Lead Conversion Strategies With Joe Polish and Dean Jackson – #54

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: And Joe Polish.

Joe: That’s right.

Dean: You know what I think we should talk about today?

Joe: What is that Dean?

Dean: I think we should talk about, the reason I say it is because I’ve got a couple of really cool stories actually that I’m starting to see the real value in working on lead conversion. You know, with so much of what we talk about is about generating leads and using direct response and getting people to call for guides and, or free reports or opt in and leave their name and email address. All these things to generate leads but I want to spend a whole episode here just talking about what I believe is really the most valuable thing which is lead conversion. Profit activator number three; educate and motivate your prospects to meet you.

Joe: To meet you, to call you, to go to your website, to give you money, to hang out with you, that sort of stuff?

Dean: Exactly, well part of this thing is when we start talking about, you know, generating leads, it’s usually, we separate. A lot of times, people make the, there’s a subtle distinction between profit activator number two and profit activator number three. So profit activator number two is compel prospects to call you by using direct response marketing and, you know, we talk about using, those are all the things that you do just to get people to call and raise their hand. We’re not now in the ad or in the marketing. We’re not trying to convince them to do business with you. We’re not trying to convince them to meet with you yet. The only thing we’re doing is enticing them, compelling them to raise their hand and identify themselves as someone who is a prospect for what it is that we do.

And profit activator number three is about educating and motivating those people so that they want to meet you but, you know we always add on to the tail end of that profit activator . It ends with when they’re ready. You know, it’s because we talk about this whole idea that not everybody is ready now. You know, not everybody is ready to do what it is that you do immediately, you know? They may be ready to gather information about it and that’s why it’s so easy to get people to raise their hand when you focus all your attention on compelling them to call you that way. But where the real value is in, is in nurturing and really educating those people over a period of time. The longer that you can follow up with people, the better off that you’re going to be.

Joe: Yes. Exactly what I was going to say.

Dean: So do you have any experience in that?

Joe: Well let me ask you then because, you know, I want to clarify this for a lot of the listeners so say for instance someone was just simply an online marketer and we have terminology and the profit activators, compel prospects to call you. Educate, motivate prospects to meet you. Put that in online terms. What does that actually mean?

Dean: Okay, perfect. So, you know, when you look at, so last week, this is a perfect time to talk about it because last week we talked about, we had Perry Marshall and we had Tom Meloche on talking about Facebook advertising and using Facebook to get your message in front of people who have a high probability to be your prospect and to get them to click on an ad that you put right in front of them in, you know, at just the right time. And then hopefully when they go to your landing page, you’re offering them something that’s going to compel them to leave their name and their email address. That would now be a lead.

We’ve generate, we’ve done the job of profit activator number two. We’ve compelled people to call you by raising their hand and call you, and let’s say that to cover both online and offline that it’s to identify themselves to you. That’s really who it is, you know? It’s like we’ve got this big group of people if you think about who you’re trying to put your message in front of, we’ve got this big group of people who could potentially be our prospects if we’re talking about carpet cleaners. It could be a whole a neighborhood or a whole city. Everybody in there who has carpet is a potential, is a potential prospect for you but by using direct response advertising. By using some sort of marketing piece, we can get the ones who are interested in getting their carpets cleaned to raise their hand.

And, you know, we’ve talked about how we do it with the realtors, you know, using, picking a neighborhood and getting people to raise their hand as somebody who’s interested in potentially selling their house by offering them information on the latest activity in their market, you know, in their neighborhood. So we’re compelling those people to call and we get them to identify themselves as somebody who has a high probability to be somebody that we can help.

But that there’s the thing, sometimes people think, and this is where we see the mistakes that they make with applying the profit activators is they think that that’s enough. That they generate the leads and then they don’t have a really strong system. A method, a way of communicating with people for an extended period of time to bridge the gap between when we’ve got them to, you know, we’ve compelled them to identify themselves and when we’re meeting with them to present our mafia offer, you know?

Joe: Yeah, well let me give you an example of like with cleaners in the very beginning and for what happens to this day. When I first started teaching, you know, the methodology that I use just probably very, I’m sure you’ve had the exact same thing happen to you just a different way for real estate. You know, I would teach carpet cleaners before there was the Internet, you know, to run an ad and the ad would drive people to call a free recorded message.

Well, they would, first off, they would start trying to do all kinds of selling to get them to hire them before in the ad before they would just call the free recorded message and we’re like, no, no, no. You just, the only purpose of the ad is to get them to call the number. When they call the number, the only purpose of the number is get them to leave their name and their address so you can mail them a consumer awareness guide or get them to just listen to a longer educational free recorded message which then becomes part of number three. And the offer would be a free room of carpet cleaning and a carpet audit.

And there was all kinds of different ways that, you know, someone that is over anxious or doesn’t want to really, you know, embrace the psychology of how this works. That they try to shortcut it and, you know, it always goes back to how long does your sales letter need to be? How long does this copy need to be? You know, it’s like how long do your legs need to be? Long enough to reach the ground but, you know, they don’t need to be any longer than that but they need to be long enough to reach the ground or it doesn’t work. And so what would happen with the carpet audit, and invariably, there would always be, you know, like 1 out of 10 people would buy my kit and I used to do these critique coupons where I actually, myself would get on the phone or I would critique their ads. I don’t do it anymore just because there’s just too many people.

However, when I would talk to them, they’re like, “Well, this isn’t working and I’m doing it exactly like the way you teach.” And if I ever got a copy of the ad or the promotion which I would ask them to fax it to me. You know, back in the good old days with fax machines. They would always leave something out or I would always find out that well they’re just, you know, once someone would call them, you know for a free room of carpet cleaning, they would just want to show up and do the cleaning but they wouldn’t want to do the carpet audit. They just want to get the money and it’s like, “No, no, no. The carpet audit is the unique process of presenting, you know, your service offer to motivate people. You need to educate them. I mean you’re asking people to make a decision to buy something from you that you understand but they don’t understand it, and see, that’s the biggest challenge for a lot of business owners.”

Is they live, eat and breathe the stuff and they know it. They think it’s the greatest thing in the world. They think, you know, that everyone should just buy it because they’re offering it and, you know, it’s not about that. It’s people literally need to be, they need to be courted the same way that you court a romantic relationship. If you meet someone and you immediately, you know, you’re not going to romance them. You’re not going to take them out. You just want to jump into bed. I mean it’s just, it doesn’t work that way.

And, you know, sometimes it does when you’re like Brad Pitt or someone, you know, if someone’s or vice versa, you know? This works men and women. Don’t get all excited while I’m talking about Brad Pitt here either, Dean. I know how you’re really totally into Brad but, you know, the point is it’s the same thing and if you’re not willing to court your clients, you cannot expect them to fall in love with you and to trust you and so.

Dean: Right.

Joe: All right, so let’s take them through it. I mean, and by the way, I want to mention this too. My voice is still a little raspy I know because of getting over my, you know, long term cold here but nonetheless.

Dean: I wasn’t going to say anything. It’s kind of sexy though.

Joe: Yeah, well I was interviewing Dan, well I was actually doing a recording with Dan Sullivan a couple of days ago and he said the same thing. It makes me sound more distinguished but basically, I have a letter that I’m going to read from a college student later in this episode that has generated over $10,000.00 in sales following our strategies using consumer awareness guides and things like that.

A really cool letter that I got from a graduate student and who listens to our I Love Marketing podcast and I’ll share that later so just proof that, and this isn’t in an environment raising money for non-profit and to do good things in the world. So this sort of stuff applies to everything and I’ll read that later but I want people to really kind of get that there is a method to the madness and if these things were unnecessary to do and go through these profit activators, there would be no reason for us to do all of this.

I mean because, you know, Dean, both me and you are impatient. We love to just get sales quickly and great marketing is the quickest path to the sale. But the quickest path to the sale requires you to do things, and if you try to speed it up or shortcut it, it’s not that it won’t be a quicker path to the sale it’ll be like no sale. Or you’re going to be competing on price. So there’s a lot of benefits of following the profit activators in the way that we teach it and we’ve been doing this for many, many years and so we’ve kind of learned with our own money why this works and how this works and so, okay, so how.

Dean: And, you know, I want to start, I always begin with the end in mind. I always begin at the, you know, the purpose of educating and motivating your prospects to meet you is so that ultimately, they do meet you. So the only people that we’re really speaking are the ones who are ultimately going to meet us. We want to do everything we can to speak to the five star prospects. The people who are the most likely to want to do business with us and not worry about the ones who are not likely to do business with us.

And that’s going to be important in a few minutes because I’m going to share some of the mistakes that people make and how to really kind of avoid those and have the very best conversion process that you can. And so the very first and best that you can do if you really want to start working on this profit activator is to begin with what you already have. You know, everybody has leads that did not convert. They had opportunities that they didn’t get to do business with people right away.

And by the way, most businesses, most business owners are really good with the people who want to do business right now. You know, if they run an ad and everything falls into place where they run an ad for a consumer awareness guide. Somebody calls for the guide, you send it out and then they, you know, the prospect calls you and invites you over to meet with them right then. Most people are really good with that. But if there’s any kind of a delay, any kind of a time lag, most people kind of drop the ball. It’s the most, you know, missed opportunity that most people have and so one of the things especially this time of year. It’s a great idea and to reconnect with all of the prospects that you may have missed out on, you know, or you don’t know what the status is. And I created something called the amazing nine word email that revives dead leads.

And this was something I did for the realtors but it works for any business that the best place to start is to gather up all of the names and email addresses or telephone numbers or mailing addresses of all of the prospects that you can possibly gather up. Ones who have not done business with you yet but came across your path. Maybe they, you know, came in to see you in your professional business service. They came in for a consultation or they called you for a quote but they didn’t actually get anything yet or if you’re a realtor, they came to your open house or to your website. They left their name and email or as a carpet cleaner, maybe they called for your consumer awareness guide or they called to get a price quote but they didn’t do anything.

All the people that you can gather, you know, look in your desk drawers and, for all those scrap pieces of paper you wrote down the info when you were talking to somebody on the phone or look in your emails. Look in your car, under your sofa cushions. All the places that you would keep all of these prospects. Gather them all in one place and put them in, somewhere where you can send this nine word email to them.

And, so the subject line of the email is just their first name. Just their name; Joe. And then the body of the email would be, and I’ll share with you the real estate version of this is, “Joe, are you still looking for a house in Phoenix? Dean.” That’s it. That’s the entire email. Now, if you send that email out, a couple of things are going to happen. First of all, you’re going to struggle with your restraining yourself from not adding anything to that email. The biggest temptation that you’re going to have is to want to say more in that email than those nine words.

Because you’re going to say, “Are you still looking for a house in Phoenix? Because if you are, blah, blah, blah.” Whatever it is, you know, you want to finish that. That’s going to be, you know, driven, you’re going to be distracted enough that you’re going to want to finish that email. And I’m sharing this with you because the most important thing you can do is not finish that email.

Your mind can’t stand an open loop. It’s uncomfortable to send out an email that doesn’t tell the whole story. But the reason that it works so well is exactly the same reason as why you want to fill it in. Because your prospects who are receiving that email, they can’t stand an unsolved mystery either. They want to know why you’re asking them that.

So even if they’re not still looking for a house in Phoenix, they’re going to reply back and say, “No,” you know? And that’s okay too but when you send it out, I guarantee you, you know, if your, if you send it to people who have inquired about carpet cleaning, “Are you still looking to get your carpets cleaned?” That could be the email for carpet cleaners.

Car dealers, you know? “Are you still looking for a new car?” That’s it. Somebody who got a quote on their roof, you know? “Are you still looking for a new roof?” Whatever the thing is. Whatever it is that you do, just fill out that short nine word email. I’m going to read you an email that, because I encouraged our real estate agents to do this right at the beginning of the year, you know? Because it’s a really great time, right now, to do this.

To kind of reconnect with all these people so this way they send me back this email. “Hi Dean, for the last few days I’ve been busy cleaning files, closing out the year and setting up for the new year and as you say, I love this time of year. Anyway, I threw in the waste basket yesterday about 20 printouts of suspects. People who had responded to my website but nothing had come of working with them so they were filed and I thought dead. Then I read your amazing email early this morning and by 7:30, I had sent 20 emails out with only the nine words and maybe Happy New Year in the body of the email over my signature. In short, personally expecting a response. By 9:30 AM, I had five responses. Dumbfounded. Two yes’s, one apologized. Had some issues to work out but looking forward to getting back to looking. Another was still interested so I sent some listings. Then one replied, “No, we’re not.” Another had bought from someone else and one email not working. I thanked them all and by 9:30 PM, a total of eight responses with three yes’s. Ready to work with me again, two no’s and of the other three, an invite to lunch, an email not working and one walking away from an upside down home and did not want to try short sale. 40% response in about 12 hours. Unheard of. Thank you so much. It kick started my year. You are the best.”

Joe: There’s only one thing that she was wrong with about that.

Dean: That I’m the best?

Joe: Yeah, yeah because you are not the best but that, everything else though I think is pretty valid.

Dean: Here’s proof that it works in other things, you know? “PS. I told a friend who’s a consultant about it to see if they can choose doing the same thing for her consulting business.” So when you look at this, it’s like these were leads that she had thrown out. She’d already given up on them as dead.

Joe: Right.

Dean: And every business has this. Everybody has these people, you know?

Joe: Yeah, yeah. See, you know, I mean, see, this is the reason why we get paid the big bucks. You know, what I want to try and do is borrow this like is this like I came up with it, you know, since I’m part of it.

Dean: I like that, yeah.

Joe: Because we got this show together but really, you’re the one that came up with the nine magic words. However, what you just said though. I mean seriously, think about this. People can read dozens of marketing books. They can go to like, you know, $5,000.00 seminars and rarely, are they going to get like something so simple and our biggest challenge is the fact that we’re putting this out there for free.

Anyone can take that formula and use it. You already know it works like gangbusters, we already know that, you know, the simple human psychology and bringing simplicity to confuse and using Socratic selling. Really not try to oversell to, you know, all of this is proper positioning and proper mounting. We all know that it’s a very best way to present anything and maximize response and, you know, there’s going to be people that simply won’t do it because they’re thinking, “Well, you know, it can’t be that easy.” But it really could be and guess what? You can just try it and find out.

Dean: Yeah. And that’s the thing so homework assignment number one would be think about all of the prospects. Gather up all of the prospects that you can. That you have either given up on or you haven’t really contacted and you know look at those people. It’s fascinating how much potential you have in those, you know? There, I would do some consulting with a company that has a list, a database, name, email, all contact information of nearly 100,000 people who they have generated leads through radio advertising and they have again, a really good process for converting people who are ready to go right now.

You know, they drive those calls. They are able to talk with people and they help the ones that are ready to be helped right now but they don’t have and didn’t have a really great way of bonding with the ones who don’t and recapturing them later, you know? So they had, it was funny because I was on a call with the president of the company, the marketing guy and the operations guy and, excuse me. I had them laughing because the way they, even the language that they were using, they had segmented their data. They got really good data. Really good record keeping. Really good execution, you know? They were able to do everything. But they would segment their database into new prospects contacted, in process, and then if they didn’t get into process, they put them into archive. That was the category that they used. That’s the big, that’s the 100,000 people. And I said, “Do you guys have a swear jar in your office? And they laughed. I said, “Because I think what I want to do is, we’re going to, I want culturally, I want this swear jar to be the archive jar. I don’t ever want to hear you talk about the archive again. We’re going to rename it, “The Gold Mine.” And every time you start talking about the archive, we’re never going to say that word. We’re going to talk about it as the gold mine.”

Because in the fall, they hadn’t really done much to reconnect with these people, and so in the fall we sent out an email to all of these people and we invited them to come on a Teleclass and had 800 people, you know, come and come on the Teleclass. Generated 400, over 400 new, you know, reengaged leads and were able to do business with, you know, 50 or 60 of them immediately.

All from this group of people who were otherwise dead leads and, you know, it’s like, you know, and each time doing business with them represents, you know, $4,000.00, $5,000.00, $6,000.00 so it was a lot of money that they were able to generate, able to mine from the gold mine there, you know?

And so I think that’s really why it’s been on the front of my mind, this whole conversion process because we can show people how to generate leads until the cows come home. I mean, you know, we can generate tons and tons of leads, it’s easy and it’s exciting because, you know, most people, it’s always more exciting to generate something new than to try and manage what you have, you know?

Joe: Right. No, it’s so much sexier for most people to chase new customers, new customers, new customers than to do all the other stuff.

Dean: Right, and that was the other thing.

Joe: The other stuff.

Dean: Yeah.

Joe: Yeah, it’s harvesting though? You know, everyone wants to run around and throw seeds everywhere and gather seeds and this and that but, you know, what about the tilling of the soil? What about the watering, you know?

Dean: Yeah. I said, and it was so funny because these guys, I did the first call of the year with them, you know, a couple of weeks ago and, you know, first thing they wanted to talk about was, “Well what can we do new this year? Like what kind of new lead generation stuff can we do?” And I refused to let them talk about it. I said, “We’re not going to talk about it at all until we schedule another one of those teleclasses for the gold mine every month, you know?”

Joe: How funny is that though? I mean you know what also cracks me up too though, Dean is how many people are in charge of marketing departments that don’t even understand what the hell marketing even is.

Dean: Right.

Joe: I mean it really, I like constantly run across people that have really high and mighty titles or at least they think they do. And they just have no clue.

Dean: And no, I mean I don’t want to say in any way that these guys are not good marketers because they really are. They’ve got a huge business and they do millions and millions of dollars but it’s, but just the, you know, even that. Just showing that just simple things like not really thinking about doing the same thing again and again. It’s like almost thinking about that as an event, you know? Thinking about what we did, yeah, we did that. That was great. But not that it doesn’t cross their minds that we should be doing that every single month.

Joe: Well, you know, I mean look, it’s clear that I obviously like to help people or we wouldn’t be doing a free podcast and putting it all over the world, giving away all of these amazing money making strategies with zero compensation to us other than, you know, people send us nice gifts and stuff every once in a while. However, I mean from that perspective, I think it’s totally fine and actually, a necessary that we, you know, make fun of people every, you know, more frequently.

Dean: Yeah.

Joe: I mean, you know, I think if we even have the I Love Marketing stupid ad example of the month or something like that, that would feed that side of me that enjoys that.

Dean: Oh, that reminds me. Boy, I wish I had it right in front of me. I saved it for that purpose. I got in my mailbox a postcard for a workshop that has a doctor’s picture on it and the headline was, “Avoid total knee replacement.”  And it was a free workshop.

Joe: Well explain to me why that wasn’t brilliant?

Dean: Why that wasn’t brilliant, exactly. It was just kind of I see it all the time because there was a cosmetic surgeon here who had run an ad that was, the headline on the ad and it was done in cursive writing like in script. It was laser assisted blepharoplasty which is like eyelid surgery, right? And I remember it so well because the whole thing and the guy, the cosmetic surgeon who’s become a really good friend of mine. He’s, I play golf with him all the time now but, you know, when I first was talking with him, the ad itself was like, you know, you could tell they had some co-op money from the laser company. You know, the actual tool that they had to market their services? So the ad was all about the new UltraPulse 5000C Laser, you know? And it was like the words that they were using, you know, new technology that penetrates to a precise distance with less bleeding, swelling, and bruising. I mean all the power words you want in a surgery. It was just the funniest thing ever, you know?

Joe: Let’s scare them into not buying from us.

Dean: Well, the funniest thing was I called the, I looked up the company. I got them to send me some literature on the UltraPulse thing and the envelope that it comes in. This is the funniest thing was it had the UltraPulse logo was like a red, kind of red laser beam coming out of the thing but it looked like, you know, a stream of blood coming out of this thing, you know?

Joe: So you’re saying it was quite appealing?

Dean: It really was appealing on every level.

Joe: Oh that’s funny. That’s funny. Well, you know, like we talked about this I think before but, you know, Daniel Amen who is a good friend of mine. He’s in my 25K group. He wrote Change Your Brain, Change Your Life and about 20 something other books on the brain and health. And he has a, you know, it’s a pretty large organization. Four different clinics throughout the world. Top brain scan psychiatrists in the world and,

Dean: He also has the brightest, clearest eyes of anybody I’ve ever met.

Joe: Yes, he does. He does.

Dean: Yeah.

Joe: And he’s done like five PDF specials and I mean you can find him all over the Internet. Smart dude. And basically, you know, he really gets and understands marketing, you know? And the reason is because he studies it, you know what I mean? He understands that being the best brain doctor in the world is one thing but getting to understand how they can helped by him is entirely a different thing so he really is a student of how to communicate, which of course is interesting considering his studies is the human brain, right? And he has a great line where he says, “You know, psychiatry is the one industry that doesn’t look at the organ that it treats, which is why I’m such a big big fan of brain scans.” And he listened to my whole Nightingale-Conant program and the part on where we talk about, you know, a carpet audit. Doing a carpet audit and so he spent six hours and he created a brain audit process.

And so when people go to Amenclinics.com they can take a brain audit and what he’s doing once he drives a lead or someone that’s interested that goes to his site, he actually educates them by having them answer questions and then giving them very useful information about diet, about exercise, about sleep and a lot of it’s simply things you can do for free but other things are things that his company and organization offer all the way up to full blown, you know, brain scans. Come to Amen Clinic and get a brain scan.

And the point is, it doesn’t matter what business you’re in, you can do this. You can do this with carpet cleaning. You can do it if you’re a doctor. You can do it if you’re a blue collared business. You can do it if you’re a high tech Internet business. I mean there’s just a whole variety of things. I mean, you know, I remember a guy in Australia that would do, he had a pet shop and he would do seminars that would teach, you know, a parrot how to talk. And so people that had parrots, they would go there and, you know, I think this guy was bringing in just thousands and thousands of dollars a month doing, I think $49.00 or $97.00 person, you know, seminars on teach your parrot how to talk.

But so there’s all kinds of ways that you can go about doing this. If you’re a printer, you can do a printing audit. If you’re a carpet cleaner, you can do a carpet audit. If you’re a realtor, I mean, you know, there’s all kinds of ways to package up messages. And so let’s go through some more stuff Dean. You’ve got a whole, you know, you’ve got a whole slew of different ideas and things. And certainly, I mean there’s got to be someone out there that is not going to, they just need a new idea. They refuse to use the magic nine word, you know, email. So, you know, it’s just not, it’s just not for them. Their clients are different. You know, the famous line that will put a nail in the coffin of your business is, “My clients are different.”

Dean: Yeah, exactly.

Joe: Let me ask you about that though. What are your thoughts on that? Because, you know, that’s probably one of the number one things, you know? Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer, they even made a big banner for their seminars that, I don’t know if they do it anymore but it, the last one I spoke at, I didn’t see the banner but they, I’ve seen them with a big banner before that says, “But, my clients are different.” And they would really get annoyed with people that would say that and I literally have seen Dan Kenney, you know, someone will raise their hand and ask a question and, you know, if at the time where Dan were to take questions and if they start the sentence with, you know, “But my clients are different,” or, “My clients are high end,” or, “My clients don’t respond to this sort of stuff.”

I mean he literally would not even talk to me. I’ve even said to, I’ve seen him in live audience say, “You’re an idiot. I’m not even going to answer your question. I mean until you can pull your head out of your ass and not say that my clients are different or they don’t respond to this, while you’re sitting in a seminar that you responded to this. Telling me that people don’t respond to this.” So what are your thoughts on that?

Dean: Well I mean, I agree that they’re right. That it’s not you know, clients the only thing that’s different are the actual details of what it is that they’re asking for or going to respond to. But the fact that they’re going to make a decision about something is universal, you know, no matter what the situation is. The information that they’re going to need. The criteria that they’re going to use to make that decision is what changes but the process is the same.

They’re either going to, you know, if you compel somebody to call because you’ve used direct response advertising. You’ve gotten them to raise their hand. The only reason people even raise their hand about something is because they have an interest in that thing, and if you know that we often quote the inquiry handling service studies that show, you know, that half the people who inquire about something, 52% will actually buy what it is they inquire about within 18 months.

And so you look at that and it shows you that you don’t, a lot of the people that inquire are ultimately going to do something whether they do it with you or whether they do it with somebody else. Especially when you’re looking at things like, that have a shorter window, you know? Like somebody getting their carpets cleaned, you know, there’s a good chance that they are going to do that at least once a year with somebody, wouldn’t you say? I mean I don’t know whether sometimes people don’t get their carpets cleaned at all but they’ve got to be in the minority, wouldn’t you think?

Joe: Well if they’re, if they’re getting their carpets cleaned by a Piranha member that’s actually doing his job right, their, our members are mailing out monthly client newsletters and they’re educating people constantly on the health benefits of cleaning the carpet and it’s not just about appearance. I mean do you know that you can actually hide a pound of dirt in a square foot of carpet before, you know, not all carpets but an average type of carpet. A square foot. A pound of dirt before it becomes visible to the human eye.

Dean: Yeah, right.

Joe: Oh yeah. And in, you know, when they start really getting their, I even have sales letters that’ll say things like, “You wouldn’t sleep in your sheets for six months without washing them would you? Or wear your underwear for six months without washing them, you know? But people do it all the time with their carpet.” And if you start saying things like that or at least plant that sort of imagery in their mind and I’m not talking about scaring people. I mean this is true.

I mean who would use, you know, who would use a towel to take a shower with, you know, more than, you know, a couple of times? Three or four times, you know what I mean? If you’re one of these individuals that goes to a hotel and you actually will use the same towel, I love the different verbiage is that they have to entice people to not, you know.

Dean: Save the environment.

Joe: We could do a whole episode on that. I mean I’ve had conversations with Robert Cialdini about all the different verbiage that they’ve done to test that. but you know, that being said, I mean, you know, it’s not real difficult for a carpet cleaner to dramatically increase the frequency of their clients use of their services through education and see the thing is, if you don’t use education based marketing, people, they’re not incentivized to do business with you more frequently because they don’t even understand why they would benefit by doing business with you more frequently.

So this is not even about, you know I know I’m saying it in a way to be joking and sound like scary and freak people out but I mean I can say things about carpet on, you know, this podcast here that would make people think like, “Oh my god, you know, I can’t believe that.” And they don’t make them want to clean their carpets more frequently but, you know, when you’re properly presenting whatever business you have to someone and educate them, tell them what it is they need to know and how you’re going to benefit them, and don’t expect a sale if you’ve tried to do is just leave that part out. I mean people need to understand.

Dean: Yeah. So I’m going to share some of my top three let’s say, ideas. Top three things and there may be four or five by the time we’ve tallied them all. But the best thing that you can do is to realize and understand that not everybody is going to buy right now, and so if you buy into that, you know that, you know 50% of them are going to buy something and you just realize what is the value of that? Realize that there’s a gold mine in all of these leads that you have because none of your competitors are really able to educate and motivate people over a period of time and patiently wait until they’re ready to actually do something.

So I just want people to understand the economics of it because it really is incredible. If you look at, when you look at the total value of what these leads that you’re generating are actually worth. You know, if you generate 100 leads and you know that 50 of them are going to buy in the next 18 months and you calculate what that’s worth, you know if just your average one time, first time job with them or the commission on the average house that they’re going to buy.

Like if I do this with realtors, if you generate 100 leads and we know that 50 of them are going to buy something in the next 18 months and that average commission is $5,000.00, or $6,000.00 or $7,000.00. Let’s call it $6,000.00. There’s that portfolio, that bundle of 100 leads in the next 18 months is going to yield somebody $300,000.00, you know? $6,000.00 times 50 of them so when you start thinking about that, what would it be worth to you? What could you invest in, you know, to educating and motivating those people and build, taking at least an 18 month window of time to kind of bond with those people. And be there when they’re ready to move.

I just want people to understand the value of that. So do the math yourself. And I always whenever I’m talking about converting leads, I always like to speak in terms of bundles of 100 leads. Because anything can happen with one or two leads but let’s talk, generally what’s going to happen with 100 leads is going to happen with the next 100 leads. In all areas, you know, if you can generate 100 leads from an ad, whatever it cost you to generate those 100 is probably plus or minus a very small amount what it’s going to cost you to generate the next 100. So it’s all, you know, thinking through the portfolio value or the bundle value of those 100 leads over 18 months.

Then make a decision that you’re going to do everything you can to get that money. When I started thinking about my lead conversion really seriously, one of the things that I did was, I used Gary Halbert’s idea of what would you do, because when he wrote the letter that changed everything for him. The idea that he used was, what would happen if I could only mail one letter and if I didn’t get an order, I was going to be beheaded?

And, you know, that’s pretty motivating so I took that approach. I said, “What if I’m given 100 leads and I’m given 18 months and that if over that 18 months, at the end of 18 months if somebody had bought a home and they didn’t buy it from me that I was going to be beheaded. How would I approach this group of 100 people?” How would you approach that group if you knew that your life literally depended on you being there when they are ready to do what it is that your business does?

Joe: Yes, that would change things.

Dean: It would change things and even if you can get yourself to go there and just think that through. Know what that commitment would look like, that is going to help you really take this seriously because it really is a serious thing. You’ve got such a great opportunity here. Now, if that’s your mindset, you know, you realize what that bundle of leads is worth to you. You’re committed to it because you know that if they don’t buy with you or do whatever it is, let you help them, that you’re going to be beheaded. It takes a whole different level of emotion into what you do with all the thought processes that go into developing the system that you’re going to use to educate and motivate those people.

You know how we were at the marketing live event and Eban was talking about using emotional, you know, raising the emotional value of the words. Those, that two exercises that I just talked about is what’s that bundle of 100 leads worth? That should excite your greed glands as Gary would say and what would happen, what would you do if your life depended on you making sure that if they did what it is that you do, that you are the one they do it with? Those two things, you know, if you can excite your greed glands and your fear glands and getting working in harmony that, right there is going to add weight and depth to what how you really think about this.

Joe: Right. Totally, totally.

Dean: Yeah, it’s funny because I do want to, you know, we were both silent there for a second, but I do want people to really get the weight of this. I’m not saying this just as something to say because it’s entertaining on a podcast, I’m sharing with you exactly the mindset that I use to go through and create some of the most compelling conversion processes that you can imagine.

Because I take it very seriously and I’m just sharing with you like from, I want to really like implore you that this is a serious exercise and if you really seriously get yourself to buy into the full weight of the emotion that comes from really thinking through those two provocations that your lead conversion process even just by thinking those thoughts will be forced to improve.

Joe: Totally. I hear you and one of the things that I think that Gary was a master at in what you just sort of explained is getting yourself into a position where you’re sold. You know, if you can’t sell yourself on the power of something and put enough positive pressure on yourself, I mean literally, you’re going to be beheaded if you don’t write that one letter. I mean you approach it much differently. I mean, you know, even if it’s a trick.

Dean: Well everything, you know? You look at Tony Robbins. We talk about everything as, is a result of the state that you get yourself in, you know? Your physiology changes when your state changes.

Joe: Yeah, completely. You know what would be good? For people that have just started listening to the I Love Marketing podcast, at the very beginning when me and Dean started this going on a little over a year ago, the first episodes that we did that kind of tells the whole story. I mean we really explained a lot of this so if you’re one of our new listeners and even if you’re one of our current listeners, it’s always valuable. I’ve talked to a lot of people that have gone back and listened to the original episodes that after they’ve been listening to us for a while, when they go back and listen to the first ones, they actually make a lot more sense to them.

Because they have a whole other context to think about these marketing strategies, but every podcast that we do we do a really good job to make sure that there’s several real true strategies, tactics, walkaway gems that you can immediately use to build and grow your business. Make more money and just make everything much more effective. And as far as Gary Halbert, you know, do a search for Gary Halbert at Ilovemarketing.com and listen to some of the podcasts talking about Gary. And watch my presentation at Dan Kennedy’s event where I actually talk about the seven things that I learned from Gary and everyone that watches that video tends to really learn a lot and find it really valuable.

So Dean, I actually want to read this letter here in a minute but I want you to keep going through the different things that you want to share before we get to the point where I’m allowed to read this letter. I need your permission because, you know, you’re kind of like the boss tonight, I think.

Dean: Oh is that like the boss, like a boss.

Joe: No, I’m kidding. I’m just making that up. I’m trying to make you feel good. Make you feel authoritarianist.

Dean: I got you.

Joe: So go ahead. What else? I mean what jewels do you have for our I Love Marketing, you know?

Dean: Okay, here’s the good stuff. So you got that state. You understand what they’re worth. You’re committed to converting those leads, now here’s what you do actually in practice to make this happen. You got to really get to the bottom of what it is that people really want when they do business with whatever your business is. You know, what are the things that are going to motivate them? What are the things that they need to educate themselves on and how can you phrase those things, how can you offer them those things that, in a way that makes it easy for them to take that first step, you know?

So I’ll give you some real estate examples of how we do this and you can extrapolate from that. Three things that people want to know when they’re thinking about selling their house, I mean those three thoughts are, you know, how much is my house worth? That’s the first thing that people want to know, and so we compel them to call by offering them information that scratches that itch. If they’re thinking, you know, I’ve been doing a lot of work here in Winter Haven.

We’ve put together an offer for lakefront homes. We chose that as a single target market. We send our postcards offering the January, 2012 report on Winter Haven lakefront real estate prices. And people call and they ask for that and we know that the next things,  because that’s going to give them an idea of what all of the lakefront homes are selling for but what they really want to know is how much is my house worth?

So we offer them. We scratch that itch by offering them a pinpoint price analysis. You know, we talk about coming to show them exactly what their house would be worth in today’s market. And when people are ready for that, they’re ready for it, you know, and they will call up. We have been doing as I said with Julie Matthews here in Winter Haven. We sent out these postcards and how it happens is you send out the postcards, they respond. We send out the guide, we got a consumer awareness guide on how to sell your house for top dollar fast.

We send out the report along with a cover letter and Julie gets a call from a guy who says on her voicemail. She played the voicemail for me. He said, “Hey, I got your package and it looks like you’re serious about selling some houses.” I mean it’s just kind of that kind of thing happens all the time because we’re speaking directly to them. It’s nothing about, it’s not pumping yourself up, not saying how great you are. It’s talking about what they want to know and making offers to them that are going to motivate them to want to meet with you, you know? Because they want to know what their house is worth and here we are, offering them something that sounds exactly like what they want with a pinpoint price analysis.

Another thing they might want to know is what do I need to do to my house to get it ready to sell? What kind of repairs should I do? Which ones are worth it? So we offer them a room by room review. It’s a booklet that’s got checklists and it shows people, it’s meant that the realtor will go over the report with somebody but people call and that’s what they want to know.

Or we offer them a chance that we may have a buyer for their house. Give them a chance to put their house in our silent market where if we have a buyer who may be able to sell their house without even putting it on the market. So we got those three things that are going to motivate people to want to meet with you because it’s speaking completely in benefits. It’s talking about exactly what they want and every month we send them a newsletter that is packed with tips on things that somebody who’s looking to sell their house might be interested in knowing.

It’s going to be very helpful for them. We call it our get top dollar newsletter. And so every month the get top dollar newsletter goes out along with a cover letter that’s offering them one of those three things, and information on all the activities that’s happened in the last 30 days.

And so, you know following up with people like that. Being there every month knowing that most of them are going to, are going to buy later and not now. The return on investment is huge on that conversion process, you know?

Joe: That’s what I’m trying to say.

Dean: That is what you’re trying to say. I would say to people that, you know, think about what are the things that people would want to know? What are the things that would be most motivating for them to want to meet you? And how can you phrase it? How can you put a name on it, you know, and make it seem like it’s one of those cookies that we talk about. If I had you in my living room and instead of saying to you, “Hey, if there’s anything you want, there’s lots of stuff in the fridge.” Bringing out the cookies and putting them right in front of you and saying. “Hey, Joe. Would you like a cookie?” Because it’s far more compelling for you to take that cookie if it’s right there in front of you.

Joe: Well and if you’re over in my house, it would be more like, you know, raw chocolate or almond butter.

Dean: Yeah, you want to rock the cow. Yeah.

Joe: It’d be rock a cow basically.

Dean: Basically would, or kale. You have a bottomless supply of kale at your house.

Joe: You love coming over to my house, don’t you?

Dean: I do. That’s what I’m most excited about this week actually.

Joe: Yeah. Yeah, me and Dean will be with each other so anyway. I mean not like that but we will.

Dean: Wait a second. I don’t want to be presumptuous.

Joe: Yeah, that’s sounds really weird. Alright, well look. I think you’ve given more than enough and I want to mention that, you know, in our continual quest of delivering such amazing stuff to all of our listeners. We’re going to do some bonus interviews that are going to be coming up as part of I Love Marketing but you’re going to have to go to the website; Ilovemarketing.com and you need to be opted in so we have your email and all that so you’re notified of these things.

But I’ve interviewed recently Peter Diamandis and his author Steven on their new book Abundance that’s coming out and I did a video at Singularity University because I’m a platinum partner in Singularity University now and you can watch that interview with Peter Diamandis. And then Loral Langemeier, who is a financial author of, you know, she’s made millions and millions of dollars and she’s written a bunch of bestselling books and she has a new book called Yes! Energy that’s with HayHouse and so you can hear my interview with Loral and then Dave Crenshaw who is a productivity expert who wrote a book called The Myth of Multitasking and Invaluable and we’re going to make those bonus interviews. These are things that will add to your knowledge base in different parts of success in business.

So we don’t just cover marketing here, although we love marketing and marketing is definitely the first horse in front of the cart because that makes everything else matter, you know, through our I Love Marketing channel. Me and Dean are here to just help you do a lot better in business and in life so Dean anything else you want to say? If not, I’m going to share the letter that I got.

Dean: I’m excited to hear this letter.

Joe: Well here’s the deal. This is kind of interesting because I was, his name’s Jeremy Ellens. He is a student at Arizona State University and basically, the way that I met Jeremy was I have a neighbor a few houses down from where I live named Laura Burgess and she has an environmental company called Burgess Environmental. She’s a professor at ASU and basically, she had, she does a lot of volunteer work in foundations from the Heart [inaudible 00:58:41] Museum to entrepreneurial groups and she asked me if I would, you know, wouldn’t mind speaking to a group of graduate students.

And I’ve really never done anything like that and she wanted to bring, you know, some students over to my offices at Piranha Marketing in Tempe and have me speak to them and since, you know, I’m a guy that failed, owning and operating a small business in community college and got a C minus in marketing and never got a degree in anything, I was like, “What exactly would you like me to talk about?”

You know, Laura knows me and so she’s like, “You know, just talk about entrepreneurship and stuff.” So it took several months for me to actually schedule a time that we could do this but we did, and I was going to speak to these students for an hour. And I ended up speaking to them for about three hours and there was one of the guys there was, his name’s Jeremy Ellens.

And so little did I know until a few days ago, he had actually sent me an email on message on Facebook and he started telling me about how he’s, you know, been implementing all of these strategies, listing I Love Marketing and I said, “Would you mind sending an email, you know, to me and my assistant, Eunice via email kind of telling me what you got going on?” And so he did and this is the letter he sent and just got this two days ago.

And it’s, “Joe and Eunice.” And Eunice by the way, is my assistant of 16 years. Her title is Office Angel at Piranha Marketing so it goes on to say, “I spoke with you earlier but wanted to give you a little bit more background on myself and what I have been able to do since I began using what I’ve learned from, you know, Joe Polish and I Love Marketing.” Which is the podcast of me and yours truly, Dean Graziosi. I’m kidding. You’re supposed to say, “Dean Jackson.”By the way, do you think you’re smarter than Dean Graziosi since he’s in real estate?

Dean: Not at all.

Joe: No? I think you are actually. I think, yeah, I think you’re better looking too. Alright, so anyway, it goes on to say, “I originally met Joe at a small group meeting in his office which was set up through my scholarship program by Laura Burgess. The meeting was scheduled for an hour but Joe graciously extended our time together for several hours. When I left the meeting, I had found something special. I told Joe that day that I couldn’t wait to tell him how I applied the education he gave us.” Since that day, I dove into his I Love Marketing series from ILM. I found and dove into so many other useful resources mentioned in the series. I subscribed to the Gary Halbert letter. I attended I Love Marketing Meetups. I read books by the speakers of the I Love Marketing series like Start Something That Matters that was written by Blake Mycoskie and Gary Vaynerchuck’s The Thank You Economy. My marketing knowledge has grown exponentially since diving into this education.”

So side note, we do have interviews with, you know, Gary Vaynerchuck and Blake Mycoskie if you just do a search for that on I Love Marketing and Blake Mycoskie started TOMS Shoes. Anyway, alright. Back to the letter. “I’m a senior at Arizona State and I have co-founded two companies. I co-founded a web development firm called Yazamo with my partner, Dornubari Vizor since meeting Joe. Although we create and educate our clients on how to create exceptional websites with incredible value, we wanted to do more. This is where influences like Blake Mycoskie started to come in. Dornubari spent several years growing up in the UN refugee camps in Africa. Dornubari and myself are passionate about making a difference through entrepreneurship and we found a perfect fit through Kiva. We believe that entrepreneurship drives innovations and solves the greatest problems in the world. This is why we decided to create a business model based around funding alone through Kiva for every website we build. We have generated over $10,000.00 in sales since founding Yazamo with a lot of thanks to the things I’ve learned through Joe. We have created consumer awareness guides for Yazamo. Jeremy, you’re welcome to punch me if you ever see me if I said any of this wrong.

“These have been extremely effective for us by establishing us as the experts in our field. Every client we have has been extremely impressed by our educational material and have trusted us right from the beginning. We’ve created mafia offers for our clients by offering 100% money back guarantee on all our work. I can name a number of different things we have applied but to be honest, we are just beginning. To further explain how valuable I find this marketing and business education from Joe and I Love Marketing, I want to share one last thing. I was recently accepted into The Global Scholars Program. A sponsored, all expenses paid, six month trip to study entrepreneurship at MIT and Stanford. In this program, you study with the world’s leading scholars and thinkers, policy leaders, innovative researchers and business founders. I turned down this opportunity. I had an incredible team put together at Yazamo and I knew how much information I already had at my fingertips. I had incredible resources available through Joe and all I have to do is continue to apply. Thanks again for everything, Joe. Jeremy Ellens.”

And his company is Yazamo. And you know? The thing that is really cool about this is that, it just, you know, everyone has access to what it is we are doing here at I Love Marketing. The difference is when someone actually takes it seriously and they go and they apply it. And I, for one, Jeremy, I want to give you a big congratulations on what you’ve done. This makes me very happy. I know it makes Dean very happy hearing this. How people actually take what it is we teach and actually go and do something big. And yeah, I mean I just, so what are your thoughts on this letter, Dean?

Dean: It’s fantastic, you know? It all shows that no matter what industry, there’s so many ways that this all, that this all works, you know. We talked about the Breakthrough DNA report and how, you know, The Eight Profit Activators, you can apply, you can trigger in your business and this, he’s basically cracked the web developer code, you know?

Joe: Yeah, yeah. And so basically, The Eight Profit Activators are select a single target market is the first one. Number two is compel prospects to call you. Number three is educate and motivate prospects to meet you. Number four is present your, you know, offering. Number five is deliver a world class experience. Number six is provide aftersales service. Number seven is nurture a lifetime relationships and number eight is orchestrate referrals. And to elaborate on all of these eight profit activators, this is what the entire I Love Marketing series is all about. We go back and forth with different ones but if you have not read our DNA breakthrough report on the website, go ahead and do that.

And if you want to fully immerse yourself in all of this then listen to every episode on Ilovemarketing.com and if you want to go even further, then you can become a platinum member and just let us know if you’re interested in that. And if you’ve never attended the I Love Marketing conference that we recently did and you want the I Love Marketing DVDs then go to Ilovemarketing.com. Click on the button. Read about it. It’s something that it’ll be the best investment you’ve ever made in your life. Better than a Porsche, better than a balloon ride. I mean, you can do that too.

Dean: You can do that too.

Joe: Better than a poodle. I mean it’s, there’s so many things that the I Love Marketing program is just superior to and that’s all the choices that we. Alright, Dean so where do we go from here then? I’m a little tired, I’m just going to start babbling here.

Dean: I know. Well I think you’ve crossed that line into babbling now.

Joe: I mean I started babbling from the beginning of this episode but still. You know, the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits.

Dean: There we go. Perfect. There’s no limits to stupidity.

Joe: You didn’t want to downplay what?

Dean: The importance of this episode because this is one of the things that we’ve shared here tonight are, you know, on the whole. The most valuable things that we’ve talked about and I think that this would be an episode that I would encourage people to listen to more than once. Maybe put it on a loop in your car all week. Listen again and again. Really download the transcript of this episode and block off some time. Block off some time to do a 50, 20, 50 at least to go through those exercises of really thinking through and calculating what’s the value of 100 leads if you generate them in your business? And what is the feeling and what would you do if your life depended on you getting every piece of business that comes from those 100 people? And that really, those two provocations are life changing.

Joe: Totally. Yes, and Dean was talking in code there where he said do a 50, 20, 50. That’s basically a focus finder exercise based on his focus finder process, and if you are overwhelmed or you need just a way to kind of process how to put things together, if you are challenged with time and how do you do it, then watch the focus finder video on Ilovemarketing.com. Just type in focus finder in the cool little search button and for those of you that are continuing to attend and do Meetup groups; thank you.

We’ve been having some really awesome Meetup groups at our office. We heard one thing that was sort of weird this week where someone went to a Meetup group and someone tried to pitch him into a seminar or something, but we don’t even know if it was a Meetup group or just someone that actually heard about it through Meetup. We still haven’t gotten to the bottom of that one, but if you’re out there doing Meetup groups, utilize the curriculum of Ilovemarketing.com. And for those of you that really want to learn this, one of the best ways to get really good at learning marketing is to evolve yourself in discussions with other people about it and there are some great Meetup groups all over the world, I Love Marketing Meetup groups.

Go to Ilovemarketing.com click on the Meetup button and you can see some of the Meetup groups. Not all of them that are happening throughout the world are listed there but if you go to Meetup.com and type in I Love Marketing, you can find if you have one in your area or not and attend them because we’ve got some amazing people all over the world that are actually running I Love Marketing Meetup groups and we would love to have you start one of your own.

And we have a whole guide, a PDF that you can read on the, when you click on the Meetup section and we just recently updated it so all the episodes are there if you want a printout of all the episodes of I Love Marketing. It’s on that guide, and there’s a whole curriculum on how to run a group and people that really are doing them are just reporting just great accelerated ways of learning and applying the marketing here

So we actually think it’ll make you money if you run a Meetup group much, much quicker and if you attend them, you know, all the same. It’s all good stuff so thank you everyone and please leave your comments on our website and have a good day.

Dean: That’s it.

Joe: That’s it. Until next time.

Dean: Alright. Good night, Joe.

Joe: Good night, Dean.

Hidden content