Dan Kennedy Selling From Stage!!!

Hey everyone, I want to welcome you back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. I'm excited for this episode. We found a gem in all the archives of all the Dan Kennedy files and the videos and the audios and everything. We actually found one of the original presentations of Dan Kennedy himself speaking at a Peter Lowe event selling magnetic marketing, which is so cool. Now unfortunately, the last 7 minutes Dan will start transitioning over. He says, I got 7 minutes left. He starts transitioning into his pitch, which is the part I was the most excited to hear but unfortunately the old owners of these audio files had actually edited out Dan's pitch and put in a new pitch that they recorded over. So I'm not gonna include that, I'll pull that out. But we have a chance to hear Dan's actual stage presentation. You've heard about him speaking from stage and selling from stage, and this is where I learned originally how to sell from stage was from Dan, and I've always wanted to hear him. I've seen Dan speak a lot over the years, but more as an educator, not as a salesperson selling from the stage. And so it was so much fun for me to hear him in his element when he was at his peak selling from stage at the Peter Loew events in front of tens of thousands of people. I heard him tell stories all the time about they'd bring in all the celebrities and they'd all speak and he'd be at the very end in there as the one who was making the money, who was selling the products and the services. And so it was just fun because a lot of the stories I've heard before, many of them you've probably heard on this podcast or other places, but I never heard him, how he weaved them into his actual presentation. To set up his sale. And so for me, this was like a gem. Someone who studies stage presenters and studies how to close from the stage, to actually hear Dan in his prime doing his stage pitch was amazing. So even though we missed the last 7 minutes, you don't get to hear him actually calling people to run to the back of the room, you do have a chance to hear the rest of the presentation, which was amazing, which had all the elements that he needed to set up the sale, to persuade people, to move them, and to help them to understand why they needed his new opportunity. So I hope with that you guys can enjoy this episode as much as I did. It's amazing to hear Dan, it is prime, speaking from stage and selling. So with that said, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Magnetic Marketing Podcast.

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 kinda laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

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

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. I'm going to send you out of here with specific, usable 1-2-3 marketing strategies that apply to any product, service, business, or sales career. That you will see results in your bank account within 21 days or less. I'm gonna give you one complete strategy you can use exactly as I describe it to you at the end of our time together that you will be able to go and apply. And I can make a virtual certain bet that none of you in here are using it exactly as I will describe it to you, but that most of you can. And again, most of you will be able to see results in your bank account in 21 days or less as a result. So we're gonna do some real practical stuff. I am here to make you money. There's a couple things I'd like folks to know about me before we get rolling. One is, if you're at this seminar, good bet you go to a bunch of them. And at many seminars, what you encounter is what I call the pretend experts, the folks who sell only in their memories, run businesses only in their nightmares, and now traverse the globe telling people how to do what it is that either they never have done a whole lot easier to write a book than it is to do it, or that they did so long ago that it just no longer matters. I do this 50, 60 times a year. It's only one-third of my life, though. Two-thirds of my life is like yours. It's in the real world dealing with customers and clients who eat their young every Monday morning, real marketing problems. Everything we talk about here this afternoon will be reality-based, not theory-based. I have two hate lists for you. That pretty much summarize where we're going to go this afternoon. If you run a business and you sign your name on the dotted line on all the checks, then one of the key things on your list of things that you hate should be being what I call an advertising victim. And when I say that, you should get a mental picture. That's when you get the big black checkbook out and you sign one of those checks for some kind of advertising expense and you hand it to to some kind of advertising salesperson and you have no earthly idea whether you made a good decision, bad decision, when you'll know, how you'll know, if you'll know. I detest that kind of uncertainty when I spend my money. Bet you do too. I'm going to show you how to eliminate it, how to make every dollar you spend promoting your business trackable, accountable, measurable, and come back to you quickly in multiples. For those of you that sell for a living, number 1 on your hate list should be cold call prospecting grunt work. My friend Zig would call that warm approaching. And if he and I agreed on everything, one of us would be unnecessary. I just don't see anything warm, friendly, fuzzy, happy, pleasant about this process of trying to talk to people who, at least emotionally if not physically, are backing away from you as fast as you are moving towards them. I grew up in the Midwest where we have coal mining, and to me, cold prospecting is like coal mining. It's dirty, filthy, the ugly, smelly, sweaty work best left to people who earn minimum wage with brawn, not maximum wage with brain. So regardless of what you have done before this afternoon, as a result of what we do this afternoon, you should never cold prospect again as long as you live. I'm going to show you how to eliminate it from your existence and change the way you attract your customers or clients. One quick story to set the stage for where we're going to go, then we'll roll up our sleeves and get to work. Story gets us acquainted and sets our direction. I live in Phoenix and I guess you have heat kind of like ours. You know, our license plate slogan is "But it's a dry heat." And it is. Just like a microwave 4 months out of the year. And it's important to this story. Phoenix, if you haven't been, just take my word for it, there is no hotter place in North America than Phoenix in July and August. I travel a great deal, 200,000 air miles or so a year, but I do have an office. I do have a staff. Even when I'm home, though, I tend not to go to the office. I find it disturbs the staff. And so generally when I'm home, I stay at home. And one of the things I do is I catch up on consulting calls with my clients on the phone. And so several Julys ago, I'm home alone, weekday afternoon, everybody's out of the house, I've got the house to myself, I'm at the kitchen counter. I've got a picture of iced tea. I've got a client on the speakerphone. I'm intensely involved in a conversation with my client when someone uninvited, unexpected, and in fact unknown to me begins to ring the doorbell and bang on the front doors of my home with earthquake intensity. You all work for a real living. You're not home during the day. But if you stop and think about it, the options of who can be at your home on a weekday afternoon, uninvited, banging on the doors, pretty slim. It's a pest. Not sure who it is. Back in the recession years we knew, because all the Jehovah's Witnesses and Avon ladies carpooled, but now it can be all sorts of people. But it's a pest. And so I did what you do with pests, I ignore it, confident that if sufficiently ignored it'll go away. Didn't. I'm ignoring, continuing my conversation, he's ringing and banging, ringing and banging, ringing and banging. But finally I'm right. After ignoring him for a sufficient length of time, he gives up and leaves. Ever so briefly. He goes around to the rear of my property. He climbs over an 8.5-foot-high masonry wall with shards of glass embedded on the top to discourage this method of entry. Comes down past the cactuses, the shrubs, the pool, and the spa, and he is now on the patio deck immediately behind me. He can see my back to him through the panes of glass on the doors on which he is now banging with incredible violence. This is by far the most annoying pest ever. But I'm like the most stubborn guy ever. So I keep my back to him, raise my voice to carry on my conversation. We have the contest of wills that seems to last an eternity. Finally, he wins. I can't handle it anymore. I turn around to deal with the most annoying pest ever. It turns out the reason he's there is my entire backyard is in flames. We set a record that year, 15 straight 120-degree days and everything a little dry, brittle. My guess is some imbecile driving through the community flicked a cigarette butt into orbit and picked my yard to limp, and I'll never know. But literally everything but the water in the pool is on fire. And this, um, this Good Samaritan who thinks I'm an idiot, which is arguable by now, is, um, is there trying to save my house. Now here's what's instructive. Here's what's useful. At that precise moment in time He went from being the most annoying pest to the most welcome guest ever to visit the Kennedy household in 15 years because he was there with just the right message at just the right moment in time. In this case, "Call 911, stupid. I'll work the hose." Now, the reason it's instructive is because know it or not, acknowledge it or not, like hearing it or not, the vast majority of the time that you try and communicate with your marketplace, present, past, or future prospects, clients, or customers, you are categorized as a pest, not as the most welcome guest of the day, week, month, or year. And I'm here to tell you that if you discover how to change that, I call it addressing the first square on the marketing game board, if you change that, you automatically change everything. Everything else suddenly gets easy if you become what we call a welcome guest marketer. Let me give you two quick examples. I have two friends in this business. You would know one or both of them maybe. I won't tell you their names, but one is a sales trainer. And if you've ever had the joy of being locked in a 3 or 4 or 5-day sales training boot camp, then you'll appreciate this. He teaches 365 different ways to close a sale, presumably for people who would like to improve their effectiveness at doing so. And whenever I see him, the first thing I always ask him is whether or not he's found one yet that works because it would seem to make the other 364 superfluous. It's less tapes in the box. But other than that, here's my contention. If you want to increase your conversion percentage, if you want to close more sales, you don't do it with a new magic 7-word manipulative phrase you pop out of the box at the end of the process. You do it from the beginning of the process. And if you become a welcome guest marketer, as we're going to talk about, then your closing percentage goes up without improving any of your sales skills whatsoever. My other buddy is in the time management business, and, uh, he sells— some of you have them probably under your seats or out in your cars— the really big honking time management systems that if you got a small car, you got to strap it on the roof when you drive around, which is why they come with solar calculators. They recharge while they're up there. These things usually have 56 colored tabs and 86 colored pens, and it takes an hour and a half to learn how to use it. It comes with a videotape, and as near as I can tell, it takes an hour and a half a day to use the system to manage the time that saves you an hour a day. But if you like those things, that's fine. My contention, though, is if you want to improve your personal productivity, you don't necessarily need a new leather binder. Instead, what you is become a welcome guest marketer so you spend all your face-to-face time only dealing with people who have sought you out and are predisposed to do business with you in a competitive vacuum. And so that's what I'm all about. That's what I do for companies and organizations. People, every time we do it, we build a new marketing system. We cover 3 main issues. We deal with 3 steps. I'm going to run you through them very quickly here this afternoon. And here they are. We'll talk a little bit about each one of them as we go along. Gentleman in the back of the room, thank you. To you. The first one is right message. What do you say? Message. Marketing message. What do you say to your marketplace, to your past, present, and future prospects, clients, and customers that is compelling, that is magnetic, that cannot be ignored, that must be responded to, that draws them to you like a light on a dark night draws moths? Do you have a great marketing message? We're going to ask some questions and find out. Secondly, who do you say it to? And by deliberate strategy, who do you not I say it too, being efficient in your marketing. Are you efficient? Are you smart about this or are you throwing mud against the wall? We're going to ask some questions and find out. And third, the media. How you deliver the message to the market. Do you do that effectively? Do you do that affordably? Do you do that efficiently? Do you do that in a way that involves little or no manual labor and magnetically attracts people to you? We're going to take a look at that. So in each of these 3 things, I'm going to give you 1 or 2 key ideas to take with you. And for starters, under message, I want to send you home with the single most important question anybody's going to ask you about your product, service, business, or sales career as long as you're in it. Master this one question, you take a quantum leap in ability to create income as a salesperson, business owner, or marketer. This is the single most important question because the right answer to it, as I'll demonstrate, is the key to the it's a marketing vault. It doesn't just marginally increase things. It multiplies them far beyond the ability of most people to even conceive. It is that important. And I'll give you a model, a demonstration. Now, the technical term, for those of you taking notes, for the answer to this question is USP. It stands for unique selling proposition. That which differentiates you from all competition, direct and indirect. And here's the question: Why should I, your prospect, choose to do business with you versus any and every other option available to me in your category? Why should I choose to do business with you versus any and every other option available to me in your category? And when you have a great answer to that question, you can turn things upside down. Example, model. I'm going to give you a model to take home. A model of one of the best unique selling propositions invented in maybe the last 2 decades. And so what you want to do with this model is you want to take it home and lay it down next to your unique selling proposition and see how they compare. And if they don't compare very well, then this one's a good place to start to build a great answer to this question. This particular model, this unique selling proposition, was invented by a college kid. Two kids, orphans, no family resources, no athletic ability, no scholarships, determined to go to college. Here's the plan they hatch. The plan they hatch is they They find a crummy, miserable, stinking little retail business that's on the edge of campus, on the brink of failure. Its owner is only too happy to lease it to them with no money down, just to get out from under the ongoing bills. The plan is the two kids are going to run this business. One of them is going to go to school during the day while the other one works the business. Then they're going to flip-flop. The other one is going to go to school at night. They're going to do everything in the business. They're even going to sleep on cots in the back room, keep all the money. This is how they'll get through school. Shortly into this plan, the business business continuing to hemorrhage money, one partner bails out on the other, the one who stayed behind, dropped out of school, determined to honor his commitments and make this work, shortly thereafter invented a unique selling proposition. I think it's 8 words long. And on the strength of his unique selling proposition, he not only almost immediately turned a failing business into a successful business, but he multiplied it. Pretty soon he had multiple outlets. He dominated his city. He dominated his state. He dominated North America. And in under 5 years, according to Fortune Magazine, he became one of the 1,000 wealthiest citizens on the planet, all thanks to his 8-word unique selling proposition. His unique selling proposition was so powerful, think about this, that for a decade we could go out anywhere in North America, stop 100 people at random on the street, play word association with them. What's the first thing that comes into your mind when we say blank, give them the generic equivalent of his business, and 80 or more of the 100, the first thing on the tip of their mind, first thing on the tip of their tongue, was the proprietary brand name of his business and what a good job he did. If we go out in Salt Lake City tomorrow, we stop 100 people at random on the street, we give them the generic equivalent of whatever it is that you do— real estate, insurance, stocks, bonds, computers, automobiles, pet grooming, doesn't make any difference— and 80 of the 100 instantly respond by telling us about you buying name and what a great job you do, what's your market share going to look like? That's called marketplace dominance. That's what this kid got. He turned his entire industry upside down. He had everybody chasing him for 10 years trying to catch up. You can do it too with the lever of a great answer to this question: a powerful unique selling proposition. Now, if you've guessed what his was, that's all well and good, but what I've said should hopefully motivate motivate you not just to guess and shrug, but to want to microscopically analyze his and others like his to find clues that you can use to strengthen your own. His was fresh hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed. And on the strength of that unique selling proposition, Tom Monaghan took a crummy little corner pizza joint and built an empire. When you analyze it, there's a number of things to spot. I'll point out 3. How narrowly he defined his position in the marketplace. Tom didn't try and be all things to all people. There's no mention of Mama's recipe from the old country. There's no mention of only using sun-dried tomatoes gathered on the east side of the mountain on Tuesday. There's not even any mention of good pizza. There's truth in advertising after all. There's 52 ways that I teach to build a USP. The one Tom used there is called opportunity gap exploitation. He identified the He found the one thing in his industry that everybody did badly that annoyed the consumers the most, focused on it, fixed it, and made it the core of his marketing message. Secondly, what we teach is meaningful specifics rather than vague generalities. Tom Monaghan didn't say to you, "I'll get you a pizza soon, fast, quick, quicker than the other guy, faster than a speeding bullet." Tom said, "Set your watch. It'll be there in precisely 30 minutes or less." We call that gutsy, accountable marketing. Very few marketers, very few business owners are ever willing to do it for obvious reasons. Those who do gain incredible leverage in the marketplace, and there's case history after case history after case history to support it. Third, a guarantee. Tom took all three of those things and a number of other things we don't have time to analyze and knit them together in this tight, concise little statement called a unique selling proposition, the foundation of his entire marketing message, and it gave him the leverage to turn one turn one little business into a global empire. You may not want a global empire, but you may like the leverage. So the first thing to take home, the first little homework assignment is to go home and think about why should I do business with you versus any and every other option available to me in your category. How's your answer? How's your marketing message? Now second, let's assume we figure all that out. Let's assume we got a great marketing message at its core as a great unique selling proposition. We're excited about getting it out to the marketplace. It's so good, we're ready to spend money getting it out to the marketplace. Here's the next challenge: world's greatest marketing message is no better than the world's worst marketing message if it's shouted at deaf ears. We do this a lot. Most people are not any more sophisticated about marketing their businesses, products, or services than they were 2 decades ago. In fact, here's the level of sophistication that most of us unfortunately settle for. Print up brochures, a lot of them. Stuff them in a big burlap sack. Rent a plane. Fly low. Lean out. Shake sack. Hope. We can do better. And here's why we can do better. For good or bad, and it's a debate that has nothing to do with us marketers, privacy in America is dead. It's gone, buried, forget it. The database world, the world of lists, the world of demographic psychographics, the world of target marketing knows more about you than your mother. And so if you say to me, here's what target marketing is all about— target marketing is all about leveraging resources, great marketing message, now we want to leverage our resources— it's matching the message with only high probability prospects, and here's why and how it can be done. If you say to me, my perfect prospect is a one-legged midget with an industrial engineering degree between the ages of 35 and 52. He's got 3 kids, 2 dogs, 1 television set. He bowls in a league on Wednesday night, and he drives a Chevy Impala that's between 4 and 6 years old and has primer paint on the left front fender. We can get a list of them in your zip code. Code. Not going to be a very big list, but we can get a list. And it begs the issue of high probability prospecting, target marketing, using your resources only to reach the people who are perfectly matched with what it is that you have to offer. So when we start to talk about target marketing, we're going to spend about 5 minutes, and if you know nothing else about target marketing, you'll instantly understand the first thing on the list. There's about 15 ways to do target marketing if you're a business-to-business marketer. You do it technically different than if you're a consumer marketer, but conceptually it's the same. Here are the top 5 ways to target market if you're a consumer marketer, and you'll understand the first one if you understand nothing else about target marketing. The first one on the list is basic geographic target marketing. And just about everybody gets it, and pretty much just about everybody does it. That's where you get a map, take a kid's crayon, Styrofoam cup, cup, put the cup over your house, your store, your factory, your place of business, take the crayon, draw a circle around the cup, take the cup away, that's my target market. That's valid, but it is dangerous and wasteful in its simplicity. And so what I want to do with these 5, 6, 7 minutes, I want to at least get you intrigued enough with target marketing that you'll go do the research necessary, which 90% of it can be done for free and 90% of it's a duty do-it-yourself project, take you less than a day, in order to become a much more sophisticated, precise target marketer in your particular business. So let me tell you why you want to be more sophisticated than geographic. I'm in my office one day and I get a phone call. Now, you should know I'm never in my office, and when I'm there, I never take incoming calls for reasons that'll become obvious in a second. But somehow this day, this guy gets through to me on the phone. He says, look, I've been to 3 of your seminars, I got your complete marketing system, most Recently we've been doing a marketing campaign for our company. We followed the examples in your system. We've been doing direct mail. We followed your examples perfectly and we are getting zero response. This is not a good call. This is why I don't take incoming calls. But somehow I'm on the phone. So you've got to ask questions. Turns out this guy owns the largest carpet cleaning company in Phoenix where I live. I said, okay, where did you send all the mail that didn't get results? He said, "We picked a few neighborhoods real close to the plant so it would be easy for the guys in the trucks to take care of the customers." Geographic marketing. I said, "Okay, what can you tell me about the people who live there?" He said, "They live close to the plant." I had that. I was moving on to what's called demographics and psychographics. Big words, simple concepts. Fascinating when you know how to use them. Demographics are statistical information about groups of people. Because birds of a feather really do flock together. Demographics are like head of household, occupation, income, do they have kids, not have kids, that sort of thing. Psychographics are even more interesting— excuse me— because they're predictive of buying behavior. Psychographics have to do with what interests people. What magazines do they subscribe to? What books do they buy? What products do they buy? What have they spent money on? How much money have they spent? How frequently do they spend money? And as I said, all of that information is readily available if you know where to look for it and how to get it so you can precisely match yourself with only the high probability prospects and you can omit others. To prove to him, the owner of this carpet cleaning company, the incredible importance of all this, we did free research for him. I got in his car with him at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and we drove up and down the streets in these neighborhoods where he'd been sending all his unsuccessful mail. And by the way, if you do consumer marketing and you haven't gone out and looked at them lately, venture out and take a look. You've got to go into their own habitat late in the day. 5, 6 o'clock is a good time. It's when all the ordinary folks rush home to the caves, but they don't put the rocks in the holes right away, so you check them out. So we're driving up and down the streets, the carpet cleaning president and I, and here's what we find. Real small lots. Chain link fence around just about every lot. Small, cheapest block construction house on a slab you can build. Almost every front yard, driveway, or both, there's one old broken-down car or truck up on blocks, parts laying around. It's happy hour. Papa's out on the porch, the concrete slab extension of the foundation, enjoying the ambiance of the evening. He's got on an old greasy undershirt with holes in it, droopy plaid shorts, beer bottle tucked in one pocket, and he's sitting in one of them lawn chairs, the green and white plastic crisscross straps, two straps missing, Papa's hanging a little low. Next to him on most of the torches. Mama's out there enjoying the ambiance of the evening with him. She's got on a matching undershirt. Hers says his, his says hers. Greasy holes, droopy plaid shorts. The baby wearing nothing but a diaper, no shoes or socks, is out playing under the car on blocks in the car parts, the mud and the grease, being supervised by the old mangy, flea-bitten, three-legged, one-eyed dog. I say to the carpet cleaner, do these look to you— slow down, look close. If they clean them at all, once a year before the poor relatives come for vacation, they run down to Target, they get a gallon of Blue Gop for $1.98, they rent a machine, and then they move the furniture around. Doesn't make them bad people. Makes them terrible prospects for a carpet cleaning service. Second big question to take home: In your own way, are you making the same dumb mistake? Wasting bullets on targets that even if you hit them, it doesn't count. The biggest leverage you are going to find in taking small amounts of money and getting big results, small amounts of effort and getting big results, is learning, understanding, and using target marketing. Let's assume for the sake of our conversation we figured that out. We got 2 of the 3 things. We got a powerful marketing message at its core, a great unique selling proposition, and in our sights we have exactly who we want to deliver the message to and we We have excluded a whole bunch of people we do not want to waste time or money delivering the message to. So we got a great message, we got a great market. Here's the next challenge. How do you take the message you've so lovingly crafted and birthed and deliver it over here to these people you've carefully selected in a way that is effective, efficient, affordable, involves little or no manual labor—I'm philosophically opposed to manual labor—and will magnetically attract back to you the perfect prospects who are ready able and eager to buy and buy only from you so you get to sell in a competitive vacuum. How do you do that? Well, if you make a list and if you stop to think about it, whatever business you're in, whatever sales career you're in, you can make a long list of media, things that you can spend money on to deliver marketing messages. Depending upon your business, you can advertise in the newspaper, in consumer magazines, or in trade and industrial journals. You can advertise in consumer or industrial directories. You can go You can go exhibit at home and consumer shows or trade shows. You can advertise in the Yellow Pages. You can go on radio and television. You can put telemarketers on the phone. The list goes on and on and on and on. Here's a couple things you need to know. First of all, all that stuff works and it all can be made to work better with good direct response methods, but only a handful, a handful of all those things that you can do can be converted into a system. And system is one of my favorite words. System means reliable, consistent, predictable results. You get it working once and then it keeps working on its own for a long, long, long, long, long time before you have to tweak with it again. We need marketing systems. And the example I'm going to show you of a marketing system is so predictable, so reliable, so consistent that you go to bed at night when you have this working for you knowing, not hoping, wishing, not even praying, but knowing within a small acceptable range of variance how many good prospects, customers, or clients are going to come to you by noon the next day every single day for as long as you use the system. And it's like a thermometer. You can even turn it up or down to get more or less any time of the week, month, or year that you want them. It's that scientific. So I'm going to show you one example of one marketing system. This example does several things. It demonstrates to you what a system ought to look like versus just catch-as-catch-can media. It shows you how to take a message, deliver it to a market in a in a way that's effective, efficient, and affordable. And this one has a bonus to it. This one shows you how to enter a new target market and dominate it in 45 days or less for $3 a prospect or less. You become the dominant presence in any target market you can define. If you can define a target market for me— and it doesn't have to be geographically precise necessarily— but if you can define a target market, then this particular system, in 45 days or less, $3 Prospect or less makes you the dominant presence in your category of business in that target market. Everybody knows who you are, what you do, why they ought to do business with you, what your USP is, and a significant percentage have responded to you. There's a couple of caveats, things I have to tell you about this before I show it to you. The first is I stole it. I'm a huge believer in creative theft. Do not know if I've ever had an original idea in my life, but the older I get, less interested I am in encountering those things. Pioneers come home full of arrows. So I'm interested in stuff that works. But I get to do something you don't get to do. Last 3 years, my consulting practice, I've worked with clients in 136 different product, service, business, and professional categories. So you see, today's a weird day for you because you're sitting with people who do different things. But most of your continuing education, whatever business you're in, here's what you do. You belong to belong to a national association totally made up of people in your business. You belong to a state or local association totally populated by people in your same business. You go to its conventions, meetings, and conferences organized by, put on for, and put on by, and attended by people in your same business. If you go to a strange town, you look in the Yellow Pages in your section to see what everybody else in your business is doing. You read books written by people in your business. We have a technical term for this. It's called marketing incest because it works just like real incest. In a short period of time, everybody seems to get dumber and dumber and dumber and dumber until the whole thing just grinds to a creaking halt. All great advancements in businesses come from outside the box, not inside the box. Well, I get to do— see, what I get to do as a consultant, I get to go over and work with Industry A. And because everybody's myopic, while I'm over there, I notice something they're doing that's phenomenally effective. Hardly anybody else outside their business is doing it but could be doing it, I borrow it from Industry A and I take it over and I teach it to Industry B. And while I'm over there, I notice something they're doing that hardly anybody else is doing but could be doing, and so I borrow from Industry B and I take it back and I teach it to Industry A. It's a disreputable way to make a living, but I'm a high school graduate. This particular system I'm going to show you as an example, I borrowed, um, 25, 26, 27— I don't know how many years ago now— by observation only from the real estate business. Realtors have a marketing term they use called farming. And what they mean, they don't mean DeBoer sister, mule, funny hat, pitchfork, Green Acres song, move to the country. But the agricultural analogy is there. What they mean when, if you hear them talking about farming, what a realtor means is getting a small, carefully selected, manageable target market and setting out to become the dominant presence in their business in that target market in a shorter period as possible. Now, they do it with manual labor. I don't like manual labor. But conceptually, it's the best marketing advice you're going to get as long as you live, so let's spend a minute dissecting it. What they mean by farming is getting a small, carefully selected, manageable target market and then nurturing it, setting out to become a dominant presence. Now, they mean geographically small. I don't necessarily mean geographically small. A small target market for you could be all the dentists in Salt Lake in Salt Lake City who earn over $100,000 a year, but it also could be all the dentists in North America who earn over a quarter of a million a year. It's a defined target market. Small, carefully selected, manageable, set out to become the dominant presence. So why small? Because the biggest marketing mistake most marketers make is marketing too big. I'll say to somebody, what's your target market? Guy says Salt Lake City. Terrific. If we send one postcard once a year to every adult in Salt Lake City, which can hardly be called an intensive campaign, what's our budget have to be? Eh, a quarter of a million dollars. How much you got? $600. Problem. You want a formula? Here's a formula. Somehow, preferably by science, by strategy, by demographics, psychographics, but if necessary, by personal preference or bias, but somehow you have to shrink the size of your target market so that whatever resources you're willing to commit allow you to have big impact. Somehow you have to shrink the size of your target market so whatever resources you're willing to commit allow you to have big impact. There is absolutely no point in jumping up and down in the ocean and thinking you've done something. You want to jump up and down in a puddle. You can move from one puddle to the next, but you want to work puddles, not oceans. Small, careful Carefully selected. We talked about the power of selection, of target marketing. Carefully selected. Manageable. Manageable means either they are all in the same place or they all belong to the same thing or they all read the same thing or they're all available on a list. Somehow we can affordably, effectively, and efficiently reach them. Small, carefully selected, manageable target market. Set out to become the dominant presence in the target market in the shortest period of as possible. We just want to do it by substituting something for the manual labor the realtors invented. And what we're going to substitute is a very particular type of direct mail. The example I'm going to show you is a direct mail example. Now, two quick caveats. First of all, direct mail is not the only thing I teach, not the only thing you should use, not the only thing in my system. In fact, far from it. There's all sorts of media and delivery systems that can be used, but direct mail can can be and often is one of the best bangs for your buck if you learn to do it right. Which brings me to the second caveat. As soon as I start to talk about it, one-third of the ears in the room flop right over. Man, we've tried direct mail. Doesn't work in our state, city, business, industry, product category. It's too expensive. It's too complicated. A couple things about that. First of all, you and I go through life only doing the things that work real, real well for us the very first time we do them. Less kids with each generation. Secondly, you have not tried direct direct mail the way I'm going to show you how to do direct mail. In fact, yeah, almost everybody makes this mistake when they do try it. They get a list from somewhere, maybe not a very good list, but they get a list. They print up something, they send it to the list, and almost no matter what happens— ugly, bad, good— they never mail to those same people again. Or if they do, it's 3, 6, 8 months later by accident, and they send them the same stuff they sent them the first time. Save your money. Never do one-shot mail. Let me explain to you why that can't work. Here's how people do not live. The last thing Harvey says to Marge when he leaves the house in the morning is not, Marge, I want you to stay home. Don't go to work, don't take the kids to school, don't go to the grocery store. Do not leave this house. Do not leave the foyer. Stay right here in the foyer with your nose pressed against the window, watching for the mailman. When the mailman arrives, I want you to hustle your buns out to the mailbox and get the mail before somebody gets it, a bird snatches it, it catches on fire, it gets wet. Get it back in the house. Guard it until I get home. Together we will open the mail, because today might be the day that a life insurance agent sends us one of those nifty letters where we can get a free road atlas if we let him come over to our house and beat our brains in for 3 hours, and I want a free road atlas. This is not how people live their lives. And what makes people think they can print up one crummy Goldenrod flyer, send it out one time, and get some stampede of response, it's a mystery to me. The thing doesn't even nick them on the way by. They don't even feel the breeze. You want secret? Secret to advertising, secret to marketing, secret to direct mail in specific, secret to both impact and response. If you want impact, if you want response, you must have repetition. The two are inextricably linked. One does not happen without the other. But you cannot do Madison Avenue kind of repetition. You can't afford the time or the money. You need a guerrilla warfare kind of repetition. And that's what I'm going to show you here with this example. An example of one type of marketing system, but certainly a very good one, that in any target market you can define, in 45 days or less, for $3 a prospect or less, with no manual labor, penetrates that market and makes you the dominant presence in that market using a particular type of direct mail. Now I'm going to show you one example from one business. Got to quickly convince you you can move the example to any business, and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether you sell big-ticket items, small-ticket items. It doesn't matter whether you sell to the corporate CEO in the boardroom or mom and pop at home in the kitchen. Doesn't matter whether you go to them, they come to you. Doesn't matter whether you sell tangibles, intangibles, consumable products or services. None of that matters. Let me quickly try and prove it to to you. These are a few letters about what I'm going to show you across my desk recently. This is from an insurance agent. He just says, I targeted 500 business owner prospects. 174 of them called us to set up appointments. This is the only way I'm prospecting now. I would think so. This is a computer software company. They sell only to the Fortune 1000. Your system's the most profitable thing we've done to get new business in 12 years. This is an automobile salesman. I'm amazed I sold 11 cars last month through referrals brought into an event by past customers, all thanks to your mailing system, and we sent to only about 100 customers. 100 customers, 11 cars. This is a certified financial planner. I went from $13,000 a month to $42,000 a month in fees and commissions, all in a 1-month jump, thanks to your system. This is a children's clothing store owner. We doubled business last year even though a big factory closed in our town. This is an Amway Diamond Direct. We never thought direct mail would work for us, but in 1 month we've dominated in a neighborhood, etc., etc., etc. I've got hundreds of them I could read you. So, whatever business you're in, the model moves. The example I'm going to show you comes from the restaurant industry. I use it in all my seminars for two reasons. One, if you had an arena full of restaurant owners, I'll swear it won't work. Restaurant owners don't do— built 7 restaurants that I know of, but restaurant owners pretty much don't do direct mail, and if they do anything, they do Valpak, you know, the thing you go through, find Baskin-Robbins, throw everything else out. Secondly, I've got to do a speaker set. I've got to read you just a couple paragraphs of what I'm going to show you, but since I'm going to read to you, we might as well have a little fun. This is kind of an in-fun example, but don't miss the serious point of how this can take your marketing message, deliver it to a chosen market effectively, efficiently, and affordably, and magnetically bring you ready-to-buy customers or clients that dominate a market 45 days or less. So this is letter number 1 to a geodemographically selected list. For an Italian restaurant. In real life, where the square is, there's a photograph of the owner of the restaurant. The headline says, "A confidential letter to the husband of the house from Giorgio, the romance director of Giorgio's Italian Grotto." I'll read you just two paragraphs. Dear husband, women are different than we are. Your loving wife needs, wants, and deserves special attention, maybe more often than you think to give it to her. You are busy, preoccupied with work, aggravated with that dumb-dumb you have to deal with every day at the office, tired, Who has the time or the energy to even think about romance? Two-thirds of all marriages end in divorce, and the number one reason given by divorcing women, quote, "He just didn't pay enough attention to me anymore." I wrote this while I was watching Oprah. The restaurant goes on to present a solution to the problem, which in this case is a prepackaged evening of romance. One price, table in a special section, 5-course meal, strolling violinist, rose in a bud vase, heart-shaped box of candy to take home. A little souvenir photograph. That's called an offer, by the way, and it's useful to know how to do one of those, although it's not our point. My point is what happens to everybody that gets this letter and does not respond. 15 days later, they get a second one. This one too has a picture of Giorgio in real life. Where the circles are, there are 3 pennies glued to the letter. The headline says, "3 Coins at the Fountain." For the sake of time, I'll just cut to the chase. The second paragraph says, "You see, this is your second notice. Your romance Wake-up call from me, Giorgio, the romance director. My bell tolls. Does it toll for thee? This letter goes on to restate the problem, restate the solution, remake the offer. And it works. It gets response. That's not what's important to our conversation. What's important is what happens. Everybody gets letter number 1. Letter number 2 does not respond. 10 days later, they get letter number 3. Letter number 3 has a picture of Giorgio. The headline says, Hear that lonesome whippoorwill? He sounds too blue to cry. Dear husband, "Dear Joe, this is your Joe, too blue to cry, disappointed. Attached are copies of the two letters I previously sent you." And the real stubborn ones that don't respond to that soon get a postcard that looks like this, and it says, "Can this marriage be saved?" Now, here's what you have to ask yourself seriously for just a second. Do you have any doubt that any household that gets the three letters, and if necessary the postcard, he's not the topic of conversation? It doesn't matter who opens the mail, they're showing it to each They're showing it to their neighbors. You get this guy's mail, which some are, some aren't. Giorgio walks into a 7-Eleven, dry cleaners in the community. People gather around him, tell him how much they enjoy getting his mail, when they got reservations at the restaurant, and ask for his autograph. For the price of 3 letters and a postcard, he is the dominant presence in his category of business in 45 days or less in his chosen target market. You can't do it more efficiently than that. Now, few people are saying, "Wait a minute, I sell very sophisticated good stuff to very sophisticated people. Never do anything like that. It's unprofessional. Well, you can separate style from structure. I want you to know this works even better in business-to-business than it does in consumer because everything else they get in business-to-business mail is deadly dull, institutional, and boring. But if you like, you can separate style from structure. What's most important is the structure. Let me show you. Now, this is a business-to-business marketer. It almost doesn't matter what I don't know what they sell, but they were in a seminar just like you, went home and applied this idea. We used the 3-letter system to sell our coupon books. They have to get to the business owner. He buys in bulk. Our response was letter number 1, 7%. Letter number 2, 8%. Letter number 3, 3%. Total response, 18%. Now, there's 2 things you've got to know. Number 1, nobody gets 18% response from direct mail. 1.8% maybe, but not 18%. My people, but nobody else does. But what's more important? If they stopped where everybody stops with letter number 1, in their case they leave 11% behind. They don't get it. They don't know it was there to get. Maybe they have an unsuccessful instead of a successful experience. There's magic in the structure itself. I stole that too almost 30 years ago. In one year I managed to have 2 cars repossessed and go personally and corporately bankrupt all in the same year. During that year I got all of it with at once. During that year, I became intimately familiar with the collection industry. And I noticed a pattern that probably none of you have ever seen, so I'll describe it to you. It looks like this: first notice, second notice, third notice. They're roughly 15 days apart. There's no mystery. They're writing to you repeatedly. It's technically called linkage. Each letter refers to the previous letter. Generally, the last one has copies of everything they sent you before with final notice rubber-stamped all over it stuffed in the envelope. I saw it over and over and over again. I said, "If this will get money from people who haven't got any, offering them nothing, I wonder what would happen if we tried it on people who got some and offered them something." It's since become one of my most reliable magnetic marketing models of the 49 that I teach, and I commend it to you highly for you to try. Now, I'm going to tell you a closing story. This story keeps promises I made you at the beginning of the time together. This story is a real important story. Here's everything it does. First of all, it takes everything we talked about this afternoon and the few things we didn't and stitches them together in chronological application order so you see how they work. Secondly, it does it in a real-life business. This is a true-life example. Third, it does it in a business most of you would never expect to find good marketing, thereby demonstrating if this guy can do it, you can do it too. Fourth, It gives you a complete, as I promised you at the beginning of our time together, a marketing strategy, a system, step by step, that you can walk out of here and use exactly as it is described to you in this story and see results in your bank account in 21 days or less. And as a bonus, it gives you a new market, a farm, a group of prospects perfect for you, which you already have access to but are not currently harvesting. For it to do all of those things, every little nuance is important. I only have time to tell it once, and so here we go. In the mail one day, I get an envelope. The envelope is addressed to me, Dan Kennedy. It has a real live stamp on it, and in the return address corner is the name of someone I know. In this case, not a buddy, not a relative, not a friend, not a family member, not a golfing partner. In this case, it happens to be a peer, another colleague in our business who also lives in Phoenix. It doesn't matter really that that's the case. There are 300 of us, by the way, professional speakers who live in Phoenix. I don't know why that is. I wish 299 of them would get out of town. But none of that's the point. The point is the envelope is from someone whose name I recognize. It's addressed to me and it's got a stamp on it, so I open it. See, look. Here's a direct mail mistake. People send out mail with the assumption assumption it'll be open because they sent it. It doesn't work that way. America sorts its mail over a wastebasket. If you don't make the cut, nothing else counts. You can have inside your envelope one of those beautiful full-color brochures the home office loves for you to use. It's gold embossed in the chairman of the board's head. It's got the logo die-cut in the upper corner. When you open it up and fold it out, things pop up and music plays. It doesn't make any difference if they don't open the envelope. What I've just I described to you is one almost certain way to get an envelope open. It's not the only way. Sometimes it's not the best way in a given situation, but it is a very good way. So, I got the envelope. It's addressed to me. It's from someone I know. I open it. The letter I take out, the headline across the top of the letter says, "I suppose you're wondering why I'm writing to you about a plumber." I say to myself, "Yep." We don't even get a Christmas card from this guy. Nah, I see him at airports. Now he's writing about a plumber. What is this all about? So I read the letter. Second important phrase: if you want to make direct mail work, write down— got to get them to read it, got to get them to open it, got to get them to read it. And you got about 10 seconds from flap to trash to compel readership. This curiosity is one way to do it, not necessarily the best, but it's the way that was used now. So I go ahead and read the rest of the letter. The letter goes on to tell a story about how he was having a social function at his home on a Friday evening to which I had not been invited. At about 9 o'clock at night, a pipe in the den under the bar began to spew water everywhere. Horrible mess. Had to find a plumber who would come out on a Friday night at 9 o'clock. Made calls out of the phone book. Finally found this guy, Al the plumber, who rushed out, gooped this, tightened that. Didn't have to sell him any parts. Had the whole mess cleaned up in under 20 minutes. Only charged him a small amount of money. In order to say thank you to this plumber for this extraordinary service, he, my speaking colleague who lives in Phoenix, decided to send this to all of us, his speaking colleagues who live in Phoenix, and let us all know if we ever need a plumber, Al's the guy we gotta call. Now, think about this for a second because two money-making things just happened. There's more to the Al story. There's more you have to know about the Al story, but two money-making things just happened. Let's see if you caught them. The first is called a champion circle of influence. See, everybody has a circle of influence in which you could do business if you were properly introduced, but you haven't been. So the plumber goes back to the customer and says, "You know, when I was here the other night, you were very appreciative and I appreciate that. What you probably don't know is we get very little of our new business the way we got you from advertising. We get most of our new customers through people like you because you probably belong to Do you belong to Rotary? No. Kiwanis? No. Neighborhood Watch Association? No. Well, everybody belongs to something. The guy confesses. He says, well, there is this speakers association I belong to. Great. How many of those are there in Phoenix? 300. The plumber says, terrific. Here's what I'd like to do. Now here's the second thing. The plumber says, here's what I'd like to do. I wrote up what you said to me as I left now as a letter from you to those 300 people. We can change anything you want to change. But then I want to take it and I want to put it on your stationery, not mine, yours. I want to put it in your envelopes, not mine, yours, and I want to send it to those 300 people who know you by name but do not yet know me. May I do that? That's called an endorsed mailing to a champion circle of influence. It's the only piece of mail on the planet 100% get opened and 100% get read. So I got the envelope. I opened the envelope. I read the whole letter. And when I got all done with it, I didn't call Al the plumber. Why didn't I call Al the plumber? I didn't need a plumber. Sure. So all that's wasted, isn't it? How many think it's not wasted? You're all wrong. If he stops there, it's a giant epic waste. Think of what has to happen now for it to turn into business for the plumber. I got the letter, I read it. Al sounds like a pretty good guy. I don't need a plumber. I gotta go down to the copy shop, Tinko's, wherever I've got to get 18 copies made of this letter. I've got to get 18 Ziploc sandwich bags and 18 pieces of duct tape because I've got 18 pipes. I've got to put a letter in each bag. I've got to go around and stick one to every pipe so someday when I need a plumber I can find this guy. This is no way to get a flood of business. That's why about 10 days later I get what I would call letter number 1 from Al the plumber. Hi, I'm Al the plumber. You'll remember me. I'm the guy your friend wrote to you about who had the party you went to. —were invited to—had the leak I rushed out and took care of. Now, the reason I'm writing to you now is we have this very important free thing we do only for people referred to us by our VIP customers. That free thing is a free home plumbing problem prevention audit. And the reason why it's so important for you to have a free home plumbing problem prevention audit is every home 10 years old or older has at least 100 horrible plumbing problems that can occur at a moment's notice. We come out and make sure none of those things are about to happen to you for free. I still don't call Al the plumber. I'm hearing drips in the night. I wasn't hearing them before, but I don't call Al. That's why 10 days later I get from Al the plumber a second notice. Hi, I'm Al the plumber. You'll remember me. I'm the guy your friend wrote to you about. Had the party you weren't invited to, had the leak. I wrote to you about our free home plumbing problem prevention audit. I haven't heard from you and I'm very concerned. If you'll take a look at the enclosed article reprint, you'll see why. You take this article reprint out of the envelope. It's from a small community newspaper. Little community newspaper. Everybody knows everybody. They only publish once a week. You hear a front-page story about this couple, elderly couple. They went away just for the weekend to visit the grandkids. A little drip under the sink when they left. They put a little Tupperware bowl under there to catch it. They come back on Monday. There's a photograph in the article of the house in 5 parts floating in a pond. There's another photograph of the family dog clinging to a piece of wood waiting to be rescued. You go back to the letter and it says, "As you can see, even small plumbing problems can become big plumbing problems." I still don't call Al the plumber. I'm now looking at pipes. Uh-huh, they look okay to me. But 10 days later, I get from Al the plumber, "Final notice. We've twice offered you our free home plumbing problem prevention audit. We haven't heard from you, but we sure have heard from a whole lot of other smart folks. That's why if you want the free home plumbing problem prevention audit, it's very important you call within the next 72 hours. Otherwise, we may have to put you on a waiting list of up to 100 days. And enclosed is a list of some of the horrible plumbing problems that might occur during— I call Al the plumber. Now, I'm going to tell you the rest of the Al story in 3 or 4 minutes, mostly for fun. It makes one important point. But let's do 30 seconds of analysis. Al the plumber did everything we talked about this afternoon brilliantly. Leverage him. So if he can do it, let's analyze his marketing campaign. Al the plumber, our marketing genius, goes and he gets himself a farm, a small, carefully selected, manageable target market. His is his champion's circle of influence. One of the most productive farms you'll ever own. The first seed he plants in his farm is the endorsed mailing. The only piece of mail 100% get delivered, 100% get opened, 100% get read. He then nurtures his farm with a sequence of mailings. He creates unique selling proposition. He creates an offer that transcends timing. He did everything we talked about brilliantly that if a plumber can do it, You can do it. Now, for fun, Al arrives at my house. Virtually no resemblance between he and a plumber. He's not wearing work clothes. He's not carrying a toolbox. Al the plumber is in a 3-piece beige suit, white shirt, brown and white polka dot tie, gold collar bar, gold cufflinks, little wrenches. He's carrying a brown eel skin attaché case. The only resemblance between he and a plumber is on the breast pocket of his suit coat there's a cloth patch sewn on that says, "Al." He comes into my house. Opens up his eel skin attaché case, takes out a matching clipboard, says, Mr. Kennedy, as you can see, this is the form I'm going to use to check the 100 possible plumbing problems. Takes me about 20 minutes to do that. While I do that, do you have a VCR? Got a VCR. You need to watch this videotape. Watch the videotape. Videotape educates me about one of the greatest healthcare crises in America today. I had no idea. Seems an alarming number of us are falling and slipping in our bathtubs, serious injuries, breaking hips. It turns out they got this Invisible Glop replaces bathmats forever. One-time application, nothing to clean, and you'll never slip and fall. Lifetime warranty. The video clicks off at 19 minutes, and as it does, Al is standing there. I say to myself, he's done this before. Al says, Mr. Kennedy, I have very good news for you. You do not have 96 of the most common household plumbing problems. 96, 100, 4, like the ones you do have are very trivial. I have everything with me I'll be able to take care of them today. I just need to go out and get some work clothes, get some tools. While I do that, did you watch the videotape? Yeah, I watched the videotape. Notice you have 5 baths. You have one in the master suite, then you have these other 4. While I'm here today, shall we just protect the one in the master suite or shall we protect all of them? $389 later, Al the plumber gets in his beige Mercedes and putt-putts down the hill from my house. I call him a few days later. I said, look, I didn't want to bother you when you're out the house working. I know that's rude. But I teach magnetic marketing systems and you used one of them brilliantly. I wondered if you'd mind sharing the numbers. Not at all, Mr. Kennedy. I'll just have to put you on hold to get the project file. I'm now on hold listening to a recorded commercial for his brother's pool cleaning service. When that's over, he's back. What would you like to know? How many homes did you mail to? About 300. How many of those home plumbing problem prevention audit things have you done so far? 72. Do the math if you wish. Assume no one but me gave him money immediately, a poor assumption No obligation on your part, but make it if you wish. For the price of 300 letters times 3, he's been in 72 homes where he's put on a show and a half. When they need a plumber, who they gonna call? To make sure every place there's a pipe, there's a sticker. It took us a while to get that off the cat. Well, there are problems with everything we do here together this afternoon, even if we had 3 times as much time, and we don't. I want to talk about the problems and how to solve them in the last 7 minutes that we have available. And these 7 minutes are important to you if, as you sat here, you said one or more times to yourself, "Maybe." Maybe there's something here. Maybe there's a way for us to prospect better. Maybe there's a way to get better quality customers. Maybe there's a way to spend our ad marketing dollars smarter. Maybe, maybe, maybe. If you said maybe, then you have to be concerned with these these problems. And I'll summarize all the problems. Here's the problems: bridging the gap between new ideas, new information, new intentions, and implementation. Huge gap. Easy. Now, excited. Some people think they got it. Psychologists tell us you don't. Uh, 48 hours from now, you will have forgotten everything I said, half of what you thought of as a result of what I said. 16 days from now, you won't even remember having been here, let alone anything we talked about. This thing works just like Mama always accused you of, in one ear and out the other. Some of you took notes, admirable. Some of you have been taking notes since dawn, admirable. But I'm a note-taker too, so let you and I be straight with each other, the note-takers in the room. Somewhere you got the place, maybe at home, maybe at the office, probably at home, and it's probably in the garage, the basement, the attic, under the kids' bunk bed, in the trunk of an old car you don't drive anymore or way in the back of a closet, but somewhere you got the place. The place is where all the notes from all the seminars you were at before this one have gone and it's where all the notes from this one are going to. So who's kidding who? We're not going to bridge the gap from new ideas, new information, new intentions to implementation, to something actually happening with notes. Need tools.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. Now this free gift comes with almost $20,000 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 and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.