Five Must-Follow Principles For Selling High Ticket Products & Services

How many times have you done a sale only to wonder, I wish I would have charged more, or I've made X many sales. That's the only amount I've made so far. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we're talking about what would happen if you were to actually offer high-ticket products and not just high-ticket products. We're talking about 6-figure products. Now, if your mindset is not currently set to be able to focus on a 6-figure product, then at least find a way to be able to increase your product. The price of your product is the number one thing that you are able to adjust and it can change absolutely everything. But when you have a high-ticket business, what does that look like? How do the leads flow in? How do you position everything? What does that look like? Well, in this episode, we get to listen to Dan Kennedy as we speak to Jason Stevens and Dr. Charles Martin, both from very different industries, talk about what their businesses look like, how their leads flow in, and more so that you can model it as your full business model or as an amazing backend. It's all your choice. Let's listen in to 5 must-follow principles for selling high-ticket products and services.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our diamond call. Uh, on the big fee, big price selling, and we will get started in just a minute. Um, we have, uh, with us actually two guests, and, uh, Jason Stevens, member of Arson Financial Services, and, uh, Dr. Charlie Martin, who, uh, probably many of you know or know of. So we want to talk about, um how to get people to hand over large sums of money, inordinately large for the industry or category of product or service that you may be in. And I started— he won't like it characterized this way, but I originally invited Dr. Martin because he's probably one of the highest-priced dentists in the country. You guys don't even use price— highest fee dentists in the country, uh, and, uh, and is very good at making people think that large numbers are reasonable. Um, and so we have Dr. Martin, and then we also have another guest. So Charlie, I'll, I'll let you go first just to kind of do your own introduction. Yeah, not going all the way back to the womb, but about giving people a— what it is that you do, kind of how you got here, what the practice looks like.

Yeah, well, yeah, Dan, thanks. I'm Dr. Charles Martin. You can call me Charlie. I have been a dentist for many, many years, and during those 37-plus years, I also for the past 30 have been doing business advising. So my new entity is called Martin's Milestone Advisors, and a a sister website called Martin's Business Milestones where we literally just celebrate entrepreneurs. But what I discovered early on as a dentist is that I did not want to treat run-of-the-mill patients. I wanted to treat patients who had a lot of problems. Of course, the more problems they have, the bigger value you could bring. So I have been teaching that for now for, oh, since the early 2000s. And written 6 books, done a lot with that area, and actually have 5 main topics to bring up today, but we'll talk about that in a minute.

Quick idea of examples of case sizes?

Oh, they run the gamut, but, you know, it's not unusual to have a 6-figure case size. So $17,000 to $137,000 is kind of the range, and of course, someone's going to spend that much money, it's for a very, very big reason, and that means we're really putting them back together again, and there's a lot of work involved in that. That can take a year to 2 years to do completely, so there's a reason for that, and I want to talk about price and value a little bit later, but yeah, so we deal with lots of kind of big cases and, you know, what people would call expensive when they think about dentistry in general.

Yeah, well, we don't want to break that down by the tooth. No, we don't. That's like, I just saw a statistic, if you go to the movie theater, the price you pay per ounce for popcorn is 4.5 times what you pay per ounce for filet mignon at the grocery store.

Wow.

So there's price references nobody ever wants to make, right? And in your field, it would be Divide that $137,000 by the number of teeth in your mouth. Um, uh, uh, Jason. So Jason's kind enough to be with us, um, prompted by a report he sent me. Um, and so, uh, Jason, why don't you give everybody the same thumbnail sketch of who you are, what you do?

Sure, that sounds great. Uh, Dan, I'm excited to be here. Um, My story is I originally sort of set out to be a professor and that took me to New York City, but very soon into the business I figured out that there was no real upside there for somebody who believes you should earn what you provide in value. So I got into the life insurance business and quickly found that I had access to a niche and I was in a space where I could do some cool stuff. Very quickly went from, I don't know what the heck I'm doing, and almost washing out, to getting paired up with some senior people, and within a very short time was doing some larger transaction sizes, to some extent rivaling them in the production I was pulling off. Then switched houses, went to one of the big mutuals, and within 6 months I had done a 6-figure transaction all by myself and repeated to do a number of transactions between $15,000 and $30,000 for mostly life insurance. But to the cost of nation—

You're talking about the premium amounts?

Yeah, the annual premium amounts, right. So my take was half, 60-some percent of that. And yeah, transactions that were large in the scale of like what kind of check are you going to write? But I think a lot of the principles still apply that you've talked about and that we hope to get into.

Well, so I want to start. With you. I'm gonna let you kind of go for about 10 minutes, then we're going to move to Charlie's mini seminar that he has graciously prepared. Um, so let's talk about the 6-figure premium, uh, cases. They're relatively rare in your field. Um, it just— let's just take us through how that happens, what you know about that that a lot of people would not know. Sure.

That sounds great. So I think one of the things is it didn't come from nowhere. Like I had to get all the information from the business and work out kind of the lay of the land in my head before I could cite these things. But I was always a really, really voracious reader, so I picked up the books by Ben Feldman and these guys who had come before and done big transactions and had that stuff in my head. I was really emotionally committed to, "I can make an outsized living doing this and people have done it." Winning Through Intimidation, Robert Ringer, he said the same thing. That became a focal point of mine as I was doing the regular business. I quickly found out that most of the people I was learning from were saying, "Hey, go in there, 1 to 2 meetings, get the app and get out." and go on to the next guy. Once I started having some success with some larger than average premiums, I figured out, I was like, "Hey, you know, I'm doing a real consultative process here. There's a lot of Q&A. I'm really asking most of the questions and trying to get them to understand the realities that exist even if they don't know it." Then parlay that into an extra couple of meetings to triple or quadruple the size of the case. I thought it really came from a consultative process.— and getting them to see that, you know, the cost of doing nothing is a lot more expensive than the cost of doing something.

You know, it's interesting. Today's my phone day, so I'm on the phone all day with clients and this and whatever else. But all my clients in financial services who I spoke to earlier today, they are— they They're earning an outsized living, a 7-figure business, and they are selling large cases and large premium life. Their sales process brings somebody through a 3-hour class to a paid weekend class to a series of 6 meetings. Before the businesses transacted. And as you say, one of the things is most people think in the opposite direction. You know, they want to abbreviate the process as much as possible. But abbreviation almost always involves a boilerplate approach to what it is that you sell rather than a customized approach.

Yeah, and that's something that I've— it's never made intuitive sense to me. Maybe it's just my bias, but I've never known somebody in my business who worked from a script. There's probably going to be an eruption when I say that, but I worked with a really successful guy in New York who was kind of a gift-of-gab guy. What I learned from him was the relevant thing is to find the issue that matters most, and then that's what you stay on, and that's what you come back to. Wherever possible, you're right, you customize it, especially in these days. They always talk about in direct response, right, a customized thing is better than a boilerplate, but I think the consultative selling process is really that whole customization thing writ large. You know, we're able to do a totally customized approach for people now. They can see their own situation, and like the participation elements in mailings, same deal. Like, you know, what's your asset load? What are your estate taxes going to look like? What will happen to your family net worth if something happens and you don't have protections in place? You know, those are the sorts of things that get people to buy in, and then when they see the solution, they're like, oh, that makes sense.

So what does your business look like? Where do the prospects come from? What's the funnel that they move through? How are you getting in front of people that you are able to do these sites of sales to?

Well, it's funny. That's actually what brought me to you. I was doing this primarily in the niche I started in, which was professors in New York City.. That's what brought me to the first big client for the 6-figure premium. From there, it's mostly referral-based now. We go in and I formalized a referral process. The point is to get in front of other people just like these guys who have this problem. Not everyone is going to do it, but mostly now it's a referral process. When I got to the point— sort of a little disclosure on my end— when I got to the point where I was doing these deals, my managers couldn't figure out how I was pulling them off. And I said, "Guys, help me here. Help me replicate this. Tell me what I need to do to make this into a conveyor belt of people coming my way." They really didn't have any useful information, so I sat down and thought, "Well, how do I do this?" That brought me to you and how you replicate, copy, and clone your best clients. At this point, when I'm getting in front of the right client, I can make the good things happen. To be frank, I'm still perfecting the cycle of getting them to come to me in a regular manner, so I'm not anywhere near that 6-step sign-in for the meetings and that sort of thing yet, but that's the vision.

You know, you're the second one— again, another call today with a client of mine in financial services who also specializes in university professors.

Get out of here, really?

Yeah.

I've never heard of anybody else doing it.

Yeah. What state are you working? Where are you?

Just geographically.

Oh, where am I?

I'm sorry, I thought you're asking somebody else.

Um, it was New York City.

Oh yeah, so he's, he's not in your same market. Uh, I'll make a note, I'll connect you guys. That would be great. Talk to him.

Yeah, that would be great. It's a, it's a wide open market if you know how to access it. There's nobody in it and nobody got— I was, I was in New York City and I'd only ever heard of one other guy doing it, and that was like 10 years ago.

Yeah, well, the power of specialization, people don't get it, but it applies to any business. So second to last thing, what haven't I asked you I should ask you?

That's a good question. Well, I think the thing to know when you're in this space is that it's easy to get psyched out. By the size of transactions, especially if it's kind of new. I got this guy on the line and it felt like such a big transaction, the first one, that I almost was like, you know what, I'm just going to go with this the way I would do a normal case and not get psyched out by it. I think that mental advantage helped a lot because we tend to think, at least in the insurance space, $40,000 for a life insurance premium, that's a lot for a year. For the guy who's making $1 million, $2 million, or is worth $12 million, he looks at And he says, "Well, that's reasonable because it's going to give me this $5 million of tax-free death benefit that's going to keep me from having to pay estate taxes." And it was a shift for me in perspective when I got it through my head because one of my other advisors was like, "That's a big— $40,000, that's a big deal." And I thought and I was like, "No, it's not a big deal to him. It looks big to us because we're not used to writing that, but for him, that's not a big thing." And being able to put myself in that position of— sort of being an ally and being like, "Look, this is what it's going to do. This is the sticker price. I'm not psyched out by it." I think that helped because that allowed me to break through into that space where it otherwise would have been really intimidating.

Cool. Yeah. All right.

Thank you.

I appreciate it. Charlie. Hello. Why don't you start wherever you want to start? What do folks need to know about looking at somebody with a straight face? Writing a $100,000 dental case?

Well, whether it's a dental case or an insurance premium, no matter what it is, it boils down to how much does the person value what you're providing for them. And this is a process. In fact, the term pritium, which is a Latin term, actually means price.

This is so you get to use the Latin you you, you had to study in college to get your degree.

Is this what this— no, I studied this in high school.

I said this. Yeah, okay, well, I did too, by the way. I understand. However, however, the point actually probably got some use out of it.

The point I want to make though is, is the, is the root of the word price comes from a Latin word which means price and value. So there is clearly an objective value to what we provide, transportation. You can drive a Kia or you can drive a Mercedes. And for some people, it doesn't matter. But for other people, the subjective value is high enough they want to drive the Mercedes. And so, you know, the first principle to me is that if you're going to have high prices or high fees is a principle that some people will think will be counterintuitive. I think is absolutely true. It's the way you work. It's the way I work. It's the way that the people who are really my friends work, which is deliver more value than you charge. I—

Well, more importantly about what you said though is to delink from objective value or intrinsic value. A rock is a rock is a rock to subjective value. Right? I mean, that's a really big idea.

Well, and if someone even is selling a commodity, their granite rock company in California has delinked them, believe it or not. They sell rocks. And they have a policy, which is very interesting, which is that If, you know, you don't like the fee that we've charged you for your rocks, mark it out and write the fee in that you think is right. Now that takes some real guts. Of course, when it happens, they use it as a learning experience. So I think that— by the way, that company charges an average of 6% for rocks more than their competitors. When you think in terms of objective value and subjective value, what's the value of staying in a Motel 6 versus staying in a Ritz-Carlton? It's a totally different experience. And the subjective value is in the experience. Both are a bed, both are a room, both have a phone, a TV. But the subjective value is one is one considers as upscale and to a large degree luxury. And the other one is like bare bones, I'm just barely surviving. And of course, that subjective value is largely tied to the identity of the person buying it.

Yep, there you go. So I have two— I have it too. I discourage it enormously, but I have two clients. So everybody that comes here, which you well know, um, we meet at my house, which is basically halfway between Cleveland, Akron, and, um, and everything is for my convenience. Clients, and, uh, the closest not horrible place to stay overnight to be picked up in the morning is a La Quinta. And I mean, it's fine, you know, but it's not, you know, it's a La Quinta, right? And, uh, so I have two clients who secretly— they think I don't know, um, they stay at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Cleveland and That means they have to— they're probably getting up at, oh, 6 AM when they could get up at 7:45, um, and commuting, uh, to be picked up at the La Quinta. Uh, and they both think I don't know, but I do. And, um, and it is, you know, it is really less about the luxury in this case, because look, they're flying in that night, right? Right. So, you know, they're getting to the place at bedtime and then they're getting up and leaving. It's more about, as you said, their own self-identity.

Yes.

How they view themselves, and they view themselves as somebody that does not and will not stay at a La Quinta. I—

if you guys don't mind, I found that in my business too, a number of transactions. This The first big one in particular, the guy even said, he's like, "I owned a policy with a company years ago and I liked it and that's part of the reason I'm doing this." I heard a number of people say things like that, especially when it was a big-ticket item. They said something to the effect of like, "Now's the time. I've arrived and this is what people do when they arrive." That was the emotional element that drove a lot of the sales. I didn't know that until it was done, but I started noticing that when people would say things like that. That's why they're doing this.

Okay. Well, so Dan, the whole deal here is that you start with the premise of delivering value more than you charge. And there's a little story about this, and you probably heard it. There was an older candy store owner, and he'd been having this candy store for 40 years, and it was time for him to retire, and he sold it to a younger person. But what the younger person did is observe the old shop owner doling out candy to kids and adults. And they would order malted milk balls, you know, $1.50 worth of malted milk balls. He'd put it up there and weigh it. And then he would give them a wink and add a few more malted milk balls before he put it in the bag. Well, he was quite successful in his little candy store, right? The new guy comes in and says, no, I'm going to give them exactly what they pay for. Well, guess what happened to the candy store? Yep, it went downhill. And people realized they were— they were— the exchange factor they'd come to count on and believe in had disappeared, and so did that store.

You know, they did a— Walmart ran a test in 2009 And they eliminated— but you probably haven't been in a Walmart in two decades, so I'll, I'll tell you something you don't know. Um, uh, at Walmart they have greeters, um, and they're mostly old people that, you know, didn't do a very good job of planning for retirement.

Yeah.

And, um, and they have blue vests on and They greet you when you come in the door and sort of help you get a shopping cart. But mostly they're like the Goodwill ambassador welcoming you to the store, right? They don't really serve any practical purpose. I mean, the shopping carts are right there. You'd find it with or without the greeter. And so they eliminated him in 10 stores. I forget the month in 2009, and that calendar quarter with no other observable or detectable variable, the sales volume in the store dipped by almost 15%. Wow. Geez. And it simply evidences that at really at every level of consumer Whether all the way down at Walmart or all the way up at Neiman Marcus or above, people are unconsciously, if not consciously, responsive to the 3 extra pieces of candy, right, put into the bag, right? And obviously economic practicalities determine what we can do about that, right? But there's no doubt that people feel it, they sense it, and it then affects all their subsequent behavior. You know, I've been in the seminar business my whole life, and I'm constantly getting clients to do stuff that they don't— that they just view as an empty expense. But that affects the mood of everybody going forward, which affects what they spend and how freely they spend. And so value is not just about the core product or the service or the quality thereof. Value is about how people feel about the product, the service, the provider, the experience.

Exactly, which leads me to my next point, Dan, which is— It's almost as if we planned it.

What's that? It's almost as if we planned it.

That's true. The poster's in the mail for you. And I talk about the power of self-confidence and belief in your offering. You know, it's really the attitude of the seller and the team in many cases that we're worth the fee we're going to quote. And that we provide outstanding value, in fact, in excess of this. So, you know, the test of this is what I call the choke point. The place where you have a hard time actually saying the price or fee directly to a customer.

Yeah, Jason does. Jason alluded to that when he first started to sell big premiums.

Yes. Yeah, it's a head game usually with the person making the offer.

So you have to do whatever you need to do to acquire the belief about your worthiness of your offerings and yourself. And there's a big point here that I think that needs to be made about if you have something that people need, you have a responsibility, and dare I say duty, to care enough about that individual that you're helping to work through all their own barriers and your own which will inevitably come up, particularly on higher price items, to help them get through all of that. And kind of the attitude of you is a relaxed confidence, a personal certainty, and a faith in what you're doing is going to provide more value than someplace else where they get to spend that same money.

That's how I go about it. Yeah, and that's, you know, it is a lot about how you understand what it is that you do, how you position what it is what you do to yourself and then to others. Like you guys, I'm often in that high 5-figure to 6-figure to in some cases mid-6 fee level in a profession where you can certainly find copywriting for less. I was telling somebody the other day, our personal frames of reference for a variety of things including price and everybody else's, it's always useful to remember, tend to be the year they were born, the year they graduated from high school, the year they graduated from college, and the year they got married. And those numbers stay, you know, on a shelf in your head. Um, and so, like, the year I graduated from high school, the average price— the average priced home in America was $34,000 and some odd dollars. And anything above $100,000 was, you know, it was the Warren Buffetts and the Trumps of the world. It wasn't what anybody, certainly anybody I knew did. So you quote somebody like $150,000 to write copy and there's a little voice that comes off the shelf that says, "You realize that's 5 times what the house is worth." So a big help for me was reframing. So I view it In most cases, because I'm mostly not doing one-and-dones. I'm doing systems that are going to be used on an ongoing basis. So I always view it, and then I got good at describing it to others, as I'm not doing copywriting here. I'm creating marketing assets for you. Which is true.

Well, yeah.

Well, it has the terrific added virtue of being entirely true. Which, well, that's really more important for us to accept it ourselves, right, than it is for anybody else.

True.

But, but, but yeah, that, you know, it absolutely is true. And so somebody I'm doing something for might think nothing of $100,000 for a piece of equipment for their business, or opening the next outlet, right, or even putting on an event. Um, but to have, to have some ads written, if you leave it to them, they're thinking about that like having plumbing done, right? And if it's like having plumbing done, these fees are really unreasonable, let alone royalties and pieces of equity and so forth. But if you're creating assets, that's a whole different story altogether, right? And So I think everybody needs to sort of find that way to reframe the value of what they do for themselves to have this confidence that you're talking about and then to present it well to their prospects, customers, clients, patients.

Well, then that leads me to my next pillar, pricing power. Thank you for that. We're right on target here. Our unannounced schedule together, which is value perception is your job. It is your job to help your customer, client, patient, patron, whoever value what you do in a responsible way.

In fact, if you—

and what I like to say it, you have to hone it so you can own it. And you really have to teach your customers how to appreciate and value your offerings. Because if you don't, you're left to the vagaries of their own experience, and you can't do that. So you have to use— while you use the language of your targeted public, then you have to mix in symbology and pictures and comparisons, design, simplicity, ease of use, etc. Remove risk, of course, with guarantees and delivering on your promises. Of course, a billion-dollar company was created by that, right?

Yep.

FedEx by promising to be delivered the next day. What frustration you can remove, what speed you can deliver, what experience you can deliver, what gnawing problem can you fix that they can't get fixed somewhere else. And in many ways, as you call selling money at a discount, which is make money by investing money with me and my offering. And then frame your price early so then you can— support it, but it's going to need a lot of support.

You know, FedEx is such an interesting thing to mention because there's an entire generation now and huge numbers of people listening to us who really have no appreciation for what a groundbreaking and radical thing FedEx was. And the comparison, of course, was to a postage stamp. Yes. Because that was the other option. So, you know, you were going from, I don't know, stamp was like 15 cents, I think, to I think their initial deal was like $9. You know, and I mean, there was a lot of conversation of really, does the damn thing have to be there overnight? And the spread is actually even greater now. But of course, people have used— have learned to use FedEx not just to deliver essential documents but really as a marketing media, and a lot of FedEx business is that. And now we're all paying extra to subsidize their Amazon delivery.—

but— Well, it also, you know, it gives importance to the item being delivered. You receive it and say, oh, it's a FedEx, so it must be more important.

I'm going to open it, which is what's alluding to the marketing. Yeah, that's exactly— so there's your value, right?

Yes.

It's not really that it gets there. It's how it is perceived and handled when it gets there. Gets there. That exists in everything, is finding what's important. Jason, you said it earlier. What's the real important thing to your prospect? Then tying your value to that. Often that's very different from this is a glass, this is a box, this is a FedEx, this is a rock.

And to add to that, Dan, you know, you do have to teach people to perceive the value you deliver. And of course, there is the thing that's most important to that person at the moment. But typically and almost always, the value they really should be appreciative of are the other things that you can bring to them. You know, whether it's an insurance policy that's going to give a death benefit. Well, it's a lot more than that, and here's why.—

Can I share a funny anecdote about that?—

Well, let me finish what I'm saying first.— Oh, sure. I'm sorry.— So there's a lot to be said about what value you have to create as a package. And it is the addition of those other values beyond what they said was important to them that really gives oomph and more power to the actual outing you're going to give.

Yeah, and I want to go to Jason for just a second. So there's something that you'll appreciate, um, that again a bunch of people won't, but cosmetic surgery, which is sort of the sister to cosmetic dentistry, um, there used to be no value in the cocktail party story about having it done and the bragging rights of the doctor you were going to. Value because everybody kept it secret. Women left town and hid out afterwards, whereas now there's enormous value in the bragging rights of the doc you're going to and the cocktail party story. So these things do change with time.

You want it in, Jason? Oh yeah, it struck me what you were saying there about understanding why people are doing what they're doing and being really clear on it. One of the big deals, the guy started out the conversation and we said, "Hey, you know, you're going to have this estate tax problem. You can either pay $5 million to the government when you guys pass away and your kids get X, or you can do this and do 5% a year," and so forth and so on. So we started it under that premise and he was like, "This is This is a good idea. It makes a lot of sense. But all along the way he kept saying, when we would talk, he would say, "Well, I really don't care about leaving that much money to my kids. I don't want them to be rich, so X, Y, and Z." I started to get nervous because I was like, "Wait a minute. This guy, we started it under the assumption that he wanted to avoid estate tax and now he's telling me he doesn't want to leave his kids rich. What's going on?" But my sales spidey sense was telling me, "No, he's still on the hook. Just keep going. He's going to come through." Sure enough, he did. By the time we got the whole transaction done, I looked at him and I said, I said, "You know, you've got to share with me. You've been telling me this stuff all along about why you want to do this and then it appears that it's not why you wanted it." He said, "Well, yeah, sure, we started it under that premise, but by the time I got to the end I realized, hey, with this in place I can spend all my money and still leave my kids something." Which was eye-opening for me. My spidey sense was accurate, but I wanted to make sure the whole deal was done before I questioned why. It just speaks to the point of understanding why. Why people are doing what they're doing. It ended up not being, in this case, sort of altruism for his kids. It was more like, oh, instead of being able to spend $8 million, now I get to spend $12 million, which is a very personal benefit for him.

He still got to take care of his family. Well, you know what happens with sort of lazy, low-level salespeople is they decide there are 5 benefits, 5 reasons to buy X. And they wind up with this very standardized pitch of the 5 reasons. But for the most part, different people have different reasons for buying the same thing. And to your point earlier, just about every person has one overriding reason, not 5. And at some point, it's useful to find that out.

So we were at 3, Charlie.

Right.

Yeah.

Let me just hitchhike on that little idea there for a minute. Oftentimes people will hide that crucial factor that's like, I can't tell them that. So you actually have to continue that consultative selling, talk with And honestly really care about the individual you're working with because you are going to make a difference in the quality of their life, and that is huge. Yeah, number 4 is what I call surfing the persuasion foam. And here's the great misunderstood that 99% of all small businesses suffer from, and which is they don't use any reputation crafting, which is really PR on steroids. They don't use that as a mechanism. Magnet to draw people to them. And point of fact is it really is the tip of the spear. It's the very first thing you should be thinking of. This is— so what is the persuasion funnel composed of? One, reputation crafting, which is that PR on steroids. Number two, marketing. And the third one is sales. And it's in that particular order. And when it's done well, it makes the work of marketing smaller, easier, more efficient. In some cases, it removes the need for it completely. And, you know, examples are, first right off the bat, are Ben Jerry's ice cream and Red Bull, a small multi-billion-dollar company out of Austria. So the point about this is that when reputation crafting is done well, it gives you an edge that most other entrepreneurs and small businesses are never going to use. And so it is something that is done both online and offline today, but it's the— to me it's the great missing fulcrum that you can use. And certainly, Dan, you've used it in your business for a long time, and I've used it in my own. I'm on the COVID of a magazine, so I've become at least slightly famous where I live, and it helps enormously to allow your marketing to go in before it was just filtered out?

You know, when Buffett bought— when Berkshire Hathaway, to be precise, bought NetJets, that's the first Berkshire Hathaway company that has ever actually used Warren in its advertising. And I think, I hope more because he didn't want to do it than because everybody was too damn dumb to do it. But you never know. But NetJets was the first one. And the first ad had Warren and Bill Gates flying on a NetJets plane.. And they rarely got direct response because first of all they're not doing direct response advertising, but they said they rarely got direct response from all their other advertising up until that point. So their advertising, they viewed themselves as a brand advertiser. Advertising's job simply to establish awareness and lay a foundation for then their sales operation. And this ad, they got qualified direct response. I mean, they got people calling up saying, I want an appointment with a NetJets person because of the ad in XYZ magazine. And it, it simply speaks to this issue of leveraging reputation, right? Yes. And, um, and if you don't have it, you got to figure out what kind of reputation is going to be useful with your audience, and then you create it or you rent it or some combination thereof. But you're right, a lot of small business owners, a lot of practice professionals, a lot of salespeople neglect this and they handicap and hamper themselves a lot. In financial services where Jason is, I mean, I went through a whole process a couple years ago now of, um, selecting a private banker. And, um, and one from the very big— well, from PNC, very big bank. Um, he had his PowerPoints, which, you know, the minute they get the laptop out or the pad and want to start the PowerPoint presentation, I want to just shoot my glass over it. But so he had his PowerPoint presentation and I suffered through the 25 minutes of the thing. And one of the things I said to him afterwards is I said, but what about you? I don't know a thing about you. And you're the guy I'm going to have to deal with. Yeah. And what did he say? It was like, You, huh, what? You know, um, we're the oldest bank, which they're not because they've— they're the oldest bank if you count the fact that they acquired a bank that acquired a bank that acquired a bank that was the oldest bank in Cleveland.

But he—

we're right back to, you know, corporate stuff, right? But, but, you know, it's Charlie's hand in my mouth, and it's your hand in my wallet. You know, it's not some nameless, faceless institution. And so corporate reputation matters, but personal, uh, branding, personal reputation matters a lot too. Well, it's absolutely true. When you climb up the affluent ladder I always teach that the more affluent the customer/client/patient, the less they are interested in the thing and the more they are interested in the individual they're going to deal with who provides the thing.

Well, it is— it's never-ending, in fact. And when you look at startup success, whether they get funded is often determined by Who were the managers? Who were the founders of this? Am I going to get involved with them? Have they been successful before? Yeah, I'm in, or not. Continuing with kind of our PR point of view thing is that, you know, there is a— ALS did an ice bucket challenge that kind of rolled over the country and ended up bringing in tens of millions of dollars for them with no advertising whatsoever. It became something was fun, it was all viral. But it was the use of a creative idea. And there are creative ideas by the tons out there, but it's just not looked at or even observed. We're doing something with Martin's Business Milestones, which is a recognition of entrepreneurs and their success. That's a dot-com, by the way. That we celebrate entrepreneurs and showcase them for what they've done because honestly they don't get shown very much. So I think that when— if you have a small business, a professional practice, looking at how you can create reputation crafting for yourself is a big lever that more people need to push on.

Let's get to your fifth point, and then I have one specific question for both of you, and then we will— we will get to open conversation with anybody that wants to play.

Okay, sounds good. Yeah, well, you mentioned who, and the fifth one is becoming a category of one. 2005, a book was published called Blue Ocean Strategy, but way before that, people knew that if you can get into a specialization, which you mentioned earlier, get into a niche and become the authority in that area, it gave you a huge leg up. So people are always asking, why are you different? Why should I care? But when you start differentiating things in that category of one, well, Ferrari is largely a category of one in the Ferrari category. The interesting thing more recently is this heavy-duty constructed cooler, a beer cooler.. That's now gone into other kinds of things called Yeti. And it's being sung about in country songs. It's going everywhere. But the price of that cooler, you might pay $40 for this cooler normally, but their price is 10 times that amount of money. And it's based upon the image they have, the reputation they've built. Actually, they do have what I call hyper-functionality. You can put ice in there and it will be there 5 days later.. But they became a category of one in a, of all things, ice cooler. And then of course there is what you've taught forever, Dan, which is being a celebrity, being an author, being an expert.

And then basically from that, being able to prescribe what you recommend rather than having to sell it. So here's my question for both of you. Um, when, when you present a $50,000 to $100,000 premium, a $50,000 to $100,000 dental case, pretty much a $50,000 to $100,000, you know, a lot of things, um, there is sticker shock. There is— it's not really a value question. It's a, gee, I— this was not a number that I anticipated hearing. Um, this is not a number— like, I learned a lesson in 19— I think it was 1983. I was in Beverly Hills doing some work for somebody. I walked into a men's clothing store Really liked a couple jackets and realized there's no price tags on any of them. And if you care, you do not want to be shopping in a place that has no price tags because you are undoubtedly going to be surprised by the price. No matter what the number is that's in your head, that number is going to be higher when you get that thing to the register. Um, um, and I wound up paying more more for a sport jacket than I paid for every item of clothing in my entire closet. So sticker shock happens and it's a visceral reaction. Really, that's a lot of money. Not necessarily value reaction. But so you guys both live in this world.

How do you prepare, preempt, or deal with sticker shock? I love— this is— there's a number of things with this. One is you have to set expectations way earlier because if you are in a sales situation and it's time for them to make a decision, everybody knows the immediacy of decisions is important because life stream happens and friends and family try to talk people out of doing things that they really should do because they don't know any better. But you have to set expectations so that, you know, this is what you should expect this to cost and then really tell the stories of other people who have made this decision and their happiness with having made it. That absolves a lot. But another point is that you have to give them some type of what I call rational scaffolding.

I don't have time to talk about a lot of it here. That's good language though.

Yeah.

Yeah, I make the decision to do it, but I've got to be able to justify it. Yeah, I've got to be able to justify it to my friends and family who are inevitably going to ask me about this. And either I don't say anything to them or I do talk to them and then I have to defend it. Well, if I have to defend it, I want to have a good reason. For defending it. And so you have to give them the rationale, the logic that they need too, by the way, because we know that these decisions are made emotionally and backed up with reason, not the opposite. But you have to give them that. And then, you know, the big thing that most people who are in sales or getting anybody to do anything forget is that the anxiety that you as a a salesperson, representative, whatever you're going to call yourself, experience up until the point they say yes, that anxiety now goes across the desk or across the way to the person who said yes. They go, the first thing, among the things they're thinking about is, did I make the right decision? So you have to, believe it or not, you have to continue the process and understand psychologically what's happened to a person. When they've made a relatively big decision. And one of the other things that we haven't talked about, Dan, but I want to add in here is that if you think you can sell a big case or big anything and that it's going to take a short amount of time, it just isn't going to happen. You need 5 to 9 hours for that to occur and that you need to understand that that's what's going to happen and that you should expect it.

And if you try to to abbreviate that, 99% of the time you're going to wish you hadn't.

My rationalization, by the way, for flying private instead of commercial is that I get free parking. Well, I think Buffett's rationalization for NetJets was that he wanted to be in the airline business, but he lost his shirt before.

Yeah. So, yep.

Yeah.

All right, guys. Operator?

Oh hey, Dan, can I do the sticker shock? Oh yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. That's okay, that's okay. Yeah, so sticker shock in our industry, it's kind of interesting too. My sales process is to start with identifying the pain and kind of the big cost they're going to incur. And then that's always the backdrop is, listen, doing nothing is going to cost you this. Doing something involves doing this. The comparison, as long as it is clear, is far less. So that is one of the things. The other thing was I picked this up from Robert Cialdini's book, The Influence book, where he talked about the guy who sold pool tables. He found out if he started walking people through the showroom with the expensive one and then walking them down to the cheap one, he could usually sell a higher average cost of pool table. I applied that to my business and thought, "Okay, I'm going to talk about the expensive stuff first and we'll work our way down." I did that with one of my big cases and I said, "Look, you can solve this problem once by doing $700,000 into a one-pay life insurance and you'll be done. You'll have $400,000 of cash that's growing inside and so forth and so on." I said, "Or you can do $112,000 each year for about 18 years and then that'll be done." And the walking them down from the big figure to the one that you actually want is tremendously powerful. And I think that's one of the things that I learned early that really works is you frame it, even if you know your end goal is going to be like 30% of the big number, you start with the big number as the solution and they're sweating and they're like, oh my gosh, that's crazy. And then by the time you end up with the result, they're like, oh, Yeah, I can deal with that. And the other one is to— in our space there's often, you know, people will do $100,000 into a mutual fund and that's no big deal. But $100,000 for life insurance, if you understand that they're writing a check and it's the same number for them, then it's less intimidating for us. So, you know, they might— to us it's a big deal, $100,000 for life insurance, but they'll write a $100,000 mutual fund check. So if you understand that them writing that big check is the same thing for them either way, it's less intimidating for us.

All right, gentlemen, again, thanks for your time.

Thanks for everybody being on the call and have a great rest of the day.

Thanks, Dan.

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