A Timeless Strategy For Staying Relevant With Your Prospects

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 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. Hello, it's Dan Kennedy. Welcome to the Diamond Call. I have a marketing thing to quickly discuss with you, but then as I said, we will go to open lines and we can talk about it or anything else that you would like. The thing I want to discuss— and I got two faxes from members that prompted it is the idea, and you're seeing it again in the current political campaigns, the idea of what Carville during the Clinton campaign called the war room and the fast response team, which in the political world is all about responding quickly, if not first, to useful news items and responding quickly to attacks by opponents or media, etc. It's the first part that really matters to us as marketers, and that is the leverage of perishable news items, water cooler conversation, cocktail party conversation, backyard fence conversation, what people are seeing on the news today, tonight, and will be talking about amongst themselves tomorrow. Because top of consciousness is such a powerful position, this is an important opportunity when you can link yourself and your message to what is already going on in the news and in the conversations and discussions of people about the news. It moves you from last place to first place. It helps you get attention. But the trick to it is that if you can't be first, you at least need to be quick. Most news is somewhat perishable. Some more than others, but most news has an expiration date on it like a carton of milk, and something that is page 1 and conversation topic number 1 today, while it may still be in the news, may be page 8 and down near the bottom of the conversation list tomorrow. The best thing that happened to Herman Cain regarding his scandals was the Penn State scandal because it rearranges the news page and it rearranges the conversation. If you are going to leverage news for marketing purposes, you either need to be first or you at least need to be quick while something is still page one. With that in mind, I've got one example of something that is definitely perishable and another that will have longer life and is clever and deserving of recognition. So the perishable item comes to us from Chip Kessler, Diamond member and co-author with me of the Making Them Believe book and of an upcoming book in the No BS series about marketing to Boomers and seniors, which Chip's main real business is as a consultant and business advisor and provider of done-for-them marketing to the nursing home and assisted living facility industry. And not only does he deal in the marketing arena with them, but he deals in all business arenas with them. And so I'm just going to— it's only a paragraph, so I'm just going to read it. As you know, Joe Paterno and Penn State have been all over the news this week, culminating in the coach's firing. The university's crisis communication was terrible, as noted by many experts paraded all over the news about the school's handling of the matter, which provided a perfect opportunity for our company to promote and market via email for speed purposes our own crisis communications program for nursing homes and assisted living facilities use. The Penn State subject matter was delicate, however, there are ways to be respectful but make our point, which I think we accomplished. The subject title of the first email was The Sad Case of Joe Paterno. As you've taught, basically nothing should be off limits in our marketing efforts. Not only is that true, but it is always true that one person's tragedy is another person's opportunity. This is certainly a tragedy in many respects for the affected families, for the university, their alumni, their currently enrolled students, for Paterno, et cetera, et cetera., but as Chip astutely recognized, since he has a product for the businesses in his niche about how to competently and capable handling communication when a crisis occurs, either just with that business or with its industry as a whole, this provided the perfect launching point, uh, for that conversation. Tied to page 1 of the news, and he astutely recognized you've got to be quick. A pet peeve of mine is that we have all this media now that allows us to be quick— email, Twitter, Facebook, etc.— and yet most business owners and most marketers are not good about this at all. They do not leap upon page one items and leverage them for their own communication and promotional purposes. And therefore, the greatest virtue of the online media literally goes to waste. So kudos to Chip, and if he's on the call, he's welcome to get in when we open the lines, but kudos to Chip for jumping on something that many, many people would, who could use it in one way or another, would be intimidated about using it, and the bigger picture for jumping on something and using it, period. The less time-sensitive, but that can be given legs over a period of time, although in the short term It provided great PR opportunity. Our doctor, and I'm probably going to butcher the pronunciation, Zook, I think, or Zuck, it's Z-U-K, I should know it, Michael, and I don't, so I apologize in advance, but some of you saw him compete for Marketer of the Year at a GKIC event. He is a dentist, and an author of Confessions of a Former Cosmetic Dentist. He's somewhat a controversial figure in dentistry, and he leaped upon the auctioning off of a very odd piece of Beatles memorabilia, which was the late John Lennon's Rotten Tooth, and he is the successful bidder acquiring said tooth for $31,000 at auction and has busily been generating news releases and promotion all based around it. So BBC, 'cause the auction was held in the UK, BBC News picked it up, and so a Canadian dentist has bought one of John Lennon's teeth at an auction. Alberta-based Michael Zook bid by phone to secure the molar given by the former Beatle to his housekeeper who worked for him in the 1960s. The tooth was from a collection of rock memorabilia owned by Alan McGee, former boss of Oasis's label Creation Records. Dr. Zuk, who has written a book on celebrities' teeth, said, "Once I heard it was up for sale, I had to have it." He plans to display the tooth in his practice as well as take it on a tour of other dental practices seminars and dental schools. Since one of the things he does is speak at dental conferences, by the way, the good doctor can now use the ability to bring this happy artifact and put it on display as another reason for hiring him and bringing him in He, um, in another news release, um, he says he has a display of celebrity memorabilia. John Lennon's tooth was a bargain at only £19,500, which is $31,000 in our real money. It's an amazing addition to my collection. Um, as long as I don't do the conversion into U.S. or Canadian funds, it doesn't hurt., and then he has a variety of facts, attempting to make all of this more relevant and him more interesting, including the fact that he was born in New York City when the Beatles did their famous performance on the Ed Sullivan Show. He lived a few blocks from where the famous Beatle lost his life. Uh, the Beatles and Dr. Zuk's mother both performed at Carnegie Hall. Um, etc., etc. And so he will soon be arranging a John Lennon tooth tour, and we give him credit for acting on this marvelous opportunity to own John Lennon's bad tooth and quickly turning it into PR in and outside of the profession. And in this case, it does give him something that has longer legs than its immediate life. And if you amortize the money over some serious series of appearances, or X number of speaking engagements, or X number of coaching clients he wouldn't have received otherwise, or amortize it in various and sundry other ways,, then the cost is in fact pretty painless. So I think that you need to look at these examples and other examples like them and think about both how you can leverage page one news for your business in your communications with past clients, customers and you're prospecting for new clients and customers. And whenever an opportunity arises, like the tooth opportunity, you, you have to be first there too. You want to leap on these things and use them to generate interest and curiosity and attention and intrigue and perhaps controversy for yourself and your business. So now, whether we talk more about that or we talk about whatever is on your mind, and it is open lines for the remainder of the time we have available.

Okay, our first question comes from Dwight.

Dwight, please state your question. So there's a PE teacher who may still be on the run from charges of sexual assault on a young female student.

Oh, this is a Florida news story, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah, I, I have noticed this. Okay, so this happened at Justin's school, my stepson's school. So it's being tied into the sales letter that's going out to the unconverted leads and the former junior students. Um, I mean, initially it was just going to be, you know, get a head start on the New Year's resolutions and what have you, but now I'm going to tie that story into the need for parents to put their— to not only have their kids, you know, develop, you know, self-defense skills and stronger sense of self and what have you, but also to put them in a school where they know they can trust the teachers.

Well, look, I think that— is there a question there, or what?

Reporting?

Actually, actually, there wasn't going to be a question at all because that's not what even I wanted to tell you.

I wanted to thank you for—

well, then let's stop for a second. Okay. Thank me, because I, I want to say that, you know, I totally support what it is that, that, that, that you're doing. And, and immediately some people, when they hear it, I guarantee you, are, are squeamish about the whole thing. Yeah. And, and they would be wrong. I mean, you've been handed an opportunity that, while not page one national news, is certainly page one news in your area, right? You've been handed an opportunity to communicate value, important value to parents in a way that will get them to pay attention when perhaps they otherwise wouldn't. And for you not to use that does nothing to benefit anybody, but for you to use it, while it takes some courage, is exactly the correct thing to do. You know, when you travel a lot, as I did for more years than I care to count, it becomes readily apparent— if you don't travel much, you think that, you know, your local news is like weird and strange and in many cases horrific. And unique, but if you travel a lot, you realize that bad things, strange things, oddball things are happening in every city and every town and every burg, and these kinds of opportunities come along fairly routinely, frequently, on a regular basis, and smart business people are going to use them. Because in your area now, right now, and for at least— well, certainly until they catch her or him, and then there will be the trial. So, you know, for some period of time, this is going to be somewhere between page 1 and page 3, right? And, and if not even by the time you deliver your letter, if not in conversation, certainly in very recent memory, and for your market, I mean, parents will be clearly more sensitive to it than others. So, you know, you've been handed something of real value if leveraged, and a lot of people would not leverage it, either out of ignorance, laziness, or squeamishness, and they would all be wrong.

Right. So congratulations. Thank you. And so the thing I wanted to thank you for was recommending Michael Masterson's Architecture of Persuasion because in there I found when he talks about the core emotional complex and he talks about B-level copywriters using just greed and fear, but then there's a whole other array of emotions Well, that's right.

Yeah. Yes. And I, and I, and I recommend the book again for people that didn't catch it at what— in whatever conversation or print I did. It's a very good book on copywriting. And of course, Michael has probably trained more type top copywriters than maybe anybody in the, in the country, mostly for Agora, the big news newsletter company. And so You know, the book is based on real experience, and he's 100% right in that the B and C team tend to narrow the range of, to use a Sugarman word, triggers that they try and use to motivate response from people. And in many cases, that's okay. I mean, it's good enough and it works. But a more sophisticated approach deals with the more sophisticated range of emotions, you know, that we have.

Our next question comes from Sean.

Sean, please state your question. Hey, Dan.

Sean Block here in Idaho.

I own the dry cleaning company, and then I also teach dry cleaners how to have a better business. What we do is we mail to, or we put dry cleaners in a funnel, and then immediately they'll go to a $1,500 package of CDs and DVDs and material, and then try to upsell them to coaching packages of either $5,000 or $10,000, depending on which package they choose. At the InfoSummit and talking to a few people, there was a lot of advice said that I should start bringing more people in at a lower price point. We do have down sells from the $1,500 package down to about $1,000 with a smaller product offering. But I was wondering what your thoughts were on that because we've been fairly successful selling at $1,500, but starting them at $300 or $500, I'm not sure that necessarily makes Makes sense. I'm not sure I'm going to get— So anyhow, I just wanted to get your thoughts on starting them at a lower price point and moving them through the funnel that way.

Well, A, you have to be careful that advice that you get is from people with comparable businesses. So often the bigger, broader, bottom-of-the-pyramid approach to infomarketing with modest and even low prices as points of entry is necessary and is popular with non-niche marketers, people marketing to areas of interest or subcultures within big broad universes. So the get rich in real estate folks, for example, money-making opportunities, health, finance, etc., whereas your approach at a at a price point— well, yours is $1,500— at a price point, let's say, above $1,000 will often be favored by the niche marketer, which you are. So the marketer to dry cleaners, the marketer to financial advisors, the marketer to dentists, etc. Now, where your price point for a niche marketer as an opening price point is a little unusual is in its relationship to the transaction value and customer value of the person that you sell to. So a $1,500 opening price point for, say, a dentist is like a $150 opening price point to a restaurant owner because the dentist's transaction value and the value of the customer is substantially higher than it is for the restaurant owner. So you're a little unusual in that respect in a niche where the consumer is spending small amounts of money, although you wouldn't know it by my dry cleaning bill, but is spending small amounts of money. And is— and over a year's time, you know, may have only $1,000 or $2,000 worth of value rather than $20,000 worth of value. In most of those niches, you might very well find people below that price point. So that's a general comment. The specific comment is that A, you said something very important, which is you're doing well. And since you're doing well, everybody including me ought to be cautious about tinkering with it. One of the people I was on the phone with privately earlier today, because I do calls all day when on a day like this when I do them, is marketing to independent pharmacy owners. And like you, is going directly in, is skipping the very bottom of the pyramid part of an info marketing business and is going directly into selling coaching programs ranging from $1,500 a month to $2,500 a month. And the same conversation could be had, gee, do you think we should put in a $39, a $390, entry point. And my answer would be fundamentally the same, which reverts back to A, if you're doing well, we all ought to be very cautious about tinkering. B, if we were going to go in that direction, we have to be very cautious about not trading down what's already working and taking somebody who would give us $1,500 and letting them scratch their itch for a tenth of that. And, and of course, the more of our marketing we do online, the more that's an issue. When our marketing is offline, it's easy to do one thing to one group of prospects and another to another group of prospects, and never the twain shall meet. That, of course, evaporates as soon as you start to move everybody online. The fact that you have down sells further suggests that you don't have the need to have a lower-priced entry point and that it might not be advantageous for you to have a lower-priced entry point, you are— you're going and trying to accommodate those people. You're just doing it after the fact rather than before the fact. The third kind of controlling element here has to do with the size of the niche, how many prospects there are. And again, somebody that has a very big universe will often find it advantageous to have a big broad base of the pyramid and lower price. Ways to enter, where somebody with a relatively small niche will find that disadvantageous because everybody's only going to sell, big thumb rule, to about 20% of their market before the digging gets so hard that the cost of acquisition is astronomical regardless of price point. So it's one thing if there's 300,000 of them, it's another if there's 30,000.

And if there's—

huh?

There's 30,000.

Yeah, 32,000. Yeah. So, you know, at that point you have to be careful about that trade-down factor, because if you use up the 20% on small transactions and aren't successful at ascending, uh, now you've really shot yourself in the foot. So I would be prone— without getting a lot of detail from you— I would be prone to endorse your current business model for your situation. And if you have a price point that is working satisfactorily for you, I would not go beneath it as an entry point. I would definitely go beneath it with down sells. But I would not go beneath it as an entry point. The, the exception is some infomarketers will do it not institutionalized but sporadically, periodically. So if you are consistently putting $1,500 as the ante to get in your game in front of everybody, and you are arousing a lot of curiosity about you with people who are simply not going to pay $1,500 to appease their curiosity, and you occasionally show up with a big, aggressive, intense promotion for a substantially lower-priced option, then you, you're leveraging all of your other marketing, but then it's over and you're— and it's gone, and you're back out of your way for a while. Okay. And so that, you know, is, is another kind of approach to this. How long have you been in the niche?

Well, I've been in the niche for 10 years. I've been selling to the niche for about 18 months.

Okay. Where are you now in terms of numbers and coaching, if you don't mind saying so on an open call?

No, I don't mind.

We're coaching about 10 people in coaching, and that's only because that's really new.

We just added that a few weeks ago.

Maybe 2 months ago. So, and how many $1,500 buyers then are there over the 18 months?

Yeah, we probably sold about 180, 175, something in that neck of the woods. All right. Well, online, we just started doing offline marketing to generate leads too.

Good.

Okay, so you have a long way to go. Yes. Which is very good news. And so you just— you want to be careful about a few things. One, you want to make sure that you have enough price and you have enough margin that you can afford to aggressively market, and you want to have a good ascension process in place beyond the $1,500, because the other thing that's true big thumb rule is 20% of your buyers will cheerfully spend more than the initial transaction, providing it makes sense and there's value and all of that. And you don't want to not have something for that 20%. And 5% will ascend pretty much as far as you will let them ascend. So you don't want to leave any of that on the table. If for no other reason, it loops back to what you can spend in the first place. Sure. And if you are very visible, then you will encourage knockoffs. And again, this is now— The speed at which there are knockoffs has dramatically accelerated the more things are visible on the internet and because the internet removes a lot of barriers to entry. Sure. So as soon as you got economics to work and you got numbers to work and you know if we spend X amount, we get Y amount back, and if we get 50 We know 10 will ascend, and as soon as you know those numbers, then you want to ramp it up as much as you can ramp it up because you want to be— you actually want to dominate and begin using up your market share quickly, not slowly.

Okay.

Does that make sense? Yeah, that's very helpful. And we've been growing slowly. We've been, you know, just, I run other businesses, so I've been growing a little slower and stuff.

Yeah, and so you're handicapped by your own time and attention limitations, right?

Yeah, but I mean, we can reinvest money to help.

Help do that.

And your niche is shrinking/consolidating? Yeah, it's in a state of flux. It's moving from stores to pickup and delivery, which is what we specialize in teaching them about. So, but yeah, it's down from 36,000 people to 32,000 people in the niche just due to the economy.

Right.

Well, so, you know, that shrinkage is going to continue. At least in the short term. And although in overall numbers that's not good for you, generally speaking, the weak die first. And, and you can use it as leverage, which I'm sure you are in your messaging. Yes.

Yeah, we're doing that. And then we do get a little bit of benefit from the biz-op market too, from people who just want to start a pickup and delivery route. So that actually expands our universe a little bit.

That's kind of interesting. I mean, that happens to be a field I do a lot of work in. That's interesting. So are you reaching out to that market aggressively with a, we will put you in business package? No, we've—

they've actually been finding us. We've been reaching out to dry cleaners, and then we just have— what's happened is about half of our sales are coming from the biz-op market. People who just have decided they're interested in pickup and delivery?

Well, my advice to you would be to not ignore that noise.

Okay.

Um, what's hap— what happens by accident can generally be made to happen a lot more on purpose. Okay. And if you have a low barrier to entry, relatively clean, clean hands, business opportunity at the moment, this is the time to make hay with it. Because again, the economy, the unemployment rate, is making more people interested in these things than would have been interested in them 4 years ago. The canary, the direct selling industry, the Tupperwares and Mary Kays and Shackleys and Avons of the world are able to see surges in recruiting and to recruit higher caliber people. The higher the unemployment rate is, the tougher the economy is and the longer it persists. And so you're in that position. So you really ought to think about the opportunity magazines, online search, and formalizing a we will put you in business from scratch approach to this. Because really all they need are their own—

a vehicle, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, that— you should study. Do you, do you read the op magazines now?

Yeah, I, I get them.

It's sometimes hard to read them, but, uh, yeah. Well, you should play prospect with all— with the, the real, so legitimate but low barrier to entry opportunities. So the companies that are putting people in carpet cleaning, auto detailing, you know, those kinds of low barrier to entry service businesses, you should answer all those ads and play prospect.

Okay.

Okay.

Something to do this week. Thank you.

There you go. Our next question comes from Owen.

Owen, please state your question.

Hey Dan, how are you doing? I'm good, Owen.

How are you, sir? Good, good. Now the facts I got, I thought we were talking about direct marketing, uh, response marketing, so that's where my question goes.

Well, that's fine. I just, um, I did not prepare, I confess.

That's okay, that's okay. I will write that down, but we'll forgive you. Anyway, the question, question I have goes to our B2B clients. We do, as you know, but just for the listeners, we sell artwork to companies who buy them in bulk. Typically the smaller orders we get is a dozen apiece, and they use them for golf tournaments and Christmas gifts and retirement—

Client gifts and awards and whatever.

That's right, that's right. So the question is coming in, going after a cold market.. Where, like for instance, say we want to move into more Texas, Oklahoma. I mean, we do quite well there, but I won't pretend that I have more market penetration than I do. The question becomes, there's all kinds of ways to find out the companies that are spending, and you can break the list down 100 ways. They're spending this on this many gifts, etc., etc. Drop shipping versus bulk delivery. I mean, all that's available. The question is, is I'm having a heck of a time getting a name that means anything. Finding the CEO's name is easy, but he's rarely the person. You know, sometimes we end up getting, you know, human resources. Sometimes it's a sales department. Sometimes it's a branch manager. Sometimes, you know, it's a big company with several branches. Sometimes it's all centralized, the purchasing. Sometimes it's not, and sometimes there's special situations and all this kind of thing. So what we've been doing, the thing that works the best is picking up the phone and saying, I have no idea whom I'm looking for. But that's a problem in the US as I understand it. Cold calling is essentially, you know, I've been, some of the reaction I've had has been pretty heated. And I mean, then there's the whole thing of running staff. What I want to find out is your thoughts on, identifying the person that makes the decision en masse. I mean, I consider I can make 20 calls a day and send out 18 kits and that's all fine, but that's grunt work. And I'll never, I can't, no matter how hard I work, what am I gonna get, 40? Do you know what I mean? And what we do so far, we do a lot of, and then I've had pretty good luck with self-sorting. We do the sneak up to the world's greatest boss. And little things like that. So it sort of sorts itself to some extent, but I'm— you can't do that 3 times in a row, or can you?

Yeah, you can, but so, so first of all, to clarify, there is no US— so you're Canadian, so for the benefit of everybody on the call, US Do Not Call laws apply only to residences, not to businesses. So there is no legal barrier to cold telephone prospecting.

Some of the businesses think there is, though.

That— well, it doesn't matter what they think, um, because the worst that happens is a bad reaction. But, you know, there's a lot— as you pointed out, it will take you 4 lifetimes to work your way through the market in Texas. So, right, so the ones who are aggravated and hang up on us really don't matter. And the ask for help approach that you described done well is still, I mean, I have clients doing it. If I was under duress, I would do it myself. It's still effective., and a lot of humans, particularly in small to mid-sized businesses rather than huge companies. So, you know, a small accounting firm versus— well, they're gone now, but Ernst Whinney, you might get very rudely treated by the receptionist at Ernst Whinney, but probably not in the majority of accounting firms with 3 or fewer names in there, you know, on their door. And it is scalable to an extent because it's good college intern work. It's good stay-at-home mom on the phone work. It can be outsourced to the Philippines. So there are ways to scale this ugly grunt work process that you've described. Of finding out who at Company B ought to be communicated with. The other thing I will tell you is, is that my longstanding approach to B2B, once we're above sole proprietor— so another way to think about it is if there's more than one gatekeeper or there's more than one potential person within the company who could in fact be the decision maker, which is the situation that you've described. My own longstanding approach is to market into that company on, at multiple title levels, both from the standpoint of fishing and trying to drive conversation. From one per— one person down to the buyer or up to the actual buyer. So if I were running what you were doing and I identified a list of really appropriate businesses, and so for example, you're going into Texas and Oklahoma because a good percentage of the original pencil drawings you sell have to do with oil rigs and all of that, right?

Right, right.

Yeah. So, so let's say I have XYZ Petroleum Company, or I have the First National Bank of Dallas, or whatever, who I believe is a really appropriate prospect. I would simultaneously mail or some levels might be FedEx 3-day and others mail, I would— and I might use— because you have a catalog, I might use the same generic catalog but different cover letters. I would simultaneously communicate with the president or the CEO, with the head of human resources, —marketing people. With the marketing people, yep. So there might be 3 or 4 levels that I would go to at the same time.

That's interesting. That, oddly, don't think of that. What we're having great luck with this Christmas season is the barf bag mailer, and that's a little cheeky. We got a little bit of heat, but good-natured heat. "And the COVID letter is essentially, if you're still giving your clients gift baskets for Christmas, you might want to include this." And then, you know, we have the nice alternative. Instead of the gift basket, give my framed limited edition prints. And that's been working terrifically. And another thing we've been dabbling with in a test is, I've been doing it on sort of a referral basis. When somebody says, You know who you should talk to, rather than phone them or just send them something. Do it with some rudimentary homework as to why I should speak to them. But I'll send them a framed print right out of the bat, saying, you know, because the numbers work, because at a dozen, you know, that's just about a $2,500 order. So I can, you know, I can— the margin works to give a freebie.

And that's as close to 100% response rate as I've gotten. Yeah, and that is, as you point out, I mean, you need to be sure. But as I think you know, many moons ago, I, with two other partners, owned a business with some considerable similarity to yours in that we sold eagles. Eagles, yeah, yeah, we talked about it. Not onesie-twosie to consumers, but to companies and businesses and organizations principally that used them as awards. So our primary product was a brass eagle about— oh, I don't know, 6 inches, 8 inches high on a wood base that you could stick a plaque on the front of it. And then we had a lot more expensive stuff. And we even had pencil drawings, incidentally, original pencil drawings that we commissioned an artist to do, which we printed and sold in limited editions. Unlike yours that actually are limited, ours were limited to the number that we could sell. But, and like you, we had a catalog and so forth. And because it was eagle, I mean, we sold naturally to the Boy Scouts of America and the US Navy and Philadelphia Eagles football team and so forth. But the eagle in the direct sales industry is used a lot. So a lot of the buyers were big Amway distributors and bigger Herbalife distributors and so forth. And there's no directory of them, but one tells you about another. And so when we had a qualified lead like that, much like you described, we took one of the Eagles, we had the base engraved for that person, and we shipped it to him. And it's nearly 100% kill rate. So, you know, that to the— see, you may want to think about pushing that harder since we know it works. I mean, you may want to give every client a formalized thing by which they can award a free print to somebody making it clear that you're doing it to get referrals to people like them. Now, a few of them are going to burn you, of course, and have you given a free print to Aunt Millie, but most of them are going to play fair.

Well, especially if they've done business. I mean, yeah, our business is pretty personality-driven. Like, you know, I mean, I get Christmas cards from people I have no idea who they are, but 'Cause I send them Christmas cards, right?

Well, yeah, you put out a personality-driven newsletter and so forth. I mean, if people aren't, what's a website where people can see your stuff? They can see the current version at pencilneck.com. Okay, people oughta go look. But, you know, because your business is personality-driven, that makes sense. And for that reason, you won't get burned much. Right, right. You know? So ultimately, I don't have an answer for how to shortcut this process well en masse. I mean, you can get— so if you think about it, whether they'd rent to you or not is another discussion altogether, but let's assume we went and we rented, say, the successories catalog list. Right. Or Omaha Steaks would be another one. Omaha Steaks would be another one, just at their business addresses. Right. Still, whoever is getting that catalog may very well not be the person who's making the buying decisions. True. That's what we're finding. It may be the secretary who got given the job of filling out the order form. And so there's a lot of slop in that process. Now, it's still probably worth doing, but it's not really a solution to what you're asking for.

The solution to what you're asking for is grunt work multiplied. That's right. That's right. And running a phone room is, yeah, forget it. You know, you get 19-year-olds, you've got a proven script that works every time, that Somebody knows what they're doing, can do it in their sleep, and then you get some 19-year-old that wants to do it their way.

They can't sell anything. And yeah, but we're not asking them to sell anything, we're just asking them to get names. That's true. And, and we don't need a 19-year-old, we need a good solid, uh, 52-year-old, uh, woman who wants to work from home. Yep. Yeah, I agree. And on that note, we'll give somebody another chance.

It was nice chatting with you.

Thanks for the tip.

Okay, Owen. Thank you. Take care. Our next question comes from Baj.

Baj, please state your question. Thank you. Thank you, Dan, for these calls. I'm a fairly new member to the inside circle. Well, welcome. Thank you. As I move my website from what I'm calling a static brochure type website to a more dynamic active website, website, which of course you wisely extol and utilize. Who would I— who are some of the members that can provide that, who understand the Kennedy approach? And of course you wouldn't know if they'd understand what my market is and what I'm going— what I'm trying to attempt myself.

But who might I go to of all the the swimmers out there? Okay, good question. Thank you. One to which I'm also still going to give you an unsatisfactory answer, but I'll try and give you a helpful answer. All right. So first of all, of course you're right, is you want to use your terminology, dynamic, not static. Specifically, you want to make sure you have early capture. Yeah. So that you have a list building function going on that facilitates follow-up functions going on. The second thing I'll tell you is you want good models. Yeah. So you want to look at different member sites and see how they function. And find 2 or 3 that have some analogy to what you're doing that appear to be functioning very well. So you will often find in the newsletter people's websites listed with things they've sent in or responses to them. Owen just gave out his website because I remembered to ask him, and so You want good models, and they can serve one of two purposes. One, they can help you with any vendor provider doing the work. B, if you find a member site that you— that really resonates and appears to be done along the lines that you need yours done, rather than asking me email them as a fellow GKIC member and say, hey, who did your site? And that's probably the best way to navigate this path.

Our next question comes from Julie. Julie, please state your question. Hi, Dan. This is Julie Yes Dalloway from the Client Stampede.

Hey, how are you?

I'm good. How are you? I'm doing fine. So I'm a direct response copywriter and business coach, and my question I guess it really relates to information marketing. You've talked a lot about you don't want to actually teach because you don't want teachers' wages, which makes perfect sense. But I guess the problem or the challenge that I've got is how do you reconcile that with the notion that the more you tell, the more you sell from an information marketing perspective?

Well, so I have a formula for you, but But beforehand, the axiom or cliché from sales training that says the more you tell, the more you sell, which dates back to the '50s, it refers to two things, neither one of which have to do with the dispensing of information. One, it is instruction to both salespeople and to copywriters to favor long form over short form. Right. So it really was intended to say don't shortcut a good sales presentation, not to say conduct a class. And secondly, it refers to, if you fleshed it out, The more you tell about features and benefits that are relevant and meaningful to your prospect, the more you sell. Again, it's an admonition not to shortcut, not an advocacy of education and information over persuasion and salesmanship. Now, specific to your question as an infomarketer, so here's here's a formula to consider, and it is a formula that actually plays fair with people. It serves as demonstration of expertise and value, but it does not give away the store. And the formula is teach what to do, not how to do it. And so, for example, if you were to go find— and it's in several places— if you were to go find, or if you had heard the speech that I used most often to sell magnetic marketing, well, that speech teaches only to a point. And so, for example, it teaches what a unique selling proposition is. Well, first of all, it teaches the triangle: marketing message, media, and market. And so it teaches that there is such a thing as a marketing message and that you ought to have one. And that most people don't. It teaches a component part of a marketing message, unique selling proposition, what it is. It gives an example of it so you might recognize it if you saw it, but it does not actually teach you how to sit down in a room and go through all the component parts of your business and come up with a unique selling proposition. It teaches sequential mailing versus one-step mailing, but it doesn't really equip anybody to sit down and build a sequential mailing. Somebody extraordinarily astute and determined, purely as a result of that speech, might be able to go do that. But for most people— another way to think of it— for most people, what it does is create clear awareness of useful things they ought to have or be doing that they don't have or aren't doing, but it does not actually equip them to go do them. Got it. Now there's value in the awareness alone, right? So if somebody is wandering around getting doors slammed on them and thrown out of places of businesses and rejected left and right and didn't know that in polite society you were supposed to wear pants. The first person who sits them down and explains to them that you're supposed to wear pants, he taught them something quite useful. But all he really did was make them aware of the fact that they ought to wear pants. He didn't tell him where to go buy pants. He didn't tell him how to get pants the right size. He didn't tell him how to color coordinate pants with the other items in his wardrobe. The list of what he didn't tell him is long indeed. But the awareness alone plays fair. It does have value, but it really sets the stage now for selling. The mistake that most info marketers make is they don't view all of their communications as sales and persuasion. They view them as instruction and education with a commercial tacked on. The amateur speaker, for example, will, if he's got a 60-minute time slot, he will do 50 minutes of true education. Here's what to do. Here's how to do it. Here's a demonstration of it. And then at the end, he'll stick a commercial on. Whereas the adept presenter will make the whole speech about, here's what to do. Here's why to do it. Here's the 12 component parts of it, but never crossing the line into how to do it and seamlessly moving into If you are ready to do all these things, here are the tools in order to do them.

And here is the order form to get the tools. Do you see the difference? Yeah, definitely.

That really helps.

Thank you. Sorry, go ahead, Dan. No, go ahead. So I guess sort of following on the same lines then, when you are creating information products, you've obviously, your whole catalog is enormous. So when you are creating information products on a specific topic, I mean, kind of like you said, you're not giving away the whole farm. I'm assuming that you've got a specific— when you create a product, you've got a specific strategy in terms of how this fits in your overall market need, and then what the upsell would be from that, what would be the related products that you could sell on that.

Ideally, yes. As confession, there are products in GKIC that do not have a natural what's next, what's next, what's next. And many of them have grown out of an event. So in many cases, they are literally the bulk of the event productized. And that's easy and convenient, but it does not actually create the succession of what's next, what's next, what's next. If you look at other— magnetic marketing, for example, is built that way from the ground up. And designed to set up the next sale and the next sale and the next sale. Ideally, information products fulfill their promises, but either directly or indirectly set up a next and may in fact also contribute to retention or ascension. And so you're right, under ideal circumstances, you are thinking through not just the delivery of the promised information, but your own agenda for what you want the product to accomplish. That's really true, by the way, in businesses other than info marketing. So almost everybody makes this mistake in having an end point. So for the fellow that owns the shoe store, he thinks that the sale of a pair of shoes is an outcome and an endpoint, a crossing of a finish line, rather than thinking of it as a spot setting up a next on a never-ending journey. Relationship with the customer. So everybody sort of makes this mistake, and under ideal circumstances, you have given clear thought to what you want to happen next, what you want the product to stimulate to happen next, what the sequence of events ought to look like so that it fairly meets its promises and serves its users' purposes, but it also serves yours.

[Speaker:JESSICA] And then when you're, I guess, when, you know, in the new economy where, you know, sales resistance is high and basically consumers, businesses want a lot more for their money, like how, I guess, the other challenge that I have is how do you, you know, deliver and almost over-deliver without, as you say, completely giving away the farm? I guess my tendency is just to, you know, completely dive off at the other end and I give so much additional stuff away.

Well, you don't even necessarily help anybody by doing that. Okay. Somebody can only swallow so much water at a time, and so if you connect them to a fire hose, you run the risk of drowning them rather than sating their thirst. So see, if you think about value, You can't think about value in terms of bulk. You have to think about terms of value in terms of value to the end user. So in a business setting, you or I are selling— you and I are fundamentally selling products and services to business owners that one way or another are going to increase their sales, increase their profits, help them acquire new customers. Or help them get customers they have to come back more often. So the achievement of that objective is really what we're selling. And 3 good strategies that the person can and will implement to get that done is at least as valuable as 30 strategies when they're only going to implement 3 of them anyway., and may in fact be more valuable than the 30 because we keep them focused and we move them ahead. And so the 30 is not 30 times more valuable than 1 or 10 times more valuable than 3, and we don't make the 3 more valuable by piling on 27 more.

We might, but that's certainly not the The only way to create value. Okay? Got it. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you all for being on this month's call. I hope you found it useful. 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 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. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in 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 in your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.