Episode 050: The one to start the year off

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. That’s right.

Dean: That’s right. Here we go. This is episode 50 of the I Love Marketing podcast.

Joe: It could be more than that, depending on, we could have the timelines completely messed up here. It doesn’t even matter, because this episode is going to be like all of the other episodes – phenomenal, spectacular – for one main reason: because I’m on the line. I’m kidding. The one main reason is because they’re all good and they’re all valuable, and they’re all helpful, and that’s what we’re here for. We’re here to serve the I Love Marketing community entrepreneurs everywhere, helping them with powerful before, during, and after strategies, to maximize their profits and multiply their success. Yes. That sounds like an elevator pitch.

Dean: It’s a mouthful.

Joe: Speaking of, Dean, before we get into this, and I know we have a plan here, what’s your take on mission statements and elevator pitches? You hear people in business talk about that stuff all of the time, but I’ve never asked you that. What is your thought on that?

Dean: Here’s the thing. That is a very good question, actually. I think it’s more important to have a crystal clear statement of what you do.

Joe: Like a USP or what?

Dean: I don’t even like to put words on it, a label on it, because so many people are confused with so many different definitions of what a USP is.

Joe: And that’s Unique Selling Proposition, in case anyone doesn’t know what a USP is.

Dean: Exactly. The thing that I find most useful, somebody talked about a 7-word bio or 7- word description. I did mine a while ago. So, when I looked at Dean Jackson, what does that stand for, when I was doing that exercise, the thing that came to my mind was, “Dean Jackson helps realtors make more money.” That’s a pretty simple statement. We could expand that to, “Dean Jackson helps business owners make more money, entrepreneurs make more money, marketers make more money.” I think that that is something that’s crystal clear, and I take it very seriously because everything that I do is definitely wrapped around making more money for the people that, whatever products I produce or services I offer, or programs, or coaching, or anything like that, is all about making more money. That may not sound as noble or as lofty as sometimes mission statements sometimes get construed as; like, “Dean Jackson serves the real estate professional community with honesty and ethics,” and all of those kind of lofty things.

Joe: Of which you would never do, because you have no integrity whatsoever.

Dean: And that’s the thing. It’s almost like you feel bad if your mission statement doesn’t have those things in it. I just think there’s so much stuff, that it’s such a wasteful thing, especially when companies get to a certain size where they’ve got teams and all of these employees, and they want to rally everybody around a common vision or mission. And they put a committee together and they go on their offsite retreat to bond and to really come up with what are the core values of the company. I just find a lot of that stuff just so…

Joe: Say it… ridiculous.

Dean: It is ridiculous. I was going to say circuitous. Circuitous to the point where it’s not getting to the point. I think that a company and an individual, anybody who is serving somebody, is so much better off to think about what the statement is of how they better the people who they’re actually serving, the people who they’re trying to get to give them money.

Joe: Let me say this, because I know we have thousands of people that listen to our podcast, from big companies to one-person organizations and solo operators, and everything in between. My take on it is with a passion and excitement that someone has, we even have clients with us that run big – God forbid I use the word “corporate” – sort of businesses that have hundreds of employees, tens of millions of dollars in revenues. We have a few that have hundreds of millions in revenues, that listen to us, and they do have company culture books. And they do have retreats, and they do have human resource departments, and they do hire consultants to come in and run focus groups, and they have bonding retreats and all of that sort of stuff. The thing is, to say a blanket statement, something is not valuable across the board, is not always accurate.

But, at the same time, I would absolutely lean 99% of the time towards what you said. A lot of the stuff that people do, they try to have these lofty goals. I remember going into a rental car place, years ago. I don’t even know why. I was on some flight somewhere, and I got off in some city. I remember it was freezing. And I went to some place – I can’t even remember if it was a Hertz or Avis, or whatever, but there was a mission statement up on the wall, over a water faucet, and it was talking about, “Our mission is to provide world-class customer service in the best comfortable environment”. And it was something that had to do with the environment and the cleanliness of the organization for people visiting. And there was literally dust caked on this mission statement frame, where you could put your finger on it and write “wash me” on it sort of thing. I just totally cracked up, because you just know that there are dozens of employees walking past this thing, probably every 2 minutes, and everyone had gone numb to it.

Dean: And prior to that, the whole leadership team was up in the woods, doing bonding experiences and falling backwards into each other’s arms to build team trust, and come up with and flesh out the core values of the company, to really get the first draft of this mission statement.

Joe: And it reminds me of something that Gary Halbert said, that people should focus more on the substance of what they do and less on the image.

Dean: That’s exactly it.

Joe: It was this whole thing about brand building, because we live in this world where one of the things that I think is just freaking ridiculous with all of the social media stuff, is all of this personal branding, that everyone talks about “build your brand, build your brand.” We’ve talked about this before. My favorite definition of brand is David Ogilvy’s “the personality of your product or service.” David Ogilvy was brilliant, and everyone should read Ogilvy On Advertising, if they want to get a good perspective of a true direct response guy that built big brands with direct response marketing. The thing is, people, get lost in the ego-based stuff, in all of the buzz-speak and all of the terminology, and they forget about what does Dean Jackson do. “I help make more money.” Getting to what is the substance of what you’re selling to people is critical.

And I think people would be so much more well-served to sit down and write an ad or write a sales letter or shoot a bio video, than they would to sit down and try to figure out what is the perfect mission statement. And that’s not to say that mission statements aren’t valuable, because I think any sort of analysis of what it is you do, what it is you want to present to people, what it is your company is all about, what your culture exists, all of that is better than not looking at any of it at all. And, to a certain degree, all of it is helpful. It’s just if you really want to, from our standpoint, the reality is that if you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. Our hammer is marketing. We look at the way to solve business problems is to improve your marketing. Frankly, I want to create management policy, but…

Dean: The difference is we’re right.

Joe: I’m not good at management, but I’m really good at marketing. So, if we can at least figure out how to teach people how to get more business, then let them deal with their management issues. That’s me trying to be funny here.

Dean: I gotcha.

Joe: Having said all of that – and that was a little tangent that I just brought up – how does that relate to all of the stuff we’ve been doing here? Now we’re a year out of doing I Love Marketing and, for lack of a better word, as I just bashed brand building, we’ve created a global brand with I Love Marketing in the last year. Literally.

Dean: You know what we need to do, Joe? Next, you and I need to go up into the woods and fall into each other’s arms, and do some team-building experiences.

Joe: What does I Love Marketing stand for? What is our culture and environment that we want to create with I Love Marketing?

Dean: What are our core values, Joe? What are the core values?

Joe: What’s the contribution we really want to make to people.

Dean: Cleanliness, I think, would be one.

Joe: Love, acceptance, totally void of sarcasm or any sort of insulting sort of languaging. It’s very important not to talk down or be disrespectful of your coworkers, which in this case would be me and you. That sort of thing. That’s good. If any of our listeners have any suggestions on what me and Dean should really do on our teambuilding in the woods sort of exercise, we are all ears. You are welcome to post those comments.

Dean: For our retreat, yeah.

Joe: At ILoveMarketing.com. How does all of this relate to people, though? We really have put some of what we not believe, but some of our very best marketing strategies that me and you use day-in, day-out. We’ve interviewed some of the smartest marketers and entrepreneurs on the planet, over the last year, everyone from Richard Branson to Blake Mycoskie, to Dan Kennedy to Tim Ferriss, to Gary Vaynerchuk, you name it. All kinds of bright people. We keep them coming all of the time. There’s a lot of themes that go through the calls and the strategies and everything that we bring up. So, how does it relate to that initial question I had for you? What do you think of mission statements and that sort of stuff?

Dean: I think it’s timely, right now. It’s timely to think about that. We’re right at the start of a brand new year, 2012, and it’s going to be a very important year because everybody knows it’s the year that the world is going to end, so it’s really the last year of anybody’s business. It’s time for people to get serious about their business. If they’re ever going to make it, this is the time.

Joe: You’ve only got a few months.

Dean: 12 months, right? Nobody knows.

Joe: One of your life goals might be to buy a Porsche 911. This shit’s got to happen before the world ends.

Dean: That’s exactly right. How can we help people really get down to it?

Joe: Yes. And if it takes you months to figure out what you stand for, versus when you can sit down, in an hour or 2, and just knock out a consumer awareness guide or record a free recorded message, or do a variety of things that we’ve talked about on all of the I Love Marketing episodes, what’s going to be the highest and best use of your time? I think people, Dean, are freaking scared to sell. I think they’re scared to go out there and say, “This is what I do, this is what I stand for.” And one of the things that, like our friend Steven Pressfield, who wrote The War of Art and The Legend of Bagger Vance, and everything, he writes about the war of art. It’s about the difference between being an amateur and being a pro. I’ve always loved that line, “Amateurs wait for inspiration, professionals do it with a headache.” All of us know that when we’re running a business, you go to war some days.

Some days, it is hard, some days it’s tough. Although we teach ELF marketing strategies that are easy, lucrative, and fun, having an ELF business, in the beginning, isn’t ELF. There’s things you’ve got to learn; there’s capabilities you’ve got to do, you’ve got to really become skilled at how you manage your time, what you pay attention to. And we are in a world where it’s like a machine gun of stuff coming at us, in order to make decisions. I think people are afraid to sell. Dan Sullivan says, “There’s 2 things you need when you first start a business: you need ignorance, and you need courage.” It’s kind of a funny statement. We’ve talked about this on past episodes, and I’ve even asked Dan about it, when we’ve interviewed Dan. Ignorance is a useful thing, just like delusion is a useful thing, to a certain degree, not useful in other degrees, meaning that sometimes, when things are really bad, it’s kind of good to not know how bad they are because you can press through it.

Being stupid and courageous is not good, like being ignorant and courageous. Being aware that you don’t know certain things, but you have enough courage to start a business and move forward, that’s really important. Me and you, we’ve spent enough time in the last year together. We did our I Love Marketing event, and we’ll give the same exact advice to someone. They’ll have an idea. There’s some part of their business they want to expand, and we’ll say, “Well, write a sales letter. Have you written a sales letter? Have you written a consumer awareness guide? Have you gone to our website and clicked on the button to I Love Marketing, where it says, ‘Set up a free recorded message’? Have you set up a 24-hour free recorded message?” And people that have, they’re kicking ass and taking names.

We just recently saw the video. We were sent the video from our Platinum member now, who has a seafood company that’s just implementing what it is we suggest. And then you have other people that are hearing the same exact advice, and they’re not doing anything with it, and they’re not getting any results as a result of not doing anything with it. Part of it is that fear of just going out to the world and saying, “Here’s what I do. Here’s what I sell. Here’s how I’m going to help you. Give me money.” Obviously, it’s not like that. We’re really not, “Oh, go give me money because I want it and I need it, and I deserve it,” and all of that. You’re presenting yourself in a way to where people are wanting to engage with you, and there’s a methodology to doing this. But I think there’s a real fundamental fear, for so many people, of selling, for making statements and doing that sort of stuff. I don’t know if you agree with that. I just want to hear your thoughts with that and what to do about it.

Dean: Well, I think right is a great inflection point. Always, at the end of a year, beginning of a new year, it’s always a great time to look back and reflect on what actually happened in 2011. What’s working? When you’re able to sell something to somebody, what’s actually happening with the people that you are able to help? Getting those stories, having an awareness. A lot of times, people don’t have the knowledge of what’s actually happening when people buy their stuff. They maybe sell to them, and there’s no after unit to build a relationship with people, to have a dialog with them and find out what happened for them in the last year, after using their product or using their service. Knowing what you’re actually capable of, what is happening when people are using your advice or using your product or using your service, what kind of results they’re getting, how better their life is, what’s impacted in their life because of knowing you. That’s all very valuable stuff because it helps you to understand, in the future, what is going to motivate more people to use your product or service.

Joe: So many marketers that we know come to you as a sounding board. You’re known to be, and we make a joke about it, but they call you the Marketing Buddha because, for some bizarre reason, people that don’t know you as well as I do actually consider you to be very wise. You’re not chuckling, Dean. This is not making me feel good about the jokes. Someone even in the gym today told me that, “You’re really mean to Dean.” And I’m like, “Why are you being like this towards me now?”

Dean: That’s good. Keep sticking up for me, all of you I Love Marketing listeners.

Joe: You’re brilliant, and I consider you a genius.

Dean: You said that almost at full voice.

Joe: Yes.

Dean: You must be drunk on eggnog or something.

Joe: Here’s my question for you. Going into 2012, the year ahead, you have… Let’s use some of that business-speak. Let’s use the term “best practices.” I want to bash all sort of modern-day ways of looking at business, and then use those same methodologies as part of this episode. What are some of the Dean Jackson best practices of what you have found, over the years of guiding so many people, and using effective marketing and building their businesses and creating a cool lifestyle? What are some of the principle-based things that you just do, that work for you, that would be helpful for our listeners?

Dean: That’s a great question. If you look at it, the primary business that we’re in is helping realtors make more money. So, the primary focus that I have, whenever I’m starting a new product or starting a new course or a new tool or a new program, is let’s start with is it going to make them more money? So, I focus all of my time on making sure and perfecting the system that I have to make one real estate agent more money. I know that that’s why, both in Toronto and here, I’ve got real estate agents that I work very closely with to test and develop new programs and to get as close to that frontline experiences as I can. In Toronto, when I’m in Canada, I work with Chuck Charlton very closely, implementing things with him and talking to him every month, and working really closely with making sure that I can see what it’s like on the front lines, and guiding and coming up with new marketing things.

And here, with Julie Mathews in Winter Haven, as my little laboratory, to test new things. Everything that I look at is, is this going to make more money? Is it going to provide a good benefit for people – the core benefit, which is they’re going to make more money? Once I’ve got that system down, then I have to go and do it again and again and again, and try and make it so simple. This is funny because almost a year ago now, when you were down in Florida…

Joe: My almost trip to Egypt.

Dean: Your almost trip to Egypt, and we had lunch with an information marketer who came out to Winter Haven, and we were both kind of shocked because he was so down on the people who were buying his stuff that they would get it, they weren’t really implementing everything. He had a package that had so much stuff in it, but it wasn’t stuff. We were asking the question. I asked him, “Do you have one thing in here that you would stake your life on, that it would work if somebody implemented it?” It was shocking, to me, that he didn’t have even one thing that he knew for certain would work, if somebody implemented it. Not every time, or they don’t do it. He’s always putting the blame on them. And I kind of said to him, “Well, you don’t deserve to have an information business that’s successful because you don’t have a product that is going to work every time.”

Joe: And the interesting thing about that conversation, because that guy has been a friend of mine for many years, and he’s done some smart stuff, and he’s built a successful business on his ability to help others, which he has. The thing is, there was a real disconnect with his confidence in his own stuff. If you even have good stuff, but you don’t have confidence in your own stuff, first off, you’re not going to come across as authentic to your clients. You’re not going to come across as caring, and you’re going to be second-guessing yourself all the time, which is not at all a comfortable place for anyone to be in.

No one likes second-guessing themselves. Henry Ford had that great line, “If you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” However, like you said, if someone is out there selling something that they can’t stake their claim on, they can’t stake their life on, figure out something that you can offer, that you really can. It’s impossible to have confidence in what you’re delivering if you don’t even know if it freaking works for people. Part of it with him, if he just would go back to people that have had success with him and really build upon those relationships and really see what’s happening and how it’s working, he could not…

Dean: Where are people getting stuck? If it’s them, if it’s too complicated, that was my point to him. And if you’ll notice any of the programs that I do, I don’t have one program that has everything in it. I’ve got very specific niche programs. The 3 main things that realtors want to get is they want to get listings, they want to find buyers, and they want to get referrals. So, we’ve got 3 specific individual programs for those things. We’ve got GettingListings.com, FindingBuyers.com, and GettingReferrals.com. And they’re not like one big, super-package that is everything you need to grow that business. It’s focusing on getting one specific result and having a package that can solve that problem for them.

Joe: I can’t remember what the guy’s name was, the CEO of Nike, that had the conversation with Steve Jobs, and had asked Steve Jobs, “What do you recommend for Nike?” And I think his thing was, “Well, you guys have a great company, but the thing you really need to do,” I think his actual words were, “you need to quit selling so much shit, because so much of your product line is just shit. And if you get rid of the shit, you’re going to have a much better business.” And that was his big takeaway. Steve Jobs was known to, obviously, not be the most pleasant person in the world. That’s a good thing, though. Out of all of the stuff that you’re selling, out of all of the tools in your toolbox, people don’t need 1,000 tools in order to have success. They just need, like the Kekich Credo, from my friend Dave Kekich, a few basic moves produce all results. One of the things why people will hear me and you constantly talk about the same things in different ways is because you can do really well with a sales letter.

You can purpose a sales letter in many different forms; audio, video, online, offline, pieced up into what’s called a product launch, into a variety of different ways to present an offering. There’s many different ways to use a free recorded message. You can use before, during, and after sale techniques. A lot of the times, we just use the same stuff. Out of all of the consulting and work that I’ve done with people in the “fitness, health, exercise, nutrition” business, look how many bodybuilding magazines, as an example, exist to show different exercises. How many different ways can you write articles about bench, squat, dead-lift? The basic strength moves. They’ve been writing different articles about how to do bench presses, squats, and dead-lifts with dozens of different magazines every month for decades now, and it will continue for the next 500 years. Actually, it will continue until 2012, when the world ends. But in some other planetary system, they’re probably talking about squat, deadlift, bench presses, assuming there’s gravity elsewhere. Nonetheless, the point is there’s a few basic moves that produce results you’re your clients, and that’s a good thing to hone in to and keep going back to. Why wouldn’t you?

Dean: When you look at it, that, right now, is a great time to really look at what you do, look at who it is that you’re trying to serve, and maybe look at all of the different things. Really get a good sense, rather than creating a mission statement that’s inwardly focused, to start looking outwardly-focused and start to see what are the things that you could help somebody do. What are all of the individual things that you’re really in your wheelhouse, that you can completely solve for somebody?

Joe: You know one thing I want to bring up, too? Because I want to give people some real specifics on what they can do that would allow them to really think through next year. I certainly have been doing my fair share of this sort of thinking, and have brought on a couple of people in different niche businesses that I have under the Piranha Marketing umbrella. I go back, a lot, to the Dan Sullivan question, the R factor question. If we were to meet a year from today, what needs to happen between now and then for you to feel happy with your result? I ask myself that, I ask other people that, I use it personally, I use it professionally, and it always goes back to what are my dangers, my opportunities, and my strengths? If you don’t remember, we talked about this in an I Love Marketing episode in the past. We’ve interviewed Dan Sullivan. If you’ve never seen the video, just type in “Dan Sullivan.”

Dean: I think we’ve mentioned him now, officially, on every episode.

Joe: Every episode is going to pop up. Watching the video with Dan Sullivan would be really good. The I Love Marketing thing, where he was a guest. But Dan has this question, what are your client’s dangers, what are their opportunities, and what are their strengths? Everybody has opportunities, but we don’t reach the opportunities we want until we eliminate the dangers. Some of those dangers are real, and some of those are perceived. There’s psychological dangers, and then there’s physical dangers. The way that you help someone get to where they want to go is that you give them confidence by identifying what their strengths are, reinforcing their strengths; so, with their strengths, they can overcome dangers, with confidence. So, it’s really good for everyone listening to really figure out the DOS of your clientele. As you go into this next year, or the next 5 years, the next 10 years of your business, your career, the one thing that’s always changing in the marketplace, with certain niches – some not so much, others all the time – is the DOS – the dangers, the opportunities, and the strengths of your clients are always different. I’ll tell you, man. I’ve heard this a million times, and you’ve probably heard the same thing, Dean.

Me and you are actually quite rare from the standpoint that we, for years, me going on close to 18 years that I’ve been selling marketing strategies that work and make carpet cleaners more money. To professional carpet upholstery cleaners and people that are professional restorers, fire and water damage, restoration, and I’ve got thousands of clients all over the world in that niche that use my marketing strategies. The DOS always changes, but I always am on top of what their DOS issues are. What are their dangers, what are their opportunities, and what are their strengths? I understand what keeps these guys and gals up at 3:00 in the morning. I understand what their perversions are; I understand what their fears are, I understand what their desires are.

Dean: What the shiny objects are.

Joe: Yeah. Basically, people ask us all the time, “How have you continued to make money from that niche?” Because you’ll see a lot of these niche marketers, they’ll go in, and they’ll just cream the top buyers in the niche, and then their ads grow tired, and people will quit buying from them, and then they jump to another niche. We see it happen all the time. It’s like the professional marketer, in some cases, can be like a guy that’s really good at going into a club and picking up as many women as he can, and then he goes into the next club. It’s almost like the game process of business; go after a deal, go after a deal, go after a deal. But when you have really sustained long-term relationships with our clients in these businesses, you in real estate and me in the professional cleaning industry, simply because we always are keeping up with what’s changing in the niche.

And what’s really changing is their DOS issues. Not that the marketing techniques have to change all that much; because, frankly, there are sales letters that I wrote for my own carpet cleaning business, 20 years ago almost, that work just as well today as they did 20 years ago. But the way to get the cleaner to see it, as an example of the cleaner, is to speak to their DOS issues. Basically, one of the things to think about as you go into the new year is when’s the last time you sat down with one of your clients or your prospects and said, “What are your top dangers?” This is all Dan Sullivan stuff, by the way. If you want to learn how to do this process and not just hear me talk about it, go to StrategicCoach.com or Amazon, get a copy of a little book – you can read it in a couple of hours – called The Dan Sullivan Question. If you really take it seriously, it will change your life. It will change the way you dialog with people. You simply sit down with one of your prospects, your clients, and say, “What are your dangers? What keeps you up at night? What are the fears you have? What are the concerns? What are the messes? What are the things that are just difficult for you to contend with? What are the problems you would love to eliminate?” Figure out what their dangers are. “What are your opportunities?” Use the question, “If we were to meet a year from today, what needs to happen between now and then, both personally and professionally, for you to feel happy with your progress?”

If a person is unwilling to give you an answer to that question, either they are completely confused, and they’re so unclear that it’s going to be really hard for you to help them, or they don’t want to have a relationship with you. If someone won’t answer that question, they’re basically saying they don’t want to have a relationship with you. It’s a really good thing to know that early on, when you’re trying to sell something to somebody. When I say trying to sell something, let me use the word “serve.” If you are selling anything, you really need to be serving someone. Because if what you’re selling isn’t serving anyone, you don’t deserve to make money. All money unethically is a byproduct of value creation. So, if you really want to serve and sell something to somebody, you need to clear on what are their opportunities. So, figure it out. Will they answer that question? And then, ask them, “What are your greatest strengths? What do you do really well?” Most people don’t get asked too much about what they do really well. Most of the time, it’s what’s wrong and how to fix it, not what’s right and how to enhance it.

Dean: What’s it going to take to get you in a Cadillac today?

Joe: What’s it going to take to get you in a Cadillac today. I love that. That’s awesome.

Dean: That’s the big question that people ask.

Joe: My ability to get away from your freaking ass, who just wants to target me and make a commission. That’s funny. So, my advice is do a DOS conversation on your clients. I think one of the big takeaways you can get from this episode is, if you haven’t done it in a while, do it again. The DOS conversation, the neat thing about it is that you can always pull it out. It’s always a tool that’s on my tool belt. A great analogy is when it comes to marketing tools or business tools or strategies, if you can think you’ve got a tool belt, a tool box, and a tool shed. So, a tool belt are tools you use all the time, like daily. A tool box are things you use frequently, like a monthly client newsletter or a weekly or daily email or a weekly blog. And then, a tool shed are special need tools.

One of the ways I explained this, I wrote a thick 250-page manual years ago, and we update it almost annually, called How To Get More Clients In A Month Than You Now Get All Year: 105 Money-Making Marketing Strategies, and we just increased it for the new episode coming out this year. There’s more than 105 strategies now. But basically, stuff that I teach carpet cleaners. One of the things that I always want them to have on their tool belt is a consumer awareness guide. Every day, you should have a consumer awareness guide running. Our friend Dean Graziosi hasn’t missed an infomercial on TV, every day for 14 years straight. Not a single day in 14 years, where one of his infomercials – or many – have not ran on television.

So, that’s always on his tool belt. Every day, he’s running an ad. And certain cleaners, they’re putting direct mail campaigns out, they have email campaigns, they’ve got different before, during, and after strategies that they use every day that their business is running, like a free room of carpet cleaning, an irresistible offer, a carpet audit. Those are tool belt things. Toolbox would be, again, like a monthly client newsletter or things I’ve mentioned. And a tool shed might be once a year they’re going to do a Halloween campaign, or they’re going to do a client appreciation dinner or, in our particular case, we do an annual event once a year. That sort of thing. One of the methods, the best practices that I use, and then I’m going to come back, and we’re going to keep going through your best practices, because I know you’ve got some really good stuff, one of the things that’s always on my tool belt is a DOS conversation. I always use it. Whenever I’m interacting with friends, it’s like, “Hey, what’s your DOS?” I don’t always ask it that way. I don’t always say to someone, “Hey, what are your dangers?” But I have different ways of engaging in conversations with people to find out what the hell keeps them up at night, what’s scary to them.

People always want to reach their opportunities, but you aren’t going to get them to reach their opportunities if the dangers are bigger than their opportunities, because people aren’t going to go out into the woods if they’re so scared they can’t walk into the woods. So, people say, “I want to build a million-dollar-a-year business,” or, “I want to get better clients. I want to raise my prices. I want to write a book.” What’s the danger that’s keeping you from writing the book? “Well, I’m overwhelmed. I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough money.” And if you can at least get clear on what their dangers are, you can help them to get to it. And that’s what we all do. Everyone in business that serves anyone is helping to overcome dangers, they’re helping solve problems for a profit, and they’re helping to eliminate other people’s bad news, because that’s how we get paid is through the elimination of other people’s bad news.

Dean: Exactly.

Joe: So, best practices, Dean. I want to hear them.

Dean: I think, when I look at that, the best practices is picking problems that I know I can solve. Just like you said, you know what the dangers are, you know the opportunities, you know the strengths, you know your audience better than they even know and can articulate what they’re thinking. We’ve always talked about it, that the whole goal is to enter a conversation that is already going on in the mind of your prospect, right now. That, I think, is a big, big piece of making the stuff that you do valuable to the people that you’re offering it to. It sounds so simplistic, and we talk about how even some of the things that Dan does, some of the things that Dan talks about are very simple things, and the danger is that we look at them and, “Okay, I got dangers, opportunity, strengths, that’s great”. But the depth of what that is and what can be created from that, when you really think and apply it, I would call that a best practice is really valuing the time and the effort that goes into really exploring what those dangers, opportunities, and strengths are, and building your whole offer around solving one of those, eliminating those dangers, helping them capitalize on those opportunities, or build on your strengths.

Joe: Right. One thing that I think you’re really good at it is helping to simplify complexity for your clients, and for a lot of people. Not only do you give them marketing strategies, but you’re a guy that can look at a problem, look at complexity, and kind of cut through it. The people that will make the most money in the future, one of the biggest complaints of entrepreneurs, when surveyed, is overwhelm. We’re progressively living in a more and more overwhelming sort of world, in terms of all of the data inputs. This conversation is never going to stop. You hear people talking about it more and more. And I think what we’re going to discover is there is all kinds of wonderful, amazing options and solutions for almost any problem that one could ever have that exists somewhere; but people can’t get to it, because they’re so mired in confusion, complexity, and overwhelm.

So, you need to be able to kind of have your own form of windshield wash that you can spray on someone’s windshield, so they can even see into the possibility of their future. The people that bring simplicity to the complexity that exists in people’s lives are the ones that I think will make the most money, have the most impact, and help people the most. I was saying to a friend of mine, the other day, that the biggest thing that I serve, for a lot of my clients, is not that they need a new marketing strategy. A lot of times, they just need a sounding board. They need a reminder saying, “Hey, remember you used to do this, and it worked really well for you? Why don’t you pick the top 3 things in the last year that really made a big difference in your business, that you haven’t really exploited, that you could expand upon.” You have someone sit down for 5 or 10 minutes and write those things down, and voilà, you’ve instantly giving them some clarity. It didn’t require you to have to teach them anything new, it just helped guide them and focus them.

When you did the focus finder video, which is, again, we’ve said this on the last few episodes, going into the next year, that is such a great video to go and watch on I Love Marketing. Type in “focus finder” into the search function of I Love Marketing and just watch that video. It truly is one of the best videos on time and focus that I’ve ever seen. It’s a 50-minute video, and it’s a 50-minute process that you teach people, on how to get clarity with what you call “free range thoughts,” all of these things that are floating around in their heads. That is a best practice. That’s one of the best practices that I think you’ve ever created, and that’s something that I know is in your tool box daily, at least when you’re working. I think everyone knows, by now, how damn lazy you actually are. You like playing golf.

Dean: Wait a second. I like to prefer thinking about it as efficient, than lazy.

Joe: No, versus lazy, but I prefer calling you lazy because it’s more vicious, and it kind of keeps with my persona of not being a very nice person towards you. What it really is, is you know how to go and have game days that are very profitable, so you can actually have a life. When you are working, you’ve learned how to set things up so you can squeeze the most value out of the hour that you work. Most people will spend an entire day pissing around, doing a bunch of stuff, thinking that they’re accomplishing something, but they’re simply confusing activity with accomplishment. When you’re active, you’re actually getting something done. You’re getting the results. That’s a best practice.

Dean: And the thing is, getting something done that is going to produce a recurring revenue.

Joe: Right.

Dean: And I think that when you look at the best practices, when you look at things, you can focus on any kind of product or any kind of service or any kind of business that you want. But if you focus on things that are going to provide a recurring revenue stream, those are the highest leverage things that you can work on. And, that’s really been one of my conscious choices. That’s why everything that I look at, is it going to be able to produce recurring revenue. If it’s not, I’m not that interested in doing something that’s only going to have a short life.

Joe: What about people that are listening to this, and they sell something that doesn’t teach? I don’t have any problem extrapolating the difference. If someone says, “Here’s how I sell apples,” but I sell oranges, I’m really good at knowing how to take a strategy that’s being applied in a different product, different service, and tweaking it, applying it, and understanding it for my own. However, some people do have difficulty seeing, “Well, I don’t teach people how to make money, I teach people how to be spiritually aligned.” Or, “I teach someone how to get in better shape,” or, “I have a dog grooming business. What does that mean to me?” Can you explain how to make that jump?

Dean: How to make the jump?

Joe: We’re sitting there talking about how we teach people how to make more money, and that’s the result that we get. But someone, that’s not what they do, how do they take what we’re talking about here on the I Love Marketing episodes and see how it applies to them? Dean Jackson, going from the very beginning, teaching realtors how to make more money. Like the result of what we primarily focus on, we do a hell of a lot more for our clients than teaching them how to make money.

Dean: When you look at it, you could just as easily say, “Dean Jackson makes dogs look great,” and focus all of my attention on that. The thing is, these principles that we talk about and the 8 profit activators, one of the favorite episodes that we did early on was the Yellow Pages roulette, to prove to people that these principles, these 8 profit activators are the DNA cells that can expand and form to any business that you can imagine. You look at dog grooming, any of those profit activators apply to that business as well. If I were doing it quickly, if I were looking at the dog grooming business, I would select my target market: dogs, dog owners. Those would be, in my town, if I only groomed dogs here in Winter Haven, I’d find some way to get in front of all of the dog owners in Winter Haven. That’s my target audience. Then, we’d talk about what would be a dream come true, as far as grooming goes, for a dog owner in Winter Haven. I would imagine it’d be similar to a salon situation. How often do dogs need to be groomed? How often do they need to be washed? Maybe that’s something that the owners would be super-happy to have somebody else do. If you think about how can you solve the whole situation for somebody with regard to their dog? You and I, we were just in Toronto, we were having lunch with a couple of entrepreneurs. I’m not going to even talk about who they were. Pretty high-level stuff. I don’t want to give away what they were talking about, in any way. But you know what I’m talking about, right?

Joe: I’ll know in a minute. We were just recently in Toronto, and I think almost every single person we met with was very high-level. You know why? Me. Admit it. It’s me, because I know everybody that’s important in the world. You’ve just been tagging along this whole time. I’m kidding. Go ahead. First off, our last trip to Toronto was awesome. It really was. That’s a perfect example. We should do a documentary, one day, when we actually go and do our meetings, so people can actually see how much stuff we knock out. And I don’t mean a lot of stuff like we’re trying to do a bunch of things, but simply the results we produce in a short period of time, simply because we go in there with purpose.

Dean: And there’s the thing. These 2 were talking about they’re collaborating on doing something together, and they were talking and thinking. The focus was about how will we package this? Will it be a monthly subscription thing? Will it be a whatever? The conversation that I had with them was saying, “Don’t think about or limit yourself by deciding how it’s going to be packaged first. Think about what is the best solution that you can offer for these people? What would be the dream come true for your target audience?

So, we’ll use the dog grooming business. What would be a dream come true for a dog owner, regarding the maintenance of their pet, as far as grooming goes? What kind of things could you do for people? Could you wash the dogs? Could you do flea treatments for them? Could you cut their nails? Could you do their teeth? Could you do their eyes? Could you wash them? How frequently does that need to be done? And could you, if money was no object and you’re not limiting yourself by thinking, “Well, people will only pay a certain amount of money, or they only have a limited amount of money to spend,” then often you kind of backpedal your way into a market by just dipping a toe in. And your whole approach is to try and just get one time, one person, to come and get their dog groomed, without even thinking about somebody could just pay you monthly. And over the whole year, you handle everything that could possibly be done for their dog. You come and wash them however often is appropriate. I don’t know how often you wash a dog.

Joe: I know how often you should clean your carpets, but I don’t really know about dogs.

Dean: I don’t know, but let’s say you should wash your dog once a week. So, they come, and they’ll wash the dog once a week, and they’ll groom them once every 2 months, and they’ll clip their nails, and they’ll do a flea treatment, when they’re doing the grooming. And over the whole course of the year, let’s say that whole package costs whatever amount of money, but you look at it that that’s the ultimate solution for them. So many more people would probably be willing to and be thrilled to have that whole problem solved for them.

Joe: Even people that are into dog bling, I think that’s the next big frontier for the dog grooming business is blinging out your dog. Hopefully, it won’t go into weird things like dog piercing and what not, because I just don’t think that’d be really cool to do to the dog. But, I can see it coming. Do you know how much tattoos have gone up? By the way, this is absolutely just wasting time right now in our episode, so people that are listening, you’re never going to get this time back as you listen to us babble about this nonsense right now. In order to hear the rest of this episode, you’re just going to have to bear with this nonsense that I’m about to share. I watched this documentary where, not too many years ago, it was like 10% of people that got tattoos were female, and now more than like 50% of people that get tattoos are female. And the amount of tattoos getting applied is actually less than the amount of tattoos, by percentages, that are getting removed several years later.

So, it’s spawned a whole other business. I’m just wondering where that’s going to go with the whole dog thing. Let me be serious for a moment, though. What you just said, if everyone was to get out a yellow pad or pull up their computer, and take Dean Jackson’s 50-minute focus finder best practice process and say, “Okay, I’m going to really focus on what is a dream come true experience, a world-class experience that I could provide for my clients,” and kind of go through what you just went through with dog grooming, for whatever business someone is in, not just listening to us talk about it on this episode but really blocking time and just doing that, I think it will change the entire way that you approach your clients. And, many people that have been at a loss are figuring out, “What is my messaging? What do I do? What do I focus on?” If you get that one down, you’ll have it totally figured out. We can sit and suggest it as a good idea, and the vast majority of people that will hear us talk about it will not do it.

But the ones that will do it, it’s the difference. I think this really applies. There’s the 80/20 principle, of course, which has been proven, over and over again, and applied to a lot of things, but I think this is the 95/5 sort of thing. I think for every 100 people that listen to this episode, maybe 5 of them will do it. But the 5% of people that are successful are the ones that are willing to do the things that the 95% of unsuccessful people are not willing to do. I would really encourage everyone to do that. Then, you layer it on top of the DOS conversation, and you will really have a great insight into how you can best help people and what the hell it is that they want. Who cares what you think they want. All that matters is what do they want, and what’s a dream come true experience for them? How would you phrase that, Dean? I’m being really serious about this. If there was homework from this episode that would really have a tremendous positive impact on our listeners, if they were to take a line, a sentence, a question, to focus on, how would you phrase it?

Dean: I think that is it. It’s the first 2 profit activators that we talked about are selecting a single target market, so think about that target audience, and then jump all the way up to asking yourself, “What would be a dream come true experience for them?” When you know those 2 things, when you know, crystal clear, who your audience is, when you know what would be a dream come true for them, I would recommend that if you haven’t already gone to ILoveMarketing.com. And downloaded the Breakthrough DNA Report, 35 pages, explains everything about those 8 profit activators, and went through that exercise, just like Joe is describing it, it’s the blueprint for a breakthrough for 2012 for you.

Joe: Yeah. We’re going to go through the 8 profit activators here in just a moment, because we’re going to be wrapping up here in a moment. There’s a guy that I recently interviewed. We’re going to put this interview on I Love Marketing as a bonus episode. And, if you have not listened to the interview that I shot earlier in the year with the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, we actually put that up on ILoveMarketing.com. What’s funny is that our audio episodes, because they’re on iTunes, get a ton of listeners. Thousands and thousands. The videos, we typically just post on the site. The reason I want you to watch the WordPress episode is you’ll see a guy, who literally – he’s 28 now – but Matt Mullenweg, at the time I did that interview with him, which was a few months ago, he had 31-million websites; 11% of every website in the world, right now, runs on WordPress.

This guy’s company is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and he is just the nicest, non-egotistical, service-oriented individual you could ever meet. Just a cool dude. I would encourage people. It’s a short bonus interview that we put up there – it’s like 23 minutes long. Go and watch that video with Matt Mullenweg, and I think you’ll find it interesting. I think you’ll find it valuable. So, I want to recommend that. The other bonus interview that we’re going to be putting up here is my interview with Peter Diamondis, who created the X Prize Foundation, which, in 2004, put Spaceship One up into space, and Richard Branson actually licensed that technology and created Virgin Galactic with it. It’s on their new book, called Abundance, and the co-author is Stephen Kotler. Stephen is very much into flow, the book Flow, Mihaly, which I can never pronounce his last name.

Dean: Csikszentmihalyi.

Joe: Yeah, say it again.

Dean: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Joe: There you go. He has a website for dogs. They take care of Chihuahuas. RanchoDeChihuahua.org. They actually have hospice centers for these Chihuahuas, ones that are in really bad shape, and they take care of Chihuahuas. And frankly, I’m not someone that could ever say, “I want to get a Chihuahua.” My client Paula Abdul has Chihuahuas, and she loves them, and she’s totally into it. She would be a perfect example for what’s a dream come true dog grooming experience. I can tell you; she probably spends more money on those Chihuahuas than anything. Nonetheless, RanchoDeChihuahua.org. There’s a video where he takes these dogs out in packs, ones that are really sick and unsocial and scared and frightened, but he gets them running around and gets them to a flow state. And by getting them into a flow state, they start healing themselves. They start getting better, physically better, and it’s totally fascinating.

But when we put that episode up, on their book Abundance, we don’t really talk too much about that, but we talk about it a little bit. It’s just fascinating stuff. The reason I’m bringing that up is we’re not only going to continue, in 2012, to deliver really powerful, awesome marketing strategies, the latest things that come across the pipe, what we’re going to talk about, we have our Platinum group, and we know that a lot of people that are listening are going to be with us at the end of January here, where Dan Sullivan’s going to be joining us and speaking. And people that want to really immerse themselves with us, make sure we have your list. If you have any questions about our program, just shoot an email to Gina@JoePolish.com if you want to hear about our Platinum group and that sort of thing. In terms of the free podcasts, we’re going to continue to deliver this stuff. However, we’re going to also put up some bonus interviews, including, one of these days, we’re going to get our darn interview with Tony Robbins. He’s a good friend of yours, Dean. You play golf with him. We’ve had to reschedule it a couple of times because of his schedule, but we’ve got that one coming up.

Dean: We can shame him into it now.

Joe: Exactly. He thinks he’s cool because he’s Tony Robbins. But, nonetheless, we’re going to have some really awesome bonus interviews on things that we feel are just going to be enhancing to the life of the achievement-focused, entrepreneurial-minded, value-creating individual, which is who we want to cater to, and people that obviously have a sense of humor, because no one would listen to my bullshit if they didn’t have a sense of humor. So, Dean, let’s go through the 8 profit activators, or I can go through them, whatever. But I’d rather you do it, because your voice is so much more soothing than mine. Let’s remind people that best practices always to come back to 3 stages of your business, the before unit, during unit, after unit; and then the 8 profit activators, which is totally what I Love Marketing is all about.

If you want to see our I Love Marketing program, we’ve got that. You can click on a button on ILoveMarketing.com, on the side, and you can check that out. If you run an I Love Marketing Meetup group, you can go to the Meetup tab on I Love Marketing, and you can print out the “How To Start Your Own I Love Marketing Meetup group.” We’ve got Meetup groups all over the world, where people are talking about the 8 profit activators on a weekly basis, which is awesome. And we want to say every one of our I Love Marketing Meetup group founders that have started one, thank you for carrying this message and putting it out there in the world. It’s really helping your business by facilitating these. We’re going to have a new I Love Marketing Meetup group updated guide, that’s going to be put up in a couple of weeks on I Love Marketing, so check that out. But all of the 8 profit activators are listed there, including our Breakthrough DNA Report. If you’ve never read our Breakthrough DNA Report, go to the website. It’s free. Download it, read it, it’s a roadmap on what you need to do to build and grow your business. If you’ve read it in the past, read it again. So, go through the 8 profit activators if you could, for us, big, handsome fellow.

Dean: These are the 8 moves that it keeps coming back to. These are the ones you’re going to work on all of 2012, all of 2013, and on. We talk about your before unit, your during unit, and your after unit. In your before unit, it’s all about narrowing your focus and selecting one target market at a time. That’s profit activator number one. Often, when you just kind of narrow your focus like that, it gives you so much clarity that everything else kind of falls into place. Profit activator number 2 is to use direct response offers to compel prospects to call you. That is a philosophy of using direct response, where your prospects are calling you, and you’re not out chasing. You’re not pursuing; you’re attracting your prospects. We always talk about using direct response and making offers for information, like a consumer awareness guide, or some sort of report that people can initiate with you that way.

Joe: Let me say something, too. If you are not really yet familiar with what direct response is, then you don’t understand direct response, and you want to continue to build and grow a business, a comparison of like image advertising, brand building, the purpose of that sort of marketing and those sort of messaging is to get your name out there. The purpose of direct response is to get your name out there, but get a response back, so you’re not doing anything without asking someone to specifically do something. And, you want to have an irresistible offer, what we call a mafia offer. If you want to listen to our episodes of I, Love Marketing about creating a mafia offer, meaning something someone simply is not going to want to say no to.

Because if they do say no to it, there’s bad consequences. Not that you’re going to go out and obviously kill your clients. They’re going to psychologically feel like, “Man, I really have to take this person up on this.” I wouldn’t even say it’s a stretch to say that when people read or listen to the stuff where I’m actually specifically asking them to do something, I want them to feel like, “I am a total idiot if I don’t take Joe up on this offer.” We have created offers like that. Carpet cleaners. They have a free room of carpet cleaning that’s a direct response offer, where someone reads it, and it’s not a free room of carpet cleaning, not building rapport.

Dean: It’s not a free room of carpet cleaning when you buy your whole house. And it’s not a hedged offer. It’s not a free room of carpet cleaning when you buy your whole house cleaning.

Joe: Exactly. It’s no cost or obligation. It’s totally carpet cleaner putting their money where their mouth is. If you’re not ecstatic with the free cleaning, you’re not going to be forced to buy anything. They don’t use high-pressure selling. What they do is they engage people, but it’s direct response. My point is that you want to really get skilled at understanding and using direct response offers to compel prospects to call you. You know the term “compel,” one of the greatest ways to think about your marketing to be compelling is the example of if you drive by a car accident, everyone’s slowing down and sticking out their heads, and everyone’s pissed at the person in front of them for slowing down. And then as soon as they get by the car accident, they just rubber-neck their head out there. You cannot not pay attention to certain things, and you want your marketing, your website, your offers to be so powerful that when they resonate with the right type of person, they cannot not pay attention. And that’s the type of offer you want to get to. You want to use it in direct response. If you do that, everything in your business is going to work better. If you refuse to understand and use direct response, it doesn’t mean you won’t be successful, because some people can be successful in spite of themselves. It’s just that when I look into the world of marketing and advertising, so much money is just wasted because people don’t understand direct response. What’s the third profit activator?

Dean: The third one is to educate and motivate your prospects to meet you, when they’re ready. And that means that you realize that it’s not about everybody going to buy right away. A lot of people are just entering the process of buying. If you’ve got the ability to follow-up with them and to educate them and to maintain an educational relationship with them, and all the while you’re making valuable offers to them, that will lead to profit activator number 4, where you get to present your unique service offer in a way that makes it easy to get started. Those are the kind of things where you’re making mafia offers, things that are just so good that they can’t refuse. Profit activator number 5 is to deliver a dream come true experience designed from your client’s prospective. Even though it’s profit activator number 5 on the timeline of when it actually happens, when your clients experience it, it’s the second thing that we start with. You start with number one, selecting your target market, and then you jump right up and design that experience.

Begin with the end in mind. Design that experience from your ideal prospect’s perspective. Profit activator number 6 is provide after-sale service, even after you’ve already been paid. So often, if you can just extend the amount of time that you’re offering service to people, even after they get paid, the psychological impact of what you do after they’ve already written the check is the most impactful thing. Then, profit activator number 7 is starting with the after unit, now. Nurture lifetime relationships and focus on the lifetime value of your clients. Once you get a client, you want to keep them forever, and you want to maximize the amount of value that you can create for them, like I talked about, always thinking about how can we solve the whole problem for them? How can you enhance everything about the initial thing that they did with you? Then, profit activator number 8 is orchestrate referrals by giving your clients the opportunity to feel great. And knowing all about the psychology of how referrals actually happen, so you can orchestrate them in your own business.

Joe: Every single profit activator that we discuss, if you go to ILoveMarketing.com and print out the DNA Breakthrough Report, you can have all of them there, with an explanation of not only what it is they are, but how they work, and examples. The second thing, you can print out the Meetup guide, and you can start an I Love Marketing Meetup group, or you can attend a Meetup group. If you print out the guide, you can see all of the different I Love Marketing profit activators. We’ll go through all of the profit activators. There’s key questions that we have listed in that guide, that are actually used as themes for Meetup groups, but you can do this without even attending a Meetup group. You can go through and ask the questions. For instance, orchestrate referrals by giving your clients the opportunity to feel great. Key questions would be, “Do you provide services that makes your clients want to refer you? If no, why not? Do you have a referral program? What does it consist of? What are ways you can actively get referrals, not passive referrals? Why do you think people refer others to you? That sort of stuff. So, going through all of these questions, they’ll help you, if you’re stuck on any of these areas. We’ve also done interviews with all kinds of other people about these subjects. For instance, on referrals, we interviewed John Jantsch, the guy that wrote Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine. You and John are 2 of the top referral experts in the world, and all of that is an episode on I Love Marketing. So, that’s all there.

Dean: There’s lots of good stuff.

Joe: Tons of good stuff. Anyway, Dean, we’ve already passed our typical hour time, either because we just cannot help but deliver value or because I can’t say thanks in the time-space that would be better. My inability to even try to explain what I’m saying right now shows that I just drag things out for long periods of time. Anyway, I think it’s been an awesome, awesome year.

Dean: It really has.

Joe: It really has. For everyone who’s been a supporter and an active listener since the very beginning, thank you. To all of the people that we never have had an opportunity to meet and may never will in person at one of our events, we hope you find this valuable. The people that made all of these wonderful comments on iTunes, that don’t go up on our I Love Marketing website, thank you all for the vast majority of the comments that people are putting make me feel really good to know that what me and Dean are doing is making a huge difference in the lives of entrepreneurs, which is the people we want to help and serve. I know a lot of people are using our strategies for causes and foundations, and things that have nothing to do with making money, and that makes us feel really good. So, thank you for doing that. And, please, take our strategies and use them, because nothing makes us happier than not just giving advice and selling stuff, because we are salespeople. And we want to sell our stuff, the thing that makes us feel good is when people actually utilize what it is that we sell and give us feedback on it, because that’s awesome. We hope to see a lot of you this year. We see some of you at our upcoming Platinum meeting. What else, Dean? What else?

Dean: What else?

Joe: I think we’re done.

Dean: I think we’re done. I think this has been a great episode and I’m looking forward to big things next year, and we’ll be back, every week, with a brand new episode.

Joe: Perfect. So, go watch Dean Jackson’s focus finder on I Love Marketing, right now, if you have even an ounce of overwhelm in your life. If you spend 50 minutes watching that, you will get some of Dean’s best practices to get shit done. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a wonderful week.

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