Advanced Magnetic Marketing

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about advanced magnetic marketing with Dan Kennedy. This is a session that he did that's focused on an entire approach to marketing that sustained itself for over 34 years. This is not some fly-by-night stuff, but things that worked yesterday, today, and will continue to work forever. So I hope you enjoy this session with Dan Kennedy on advanced magnetic marketing.

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 risk. 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. Dan Kennedy. All right, what we're supposed to be doing is, um, advanced magnetic marketing, which— how many of you, um, own one version or another of the Magnetic Marketing System? Okay, and by the way, you'll all— when I ask a question like that, there's more to be learned by looking that way than there is looking this way, say, because there's a lesson in all this. So let's try it again. How many of you own one version or another of Magnetic Marketing? One more time. There's more to be learned looking that way than there is looking this way. Nothing in those 30 seconds that I'm gonna do up here is that fascinating, okay? Now, how many of you found your way here as the first point of entry by Magnetic Marketing? Raise your hands. There's more to be learned by looking— there you go, okay, a lot of folks. What we're going to talk about this morning, as near as we can tell, because it's hard to monitor piracy on eBay and multiple Xeroxed copies made by fools willing to stand at Xerox machines for 12 hours and so forth, but as near as we can tell, There are 2.5 million people who've seen me present it. Now again, it's hard to count the ones leaving while you're talking, but give or take, 2.5 million people have seen it. $65 million worth of that product you raised your hand that say you own sold in its lifetime. And roughly 200 business niches substantially influenced if not, with no disrespect intended, the guru in that niche, having taken magnetic marketing and inserted plumber and gotten their start that way, with my sanction, by the way. So what— keep in mind what we're gonna look at this morning is the basis for an entire approach to marketing that has sustained itself over 34 years. Now of course you want what's advanced, that's why you came here, right? And in some respects, advanced is a review because there is a tendency the longer you do anything, so marketing, the longer you do it, to get further and further away from fundamental things that make it work or make it not work. Most of you know I own racehorses and harness racing horses, which are the ones— not the kind in the Kentucky Derby, but the kind that pull the little carts, for those that— and I'm here working for Oates, so you should be glad. If you enjoy yourself this morning, be glad I own them. 'Cause people ask me, "Why are you still doing this?" That's why. Oats and vet bills. One of the interesting things about racehorses, harness racing horses, is unlike thoroughbred horses, the kind you'll see on the Kentucky Derby— pretty much thoroughbred horses, the kind you'll see on the Kentucky Derby if you catch a rerun of it on Saturday, 'cause you'll be in session when it happens, but those horses don't wear a lot of equipment. Harness racing horses wear a ton of equipment. So if you come for a barn tour, if you're in Ohio with me at any time and you come back to the barns, you will see millions of pieces of equipment in the barn. And so there are, I think to pass the trainer's test, there's 130 different bits you have to memorize for different purposes. There's head poles that go on this side or the other. There's all kinds of boots. There's straightening bars that go on the sulky. There's 5 different kinds of head poles. They sometimes have a big spiky burr on this side. Sometimes they don't. There's elastic straps. There's jock supports for the studs that are still stud. There's spreaders for the ones that bang their legs together. There's equipment up the wazoo. When you buy an older horse, so a 7, 8, 9, 10-year-old horse— they race until they're 14— you find usually that they come wearing a lot of this equipment. And here's why. Over the period of their lifetime, they've gone from maybe 3 trainers, 4 trainers, 5 trainers, 6 trainers. They've moved through a variety of barns. And every place they've moved, somebody has added equipment. Nobody's taken anything off to see if it's still necessary. They've just added more stuff on. So by the time you get this 8-year-old horse, he is pretty much wearing everything but the kitchen sink and a trailer. Everything else has already been attached to this thing because people have just kept adding stuff on without ever testing to see, gee, is this thing still necessary? Who knows why this was put on? And ultimately what you do is you strip it all off and you start from scratch. Marketing to me, especially when I work with clients who have fairly large companies and have been at it for a long time, they've pretty much done the same thing. They've just kept adding stuff on, and they're doing more and more and more, and they've complicated and complicated and complicated, and they've arrived at a place where often they have drifted away from the key things that make marketing either work or don't work. So one of the things we're going to do this morning, not only is there new and is there quote-unquote advanced, but there is review of the things that make this tick. I have one other quick preface comment for you. At the risk of offending some, but most know better, it's just convenient slang, but you ought not be deluded by the convenient slang. There is no such thing as internet marketing, social media marketing, any more than there is newspaper marketing. Or Valpak marketing. Truthfully, there's not even any such thing as infomarketing, although we, again, call it that 'cause it's convenient slang. Social media, internet, newspaper, radio, TV, billboards, imprinted pencils, baseball caps with logos on, they are all the same thing. They are not a business, first of all. So if you walk around saying you're in the internet marketing business, That's like walking around saying, "I'm in the baseball caps with logo wearing business." It's not a business. It's not marketing. It is media. It's the way— it's a tool with which we do marketing. You ought not confuse the two things because you keep adding stuff on sometimes with no good reason other than the fact that it exists. So technology is one thing. Marketing is another. Media is one thing, marketing is another. We will be talking about marketing all the way through this morning. Magnetic marketing was built originally, and if I have time, I'm gonna talk a little bit about its origins in a few minutes, but it was built originally basically for two groups: salespeople and small business owners. And so salespeople Here is the formula that I was taught when I started in sales, and pretty much every salesperson is taught. They were taught it in 1950. That's not when I started. They were taught it in 1950. They were taught it in the 1970s when I started, and today, this very day as we sit here, there are sales managers and sales trainers all across the country probably all across the world, with 8 people in a room, 80 people in a room, 800 people in a room, still teaching the exact same methodology that was taught by the— I presume Christ got the 12 disciples together for the sales training meeting and said, "Here's what we're gonna do." So the sales formula was this. Now I don't have time to tell you the joke, so I'm just gonna give you the punchline. Okay? You all ought to know the joke, and if you don't, somebody next to you knows the joke. You can get it on a break. Okay? But the sales formula is, "Yeah, I get slapped a lot, but I get a lot too." Okay? That's the whole approach to selling that has been there since the beginning of time. Go out there, Get slapped a lot, and hopefully, law of averages says, every once in a while, somebody is gonna say yes. That's, that's the whole thing. You can summarize every sales training program pretty much that's ever been written right to that. So what's the flaw in that? Well, it requires two things. A, it requires a lot of selling skill. To survive doing that, you've got to get really, really, really good, which most people aren't willing to do. Secondly, maybe more importantly, it requires the willingness to get slapped a lot, which is sort of unpleasant, right? So it requires incredible persistence for somebody to get up every morning and go out into the field or go down into their retail store or go into their showroom or go into their professional practice office knowing they're gonna spend the day getting slapped. And maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe next Thursday somebody's actually going to say yes. That takes incredible persistence. But that's the whole approach to selling that has existed all through the ages. So here's what it delivers: erratic results, because some days people can take getting slapped a lot better than others. If they had a motivational speech that morning, they can go a little longer getting slapped than if they didn't have a motivational speech. If they just came from a 3-day seminar, they got 3 or 4 days of that in them before they run out of gas. If they just had a victory and somebody actually said yes, they're more likely to really go for 3 or 4 days and take getting slapped. If they've gone 2 weeks without a victory, they start to slow down. So you get really erratic results. Secondly, you burn out. Either you or salespeople you're making do it, they run out of gas with this. They just don't want to get slapped anymore. So now pretty much we hide is what salespeople do, right? So now we do busywork. So that used to be, oh, filing prospect files and updating the card file. Of course, that all went away with software, so then it became something else. The current place to hide is it's easier to get slapped at a distance than face-to-face, so salespeople hide Twittering, because so what, right? So you get erratic results, you get burnout, you tend to take yourself out of the confrontational situation. Also, you do damage to your long-term customer value because people who say yes to this approach to selling often regret it after they have said yes. The way I've explained this in the past is rapists don't get a lot of Valentine's Day cards. Okay? Excuse my voice. I imagine they get some, to be politically incorrect, but not many. So the prospect who feels they've been bullied, pushed, forced into a sale generally doesn't feel very good about it afterwards. So we're also hurting long-term customer value. Now the business owner model for many, many, many years has been this: How can we get to the greatest number of eyeballs at the lowest cost, grab attention, and multiply it by repetition? So every business owner, here's how they spend their advertising dollars, here's what they've done since somebody invented advertising, is how can I get the greatest number of eyeballs, how can I do it at the cheapest possible cost, No thought about comparative value of the eyeballs. How can I grab the attention of the greatest number of those eyeballs? And then, since that doesn't work very well, how can I repeat it over and over and over and over and over again? So what's the flaw in that? Well, all the money spent creating brand idea, identity, name recognition, Product awareness, even buzz, all that money is spent reaching mostly people who cannot or will not buy the thing that is being advertised. So there is massive waste. Now in recent years, the massive waste has been affordable. Because there's been so many people buying so much stuff indiscriminately without thinking about it. And by the way, if you've been doing really, really, really well like in 2005 and 2006, maybe 2004, I hate to tell you this, but a lot of that was not due to your incredible talent and expertise. It was due to the fact that the nation was full of people taking $15,000 at a crack out of their houses every 4 months and buying anything that wasn't nailed down. So a lot of people didn't have to be really good. Money was actually flowing uphill. All of a sudden that changed, didn't it? And so the waste now really is not affordable. When I built Magnetic Marketing, it was originally called the Small Business Emergency Survival System. That was its original title. Magnetic marketing is better, but nonetheless at the time, and it was built specifically during the Carter recession, which by the way, people who think that we've just been in a recession, they have no idea if they didn't, if they weren't doing business during the Carter administration. Double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, double-digit unemployment, and gas lines. So people were standing in line to get gas, not iPads. In this recession, they were standing in line outside the Apple Store. That's where they were, okay? By the way, all that tells you, if by chance you haven't been doing well, is the guys at Apple are smarter than you are. That's all that tells you, okay? So it was built during the recession because in that recession, the waste was no longer affordable. Right now, the waste is no longer affordable, and for some time to come, the waste is no longer affordable. So it was built in the early '70s, 1972, 1973, somewhere around there. To give you some frame of reference, in 1973, which by the way, well, I'll tell you in a second. So in 1973, Steinbrenner bought the Yankees for $12 million. I believe now the waterboy has a 3-year, $12 million a year contract. The life expectancy was 71 years. The life expectancy is, of course, much better today for women. A new house was $32,500. Just as it is today in New Orleans, Houston. The average income was $12,000. A new car was— the average price was $39,050. This is a car I currently own, which I bought a new one at the time just like this. In 1973 for about $3,900. This one, by the way, costs $39,000, which makes no sense whatsoever, but you could also go to Harvard for $3,000 in 1973. And so in 1973, I began my life of well-thought-out choices. I bought that car. I did not go to Harvard. They're roughly the same price. Okay, so, so here's what's going on in advertising, right? Then and now, okay? So we've switched, we got all kinds of new media, all kinds of different media, but here's what we're doing. We're still buying and counting raw numbers. We're still thinking about maximum number of eyeballs at the lowest possible price. How could we spend the least get the most number of people to pay attention to us with no discrimination about who's paying attention to us. We are still broadcasting, not targeting. We were doing it in the '70s, we're doing it now. In selling, we're still afraid to qualify and quickly discard prospects. We want to talk to everybody. We're still out there hunting. We're still out there getting slapped a lot. We're still telling the raw number story to our salespeople and to ourselves. So the sum total of this is everybody's just as stupid as they were in 1973, '74, '75, maybe even dumber. They just have more media to be dumb with. Okay? That's the deal. Alright? So, if you want to get smart about this, then this morning's pretty important. So magnetic marketing was invented for a number of reasons. One, it was to change these flawed situations. It was about how can we, as salespeople, stop getting slapped a lot in order to get a yes every once in a while. How can we change that? As business people, how can we cut out the waste? How can we change that? It was by its nature contrarian because— and you guys all know this, you have heard me talk about it endlessly, and everybody nods in agreement. Bill just made it part of the oath for the young entrepreneurs who are here, and everybody nods. Yep, the majority is wrong, and then they go right on doing the same stuff that the majority is doing. They all nod and they all keep doing it. It's like the litmus test is what I'm doing what the majority is doing, and if it is, odds are, at least in terms of financial results, it's wrong, not right. So it's not hard to look at what is everybody doing with advertising, What is everybody doing with prospecting? Well, let's not do that. Guys, if you want to stay with me, please. Let me control this for a second. Um, thank you. So it was about being contrarian. Then it was about eliminating repetitive manual labor for salespeople and business owners alike. And it was for different, better customer relationships, which I just talked about. And last, it was for better differentiation by process. And now you can switch back to me. Thank you. It was by better differentiation of process. Now here's why that's real important now. Now, maybe more than ever, Jack Trout's line, "Differentiate or die," is extremely apropos, right? Because people either are or at least feeling like they should be a little more thoughtful about how they spend their money. Now that's not going to change anytime soon. You probably all have either parents or grandparents who came through the Depression. How many have a parent or probably a grandparent who lived during the Depression? Raise your hands. By the way, when I do that, you learn more by looking. See, I don't get that. Everybody laughs at that and then they keep looking at me. I ain't getting any better looking up here in the next minute. There's nothing to see. So just about everybody raised their hands. So if you have parents or grandparents who lived through the Depression, they came away with a permanent Depression hangover. Well, they did. Their behavior— when was that? When was the Depression? Yeah, '30s. Their behavior is still governed by that experience today. They still do certain things, particularly with regard to money, consumable products, okay? They do things today based on the experience they had in the 1930s. It affected them profoundly, in part because nobody was standing in line at the Apple Store. People were standing in line at the Apple cart, not at the Apple Store. But it affected them profoundly Okay? Same thing's gonna be true to a lesser extent now. The recession will be gone long before the recession hangover will be gone. People will carry that further into the new economy than any reality. And the main part of the recession hangover is a feeling that we should be a little less loose with our behavior when it comes to spending. So some people take that to be more thoughtful, analytical. Some people take that to never making an impulse buy now. Some people will take that to all different kind of extremes, but they will be more thoughtful. That means they will be more demanding of differentiation. They are not going to be happy about me too, same as, okay, whatever side of the street it's on, we'll give it money. That's gone for a long time to come. So now when you think about differentiation, there's only a few places that you can possibly create differentiation. You can create differentiation by price, you can create differentiation actually by inherent product differences, which are rare, you can create differentiation by person, You can create differentiation by process. Process being how people arrive in your hands, what happens to them when they're in your hands, and what happens to them immediately after the first transaction and each subsequent transaction. That's process, right? And so you can create differentiation, very important differentiation, by your marketing process itself Because the 3 things that affect how people feel about you and about the purchases they make, and their feelings are more important than the realities. Why are feelings more important than the realities? Well, because 90% of the people don't use 90% of what they buy. Doesn't matter. They buy clothes, they hang in the closet, they never wear them. They buy exercise devices, they put them in the garage, they never use them. They, they buy an extra car, they hardly drive it. They got appliances under the, under the counter in the kitchen that get used 2 or 3 times a year. Certainly in our business, they got product with shrink wrap on it, a coat of dust, cobwebs, spiders living on the small crevice where the shrink wrap dips at the top of the notebook. Alright? So how people feel is more important than the reality. The second reason it's more important is because generally people don't have a good way to comparatively judge reality. So you go get dental care, you go get chiropractic care, you don't split test it. You don't get the same dental work done by 4 different dentists and then determine who was the best. You don't do that. You don't have any good means of knowing whether what you bought is great, good, just whether or not it works. But you have no comparative analysis. So how you feel, how the customer feels, is much more important in terms of long-term customer value, referrals, all that good stuff. It's more important than the reality. The biggest thing that controls how customers feel is— how they were sold. The process by which they came to you and made their purchase. So differentiation by process is really, really useful. Magnetic marketing is about changing the process by which people come to you and then buy. To talk quickly about its origins. When I first began working on it and really began thinking about it, one of the first points of impulse, I was very, very broke, and I wasn't doing a great deal. I was getting a lot of mail, and it was all from collection agencies. You don't get a lot of mail from friends generally when you're broke. It's a little lesson there. But so I'm getting all this mail from collection agencies. I don't have really much going on. I'm kind of bored, so I pay attention to it. And the collection industry has a model that they use, which is First notice, second notice, third notice. Each one clearly refers to the one they sent you before, and they get sterner as they go along, ending with final notice. Occasionally, there's another step. I was living in Phoenix at the time, and I had borrowed, hmm, I don't know, $5,000, $6,000 on a loan from a company like Household Finance, actually a company called City Loan, but they're Household Finance, Beneficial Finance if you know them., and as collateral, I had put up a car that they thought was valuable that actually wasn't, and ultimately, not only did I get the 3 letters and the final notice, but I got the manager from the city loan office who flew all the way across the country and arrived at my apartment door drunk because he was going to lose his job if he didn't collect my loan, and he slept on my couch in my apartment before he went home in the morning. That— now, that's sort of an extreme sequence, Okay? But by the way, he didn't get any money, but, you know, you got to give him kudos for, you know, persistence and determination. But generally you get these 3 notices, and then you usually get a final notice. And so the thought that occurred to me is if— I mean, and I'm getting it from everybody, okay? So I'm thinking. If everybody's doing it, everybody's doing it. Big companies, small companies, it's got to be getting money from somebody or they couldn't keep continuing to mail it, right? So that's possible. Secondly, if it's getting money from people offering them nothing, I mean, there's not even a bonus. I mean, so if it's getting money from people offering them nothing, And it's getting money from people who presumably haven't got any. Huh, wonder what would happen if we tried it on people who got money and offered them something. So that's like the first germ of where this came from. Another is there's a thing in the real estate industry I don't have time to teach this morning called farming, but that contributed to it. The direct marketing industry contributed to it. The realization that people generally back away from predators if they can contributed to it, and study of really old stuff, which I know a lot of people don't get. We're going to talk a little bit about the importance of history tomorrow night, but magnetic marketing actually— maybe I'll have time to show you this tomorrow night— magnetic marketing actually had some of its origins in 1926. And so if we have time, I'll show you that tomorrow night. So it's sort of a complex matrix of ideas and sources of information went into these basic premises. Now, these have also evolved over the years, so these are the current key premises of magnetic marketing. One is that time and talent or skill and/or a sales event, meaning when someone is face-to-face, nose-to-nose, on the phone, or at an order form, a sales event, but time, talent, and skill is enormously valuable and ought not to be wasted. So, the Cleveland Clinic, where my doctor is, makes their money by having doctors do things to patients. They do not have their number one cardiac surgeon subbing for the receptionist when she goes to lunch. Now, that may come about under Obamacare, but it's not happening. It's not happening now. How do you know if you have Obamacare? The directions to your doctor's office include, turn left when you enter the trailer park. There's a million of them. Okay, so they don't have their cardiac surgeon answering the phones. Therefore, if we have a highly skilled salesperson, you or someone working for you, we ought not have them spending a whole lot of time prospecting, getting their face slapped. Their skill is in selling. If we have a really great marketing campaign, we ought not be wasting money putting it in front of eyeballs that can't respond to it. So the first premise is time-talent sales events are extremely valuable and ought to be treated as if they are extremely valuable. Second, selling against resistance, poor use of time skill leads to all sorts of bad things. Three, This is fairly— this evolved. This was not an original premise, so we can call this an advanced premise. People prepared to accept ideas, propositions, products, to have a good experience, people properly prepared are more likely to do what you want than those who aren't prepared. That's why door-to-door selling is so hard. How many in here have ever actually gone cold door-to-door, knock on a door, stick your foot in the door and sell something? You'll learn more by looking in the other direction than looking at me. A lot of hands. Okay. Well, you all know that's a tough game. Why? Because the person on the other side of the door has zero preparation for your arrival. None. You interrupted them. They were doing something else. They feel threatened by somebody at the door. They're unhappy about being interrupted. They're in a different frame of mind. Zero preparation. So that's the hardest kind of selling there is to do in the world. What does that tell you conceptually? Somewhere at the opposite extreme of that is the easiest kind of selling to do in the world. So the smart question is, how do we get from here over to whatever that is so we get to do easy selling We do it with properly prepared prospects. There's a concept I'll talk about Saturday night called the delayed sale. So that's a premise. Fourth premise: who you are selling to is more important than anything else. That's also an evolved, fairly advanced premise of magnetic marketing. Fifth, you must appear to be magnetic to others. Nobody wants to be the only one attracted. 6, products or services are rarely inherently magnetic. And if you can't get past selling stuff, you're really stuck. Especially now. Everybody's got all the stuff they need. How many of you bought an iPad? Keep your hands up if you already owned an iPhone. Well, what the hell do you need an iPad for? It's the same piece of stuff, it's just bigger. What, you want to be sure everybody at Starbucks knows you got it? People are going to be like Flava Flav, wearing it around their neck on a great big gold chain. Look at my, look at my thing, you know? Hmm? Well, because it's not about the thing, At all. 7, pursuit's okay. It is necessary, but it has to feel like it's not pursuit. So let's look at the old and the new, or basic and advanced magnetic marketing real quick. Okay. So basic was about target marketing, the market. If you know my triangle, here's the triangle. Okay. But basically we talked about geography, geography plus demographics, and affinity. Now, the target market, selection is more important, investment in selection is more important, more sophisticated selection is more important, and segmentation is more important. Messages, always worked on the message. The newest thing is different messages for different segments. The more personalized, the more customized, okay? And then delivery of message is still basically the same, multi-step, multimedia. So, let's quickly talk about each one. Selection of target market, okay? The more extreme the discrimination, the better. So, when I work with a client now, One of my first questions is, who can we stop talking to? Who can we not spend any money on? So A, we don't waste money, and B, we don't waste with an unfocused message. I just had a client, for example, fairly successful, they're direct mailing, lead generation, driving people to websites where the sales are occurring. So offline to online. They mail about 200,000 pieces a month. So they're not big, but they're not, you know, a small repair shoe shop either. They mail about 200,000 pieces a month. They rent the lists. They mail to certain demographic information about their buyers. Guess what they've never done in 12 years? You ready? They've never looked at where the buyers are. Never looked. I found 12 states we don't ever need to mail to. One of them is California. Now that's rare, but it's a great find. Why is it such a great find? Because there's a lot of people in California. We could save a fortune by not mailing into California. And California is one of their 3 least productive states. They never looked. So my question is always, who can we stop talking to? I want to discriminate against as much as I can, okay? Now, that means it's all about buying quality, not quantity, which, understand, is completely contrary to what everybody does. They're all about quantity. Magnetic message. It links. Now we want different messages for different segments. How could we slice and dice our customers or our prospects, whether online or offline, wherever it is we finally talk to them, and talk to them Differently. One of the problems of platform selling— so I'll give you a quick example of how the who matters. First of all, if you speak and sell from the platform, you quickly determine that generally the who matters a lot. Who's in the audience matters enormously. And the best of the best of the best can get their head handed to them on a stick and walk out the door empty-handed if they're really in front of a group they shouldn't be in front of. In front of. Now, for almost 10 years, I did the big success events. Many of you know. That was the most mixed audience. The only thing they had in common, fortunately, was mindset, but they were from hundreds of different businesses and occupations and age groups and all that. So you couldn't hone in. You had to deliver a big, broad message and try and quickly touch this person, that person with one remark, one statement. One idea, one testimonial, and try and hit the 20 or 30 that there were the most of in the room, but you couldn't hone in. If you looked at percentages, percentages, maybe somebody like me was selling 1%, 2% of the room. In big audiences like that, you don't even talk about percentages, you talk about dollars per head, actually. Now, For 7 years, I had a seminar business that put people in seats and a speaker sold them stuff. We only put chiropractors and dentists in the seats. We only put 35 to 50 in the room at a time, not 10,000. And we spoke chiropractic and dental to them for 3.5 hours. Close rate was 90%. 3%? 90%. Why? Because of precision match of message. So the more precise you can be— so even with your customer list, see, you think you have a customer list, you should probably have 50 customer lists. And you should be running 50 different marketing campaigns under one roof, some tweaked a little, some tweaked a lot, okay, but segmentation is extremely important. Yesterday I had a lunch for people who've been around 10 years or longer, been with me for a long time, most of them dating into the '70s. We served soft food. And we talked— one of the things we talked about yesterday is the 5 House Rule from the direct sales industry. And the 5 House Rule from the direct sales industry is that— Howard, you can teach this, right? The 5 House Rule in the direct sales industry is wherever you have a customer, that customer either knows or is known by the person who lives on either side of them across the street and the person who lives on either side of the person who lives across the street. So it's one, you It's 1 equals 5, okay? So every customer equals 5 prospects. The 5 prospects either at least know the customer by name, and the customer probably knows them well by name. Now, direct sales, direct salespeople are all taught that. They all understand that. Most of them don't do anything about it, but the ones who do, that's who they prospect as soon as they make a sale is the 5 houses. Hardly anybody in any other business does it. Small business level restaurant owners don't do it. Auto repair shop owners don't do it. Chiropractors don't do it. Dentists don't do it. Nobody does it on a small scale. On a big national scale, like, nobody does it. Nobody. Now today it's very doable. It's just nobody does it. Okay? But if it works for the vacuum cleaner sales guy in Tupelo, there's no reason it won't work for my weight loss client who mails a bazillion pieces of mail, because every customer, we can get the 5 people who live around that customer, and we can send them a letter that says, "The next time you see Barbara, your neighbor, be sure to ask her how she's lost so much weight. And if Barbara won't tell you her secret, we will. She's eaten our green glop." And you should buy our green glop too. Now that means you gotta take every customer, you gotta take the 5 houses around the street, you gotta personalize a message to them, and you gotta reference Barbara, alright? And you gotta tolerate every once in a while some Barbara calling you up all PO'd that you did it. But it's gonna be highly, highly effective because of the match. Delivery of message. Multimedia. More than one media. I don't care what the media is. So if you're doing direct mail and you're not using email and you're not texting— why not? If you're using email and you're not multimedia, multi-step, and a system designed to prepare the prospect. Now there's one critical neglected principle of magnetic marketing, and it's one a lot of people won't like, which is okay because I no longer care. I stopped about 5 or 6, 7 years ago. I don't care whether you like it or not anymore. Here it is. Selling one-to-one and selling in a competitive vacuum. It's a critical part of this process. Thus, you must move. You must move the prospect out of any environment where anybody but you is telling them your story at that moment. If you are gonna leave them there, So, trade show floor. My most successful client over the years in a profession at trade shows had the 3 gurus/closers up in a hotel suite. And everybody's job at the trade show booth was to either grab somebody immediately or schedule an appointment and move them upstairs to the hotel suite if they could answer 5 questions yes. Why? Because if I leave them on the trade show floor, there's 20 competitors there. I don't have their exclusive attention. I want their exclusive attention. So if you only talk to them, by the way, online and you leave them online, How tempting is it to click and go see what else there is in the category in which you've interested them? I want you to think about that. The object of magnetic marketing is to get to a point where we are selling in a competitive vacuum. By the way, this is my favorite current quote about the internet. It comes from the CEO of Google. In an article in Wall Street Journal. And he's right, it's like selling in a swamp. So you got to get them out of there. You got to get them out of anywhere where others are vying for their attention simultaneously in your category, however it is you do it. And magnetic marketing is all about that.

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