the videos and the things that we do on the site for free is not enough, we’re actually going to start putting some illustration and things there. And we’d love to get all of our listeners’ comments on those. There’s so many more comments that we have. And, of course, we only went through a few here.

Dean: We didn’t even get past the first page.

Joe: Yeah, I know. We got like 3 or 4 of them, or something.

Dean: There’s a lot of them, but it stimulated a lot of good stuff. And I think that’s more important.

Joe: Yeah. There’s one here that said, “I’ll send you one of my products, if you email me a mailing address. I’d love to hear your off-the-cuff thoughts on what I love to make.” Things like that, I don’t know, Dean, if you want to give out your mailing address, but my mailing address is at the bottom of JoePolish.com. Basically, what me and Dean don’t have a lot of time for is to have people send stuff, and then think that that’s actually going to allow us to give people free consultations or tell them what to do, or whatever. It would really have to be awesome and striking, because me and Dean get a tremendous amount of things mailed to us.

That also doesn’t mean that we’re not interested in what everyone has to share. What we want to do is just do our best to offer really helpful advice on the I Love Marketing podcast. And if this comes with a favorable response, we’ll do more of these, talk about the comments that everyone has and things along those lines. If you ever look at mine and Dean’s sites, we’re not, again, going to constantly try to get you to buy stuff from us. We’d love to have you register for the event, as soon as we have that up on the site at the September 28th, 29th and 30th I Love Marketing first-ever live event. But beyond that, I think you’re going to get most of our…

Dean: They can tell us if they’re excited about it in the comments.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah. At least that. And if anyone doesn’t want to spend exorbitant amounts of money hiring me and Dean, we can possibly be talked into it. But we would really prefer you test the ideas that we’re sharing here, and know that they’re actually working for you, because we’re not holding anything back. We truly are sharing with you what we feel just will give you the best possibility of success with your marketing. So, what else you got to share, Dean? And then, we will call it a night.

Dean: That’s it. I think that’s enough. I think we can wrap it up and feel good.

Joe: Awesome, awesome, awesome. Okay, thank you, Dean, and thank you everyone for listening to I Love Marketing podcast. Have a great night, or day, or evening, or whatever it is.

Dean: Tell your friends.

Joe: Yeah, tell your friends and we’ll talk to you next time.

Dean: Goodnight.

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