Break the Rules, Win the Market: Day with Dan Kennedy (2 of 4) | #Marketing - Ep. 16

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Now obviously if you want to sell stuff online, you're going to need a good funnel, but if you want a great funnel, then you're going to need to use ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels is the number one funnel builder in the world, helping more first-time entrepreneurs to leave their 9 to 5 and to launch their dream than any other company on earth. ClickFunnels was built for the dreamer and the doer, and you can get a free 14-day trial by going to clickfunnels.com/podcast right now. That's clickfunnels.com/podcast. ClickFunnels, because you're one funnel away from changing the world. This is The Russell Brunson Show. What's up everyone, this is Russell. Welcome back to the show. I hope you enjoyed last episode. You had a chance to sit in at Funnel Hacking Live, the VIP day with my interview with Dan Kennedy. We had a chance to dive into some really cool things and the feedback so far from you guys has been awesome. And that was just part 1 of 4 of my 2-hour interview I did with Dan, so today we're gonna jump into part number 2. And this is gonna be a really fun one. Some of the key highlights you're gonna learn about during this interview, one of the things Dan talked about Dan talks about is called the radical big idea. This is why every market leader has to have a bold message that cuts through the noise. We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about creating and taking the heretic position in your market and how challenging the industry experts will create instant loyalty and attract customers to you. Talk about the man on the white horse, which is one of my favorite things Dan talks about. Why most sales and marketing insiders give you really bad advice. Secrets to handling criticism and backlash and negativity. All your haters, things like that. And a whole bunch of other really cool things. So I hope you enjoy this next interview with Dan Kennedy. If you haven't plugged into the Dan Kennedy world, Dan is where I learned business from originally almost 20 years ago. I still to this day, the person I listen to the most on marketing and business advice is Dan Kennedy. I had a chance 3 or 4 years ago now to actually acquire and buy his company, and it's been so much fun to help grow that company and that brand again. And if you're not a member yet of his newsletter, the newsletter's amazing. If you go to nobsltr.com, it's the monthly newsletter It's like getting a seminar from Dan Kennedy delivered to your house every single month, and it's one of our favorite things we do here. So if you haven't plugged into the Dan Kennedy world yet, you need to, especially after listening to these interviews. And yeah, so nobsltr.com is where you go plug in. You get like $10,000 worth of Dan Kennedy stuff for free, and then we ship you out a newsletter every single month with cool Dan Kennedy stuff. So this newsletter has been running for 40+ years. It's like the longest running marketing and sales newsletter on the planet. I've been a subscriber now for almost 20 years. And if you're not a member yet, then you must hate money. That's the only logical explanation I can think of.

All right.

Other than that, we're going to jump right now into part number 2 of my exciting interview with Mr. Dan Kennedy.

So this is your radical big idea, which in my case was the whole damn thing you pitch is not a business. If you actually want a business, Here's right. And then the second thing you do is, it's linked, is your heretic position where you are outright taking on the wise elders, the authority, the church, the board, the the authority who you are saying is all wrong. And if not by name, certainly by title. I did a lot more work with sales audiences and salespeople than I did anything else in my early years. And If you go read the No BS Sales Success book, so I, in my magnetic marketing speech, it's very front of the speech. I told salespeople that their sales managers were idiots. Okay, the suits, if you're with a big company, you got a bunch of suits in an office tower somewhere. Right, who are basically bean counters. If you're with a smaller company, you got a sales manager, but he's a nitwit. First of all, he's really you who got promoted to be a manager. He doesn't know anything about how to help you sell more, and he's detrimental to you because he tells you to do what he did. Which is sales is a numbers game, make more calls, dial more. You know, if your income isn't good today, Russell, you're just not seeing enough people. You got to go see more people. Right? And I would say, if that guy hadn't got promoted to manager, he'd starve. Because you can see all the people you want, but if they're not a match with you and what you're doing, you're gonna starve, right? The whole thing is about getting in front of people who are like an 8 or a 9 or a 10 of ability to buy and willingness to buy. So my heretic position was kill all the sales managers, right? Which, by the way, I rarely got invited back. But I got a lot of customers because if there were 300 in a room, there were 100 who were already thinking it. And they're like, they're the first ones through the back to buy whatever it is. And they're now like glued to you with Velcro because you have spoken the truth., right? And they instinctively knew it, but nobody said anything different, right? So that's the second thing. You figure out what your heretic position is going to be. And then the third thing you figure out is what your man on the white horse position is going to be. Because ultimately, you have to have an alternative plan. Right? You have to now ride to the rescue. You can't just come in and blow up everything and walk out, right? There's no profit in that. So you have to have a man on the white horse position. So that now that I have shown you that these people out of ignorance or for their own purposes are selling you a really bad plan and you're working a really bad plan, I got the alternative. And I will happily lead you to the land of milk and honey. So you have to figure out those three things and then be able to advertise them, market them, broadcast them, right? Which we now do more through media than manual labor. Online and offline, right? Um, there's, uh, guys on the— can't think of their names. They're brothers. They mostly advertise on CNBC, on TV. They're all over the place online. Um, they're like the gurus of options trading. So they are appearing in the stock market media, where almost everybody else, the pundits, the guests, everybody on all, on Bloomberg, on all of them, right? They are all essentially pimps for stocks, either specific ones, or you got to be in the market, you got to be in the market, you got to be in the market. Right? And then a bunch of them are also buy and hold. You got to be in the market and don't worry about whether it goes down. Someday it'll come back, right? That's their pitch. So in the midst of all this, these two guys, they're running the free book campaign right now. They may even be a ClickFunnels user. Same company does them and does Charles Payne. So their whole argument is, don't buy stocks. Everything these people are telling you about stocks is wrong. You should only buy options. And here's the math difference. Here's a stock. In 3 weeks, you would have made 11%. That's real good. But with options, you would have made 260%, right? And so they've got this, okay? They have a radical idea for where they are, okay? Everybody that's talking to you about the stock market, that your eyes are glued to the Dow, and forget all that shit, right? And Here we are. We got the White Horse plan. You can make more money on one trade than you're making the whole year screwing around this way. Right? Now, of course, they don't mention how much you could lose, but, you know. So, so those are the 3 things you do, right? So in, like, we're speaking, I told you what I did. And basically I put them in what we now call the info marketing business, fed by customers acquired by their speaking, right? And Cairo, we put them in prepaid. And we taught them how to run a prepaid practice and a cash practice, no insurance. And, um, after showing them that what they were doing was just a horrible hamster wheel. I mean, pay by the visit is a really bad model, um, because people don't show up, you know, the dropout of treatment plans. And pay-by-visit is around 80%, no better than 50% if you're really, really, really, really good at it. Prepay, you kind of, if you've parted with $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000, you kind of tend to show up for your appointments. Yeah. And so, and you actually, it's actually good for the patient because they actually do the stuff at home they're supposed to do. To help themselves get better, right? So we installed Prepay as the man on the white horse positioned to how bad the business was otherwise. I have a client that I also have an interest in right now, Cellbarimplants.com, where we were saying to the dentist, The days of general dentistry and filling a tooth, and you got to forget all that because one implant case, it's the same as the options trading argument, right?

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Priceline. Oh, and in publishing, I never really taught it to anybody, but what I did— so when I started to do my first book, Landscape's very different today because the gatekeepers are diminishing and while they're changing, Amazon is actually now more of a gatekeeper than the publishers. The promise was they were going to go away, but they didn't. But, but in the '70s and the '80s all the way into the '90s, The publishers were much more important than they are today, and the bookstores were much more important than they are today because almost all books were sold through bookstores. And so there was a hierarchy. When you ask any other author or you query the publisher or whatever, how do I get my book published? Published. There was a, like a little rule book. There was dogma. Hey, well, you gotta, you gotta do a big proposal and a competitive title analysis. And then you gotta find agents who have represented your kind of content. And you gotta submit packages to the agents. And you've gotta grovel and beg and plead to get some agent to accept you as a first-time unpublished author. And then if you're lucky, that agent will get you a deal, probably with a small, insignificant publisher for little or no advance. And then you get to write the book. And then ultimately the book will get published. And if you get out there and hump and hump and hump and hump and hump so it doesn't die, you might establish a good enough record that you can get a second book deal, right? So this sounded really slow to me, right? And the mathematical odds were and still are astronomically against you. The number of proposals the average agent gets coming over the transom is, I don't know, 20,000 a year, 30,000 a year, 40,000 a year. He's got some NYU intern going through them and picking out the ones he should see and sending the rest of them all the standard rejection. I mean, the system was horrible, right? Just horrible. I said, if I'm going to settle for small anyway, why don't I just go see the publishers. Right? Because I'm a sales guy. And if I get in front of somebody, I can kind of sell. Not every author could do that. But I can do that. Right? Well, you can't, you know, so now the wise troops are telling me you can't do that. Well, why can't you do it? It's just not done. I said, well, why isn't it done? Well, they won't allow it. I said, well, if it's never done, how do you know they won't allow it? Because nobody's done it. Well, you can't do it, right? So the book— it's called Book Expo now, American Booksellers Association. All the publishers exhibit there for all trade. Uh, it's smaller now because of Amazon effect, but it's all the bookstores went there. Uh, so I went, um, and most of the publishers, the small ones for sure, the presidents are there in the booth. The editors are there in the booth for the 5 days of the show. Even the big publishers, they're there for a day or so. So I door knocked essentially. I went for— they're all there in one place, right? Booth to booth. Here I am. You should publish me. Here's what I want to do, right? And I got a deal. I didn't get exactly the deal I wanted, but I got a deal sitting on the floor in the food court with the woman president of the publishing company. And afterwards, my agent at the time, who I fired, who had told me, you can't do this, he said, I don't know how this could possibly happen. I said, you go booth to booth and, you know, then you interrupt their conversation and you talk to them. You know, it's not And so I had a bucket list item. I always wanted to do mystery novels, but I got enough rejection slips early that, you know, I'm the Woody Allen thing, you know, try, try, try, try again, and now stop. You're making a fool out of yourself. So now late, gee, you know, I still would like to do a couple mystery novels. So Mystery Writers of America has an event. Every association has an event. So I go and I'm standing in a room, panels are up front. It's the same crap I heard 40 years ago. I mean, for fiction now. Well, you gotta get an agent. And so you gotta kiss agents' butts and you gotta try and find a really tiny little agent who'll take a first-time author. And I'm listening to this, the back of my room, and I'm thinking, this is a bucket list item for me, man. I ain't gonna live long enough to do all this. This is a bad plan. And we had, we have that, who lives one community over from us, a, uh, a well-published mid-list— I mean, he ain't big time, but he's got like 30 mystery novels published with the same main detective character and so forth. So if you think about like Spencer, it'd be a low-rent kind of Spencer. Um, and he's right in my backyard, right? So I can do math. Uh, I have my nonfiction agent pull his Nielsen numbers, so I know how many books he's selling. I know roughly what his royalty is. I now know what his annual income is, and it's less than impressive. And I happen to now have money. So that's a good shortcut a lot of times to the entrenched establishment, right? So I go and say, I'd like to second chair, do a book with you. I can provide because all his books are based in Cleveland and around Cleveland. I said, I can provide a setting you haven't used yet that you probably don't know much about, which I'll educate you about. I have some character ideas. And then I basically— I want a second chair. I want to watch how long I want to— okay. And, uh, and I'll write you a check for X. Which is roughly twice what he's making from writing the next book, which you'll still get that money. And because I don't want any of the money, I just want a published novel. You could keep the money, and here's a check. And of course he took it. We actually did two books together. And you could have probably done it with almost any second tier, you know, if you wanted to spend money. And I don't know if the publisher knows. I didn't tell them, but I don't know if Les did or not. I doubt it. It would be frowned upon by the Mystery Writers Association of America. You know, they might even yank his membership. That's how tough people are about defending their establishment. But most of this is always nonsense. It's just nonsense. You know, it gets entrenched over time. Because it gets passed on. Talk to the next batch getting in a business, to the next batch getting in a business, and pretty soon it's the religion, a secular religion, in the organizing system of that business. And no opportunity for independent thought exists until you trigger the simmering unhappy natives who are living in the system but are privately questioning it.

I'm curious, because what my next— where's our transition now more to like you becoming that person and doing it? But so my next question is kind of twofold, but one is you said a third of the people that are in the room are feeling that way, but most of them aren't doing anything, right? They're just feeling that way. So number one is like, how do you not have the fear to go out and actually be that person? But number two, like, what are the other things you have to do to become that person and be willing to step up and actually be the person leading the charge?

Well, so if you want to leap to the second part of the question, the fear is real. You do have to be prepared for the backlash that will inevitably come. In most cases, they are unlikely to strap a cross to your back and march you up the hill and crucify you. We have laws about that. But there are people from time to time who come close. Trump's one of them. Well, had he not won, he'd probably be doing 5 to 10 in an orange jumpsuit somewhere and be bankrupted. So there will be a backlash. And the better at this you are, the more successful at it you are, the bigger will be the backlash. Right? So you got to know it's coming. And so some of it is psycho-emotional. You have to not care about the critics. When I was doing a lot of speaking, I mean, I tried to get some people to get up and leave.

Oh, that's a sign of success.

They're walking out the door. That was like, that was like you knew you were, you know, right at a place where everybody got it. Nobody was missing your point. Oh, and you gotta not care about any of that, you know, and people tend to obsess over it, you know, one way or another they'll get complaint letters. I mean, I can't, other than when they've been funny, I don't think anybody has shown me one 30 years. Now I know we get them. I know we get them. And so now you get them. Whether you know it or not, they're coming into your office, I promise you. And I've never been interested in it. Unless it's a funny one. And then Bill would show it to me, or, you know, Carla would show it to me, but for the most part, I don't care. Say, I care about the one I got, not the 10 I didn't. And I know there will be more of those than there will of these. So I care about their value, right? Those are the two things you care about. So you have to be like, okay, with how that works early on, like at NSA, I had to be okay with being there for 3 days and seeing people cluster to avoid me, right? Or deliberately talk amongst themselves at the cocktail reception loud enough that I heard it. You know, I had to be okay with that stuff. And mostly I found it, you know, funny. And Charlie Daniels is a great— the title of his book is something like Don't Worry About the Empty Seats. And so that's one.

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Max $100 cash back per month. 2, you do have to prepare, um, I should really look at my notes to make sure I don't mess this up. You do have to prepare those around you. Because especially now with social media, your family is probably going to see it. Your staff is going to see and hear it. And they have to be kind of immunized to it, right? Um, and you have to do your own— in politics it's called opposition research. So you want to know what is in your past and present that can be attacked for whatever reason. Most people have at least a few things, you know. I always said if I ran for office, my first 2-hour speech would be the confessional of, you know, all the things that— here's my dirty laundry. You got it all. Exactly. Don't ask. And so you got to kind of know where the opposition will attack if they can. Right. I got a lot over the years, for example, of he, he's only in it for the money. Right. Which I have always openly addressed, right? I mean, I love you all, but I wouldn't be here if I wasn't getting paid. Okay? I mean, sorry, but, you know, I've got a hobby, and they have four legs and They don't talk back and they, you know, they're much easier to amuse than you are. You know, you just show up with a carrot and you're golden. So I've always said, of course I'm in it for the money, right? And so should you be too. Business is about profit. And so a question is, where's the profit in that? And if there's no profit in that, why in the hell are you doing it? So in many cases, in our kind of business, you could preempt it by teaching it. You can preempt it by disclosure. Transparency makes a lot of personal attacks impossible. Right? It's like I've never attempted to hide the fact that I went through a personal and corporate bankruptcy. And it's further and further, of course, back the longer I live, but it's there. And I assume if you Google deep enough, you would find it. I have no idea because I don't do that. But But I knew if I'm going to be in this trying to hide that, it is probably going to bite my ass at the worst possible time. So better I tell it than somebody else tells it. And then I might as well tell it funny 'Cause there's some funny stuff. And so there's transparency to decide on. And there's sort of a preempting of a lot of attack by telling everybody what your critics are going to say about you. So, you know, one of my very first business experiences, and I have— the more distant from it I am, the fonder my memory is. I learned a lot. I didn't make much money, but I learned a lot in multilevel. And so I started recruiting distributors the Amway when I was 15. You're not even legally allowed to do it, but, and I quickly discovered the instant quit phenomenon, right? So typically you'd sponsor somebody in an evening and if they hadn't talked themselves out of it the next morning themselves. As soon as they left the house, contrary to your instructions, they were going to tell people that they had joined Amway, and they were going to get an earful. And whoever they told it to— coworker, friend, neighbor, mother-in-law, whatever— was instantly on a mission to rescue them by selling them out of it. If all those people had become the distributor instead of the distributor, I'd have made a lot more money because they were much better salespeople than the people I was sponsoring. But I figured out by number 4 that this is going to be the State of the Union, right? And so the evening ended with the talk of, here's the 5 things you're going to hear if you insist on ignoring me and telling somebody what you have done. Here's what you're going to hear. And here's why it's based on ignorance. And here's the facts. And then we had a cassette tape. There's a cassette tape, okay, which essentially was the same talk, right? Here's the— I think the title was The 5 Ways People Will Destroy Your Dream by Noon Tomorrow. Here's the tape. You need to listen to this in the morning, right? Because you didn't have a prayer. And I've done some version of it in almost every business since. You know, if the chiropractor has a patient and the spouse is not a patient, chiropractor's got big trouble. Because the spouse is talking the patient out of being a chiropractic patient. Every day. So you gotta do the same stuff, right? Here's what fools are gonna tell you about chiropractors, and here's why it's not true, and here's where they got it from. It was 'cause— so if you don't do that, so you do all of this stuff to prepare. Because the more you scare them, or the more angry you make them when you take this approach to a market, you both scare the establishment and you make them angry. Right? So the more you do that, the more they will try to exile you. I was thrown out of the National Speakers Association for, quote, quote, ethics violations by the ethics committee. Had to sue to make them rescind it and reinstate me with no gap in the dates. In the directory. So it is as if it never happened, and a printed apology in the newsletter. So they will exile you if they can. They will try to kill you. But I don't mean that physically. But like with deplatforming, think about the last 4 or 5 years or so, the virus years forward. Think about how many thought leaders, if you will, doctors in political circles have just been deplatformed. They can't process any credit cards, their site's taken down. Okay, so they've effectively killed them. Right? So they will try and kill you. And in failing that, They will also, if they have media, and they have friendly media, that media will now attack you. In chiropractic, where we're introducing Prepay, the main trade journal, Dynamic Chiropractic, it's published every week, it's like a newspaper. But calling it a newspaper is like calling ABC a a news network, you know, I mean, it's— oh, they went after us like every week and they rallied other media to go after us every week, all the way to 60 Minutes. So the main company that I worked with was attacked on 60 Minutes. Yeah. And the owner of the company was an idiot., and he spent 4 days on his yacht with Morley Safer and a camera crew. I mean, and it was pretty bad. I mean, it was a pretty, it was, it was a pretty good hatchet job about this company teaching everybody, all these chiropractors, how to rip patients off and take $20,000 and $30,000 from them all at one time. And, you know, I mean, it was pretty ugly. But for 5 years, we used "as seen on 60 Minutes" and "as seen on CBS." Oh, the— oh, well, thank you. So, you know, you do have to be prepared.

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