10 Blueprints For Effective Coaching Programs (2 of 2)

Hello again and welcome to this episode of Magnetic Marketing. We are so excited to have you here. Today we're gonna be talking about the 10 Blueprints for Effective Coaching Programs, Part 2. So if you missed last week's episode, make sure that you pick up on that. Last week we talked about 3 of the 10 blueprints. Today we're going to pick up and finish the last 7. It's going to be a lot. Make sure that you are fully up to date and ready to jump in. Now, these 7 blueprints are going to talk about the most effective types of coaching programs, including their unique advantages and disadvantages. So doesn't matter if you are a veteran or if you're a total newbie, take notes, pay attention, make sure to check up on part 1 before you jump into part 2. And let's go.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. The fourth format is area exclusive, or other type of exclusive. Pretty much created this for info marketers. It, it was created for specific clients who came to me with a particular type of desire and interest and preference. It's often about geography, but it is not necessarily always about geography. It is a way to respond to people's desire to have a lot of things done for them, but also the question of, it's the ultimate answer to the question of, if a whole lot of people in my business, in my town, all have your stuff, how does that give me any advantage? And there's some legitimacy to their question. Again, in the healthcare professions, you'll often see a marketing system being sold with a piece of treatment technology. So there's some machine, there's a laser doohickey, there's a stretcher doohickey, there's a tooth whitening doohickey, and the dentist is buying the doohickey, but really the value is in the advertising, the marketing, the promotion to use that doohickey to bring patients in the door, right? Well, if there's 22 chiropractors in Toledo, Ohio, and 18 of them buy that doohickey, and now they're all running the same ads, and Toledo's only got one newspaper, and there's only 8 Valpak districts, they have a legitimate problem, okay? Now, the— if you don't have this answer to the problem, you give them my answer. Which, so we had this problem years ago with our seminar company for dentists and chiropractors because it was local. We went from city to city to city to city to city and mostly secondary markets, not major markets. We did Atlanta, for example, but usually we would be in Macon or we would be in Duluth or we wouldn't be, we'd be around. And so you'd have 30 docs in the room And every once in a while, not every night, 'cause they're not that smart, but every once in a while somebody would, like, have this thought, and worse, voice it. "Hey, wait a minute. If everybody in town here gets the same system and we all go to do the same stuff, how's that gonna work?" Right? Now, Air Exclusive answers that, of course. The answer we always used was, "What a great question. And so look around, because there's 30 people in here. They're all going to buy it, so you're all going home with it. On average, there's one of you who's going to use it. So if you happen to be the one who uses it, you got no problems. If you're one of the 29 who never use it, you got no problems. On to the next issue." And sometimes they would laugh, sometimes they wouldn't, but it didn't make any difference. It pretty much went away and everybody bought, but of course Of course, we're only selling a $499 doohickey. Now if you were selling a $49,900 doohickey, that's kind of a different story. So area exclusive answers that. It's a way to derive sufficient income from a very small niche. See, if you're operating in a big niche, many cases it's hard to make an argument for this. If you're operating in a small niche, you can often make an argument for this because it raises price. And it locks people in and makes continuity higher priced and last longer. So if you're in a niche with, say, only 20,000 people in it, and you use the 20% market share rule, there's only 4,000 people to sell to before you're, you're DOA anyway. So you might be better off making 400 sales using exclusivity at big price than trying to make 4,000 sales over a long period of time at low price. Sources, parts are borrowed from the direct sales industry. So parts of this date back to the 1930s Depression when companies that had salaried staff salespeople decided not to have them anymore and turned them into independent dealers. And so what was a territory sales rep now had the joy of owning his dealership in Duluth and surrounding communities, so the company didn't have to pay him unless he actually sold something. So direct sales was really created because of that more than anything else, and a lot of the area exclusive models in information marketing are derived from the direct selling industry where I grew up and where I have a lot of clients. Parts, of course, are also borrowed from franchising unraveled, um, um, and in some cases, the area-exclusive infomarketer actually chooses to be a full franchisor. And my prediction, by the way, is there'll be more of that, not less of that, um, if the new FTC regulations stand, because one of the many reasons not to franchise is not to have to comply with all of the regulations about tracking people's performance and disclosing only actual performance and all of that that exists for a franchisor. And really, if you analyze the FTC regulations closely, they've essentially taken franchise-type disclosure requirements and applied them to everything. And so increasingly somebody will say, well, wait a minute, if I got to do all that, I might as well try and build equity as well as income, and I might as well be a franchisor. We have very successful people in every one of these. So we have them using sort of the direct sales model to area exclusivity. Uh, Mike Gravette's doing it with his second company, Safe Family Life. Um, we have area exclusive info marketers, um, who really don't have them selling other product or services. Um, my client Dennis Tubergen— Dennis has right now, 7 different area exclusive programs, all sold in the financial services industry. Which, by the way, that's how you get to sell Duluth 7 times instead of once, is 7 specialized programs rather than one big program that encompasses everything. It's a little tip for you, you might want to make a note. And one of those programs, we have Joan London as a celebrity, so they're getting, one of the exclusive things they're getting is the ability to use all of the marketing materials that feature Joan. If you think about the cost of a celebrity, if you amortize it over 200 people who are in your area exclusive program, it's next to nothing. If you look at the street rate just to go buy one, they're pretty expensive. And we have franchisors. Chris Tomczak with HealthSource, maybe the most successful of our group. Last time I talked to Chris a few weeks ago, I think we're He's at 262, 263 active operating franchised clinics from zero in under 36 months in chiropractic where nobody has ever made it work before, but we are making it work. You can, you really can't count the Kennedy's Barber Club thing as info marketing, but it certainly is built on all the same models and is franchised, area exclusive. Virtues? Well, it adds enormous perceived value from thin air, therefore supports higher price because only one person can have it in this area or in this industry or in this Yellow Pages advertising region or whatever. Only one person can have it, and that immediately makes people want it more than they would if more than one person could have it. The same thing automatically becomes more desirable and therefore worth more money to somebody when it is something that only one person can have. And as a little aside, almost everybody has somebody in their business, in their area, who they hate, who they can't stand the thought of them having it, even if they're not sure they want it. They don't want Bob to have it. So that applies. The higher price, the higher margin enables you to buy speed because you can incur a much higher cost per sale. You can cheerfully spend $8,000, $9,000, $10,000 to make a sale if you're making a $40,000 sale. It can provide actual advantages to the participant. As I described, it does solve the problem of 22 people in the same area using the same stuff. It can provide you with a distribution channel to create and move products through them to end users, and it can create equity more so than other formats. Drawbacks? Well, you now have a limited number of things to sell, and then you're done selling unless somebody falls out the bottom of the bucket. And worse, if you're dealing with geography, there's a lot of people who want it who live in San Diego. There's hard— there's only one person who might even buy it in Fargo, North Dakota. So as soon as you get your guy in San Diego, you will suffer the endless parade of other people in San Diego who would happily give you money who you have to say no to. And you will ultimately suffer never being able to sell Fargo, North Dakota. So that's a drawback. Attrition is cumbersome and costly to deal with. There are legal issues and complexities that some people like to avoid, and maybe the biggest that people underestimate is this, more than many of these other models, is running a real business. And so you need infrastructure, and you need to actually support you need to support these people and you need to monitor their results, and when somebody is failing, you need to go fix them or replace them, you're running a real business. And this thing gets screwed up more than anything else I've ever dealt with. So the people who get it right and it is the right model for them make more money than anybody I've ever dealt with. But to be fair, there are more info marketers who start doing this screw it all up royally and walk away from it than any other model you will see during the course of the day. 5 and 6, telecoaching and online coaching. Fundamentally, they're the same thing. We're really just talking about two choices of media, two choices of delivery, but fundamentally what once was all telecoaching that is now tele plus online or online It's the same thing. And so there's a handful of different subsets. There's simple teleclasses and webinars put together into a curriculum, a sequence, a package, and called coaching. I don't— I pass no judgment on that, by the way. So that's pure group delivery. And nothing more. There's controlled or paced learning, really borrowed from academia, where there's online courses and they're very controlled. You have to complete Module 1 and pass a test before you can move to Module 2. You have to do your homework, you, yada yada. And that's sometimes now called coaching. We, of course, at Glaser Kennedy have, I don't know now how many, online courses that work exactly like I've just described. There's group participation, so take a conference call that is not about a monologue or not a lot about an interview, but it is everybody in the mastermind group getting on a call and now having a mastermind group without coming into a room. There's true coaching for the purists, which is one-on-one, a coach actually talking to a person being coached. And then there's the pure online stuff, the forums, where everybody in the coaching program is really networking and coaching with each other. Again, almost everybody winds up hybridizing some of these things rather than having any one of these things. I started doing the telestuff in, in 1998, and the conference call part of this if you want origins, was really popularized by the MLM and network marketing industry, and they drove the need for the technology that we all benefit from today because they uniquely early on were really the only ones who needed to hook up 1,000 people or 2,000 people or 10,000 people to a single call and have that actually work. And so they drove the the technology that we all benefit from now. Method number 7, format number 7, for real purists, is true private one-on-one coaching. So everybody that wants to be a life coach, which includes every professional speaker who now can't get any gigs. They figured out how to spell life coach. They went and got a certification in that, and bingo, they're life coaches. It's a real shock to them to discover that the missing element is somebody to coach. It didn't really occur to them when they were getting the certifications. But there are literally life coaches, which are essentially unlicensed therapists, right? Much incidentally to the consternation of licensed therapists. There are executive coaches. I couldn't find it to bring it. I have it, but I couldn't lay my hands on it, but it's an example I've used many times. There's a woman in New York. She's been in business for many years. She's truly an executive coach dealing purely with transition issues. Issues. So guy just became CEO, guy is getting fired as CEO, guy is moving from one company to the other. Her fees are $150,000 for 90 days and she talks to him on the phone every day. That's the gig. Capacity limit, she can only take so many, obviously, but you don't need many as well. I mean, you essentially heard Kern make an argument for why he is attracted to one-on-one work rather than one-to-many work, and there's many reasons you may be attracted to it too, and then in a short period of time you'll be unattracted to it, by the way, but I've done a lot of it, and I do have a couple of quick tips for you. One, If you schedule multiple calls for multiple people in a day, you should quickly figure out who won't make their calls. You want to couple them together, like around your bathroom break or around your lunch break, so you get a longer break. Okay? And you don't want them as one of the last 3 in the day, because then you're stuck sitting there waiting when you could be gone, right? And people's behavior is pretty reliable, by the way. So people that don't make their calls don't make their calls. Calls. Like, LeGrand's been in platinum for 10 years, and this year he actually finally started to make calls, has apologized, which I appreciate, and warned me ahead of time the first time. So we got a fax saying, I don't want you to keel over with a heart attack because I am actually going to make my call. So I was prepared, you know. So these one-on-one things usually belong real far at the top of the pyramid because you ought to get paid really well if you're going to do it. And they do require a fairly high level of skill. They were always a part— so my platinum group consisted of mastermind meetings, one-on-one phone, right, and some added value, some stuff, and access to consulting My new private client group has all the same stuff except no meetings. So we've eliminated the meetings and now bundled packages of telecoaching, one-on-one, and added value stuff. Lee, who's here, in addition to what she does with us with Peak Performers and what she does in group delivery for Millionaire Smarts— Lee actually has some one-on-one, always has for many years, one-on-one telecoaching CEOs entrepreneurs. The biggest business probably is attacking anxiety, David and Lucinda Bassett's business. And you'll hear the radio commercials, you'll see the TV infomercials. They sell a product, but then they drive people into unlicensed therapy. They drive them into life coaching specifically dealing with overcoming anxiety, and they have a room with cubicles in it with with a bunch of people, coaches who talk to them on the phone. Number 8, short-term to outcome coaching. Very common in the corporate world and probably maybe came from there. Maybe the biggest training company, I guess we would call them, certainly the best known, Dale Carnegie, was really originally this. It's a set number of weeks with an outcome at the end of the person being able to stand up and deliver competently a complete speech. In the real estate investing industry, almost everybody who's been in that business for any length of time has at least part of the time, if not all of the time, had this as part of their business. There's a very clear outcome to tie the coaching to, which is your first deal, right? So you start to learn about real estate investing. Here's a coaching program of X number of weeks, X number of calls, access to a coach who stays with you all the way to buying your first house. Pretty much now everybody else who could do the same kind of outcomes began to copy that format. So internet marketing, right to the point of having your first website done, up and running. And commerce occurring, right? And so these are tied to a very specific outcome. You'll see in corporate, you'll see a lot of negotiation coaches, and they'll be hired by a company. Usually they work with a team who are preparing for a very complex and difficult negotiation, and so they work for X number of weeks right up to to and including the negotiation. Some virtues and drawbacks. The virtue is this is pretty easy to sell. If you want an easy-to-sell coaching format, by God, this is it. Because really, what does somebody want? They want a successful outcome. And they want somebody to hold their hand until they get it. So, once somebody understands they can invest in real estate buy houses with no money, no credit, no brains, no nothing. They want to get one, right? And they, what do they really lack? Not so much knowledge or competence, they lack the confidence to do it and maybe how do I put one step in front of the other, what do I do first, what do I do second, what do I do third? And so if you think about it in any category of business, right, what somebody wants is a successful outcome once they are introduced to a concept. So the easiest thing in the world to sell is, here, you're buying the outcome, and we're actually gonna deliver the outcome, and so we're gonna be with you, right? Through to that outcome, right? In some niches, people go camp out in somebody's office for 2 or 3 days in order to deliver that. Jay Guyer, a platinum member of mine, does telephone, fix phone stuff in professional offices. Last time I talked to him, he now has 32 full-time trainers on the road who are doing nothing but going and camping out in an office for 2 days to get them to an outcome, which is all the bad habits out and a step-by-step system for handling that phone, scripts, role play, drilling, everything installed. So it really is installation, like buying a refrigerator from Lowe's and having it installed. That's really what it is. So it's very easy to sell. Second big benefit is you You have full documentation of case histories because you actually, you or your coach did it with them. So you know the numbers on that transaction. You know what that house was bought for. You know what that website did in its first 36 hours. You know how long it took to build it. You know what it cost to build it because you were right there with them. So you have fully documented case histories. The drawbacks? Number 1, you promised an outcome. Big drawback because almost everybody is a whole lot less disciplined and determined and competent than you would hope. So like they hide from the coach. They, when they don't have Step 3 done. Trying to get them to call number 4, not easy. They hide. They create reasons for delay. And so you get to hear every story about spectacular injuries and floods and fires and locust attacks and everything that might possibly be a justification, you know, in practice management. So we had all these doctors we took at $36,000 from. And a big part of what we did is we taught them how to do a prepaid presentation and get a chiropractic patient to pay $8,000, $10,000, $12,000 upfront rather than $35 a visit. And so not only did you teach them that, but then you had to make them do it until they could actually do it and show it to them, video them doing it, and then play the video back to show it to them to show where they had wimped out and they were stammering and stuttering and doing this when they ask for the money, and so, well, they went and hid. At 4-day events like this, we had staff people running all over the hotel finding them. It's their turn, she's up there, the guy's under the bed in his room, and she's got to go get him. So that's a drawback. Another drawback is different people do progress at different paces, But by the nature here, we've taken this do-it-to-outcome and put it in a 12-week program. And so that's a drawback. You can have an inordinately high refund rate with these kind of— because you're forcing compliance. Those are the drawbacks. But boy, if you want one that's easy to sell, this is the easiest one to sell. Number 9, single skill-specific coaching. So this really, you found it in the sales training industry all through the '60s, well into the '70s. You really didn't see a lot of sales trainers. You saw people who taught, trained, and what we would call today coached on prospecting. You saw somebody who just did telephone prospecting. That's all they taught. That's all they trained. That's all they coached on. Somebody else did closing, that's all they did, that was it. Single specific, right? It's very common in like recreational activities, so there's a coach for short game, there's a coach for long game, there's a coach for fixing a slice, right? Evolutionary for us, A, it's a good way to enter an already crowded niche to find a space for yourself. It becomes a way to respond to what the customer themselves is telling you about what they want. Again, Dale Carnegie began and still largely is single specific coaching. The Dale Carnegie program is about being able to stand up and give a speech. In case you didn't know, by the way, I looked it up for you. Carnegie was founded in 1912. They have 160 franchisees, and under them, 2,700 instructors, and roughly 7 million people complete the course, which is a $1,295 to $1,895 course. And it's a single skill, public speaking, with an outcome promised at the end. If you think about now offering more and more things to your buyers. So if you think about several of these things that we've talked about, one money mistake is putting too many things into one program, one basket, and delivering that basket for a single price. When in fact, you could have 5 things, 6 things, 7 things, 7 different baskets, Average person might not want all 7, but average person might want 3, okay? And they'll get more out of it and they'll value it more if they have to buy separate baskets. Number 10 and last is then hybrids and/or tiered programs. So the hybrid is of course taking this, this, this, telecoaching, mastermind group, this, putting it together into a hybrid program. Tiered is where you see a real movement from you have to be in this, and then you get to move to this, and then you get to move to this. And our industry grew out of alumni programs, but obviously has its roots in religion and in fraternal organizations, in the human potential movement. And so the tiered thing is a way to structure and to move people up from one price to the other as much because they wish to graduate and move from the little kids' table to the teenagers' table to get to sit at the big people's table as it is anything else. Close quickly with a few tips for you, my own, about coaching.. And then I will be out of your way. Number 1, appoint yourself. Coaching is no different than any aspect, any other aspect of the rest of the information marketing business. There's no tenure requirement. There's no longevity requirement. There's no— just appoint yourself. The one-eyed man is king principle. You do not have to know everything about what you coach. You only have to know something they don't know. You don't need a big margin of expertise from them, just a little. Know that value is different for different people. You can't just impose your values on everybody else. You probably won't have enough people So for example, making more money in their business and increasing their income and growing their business month to month to month, year to year to year, that's not— it may motivate you, but it's not necessarily the thing that motivates everybody else. You want to create environments that accommodate a lot of different primary reasons. So like some people want to be in a coaching group so that they get to come in out of the cold and be accepted. It's a place where they get acceptance and they don't get acceptance anywhere else. Some people want recognition. Some people want to show off. Some people just, give me the facts and let me get it, so they really want the information. Some people want the fraternity. You want to structure environments that give them as many of those different benefits as you can. Big tip. This is my suggestion box. Goes right into the trash can. Everybody— Everybody in your group will have different ideas about how your group and your business ought to be run, and they are much more interested in running your business than they are running their own. If you permit a little democracy, you will wind up with anarchy. These things are not to be run as democracies. There is to be a king, and occasionally you must behead somebody, All kings do. If you do not occasionally behead somebody, you will be beheaded. All kings learn that. So don't be running a democracy. Does that mean you don't listen? No, you listen. If you can figure out opportunity, by all means figure out opportunity. But don't be taking a vote on where the meeting ought to be, when the meeting ought to be, how long the meeting ought to be, who should sit in it. Don't be running a democracy. There is inherent conflict of interest for the coach. You are always juggling what will sell it the best, what will satisfy them the best so I have the best retention, and what do they really need. Sometimes those are the same. Often they're not the same. And so you're always walking that tightrope to try and serve those interests. Ultimately rich coaches do have integrity about that. Ultimately, rich coaches will not deliver things that are harmful. They won't not deliver what they need, but they will find ways to also give them what they want, even if it's not necessarily contributive to the objectives, as long as it's not helpful. Big, big, big, big, big, big. There's no such thing as automatic retention. You will not have retention based on what you did yesterday. For them. You will not have retention on having been there at their time of greatest emotional need. You will not have retention based on longevity. There's no such thing as automatic retention. You create it on a day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month basis. There's a lot of money to be made in coaching. It's a complex thing. If you carefully analyzed everything I talked about this morning, you would find 91 decisions to make about structuring your program. By the end of the day, you'll have even more. Okay? There's a lot of money here, and that means it's complicated. If it was really, really simple, there'd be 5,000 people in this room, and they'd all have million-dollar-a-year coaching businesses. See, somebody asked this morning at the IMA group for a very lineal, you know, list of 12 things to do in the order we ought to do them in, and 22 checklists There are businesses that exist in it. It's called a Quiznos, okay? And so there's a little picture of how to make the sandwich. There's a manual. It's not really very thick, 'cause believe it or not, running one of them things is not that complicated. As a matter of fact, you can actually leave teenagers with it and go for a day and the thing kind of functions, okay? However, average Quiznos owner makes $35,000 a year. You gotta own like 4 of them suckers to even get to 6 figures. So, so if you're thinking about a half a million or a million or 2 million, don't expect the book you got handed out to you to be the Quiznos manual. It can't be. This is a complicated business because it is an enormous opportunity. Thank you all for being here today.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. Now this free gift comes with almost $20,000 and pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.