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Episode #14

The one with Bill Glazer

  • Bill starts off with an embrassing admission
  • Bill shares the most important advantage a marketer can have
  • Dean speculates about why people are afraid to be outrageous
  • PLUS: Joe and Dean talk about Bill after he leaves the call
Transcript

Dean: Hey, everybody, it’s Dean Jackson.

Joe: And Joe Polish. What’s happening?

Dean: Joe, we’ve got another special guest today, don’t we?

Joe: Yes, we do. We have Mr Bill Glazer from Glazer-Kennedy, and the author of Outrageous Marketing. And welcome to I Love Marketing. And Bill, how are you, man?

Bill: I am good. And listen, let’s get it right. It’s Outrageous Advertising.

Dean: I was just going to say.

Joe: Oh, what did I say? Now, look, I love marketing so much I’m trying to change the title of your book.

Dean: Yeah, I’m telling you, this is a pattern that we see. It’s so disrespectful. We bring a guest into our home here, and then the first thing we do is disrespect him. Let me read the title. It’s Outrageous Advertising That’s Outrageously Successful, just like the book has been outrageously successful. We’re very happy to have you, Bill.

Bill: It’s nice to be here. But to be fair to you, Dean, I’ve known Joe for over a decade now. So I’m used to being disrespected.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. This whole relationship has been built on disrespecting each other. Wow, that’s funny. Sorry about that, Bill. I’m a complete jackass. But nonetheless, we’ve all kind of grown into this whole marketing business, and direct response before the Internet even existed. So all of us are pretty much mail order, direct response guys, long-form sales letters. We know the power of copy and all that sort of stuff. I appreciate you taking the time, Bill. We’ve got you during a really tight schedule. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to ask you some questions, you’re going to hop off in a bit, and then me and Dean are going to continue to talk about you, basically.  But what I want to ask you right from the get-go, how would you define marketing? What does marketing mean to Bill Glazer?

Bill: Well, listen. I’m going to tell you something that I might have actually first heard from Joe Polish, but if not it’s certainly in sync with what, Joe, I’ve heard you say for years. Marketing, for me, is the shortest path to the sale. And the other thing that it also does is it automates the shortest path to the sale. So it systematizes it. So, not only does it get you to a sale quicker, but it also puts it in a way where it’s duplicatable, and replicatable. Because my background was actually in men’s wear retail. In that particular case, I was doing face-to-face selling on the selling floor of our company’s men’s wear stores. Although that was marketing, it wasn’t really good marketing, because every individual customer was dealt with individually. It wasn’t the most cost-efficient way to do anything. It wasn’t until after I really learned how to be a good, smart, effective marketer, that I figured out how to automate it.

Joe: Dean, I’ll let you ask some, obviously some questions after this. How should someone that has never really done automated marketing, meaning the whole way that they’ve brought in business has been either face-to-face selling or over the phone or some form of manual marketing. And then there’s guys like us that are talking about using copy, sales letters, opt-in pages, video, different sort of sifting, sorting, and screening mechanisms in advance, how does someone approach starting to use marketing, effective marketing, outrageous marketing?

Bill: Well, okay, great. And actually, I had a great answer for that question, until you threw in the word, “approach.” But I’m going to now going to answer it both ways. I’m going to answer it both ways by sort of setting the framework of it’s the thing that Dean and you, Joe, and I all have in common. Let’s make the premise that all 3 of us are very smart, effective marketers of our businesses. It’s an easy premise to  substantiate, because we’re all very successful at what we do. So, based on success, let’s say we’re all good marketers. And what all 3 of us have in common is that we’ve all have taken our marketing knowledge and our marketing education very seriously. We realize that we needed to take it seriously. And we also realize that it’s never-ending for any of us. So, we’re always constantly looking for what are the new discoveries that we can take to already the effective marketing that we do?

Before we jumped on the phone, Joe you were kind enough to share with us something that somebody else shared with you. And again, that conversation wasn’t even around 10 years ago, when we all got started in this thing, because people weren’t thinking in terms of what you were talking about, which is basically creating a platform in order to use multiple media in order to get your message out there. And there was much, much fewer media that was available to us when we first got started, Joe; which, in a strange sort of way, was kind of nicer when we first got started, because there was less choices to make.

But I think the thing that we all have in common is we all look at our education in marketing very seriously, and we understand that we are always working on our education. So, the people that are doing the best, the people that are the most successful in their businesses understand 2 things: 1) in order to be successful, the real money is made by learning how to be a smart marketer. And 2) it’s an ongoing, forever process of working on your education. It’s just not like one day you learned it all and it ends. You’re constantly looking…

Dean: Bill, I don’t know whether you went to college or not, but Joe and I are both college dropouts. But we’ve spent the equivalent of 10 Harvard educations on educating ourselves about marketing. And I know that’s absolutely true for you. But I don’t know whether you had the advantage of going to college as well?  

Bill: Well, listen, I’m embarrassed to tell you guys that I did graduate college.

Dean: There you go. That’s what we always say, is like we’re never going to amount to anything.

Joe: You know what’s so funny about that? “I’m embarrassed to tell you that I did graduate.” I love that. That’s just comedy.

Bill: And I have a bachelor of science degree in psychology, and I cannot ever tell you one thing that I’ve done with that degree that has made me the first nickel. In all seriousness, however, anyone who’s listening to this, I’m not advocating that nobody go to college, and certainly that you don’t send your children to college. I’m advocating actually that you do do that. Because I just sort of looked at, in most cases, for people like us, who are entrepreneurs, business owners, college, if for nothing else, sort of becomes a finishing school.

Dean: It probably teaches you how to learn, a little bit.

Bill: I think you’re very much right, that it probably teaches you how to learn, although I don’t know that, necessarily, you have to learn how to learn by going to college.

Dean: No, exactly.

Bill: Yeah, but I do think it teaches you how to learn. At the end of the day, it might just give you a credential; which, again, I’ve gone and spoken all around the world, I’ve done work for very large clients, and I’ve never had anybody ask me: A) did I go to college; and B) if they did, they’ve asked to see a copy of my diploma. But I guess it makes me feel better that I got it. I don’t know.

Dean: There you go. Made your parents feel better.

Joe: Let me say something to that also, too, as it relates to our education in marketing. Human beings go and pursue different things to try to give them confidence in different areas. And sometimes, if they get the credential, like you mentioned, it gives  them confidence that they’re now qualified or that they can go out and perform something, or do a job, or do a task, or run a business, or whatever. Nothing has given me more confidence than knowing how to literally put together a marketing campaign that I can put out to the cold marketplace, and make them warm, and turn them into actual buyers and give me money.

The confidence that I get from my ability to take words and put them in the form of video or audio or sales letters, online or offline, and go out to people that actually have a want, a desire, a need. And actually engage them and get them to give me money for the solution, the entertainment, the whatever it is that I happen to be selling or my clients happen to be selling, has been phenomenal. And as it relates to education, I think all education that really matters is self-education, even if someone does that in the context of college, or they read a lot of books and attend a lot of seminars, and do all the stuff that all of us have done a lot of.

I think for me, I studied, read, learned tons of stuff. I even failed owning and operating a small business in a community college, and got a C minus in marketing. It wasn’t until I actually learned direct response marketing, starting with Gary Halbert, which led to Dan Kennedy, who you’ve now been partners with for many years, that I ended up actually having a business and income that provided for me. But marketing has been the #1 skill set that has made the most difference for me. And in my experience, Bill and Dean – me and Dean have talked about this a lot – I don’t know of a more important skill set, as it relates to making money in business, than marketing. From your perspective, not only being a great marketer but a guy that knows how to run a business very successfully, what are your thoughts on the importance of, how would you rank, out of all the skill sets that a business owner or an entrepreneur or any of our listeners could acquire, where would you rank marketing?  

Bill: Well, I mean overall, I think it is the most important job in any business. Some people are going to be listening to this, and they’re going to challenge that premise. But, let me explain to you why I think it’s the most important job in any business. Is because we could take Dean, we could take you, Joe, we could take me, and we could plunk us into any business that there is. And because of the knowledge that we know about generating leads, and then lead conversion to customers, and then once we get a customer in order to sell them more after we first get the customer, because of that knowledge that we have, that’s translatable, and transferable to any business that there is.

The reason why I know that to be true is because, through the years, I’ve consulted in probably 7 different business niches. People have sought me out to get my information and help them with their businesses. I have yet to find a business where I could not be helpful to them because of the knowledge in marketing I have. As a matter of fact, when they start trying to teach me about their business, my normal reaction is, “I don’t want to learn how to do your business. I just want to help you to grow your business. What I can do for you has nothing to do with how to do a mortgage or how to do a chiropractic procedure. That’s not what you’ve come to me for.” But again, all 3 of us could take our knowledge and go into any business. And that’s how powerful marketing is. There’s no other job in the business that you can make that claim for, that is totally transferable from one industry or one niche to the other.

Also, if you don’t mind, Joe, I want to go back a second though. I want to sort of make a comment of something else that you said. Dean, although I’ve met Dean a few times, not as often as I would have liked to have, but I certainly have a lot of respect for Dean. But obviously, Joe, I know you a lot better. And Dean, I don’t know if this applies to you or not, but one of the things I would tell you, though, that I think  that has been a great aid to both Joe and to myself, however, is the fact that even before we learned how to be smart marketers – and Dean, I would like to hear if this applies to you or not – Joe and I both were involved with in-the-trenches face-to-face selling. So, Joe, you were in people’s homes, explaining to them why they needed carpet cleaning. I don’t know if you had any face-to-face experience before that. Certainly, I had unbelievable amount of face-to-face experience.

And I think that that is another skill set that makes somebody a super marketer, is the fact that they have actually had interaction with people. I would tell everybody that’s listening to this, that if you really want to put your marketing on steroids, is at some point you want to put yourself in that environment. Now, the good news is almost everybody does get into that environment at some point, because usually, as we’re growing up as kids, we’re thrown into some kind of a sales experience, whether it’s working in the mall, or working at a fast-food place, or going door to door or selling something. But most of us have that kind of thing. But that is a great, great additional tool to have.

Dean: I agree. And you know what’s funny, Bill, is like just to what you were just saying about how that experience before you really discovered marketing, is really what made marketing the catalyst. We’ve been talking about how it was very interesting for Joe, and I in the first 4 or 5 episodes of I Love Marketing to talk about our stories. I started out as a real estate agent, applying all of the marketing things that I was learning to real estate, and Joe applying it to carpet cleaning. And here, if we were to go back to the beginning with you and take it from you applying it to the men’s wear business, we would have amazingly parallel paths before we discovered marketing, and then after we discovered marketing.

Because I know you started applying it to your men’s wear business and then that led to sharing what you discovered with other retailers. And that’s the exact same path that we all took. I think that the difference is that I think it gives you, it’s almost like the difference between being an applied scientist, or a theoretical scientist. We had the experience of being an applied scientist, and applying the marketing to a very specific business, where we’re right there in the trenches.

Joe: Yeah, well completely for me. I sold newspaper subscriptions as a kid. I would go door to door and try to get people to have me cut their lawn or paint curbs. All that childhood sort of stuff. And then as I got older and got jobs, I did everything from my first job was working in a pet store, taking care of fish aquariums, and occasionally I had to sell stuff. But, for the most part, the real experience came when I was working in the gym, selling gym memberships. And I sold Kirby vacuums for a couple of weeks, but it was so high-pressure. But the high pressure teaching really thrust me in front of people and having to figure out the whole part about objections.

I did a lot of face-to-face selling, and I totally agree with you, Bill. I think that is one of the best primers to set the stage for being a good marketer. Because, if nothing else, you realize how – by being a great marketer – you can properly position people so that they’re pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and pre-disposed to do business with you before actually talk to them. But I never would have figured out that or understood it in quite that way, had I not done face-to-face selling. I tell people all the time, “Go out and learn how to sell. Go and get some sales training. Go work for any sort of situation to where you are put in front of other human beings, and you actually have to talk to them, and interact with them, and hear all of their objections and all of their concerns, and deal with the fears, and deal with their uncertainty.” Because making a sale, the #1 question in people’s minds is, “Who can I trust?” The job of the marketer is to establish trust and rapport.  

People have fears; and fears may not show up as like frightened sort of fear, but it could be, “I’m not going to pay that. What about this option? Let me think about it.” Those are all just forms of uncertainty. And the job of a salesperson is to take someone from uncertainty to certainty. And if they want what you’re selling, if you remove the fear, they will most likely buy from you. I don’t know a better way to set the stage of being a great marketer, than any form of face-to-face or on the phone, or in-person sort of selling. I do know a great copywriter, just as an example. I know a great copywriter who never talks to anyone. He is an introverted, socially sort of kind of weird dude. And he’s a great copywriter. However, because he is never really gotten the skills of selling, I just don’t see him roll out in the ways that he probably could roll out. I see a lot of hesitancy and fear that he has with some of the marketing campaigns. I’ve known this guy for 15 years. And I’ve said to him before, “Like, dude, you should frigging go out and talk to people. Even if you just are going to go out and meet women and ask for their phone numbers, that is still a sales job. And it still will put you in touch with that sort of thing.”

I think having been a carpet cleaner and having had to learn how to do marketing because I needed to survive and I needed to eat, and I didn’t want to do face-to-face selling to in order to get a carpet cleaning job, I think it made all the difference in the world; because a lot of people that try to go into this business and understand it, but have never gone through that experience, I just don’t think they do as well.

Bill: Yeah, I agree. And you know it’s interesting you mentioned about the copywriter, because who was it, Joe, that said, “Copywriting is salesmanship in print?”

Joe: That was, was it Johnny Kennedy?

Dean: Yeah, Johnny Kennedy said that to Albert Lasker. “I know what advertising is,” yeah.  

Bill: We all write a lot of sales copy, in many different forms. A lot of it is gravitating to video sales letters today. But regardless, it’s sales copy, and it really is salesmanship in print. It’s interesting you talked about your friend, and you identified him as a good copywriter. So if he is a good copywriter, he does have the innate sales skills in there, but he had to have figured that out. By the way, the only way anybody is really judged as a good copywriter is results anyhow. So, he has to have had results to warrant that title that you gave him.

But he probably never really thought of it as much strategically, and also maybe even he didn’t spend enough time even working more on that skill set that he does probably still also have. But one of them, again, looping back to my point I made before, one of the best ways in order to really get a good skill set of writing copy and being a good marketer, is to do face-to-face selling. Because face-to-face selling, like you pointed out, Joe, you’ll hear the objections that people make, and then you have to figure out how to overcome them. You also will get much, much more into the feelings of what people are feeling. And when you do it face-to-face, you can see facial expressions, you can hear difference voice inflections, and that’s a much, much bigger sign and tell of people’s feelings. So again, moving back to a point I made before, I’m telling everybody right now to go out and become a face-to-face salesperson. But at some point, you need to do that.

Joe: Let me say, I mean people can hear them say, “Oh, yeah, right. I’m not going to do that sort of thing.” I swear to God, that is some of the best advice that anyone could ever get. And if you’re listening to this, I would really take that seriously, what Bill just  said. I mean it would do wonders for you. Even if you just went out for a week or 2, and just tried to sell anything face-to-face. There are strategic byproducts that come out of that activity that you cannot just get from a book. I would always say, all the time, if someone wants to run a business, you’re going to learn more going out and trying to run a business for 6 months than you’re going to learn reading about it.

Dean: You’re even going to learn from having a garage sale or getting a little booth at a flea market on the weekend or something. You really understand, you get to understand what makes people tick that way.

Joe: Yeah, totally.

Bill: What’s funny about that, Dean, is that if you do that, then you’ll get an even greater appreciation for marketing, because you’ll say, “I don’t want to do any more garage sales and flea markets.”

Dean: Right.

Joe: How do you know the contrast if you don’t know the misery of getting rejection?

Dean: That’s exactly it.

Bill: That’s right. I mean, Joe, when is the last time you went to sell a carpet cleaning job?

Joe: Oh, yeah, no. It’s been ages. But I’ll tell you, Bill, like the first seminar I ever had to do, because there was always this line that, I don’t know where I first heard it, but it’s like, “Whatever you fear and you don’t face, controls you. But whatever you fear, and you face, you can control it or at least you can move towards being able to control it.” I was totally introverted and shy growing up, incredibly. I mean I had such a hard time talking with people. I was not just afraid of going up and talking to girls and stuff. I was afraid of going up and pretty much talking to anyone. I was a really shy, kind of introverted kid. And as I got older, it improved a little bit. But it always just scared the heck out of me. Even to this day, going out to cocktail parties, and people I don’t know and certain sort of things, is still uncomfortable, although no one would ever think that of me because I’m such a goofball.

However, what I did the first time I ever publicly spoke, I wrote a sales letter. I knew how to sell face-to-face in the carpet cleaning industry. And right in my first venture of being an information marketer and putting together my marketing program for cleaners, I wrote a sales letter. I sold an 8-hour, full-day seminar in San Diego; 52 people signed up for $97 a person. And I had no other speakers. It was me all day. And I was deathly afraid of public speaking. But I thought, “You know, one of the best ways to get over this is thrust myself in that sort of situation.

Dean: Jump right in.

Joe: Yeah, so I did. I was so nervous; I was such a wreck. And people said, “Oh, yeah, after you talked for about the first 2 to 5 minutes, you’ll get over it, and everything will be fine.” The entire day I was sweating. I was just; it was, I was hating life. And at the end of the day, I was like running on this nervous energy, this adrenaline. At the end of the day, I pitched my stuff, my carpet cleaning course which, at the time, was a $497 and $697 course. Now, it’s closer to $2,000 for the stuff that we have. But basically, I sold $12,000 worth of stuff. Out of those 52 people, they invested $12,000 in what I had to say.

And right at that point, I said, “You know, I’m going to get good at this.” I mean that’s going from face-to-face selling, onesy-twosy, to group selling in a crowd. And that made all the difference in the world. Once someone is able to make that first sale, a light bulb, a switch flips, a light bulb goes off, and you realize, “Yeah, there’s something to this.”  Then when you learn how to do it with a sales letter or a webinar, or some sort of marketing campaign, it actually occurs without you physically being there. That’s what marketing is. Marketing is selling in advance.

Dean: What was the very first thing that got you in love with marketing? Let’s talk a little bit about how came into falling in love with marketing, and really applying it to your business, because you always remember kind of the first thing you do.

Bill: Right, and I’m glad that you asked me the first thing about falling in love with marketing, versus the first thing about doing something else. It’s kind of interesting. Right after college, I went right into the family men’s wear business and worked there. And I always tell people that we were successful in that business. It wasn’t that we were unsuccessful. We were successful at business based on, really, 2 words, which is hard work. It was my father’s business originally, and my father and I worked together for many decades. And we worked very hard, and we were successful. But I always knew that there was a better way out there to grow the business. And frankly, guys, I was on a hunt for that from day one. It wasn’t like I waited a couple decades to find it. It just took me a couple decades to find it.

But I kept going to all the sort of industry tradeshow seminars, and I was reading the books from the people that were in the retail marketing business and teaching that. I was getting little things, but I wasn’t getting anything significant. But the truth be told, where I really fell in love with marketing was, in 1995, I had a friend of mine who was a men’s wear retailer in Philadelphia. I’m in Baltimore, Maryland, as you guys know. And he called me up, and he said, “There’s this big success seminar coming to Philadelphia. Why don’t you get on the train, and we’ll spend the day together?”  And I went to the seminar, and I’ll tell you, I had my like anti-sales radar up. I walked in the seminar, and I said to myself, “Nobody’s going to try to sell me anything. No one’s going to be successful in selling me anything.” I’d been buying all this other stuff, and nothing seemed to help me.

And it wasn’t until the very end of the day where Dan Kennedy spoke. And for the very first time, and the first time ever, I was hearing things that I never heard before, and I just knew this would have to work for me. So I heard things such as sequential mailings. I heard things such as endorse mailings. And there were a couple main points that Dan was teaching, and just at that moment, I said to myself, “I’ve got to implement this in my own business.” By the way, I was like the first person in the back of the room buying Magnetic Marketing, which was the product that he offered. To your point, Dean, that was when I first sort of said to myself, “Gee, this is all the, this is where the secret sauce is,” is what Dan had to share.

Dean: Yeah, this is different.

Bill: Then after that, I just became a voracious student of marketing. Not only did I consume all of Dan’s things, but I consumed everything that I thought made sense. I found Gary Halbert after I found Dan. I know, Joe, you found him first.

Joe: He led me to Dan.

Bill: Yeah. Yeah, I didn’t know that. And so, Jay Abraham was another one. I read all the great copywriter books that were suggested. Collier and Caples, and I was reading everything I could consume. I just kept working and working and working on it. At first, I just applied it to my own men’s wear businesses, and we were having double-digit increases year after year, after year, which was sort of unheard of in the men’s wear industry.  

Dean: What was the first thing that you did that you knew this was different?

Bill: Well, the first thing I did was the first thing I did. So I got back from the seminar, and I said to my father, “I just went to a seminar, and I heard this guy, Dan Kennedy, and he was talking about sending out 3-step mailings. And you send them out 10 days to 2 weeks apart. I’m going to put together this campaign and send it to our customers.” My father looked at me like, I remember, he said, “You’re absolutely crazy.” He said, “If they didn’t respond to the first letter you send them, why would they respond to the second letter?”

And I said, “Well, let me try this.” And it was huge. What happened in our case, we got a great response to the first letter, we got a better response to the second one, and we got a better response to the third one. Now, back then I didn’t know any difference, because back then I just assumed you stopped after 3, because Kennedy said 3 letters. So today, I would have kept going forever until they say, “Stop.” But the first thing I did was sequential mailing. The very first thing I did was sequential mailing.

Dean: It whet your appetite then, right? I think I remember in your book; you said it was, ended up being like a 13 times return on investment from what you had spent on it.

Bill: I think it was even greater than that. But then you also look at other triggers. So, the next big trigger, for me, and it was kind of interesting, how it happened, the next big trigger for me was doing outrageous stuff. And the outrageous thing again, just sort of landed in my lap because one day I got a phone call from my general manager of my store. He said, “Bill, we’ve got a problem here. One of our sprinklers busted overnight and our main floor, half of it’s flooded out, and our basement is all flooded out.”  So, I got in my car and drove over to the store. I saw the whole disaster, had the insurance people there, and all this other stuff going on there. And that’s when I decided to create this advertorial, which I wrote it, which is a newspaper ad that looks like editorial, for anybody who doesn’t know.

Dean: Yeah, I’m looking at it. I’m looking at it right here.

Bill: That’s cool.

Dean: “Sprinkler malfunction prompts insurance settlement for Gage.”

Bill: Yeah. And I ran it, I ran that ad in the Sun Paper, which is our local big newspaper here. And again, it was Herculean growth for me. I showed it to Kennedy, and he loved it. This was subsequent to doing it. He actually featured it in an issue of the “No BS Marketing Letter.” This was in June of 1997, I believe. So, the second big week for me was being more outrageous in my advertising. Then, I just couldn’t get enough outrageous stuff. I just started making up stuff, in order to be more outrageous. And I found that that was actually a boost to using good direct response techniques. So when you couple that together with being outrageous.

Really, what outrageous really means is people take notice of what you’re sending them. As you guys know, we’re so flooded everyday with so many marketing messages; people don’t even realize the thousands of marketing messages that they see every day. That’s getting worse with the Internet and social media, and now mobile marketing, and on and on and on. The amount of marketing messages we see, we’re like immune to it. So what the outrageous thing kind of does is it gets people to remember it. But again, you’ve got to marry that together with direct response techniques. Because, if you don’t, people will remember it, but they won’t respond. And the only way we’re measuring whether something is successful is by return on investment.  

Dean: And what are some of your favorite outrageous things that you’ve done?

Bill: Well, recently, which is not in the book, so I’ll talk about something that’s not in the book, we did a whole marketing campaign for one of our big national events, which is our super conference; which, by the way, is coming up, and we have a huge speaker that’s coming there this year, that’s speaking for us. This young, newcomer guy, named Joe Polish is coming.

Joe: Wow. I mean it’s going to light up the house. How many people you got coming to that thing?

Bill: We have 1,200.

Joe: 1,200. Yep. You’re going to have 1,200 very happy people after this newcomer is done talking with you.

Bill: Well, I can’t tell you that we’re not concerned about that. But putting that aside… So, one of the things, so when we market an event, you talk about sequential marketing, to fill one of our events up to get 1,200 people there, we have about 90 different hits that we do. Talk about sequential marketing. So we use everything that you could possibly come up with, as far as email, snail mail, teleseminars, webinars, everything, newsletter inserts, everything. So this year, one of the things we did, was we came up with an outrageous video. And we did it very late in our sequence. And the outrageous video, in-house, the name we called it is the Attack of the Manhood video. And what we basically do is telling people that, “If you’re not coming, and if you’re not coming for these reasons, then I don’t want you to come, and you’re just a loser.”

So, we just come right at them with, “Don’t come if you’re this kind of person, because we don’t want losers at this event. This is a place where only winners come.”  So that was one of my more, latest thing. And I dressed up, we did a backdrop. I filmed it in front of a green screen. We did a backdrop where we had the White House in the background. I had a guy standing next to me with a headset on, and a suit, acting like a secret service guy. And I was introduced as the president. And so it was a whole kind of spoof on the president. So, it was a message from the president. And it’s basically telling people not to come, “if you haven’t already registered, because you’ve got loser mentality.” And that got us one of the biggest late bumps we’ve ever gotten in our super conference attendance. And again, that was one of the recent, outrageous things that we’ve done.

Joe: That, I actually love. A lot of people would say, “That’s going to offend people,” and how do you respond to that sort of stuff? Sensitivity issues.

Bill: If you’re successful, to begin with, let’s just talk about success as a whole. If you’re successful, to begin with, that’s going to offend people, because a lot of people are offended by other people’s success, and they’re jealous of it. They’re jealous of it. So, like even like, for example online, there’s all these, which I never go to, but there’s all these like sort of places where people come and congregate, and they’re forums that people congregate, and they just bash other people. Well, most of the people that are bashing people online are losers right then and there. The people they bash, they bash them because they don’t like the success of the people that they’re bashing.

So I’m getting a little off-topic, but I’m going to come back now to your point. So, first of all, you’ve got to realize to be successful, there are going to be some people you’re going to offend. Secondly, you got to realize that not everybody’s going to be your customer, anyway. And so people that aren’t going to come to a super conference, they’re just not going to come to a super conference. You can’t realize everybody is always going to be your customer. Frankly, you don’t want everybody to be your customer. There are customers that you’d rather not have, because they become pollutant customers.

The third thing I would tell you is this, and this is the thing that I’m very strong believer on. When you market to people, most people, they way they market to people is they market to them with telling them the benefits and the advantages for people in order to consume their products and services. And they usually market to them in a way where they act very nice to them. And after you’ve acted very nice to people, after a period of time, it’s time now to say to yourself, “Hey, they’re not responding to being nice, spoken nice to.” So you’ve got to take a different approach with them. Now, you’ve got to be tougher with them. Some people respond to the toughness, which is why we call it, “The Attack Of The Manhood.” So, people will respond to the attack of the manhood. So there’s a place to be putting this into all your marketing funnels. And most people, they make the mistake of constantly, in their entire marketing funnel, treating people the same way they’ve always treated them. And it is a time, I always say, at the end, you’ve got to come back with sort of a different message to them.

I first learned that when I was marketing my men’s wear retail system, back in the late 1990’s. I finally got that sequence up to 13 steps. And at the end, step #11 – it wasn’t the 13th step – I actually changed it to being tougher to people, which basically, at the time, was just to men’s wear retailers. So, one of my steps at the end, 11th, was basically, “I’ve mailed to you 10 times already, and I can only assume that you’re not the kind of person that’s open to new, fresh ideas, and is not really serious about growing your business.” And I went right after them. And we had people that called and hated me for it. “What are, who are you to tell me that I don’t interested in growing my business?”  But it was also one of the biggest bumps we had to the sale of my system. So, the people that called, they weren’t going to buy anyway. But the people that bought, who didn’t buy on the first 10 steps, is because they needed a tougher message being sent to them.

Dean: I think you’ve hit on something there. I find that most people are afraid of taking an outrageous stance, because they want to kind of stay in the middle. They want to be moderate and not offend anybody. They try not to lose somebody, versus really going out on a limb, being outrageous, and being afraid of polarizing people. Because that’s what happens. If you are outrageous, you polarize people. There are going to be people who are attracted to you even more because of it, but there’s also going to be people on the opposite end, who you’re going to repel because of it. But you’re going to repel the ones who are not going to be your customers anyway.

Bill: I couldn’t have said it better myself. So next time I needed it explained, Dean, I’m going to call on you to do that.

Dean: Perfect. You can use that.

Bill: Thanks.

Joe: I learned, early on, a couple things that have always served me well in marketing. One, you’re not your own customer. And whatever you respond to has nothing to do with what other people respond to. Another thing that I learned is deal with people at the level at which they respond. And some people do not respond to being nice. Some people do not respond to a million different ways that you can “communicate” with them or approach them. Some people respond to coupons, other people don’t. But the point is you deal with people at the level at which they respond. If you cannot get out of your own head, you’re going to have a really hard time interacting with or selling anything to anyone that is not exactly like you. Some people like  country music, other people like gangster rap. It’s just people are different, and they respond to different sort of things.

And this is kind of a funny aside, but I remember years ago, one of the most successful 900 numbers, other than the phone sex lines, was the insult line, where people would call up, and they would literally get insulted, and they would pay money by the minute to get insulted. I just remember the stats on that. Dan Kennedy actually shared it with me years ago, that it was one of the most successful 900 numbers back in the 900 number days. There you go.

Bill: Do you think Dan did extensive research on like the insult line and also the sex line, so that he would…

Joe: Probably. I would say weeks at a time; I would probably think. Hey, you know what? Let me ask you a question about Dan, by the way, Bill, because we’re going to be interviewing Dan here soon for the, I Love Marketing conference. And he’s speaking at our first I Love Marketing conference on September 21st and 22nd, here in sunny Arizona, where he used to live, and I used to go to lunch with him all the time for a long time. You have come into his company, several years ago, and many people will say that one of the best things that ever happened with Dan is you, and you’d probably say vice versa, because I think you guys have had a great working relationship.

It’s also known that Dan is the master of intimidation. I’ve got to know Dan very well. We have niche businesses, JV’s together, we owned racehorses together in the past. I mean I spent a lot of time with Dan, and that guy has absolutely mastered the art of positioning himself. I wanted to ask you about that. What the hell is Dan’s secret sauce? There’s many things that he does, but if you could maybe narrow in on why is Dan Kennedy such a frigging good ninja marketer, great copywriter? What are the best things to learn from Dan Kennedy, from your perspective?  

Bill: Well, a couple things. The first thing is he is, as you know, Joe, and probably you, Dean, as well, he’s an extremely bright guy. I think you guys asked me before the call, about if I went to college, and I said I did. But Dan never even went to college. So again, he is just a very, very, very bright guy, #1. Number 2 is, he, like all of us, is constantly working on his education. So he’s continually a voracious reader of not only books, but also magazines, and always constantly gathering more information. So, that’s the second thing. The third thing is that he doesn’t just sort of talk what he does, but he actually walks what he does. So like, for example, people are surprised when they hear me explain this, but he is truly, truly, truly crazy about time, where he looks at time as being the most precious commodity that we all have. Which, in fact, it is. So his time is very, very meticulously scheduled out, everything that he’s doing throughout the entire day. And people are surprised to hear.

Dan and I have been together at Glazer-Kennedy for 7½ years, and all but 3 times in those 7½ years, when we’ve talked, it’s because we’ve had a scheduled call that I get on the phone with him, and we talk for usually about an hour and a half, 2 hours a month, and it’s scheduled. So, I have an appointment to talk to a guy that I’m in business with. And only 3 times I’ve ever called him up, when I didn’t have an appointment, and twice was to bail him out when he was supposed to be on teleseminars and he forgot about it. So I had to call him up and say, “Dan, you’ve got to jump on the phone.” And the third time was before he asked me to do something and it was much more expensive than I thought it was going to be. I called him to make sure he was comfortable with it.

But other than that, we have scheduled times when we actually talk. And people just can’t understand that, because people think that you got to have 24/7 access to  people that are in business together. And he is like living proof that that’s not the case. A big thing about Kennedy, I will tell you, is that he really, really looks at time as a precious commodity. And that’s a strong lesson for every business owner and entrepreneur that’s out there, is figuring out where you’re going to spend your time and your best opportunities. Oftentimes, you can make yourself too accessible, where it cuts down your productivity. In my office at Glazer-Kennedy, I have an office and it has an adjoining conference room, so it’s like one big room. It has 2 doorways coming into it, and those doors are closed all the time. And both doors have, “Do not disturb signs,” on the outside, because I don’t allow my people that work here to come in and just ask me questions. I basically tell them that we have time we have scheduled, that we need to be productive together. So I have appointments scheduled with people that report to me each week – individually, by the way. I have appointments scheduled with them.

But other than that, I tell them, “That unless the place is on fire or if there’s a fire burning somewhere, don’t open my door.” So, I kind of learned that from Kennedy. It’s what’s made me much more productive, which I then translated into growing businesses that are much more productive because of that. So, those are a couple things about Kennedy, okay? Very, very smart, and constantly learning. People think that he already knows it all, but he realizes, like all of us, that he’s constantly got to be learning. And number 3 is, time is a precious commodity, and not let anybody sort of interfere with that, which he actually calls “time vampires;” not allow people to be a vampire of his time.  

Joe: That’s great. That’s a really good insight. And you are absolutely right. Ever since I’ve known Dan, and I’ve, I mean I first met Dan in 1994, actually 1993, he is meticulous. And, to this day, he still does not have email, which I think is…

Bill: Not only does he not have email, but he is not even online. So, forget about email. He can’t even go online, to a website. So, when he wants to do research on a project, he has a friend of his go online and do the research and print it out and give it to him on physical paper.

Joe: We’re going to ask him about that, when we actually interview him. I won’t actually take up your time. I was almost tempted. You know how to ADD I am, Bill. I’m like, “Hey, why do you think that is?” But, I’ll ask Dan personally.

Bill: I’ll tell you just a quick, cute story about that. I joined forces with him in 1994. And at the end, at Christmas time in 1994, I wanted to get him a couple nice Christmas gifts. So, one day I said to him, “Dan, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to send somebody over to your house. You’re not going to have to touch anything. I’m going to get you online, and I’m going to set up an email account for you.”

Joe: You mean 2004?

Bill: 2004. What did I say? You’re right, 2004.

Joe: You said 1994.

Bill: Yeah, I did say that. I was hoping to be 10 years younger. So, 2004. So I said, “I’m going to have somebody come to your house, get you online, set up an email account for you, and I’ll be the only guy out there that knows your email address. Because, right now, we’re FedExing back and forth every week a couple times, and we’re spending a fortune on FedEx.” So he said, “No, I don’t want that,” he says. I said, “Well, why don’t you want that?” He said, “Because, I’ve got stock in FedEx.”  So, his reason why he didn’t want to be on email is because he has got stock in FedEx, and he wants to support FedEx. So, that’s a Dan Kennedy true story.

Joe: So even to this day, you still FedEx stuff back and forth? That’s how you communicate?

Bill: And fax. FedEx and fax.

Joe: Yeah, no, I mean when we hired him for the event here, because he goes through the formalities. Although I’m one of the few people that have his phone number, which I think he hates. I never abuse it, though. Once in a blue moon, I’ll call him. Even his office, no email. He is like, “Yeah, fax.” I’m like, “You got to be kidding me.” To this day, he’s never going to break it. But I will say, though, look at what it’s done to probably save him from masses amounts of distraction that the most of the rest of the world is just inundated with, because they do not use technology; technology uses them. And he is one of those people that, from my perspective, has never allowed that to happen. So, that’s super cool. Now, speaking of time, I know that you got to jump off the phone here then. So how much time you got left for us, Bill? I think you’ve got to run here.

Bill: If you want, I can give you another 5 minutes. If not, I can jump off now. It’s up to you.

Joe: No, no.

Dean: Perfect. Here’s the thing. In that 5 minutes, here’s what we want to hear. I think it would be great to hear the one thing that you want to leave us with that would be just shy of if you told us you’d have to kill us. We don’t want you to kill us, but something that you’d be willing to share that would be just on the edge of that.  

Bill: Well, yeah, there’s nothing that I possibly would want to do to kill you guys. Okay? The consequence of that is not attractive to me at all. But I will sort of give you one piece of information, which is very basic 101 marketing. But it’s such a powerful thing, that most people don’t give enough thought to it all. And that is that when you really look at marketing, I look at it as sort of a 3-prong approach to marketing. So, prong approach #1 is get good, qualified leads. And most people don’t think enough about good, qualified leads. They’re marketing too broad of a net. I always think about let me try to get the most perfect leads I can get, that would be predisposed to consume what I have. And in that particular case, usually, I’m thinking of what is the bait, the best bait for that prospect, in order to raise their hand and say, “Gee, I want to get more information from you.” So that’s, step #1 is get the best possible lead.

Step #2 is now I want to get them to make the first sale. So, putting them into a marketing funnel, in order to generate the first sale, in order to buy the product or the service. What happens there is that most people get that, and they understand that it should be a marketing funnel, and that probably should be diverse in how you market, to use different media, not just the same media. And I’m a big online and offline guy, so I use both of them, which I’m a big, big proponent of that. Most people – not most people, many people today – are just doing one of the 2, especially too much online stuff. So, they really should be looking at doing both of them. So again, step #2 is to making the first sale.

But step #3 is where the real money is made. And the real money made is once you’ve got the customer who bought the first sale, you want to say to yourself,  “What’s next? What’s the next thing that I can offer them?” And it should be really things, “that I can offer them that they would also want to consume, based on the fact that, by making the first sale with me, that I am now a credible person that they want to consume more from, because I’ve proven to them that I delivered what I said I was going to deliver to them. So, sort of the thing I would say is think in terms of 3 steps: 1) get the best possible leads you can; 2) get them to make the first sale; and 3) once you get the first sale, think in terms of what’s next that we can offer to them.

And the “what’s next?” doesn’t only have to be your own products or services. In many cases, say to yourself, “What else do these people want, based on the thing that they bought from me first? And let me go find other people’s products or services that I can also offer to them and revenue share on that, so that I can also be a very, very trusted provider to them with what else do the other things they need, because they need more. Everybody needs more. So let me be that guy to provide it.” Is that helpful to you?

Dean: That is really very helpful.

Joe: Yeah, totally. Incredibly helpful. Bill, I think everyone should read your book, Outrageous Advertising, and check out everything that you guys are doing. Me and Dean are going to talk for a couple more minutes, just about you, so you can get out of here. But I, first off, want to really thank you and appreciate you taking the time and sharing some of your knowledge and wisdom and insights on this crazy marketing business. What do you recommend for people that want to go deeper and learn a little bit more about what you know?  

Bill: Well, listen, if you want to pick up a copy of my book, you can go to Amazon.com. It’s Outrageous Advertising That’s Outrageously Successful. So, you can certainly get it there. The other thing is if you want a free copy of the book, and I’m being very, very overt about this, you can go to this website. It’s called TheBillBook.com, and you can get a free copy of the book. Just pay I think it’s $4.95 shipping and handling. Then when you do that, $2 of that will go to a charity of your choice, either Junior Achievement or – what is the other charity? Help me, guys. The one that rebuilds the houses.

Dean: Habitat.

Joe: Habitat for Humanity.

Bill: Habitat for Humanity. And every month, we donate hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars to those charities, based on the $2 everybody submits from their $4.95. But if you do that, I’m being very upfront with you, that will also get you a free test-drive of Glazer-Kennedy membership for 2 months. So, just know that if you decide to go that route, you’re going to be getting Glazer-Kennedy for 2 months.

And then afterwards, after we’ve proven to you this is the best thing that you’ve ever seen, then you can just continue with us beyond that after, again, we’ve shown you, for 2 months, what value we bring to the table. So, you’ve got 2 different ways that you can get a copy of the book that way. I think that’s pretty much it. And listen, it was a pleasure being with you guys. And Joe, I look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks.

Joe: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. It’s going to be fun. So, yeah, Bill, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

Dean: Thanks a lot, Bill.  

Bill: Take care. Bye.

Joe: Okay, Dean.

Dean: When he was talking about the 3 things that he shared at the end, I think that was brilliant: get the very best leads that you can, the very best-quality leads, then make your first sale, and then think, “What’s next?” or “What else?” And I think that the really, something that really fits in with that and can really add to it, is realizing that getting the best leads that you can upfront, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to generate those leads on your own, because a lot of times, the very best thing that you could do is ask yourself the question, “Who could I be the next thing for?”

Like Jay Abraham always talked about, people don’t just consume things in a vacuum. They consume things on a continuum. There are things that they’ve done prior to getting to where they need what you have, and there are things that they’ll do after they have what you have, and to start thinking about that. You and I know so many people who’s entire businesses are based on being the what else, being the what next for somebody else’s business. You know?

Joe: Yeah, totally. Totally. No, it’s a good question to ask yourself, and it’s a good way to identify. I think one of the reasons I think me and you have been very effective in our marketing, too, is we’ve been very careful about identifying the very best prospects that what we know and the solutions we have to offer can best help them. Just even being a niche marketer to carpet cleaners and, in your case, realtors, is exactly the point. One of the mistakes that people I see have, as it relates to effective response and results, is that they do try to cast so big of a net, and try to serve so many people, that they just don’t niche it down. If nothing else, if you really were to think of who is your best, ideal prospect and how can you manufacture more of them, and how do you  need to set yourself up and communicate to them, and how do you repel the ones that really are not the best – not for the sake of being offensive, but just for the sake of it’s just not a right fit – you’re going to not only make more money, you’re going to have a better lead cost, but you’re also going to do a much better job of serving your clients.

Alright, with the time we have left, what I will say about Bill, and what was kind of funny by just even having the conversation with him and hearing the timelines, is going back to the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours thing that he has written about, me, you, and Bill kind of all started within a few years. Give or take one or 2 years, we all started learning marketing around the same time. And it just made me think of everyone listening, the results that you get. I really wish there was a one-hour program or a 3-day thing, and boom, you would be a marketing expert. If that actually existed, I personally would probably pay $10-million for it, like without even thinking, because look at how many years it would advance you.

But the point is the marketing world is expansive. There’s a lot of stuff to know, and I think the best way that people can help themselves, it’s one of the reasons we created the I Love Marketing show that we have here, is that we want to save people all the trouble and the hassle that a lot of us have gone through. But you’re still going to have to put in your time. That’s why I think it’s important, if you really resonate with what we talk about, just make this part of your education, is you listen to I Love Marketing, and you listen to it on a regular basis. And if you have people in your companies, your firms, your organizations, your business, whatever, have them listen to this, because we will continue to bring and share with you.

Dean: Yeah. And I’m loving that. We’re already seeing that in the comments. We’re already seeing people who are saying, like right around episode 4 or 5, where we start talking  about and laying out like actual templates for people to use, we’re starting to see that’s where the light switches on, and they start to like start applying all of this stuff. And it’s always, I would really encourage everybody, because I know there are new people who this might be the very first I Love Marketing show that they’re hearing, to go back right to episode one. We’ve made a really conscious point to make these not time-dated, but to make them like a progressive educational experience, where each one is building on the next.

I would encourage anybody to go back and catch up. Whatever episode this is, go back and download them all, stack them up into your iPod or on your phone, so you can listen to them and get caught up. Because there really is incredible, actionable things that you can apply to your business.

Joe: Dean, in usual Joe Polish fashion, I cut you off at the beginning – not on purpose, but on accident – when you were getting ready to say, “The Joe and Dean show or podcast,” or whatever you’re going to say. I just launched right in because I’m just, I’m very rude like that. But what we realize is that a lot of people listen to this, and have listened to it, and got introduced to it on iTunes, through the I Love Marketing podcast. And there’s many different places that people are going to be listening to this and hearing it. So we’re probably going to start referring to it as the I Love Marketing Show, or however, we want to refer to it.

Dean: I Love Marketing. Let’s just call it; I Love Marketing.

Joe: Yeah. The point is that, in the future, we’re also going to bring to you the reasons why there are different platforms and why there’s no one platform anymore. It’s changing. I had a fascinating conversation yesterday, with a guy who’s just knows so much about different platforms; 5 years from now, people might be listening to I Love Marketing through a button on their refrigerator when they’re getting a cup of water.  

Dean: Well, Gary Vaynerchuk will be very excited about that.

Joe: Yeah, it will be like one of these little 3D figures that’s being beamed down from their kitchen light bulb, and it’s like there’s Joe and Dean dancing, doing the I Love Marketing moonwalk. You never, never know. Anyway, Dean, anything else you’d kind of like to say before we wrap up and stop my useless babbling here?

Dean: No. I think it was very interesting to have Bill on and to see – like you just said – we’re all sort of within a few years of each other, of starting. And really how similar his path was to ours, in terms of starting out in a business and applying what he was learning to that specific business, and then creating a business that helps other businesses in his business to improve business. Then, going to a broader scale with Glazer-Kennedy and what he has done after being able to team up with Dan, to create arguably the biggest company in the world that does what they do.

Joe: Yeah, exactly. And the first thing we talked about was selling face-to-face. That would be a good exercise. Because when he said, “The quickest path to the sale,” I remember on a Genius Network interview years ago, I asked someone to define marketing, and that’s what they said, “The quickest path to the sale,” which is what he was referring to. If you’re not even really in tune with selling, and that’s not one of your top priorities, it’s going to be really hard for someone to really understand marketing. The people that have the most marketing juice, the most marketing acumen, if you want to call it that, are the ones that really understand the importance of selling something, because it’s been said many different ways: nothing happens until a sale is made.

Dean: That’s ultimately what it’s about anyway, right?  

Joe: Exactly. Marketing and selling are 2 completely different things. And I think marketing is infinitely a more important skill set than selling, but it still is part of the marketing puzzle. Marketing is selling in advance, and if you can automate and replicate it, and turn it into an ELF system, Easy, Lucrative, and Fun, then all the better. So that’s again, we’re just wanting to share, with all of our listeners, different perspectives on how to look at the art of selling. Marketing will allow you to create sales without physically even having to be there. Some of the very best marketers are selling 24/7 online, and they have these automated sales processes, which include copy and videos and opt-in, and sharing value and leading people into a direction that they want to go.

It’s just a fascinating world. So, keep studying it, keep learning it. But more importantly, go out and actually do something, because that’s the only thing that will actually get you better. You can read and listen and hear all day long; but until you actually go out and apply it, it won’t internalize itself. I think everyone, this week, put yourself in the position where you are actually in a face-to-face selling situation, thinking about it from what is this going to teach you about marketing? All though that may seem like counterintuitive, if you’re a fantastic marketer right now, and you haven’t talked to your prospects, or you haven’t done any face-to-face appointments, call up one of your very best customers or one of your very best prospects, and literally have a conversation with them. Ask them, “What can I do for you? How can I help you? Anything that you need?”

Put yourself in that situation to listen to them talk. A sale is simply leading them into a direction that is good for them and that they want to go in, and is going to help them reach a bigger future. So, don’t look at it as trying to talk somebody into something, or how to technique someone into giving you money. Don’t even look at it from that.  Selling is serving. Selling is really serving people. So what I’m saying by going out and doing some sort of face-to-face, go out and physically serve someone this week and think about how that applies to marketing and everything we’ve been talking about on I Love Marketing. I think it will be really useful for everyone. We’d love to hear your comments. For all the people giving us comments, thank you so much. We’ve had 2, we had 2 people at book companies actually inquire about us doing an I Love Marketing book, because of listening to I Love Marketing. So we have publishers and literary agents and people listening to the I Love Marketing podcasts also, which is awesome. We really appreciate it. We will have conversations with anyone, where it makes sense, and go from there. So, Dean, I’ll leave the last word to you.

Dean: Awesome. That’s the last word.

Joe: There you go. Thank you. No, say it, say, you got to say something else and then I have the last word, and then it doesn’t work.

Dean: Okay, ready? Awesome.

Joe: Yeah, go.

Dean: Bye.

 

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