Marketing vs. Selling (2 of 2)

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. This is part 2 in the marketing versus selling presentation that Dan Kennedy gave. In this episode, Dan is describing the right and the wrong way to implement selling and salesmanship into your business.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by.

Dan opened my eyes to what 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. We're not poorly trained salespeople. Many times it ain't their fault. They're just ignorant, and nobody has given them a system to function with. They've just turned them loose and let them do what they do. My first sales job, my only job, 1974, and the sales manager, vice president of sales, I'm still pissed off. But I had it for 10 months. They hire me, they hand me a company car, they hand me a printout of accounts, they hand me a briefcase with product in it, and they turn me loose. Now they spent all this money on the hiring process, they spent all this money getting those accounts, in the first place. They spent, they got 4 full-page ads in the trade journal that week to the people I'm gonna be calling on, and they're turning me loose. No earthly idea what I'm gonna do out there, which we had in common. They had no earthly idea what I was gonna do out there. I had no earthly idea what I was gonna do out there. How do you think that works out? Don't you think somebody ought to know? Like there ought to be an adult somewhere who knows how this is supposed to go? But we do that all the time. Run a big promotion, flood the place with phone calls, flood the place with customers, the amount of time spent preparing everybody for it, eh, 3 minutes. 3 weeks writing a sales letter. 3 minutes getting prepared. How much you think's falling out the holes in the bucket? Poorly motivated salespeople. You can't play baseball, 3 strikes and you're out, unless you have an environment where people can— who do well can do well. They gotta be able to do well financially, they gotta be able to do well in other terms. The restaurant I spoke to you about, they explained to all of their servers that if after 6 months they are not making the equivalent of $50,000 a year, they need to go elsewhere because they are a poor fit for this particular environment and they're doing the business harm. And by their second year, they should be making $100,000 a year. And there's a 6-week training class in addition to all the other training they give the servers called How to Make $100,000 a Year Here. And they expect their servers to make $100,000 a year. Now, if you provide somebody an opportunity to make $100,000 a year, guess what? You get to enforce rules. You get to have strong expectations. You get to make demands. You get to play baseball. If they can only make minimum wage, when you yell at them, they just walk across the street to where they can get minimum wage from someplace else. Okay, so motivated salespeople, poorly managed salespeople. This is now about the ugly part of the job imposed upon yourself and imposed on others. That's— this is enforcement of system and accountability for same. So if you don't enforce it— so by the way, you run home from the seminar, those of you that got staff, and you tell them you got 12 new ideas. Guess what the staff's doing? Waiting it out. It'll all blow over. They've seen it before. They're like Washington bureaucrats. 70% of all federal government department heads and on down do not change with administrations. They're locked in place like cement. It's only the top third that move around. So it don't matter then, Democrat Congress, Republican Congress, Bush, Clinton, next Clinton, next Bush, don't make any difference. They ain't going anywhere. That's why Bush couldn't get them trailers moved. 5 times he told everybody, I want those trailers down there in New Orleans moved. To where the people are who need them. Trailers are still sitting there rotting. There's a president of the United States that, "I want trailers moved." Trailers are still sitting there. Most powerful man in the free world. The trailers are still sitting there. 'Cause he ain't the most powerful man in the free world. The 200 bureaucrats who needed to move the trailers are the most powerful people in the free world, and they know all they gotta do is wait him out. So they're moving the trailers whenever they damn well feel like moving the trailers. And that goes on everywhere. The only way for him to have got those trailers moved was to get on Air Force One, drag everybody's ass down to where the trailers were, and stand there with his arms folded and say, "I ain't leaving until we move these trailers." Then he would have got trailers done. So he's missing like the enforcement part of the job. Same deal. So once you design a process, you design a system, you create a script, you create a sales presentation, now if you don't police yourself, if you're the one using it— so how do you police yourself? Well, you audiotape yourself, you videotape yourself, you have roleplay drills of yourself, you make sure you're doing it. Speaker? Every third or fourth Peter Loewe presentation, I reviewed the tape. Why? Because I think I'm doing X up here, but I gotta make sure I'm doing X up here. I got a million-dollar sales presentation for that event. I don't want to be screwing it up. I know I'm not a very reliable employee. So somebody's got to check me, right? Since there ain't anybody else to check me, I got to check me. You got to check you too, right? And you got to check the others. Inadequate measurement and accountability. Every piece of your system that can be measured should be measured. Tell you a quick story, wraps 3 of these points or 4 of these points together. It's a very simple thing. It happens in a lot of offices. This is an attorney who was in my coaching group for 3 years. Poor name capture. All kind of advertising in his practice. Big Yellow Pages ad, big billboards, big TV. Spent a lot of money to make the phone ring. DUI law practice. Only 1 out of every 7 or 8 calls are converting to appointments to come into the office. Well, they should all at least get captured. We should have their name, their address, their email, so we can do follow-up. See, can't do marketing to somebody we can't find. So we spent all this money to get them to call, they don't convert to an appointment, we have no ability to do the second wave of marketing to them because we don't know who they are. But we spent the money for the call. Now, he would look at his overall numbers, his cost per sale. So only 1 out of 7 or 8 convert to appointments, 1 out of 2 of those convert to a case, average case is $8,000, his cost per sale is $2,000, he's a happy camper, right? I said, "But you're not thinking about what you're losing. Yeah, your economics are okay, but boy, they could be a lot better without you doing any more work if we weren't losing the 7." Okay? So let's make sure your staff now doesn't let anybody get off the phone without using this little script and capturing the name and address to send them a free "What You Need to Know About Your DUI Case" kit with an audio CD and a DVD, etc., and get their email, right? So next coaching meeting, "How's that going?" "No good." Why is it no good? Because staff says nobody will give them their name and address. They need that. I said, okay, go home. How many staff you got? This was our joke the other day, but seriously, how many staff you got? He said, I got 5. I said, okay, pick one. Got anybody you don't like? Go home and fire that one visibly in front of everybody else, preferably set her on fire. That'll get everybody's attention, okay? If you got one that's the worst of the bunch, by all means pick that one. If they're all about equal, then just pick whichever one's annoying you. Pick the one to choose, go. I don't care, just fire somebody. Get their attention. Then have another conversation. Then I'll prove to you they'll give you addresses. Give them $5 for every name and complete set of contact information they capture. So at the end of the day, you hand out $5 bills for complete record forms. Guess what? The population of Las Vegas changed in 48 hours. All of the drunk drivers who refused to give anybody their name and address at this law office left town. A whole bunch of new, much more sociable drunk drivers moved in. They were all happy to give their full name and address, phone number, fax, email, mother's maiden name, every other piece of information we asked for. Why? Because Susie was getting $5, that's why. Cheap $5, by the way. That was the next conversation. Do you know at the end of one day I paid out $120? I said, "So how many leads were we losing? You're spending $5,000 a month running the Yellow Pages ad that gets them to call. Cheap 5 bucks." Right? But it proves the importance of this. Alright? So, next slide. Most businesses, business owners and their salespeople are playing sandlot ball. Now I'm a sports freak, so I never played the game, but I love football. And so one of the big things for me at Peter Lo events was getting to go backstage and hang out with the— because we always had a ball player or a coach or somebody on it. Peter Lo, by the way, was not a sports fan. So those of you that follow football, this is one quick piece of trivia of how you can really screw up by not preparing. We had Tom Landry on the program, who was the former head coach of the Dallas Cowboys, who was dispensed with by Jerry Jones, the new owner, in a, let's say, less than polite and amicable and considerate way, considering that he was a legend. And Landry was replaced replaced with Jimmy Johnson. Well, Peter knows nothing about football. I mean, he's gotta be briefed that Landry is like, from Dallas, who's Dallas Cowboys? It's the ball with the points on the end of it. Oh, okay. So I'm sitting there talking to Landry, Peter comes in and says, hey, I see they're doing really great with that new coach Jimmy Johnson. What do you think about that? Okay, pro, pro ballplayers don't play sandlot ball. This, by the way, you see the phenom come out of college and he can't compete in the pros. It's 'cause he can't master the playbook. 'Cause he can't master the playbook. The pros study, learn, memorize, and practice complicated, sophisticated playbooks. They don't just show up, everybody go long and I'll hit you. That's the way we played sandlot ball, right? That's okay for sandlot ball, it ain't no good if you're a pro, right? We got Tim Couch at the Cleveland Browns, you may recall Tim Couch. That's how Tim Couch played ball in college. Everybody go long, I'll hit ya. They hand this kid a playbook with 500 and some odd pages in it and 180 different plays, and you gotta know your play, you gotta know the receiver's play, you gotta know everybody else's play. Ooh. Incapable of doing it. You gotta be capable of doing it. Your business has to have a sophisticated playbook. Otherwise, you got all these holes, You're spending all this money over here on marketing and all the money's going out the holes. Okay? Each individual has scripted plays. The entire team has to execute the plays. And you, the business owner, you got to provide a success environment for those who will do it. You got to provide great tools. You can't just throw them out there. You got to give them good scripts. You got to give them good outlines. You got to give them good flip books. I was doing a bunch of consulting with Weight Watchers International a handful of years ago. Weight Watchers International fields 1 million inbound phone calls a year. 1 million calls a year, which they spend, you must understand, multi-millions of dollars to create these millions of calls. When a call comes in from a Weight Watchers ad to a phone room at Weight Watchers, the person who answers the phone, his job is to get you, Susie, to go to a meeting in your town. That means he has to know where the meetings are in your town. So Gail, you call and I say, "Gail, where do you live?" And Gail says, "Coral Gables, Florida." I gotta be able to say, "Gail, there's 3 meetings this week in Coral Gables, Florida. There's one on Tuesday at the church, there's one—" So I gotta have that information, right? This is only 4 or 5 years ago. 1/3 of the cubicles don't have a computer terminal in them. They got flip books with little tab dividers on them by state. State. While I got Gail on the phone, I got to find Florida, then I got to find Coral Gables. Is this the dumbest fucking thing you've ever heard? I'm in the phone room going, you got to be hitting me. Well, we don't have a budget for— spend less on advertising. You need less phone calls and you need more computers. Even dumber, now we get Gail to go to a meeting. They got the person who's running the meeting in Coral Gables, she don't know Gail's coming. There's no transmission of information of who's coming to the meeting. Therefore, there's no transmission of information back of who showed up or who didn't show up. We can't call Gail the next day and say, Gail, you were supposed to be at the meeting Tuesday night at the church, 'cause you wanna lose 23 pounds by your sister-in-law's wedding 6 weeks from now, and you weren't there, and we're really concerned about you, Gail. So, you know, we got to get you to the next— see, they can't do that, right? Want to know why? Bigger they are, dumber they get, but you got to watch out for this in your own businesses too. I said— here's what I said. I said, I'm not a tech genius here, not my department. But somehow I think you can give the person running the meeting a laptop with an antenna, and you can send over there a list of the Gales who were supposed to show up. Then she can check them off, and she can send that list back, and you guys can know the next morning who showed up and who didn't. Answer from the CEO: I got an advertising budget. I got a marketing budget. I got a sales training budget. I don't have a laptop budget. We ain't buying laptops. Don't think this doesn't go on at every level, this kind of moronic stupidity. We're all guilty. Gotta watch out for it all the time. 'Cause we can find more ways to be stupid than you can imagine, and this is one of them. So best tools and then insist on their use. Impose disciplines, measure individual performance, et cetera. All right? So pull it up there. Yeah, that's good. That's what they need to see. So here's the bottom line. All resources are funneled in and out of the performance on the field. That's what happens with a team, right? So they've got scouting, they got films of the team they're going to play, they got— they got coaches, they got conditioner guys, they got gyms, they got physical fitness equipment, they got therapists, they got all that. All of that funnels into the performance on the field. Then all the information they gather on Sunday funnels back out to get ready for next week. Same thing's got to go on in our business. All the advertising, marketing, all those resources have to funnel into whatever is our equivalent of the performance on the field. And then a bunch of information has to funnel back out the other side. Skip to this slide, Tracy. Here's the worst word in sales. Now in business, I teach you the worst word is one. Right? Worst word of all in business is one. One of anything. Okay? So if too much of your income is dependent on one account, one product, one service, one method of distribution, one method of marketing, if you have one indispensable employee, etc., etc. Worst number in business. Here's the worst word in selling. Random. It's the worst word. And it is what is going on a lot. So I do very well in selling, always have. You can slide that all the rest of the way up. I don't do well by wandering out here and talking about whatever my mood dictates. There's a guy who was on the Peter Lo events with us for a number of years. I won't mention his name, you would know him. He's a very famous speaker. And he was always mystified that his results were erratic. He would do very well one day, do very well the next. I was on that tour for 9 years. 22 to 27 events a year for 9 years. Same presentation. Okay. My results did not vary by more than 5% with the exception of about 5 days in the entire 9 years. They didn't vary when I had laryngitis and couldn't talk. They didn't vary by geography. They didn't vary by size of audience. They didn't vary by— by only 5%. His were all over the place. He couldn't figure it out. I rarely saw him because he was on in the morning. I didn't go over in the afternoon. One day I'm over there and he's backstage and he's fiddling around with his notes. I said, "What are you doing?" He said, "Oh," he said, "I read the newspaper this morning and I'm adding this. I'm going to talk about this. And so I got to find room to take something out." And I saw this on TV and I think it'd be fun to talk about. I said, what are you doing? You can't be changing the presentation day to day. You can't be going up there talking about whatever the hell you want to talk about today. You've got— the presentation's got to stay the same, you know. So if you make sales calls and you hear a new joke, You think it's cool to tell that new joke to everybody that week. Well, that's a component part of your presentation. First of all, if the old joke worked real good, you better find a way to test the new joke against the old joke and quickly measure the results and see if they're interchangeable or not. You don't want to be just monkeying around with this, okay, so you can't be random about it, okay. You cannot— you've got to be strategic, planned, organized, disciplined. That's why I go bananas with this silliness of business people and sales people making important telephone calls on cell phones while they're running through airports or driving through a flood or surviving a hurricane or in the public restroom at the urinal peeing. How can you possibly be handling that call well? You can't. So you spent all the time and energy and money and marketing and advertising to make the call happen, and now we're on the phone with an important prospect or an important client, and we're going to have this phone call while we're also thinking about, "I gotta make sure not to pee on my shoes." Do you think that's like, in a way, of the most effective— yeah, it's in the way. Okay. Let's talk about scripts for a second. A lot of people don't like scripts because they think it gets in the way of spontaneity. Well, it does. And you don't want spontaneity unless you're doing improv. You want a perfect presentation delivered in the best possible way in whatever circumstance it's in. That means you gotta have scripts. I've lived on million-dollar scripts. I don't have time to tell you these stories, but my entire life has been about selling situation, create script, get script right, deliver script same way every single time. If you find a way to keep testing against it as a control, great. Your business should be about the same. Skip the next slide, Tracy. Skip all the way over to the salesman, it's copywriting. Okay? Here's what selling is. We say that copywriting is salesmanship in print. Right? So you've all heard that. And so direct response copywriting for your ads, your sales letters, your website, etc., it's really salesmanship in print. Salesmanship is copywriting done live. That's what it is. And anybody who thinks it's anything else doesn't get it, because the actual act of selling is a performance. The actual act of selling is performance. Well, you don't walk out on a Broadway stage, unless you're doing improv, without a script. Those numbnuts on The Apprentice shot a TV commercial with no script. Huh? Oh, let's just, let's go film. I mean, we joke about that when we shoot infomercials. We say, "Let's go make some movie magic." But it's a joke. You know, let's go film a sales presentation, and let's make damn sure we check off everything that was in the script while we're filming the sales presentation, because when we cut this thing together later, we don't want to be missing these 7 essential words. So I've learned to be very meticulous as a copywriter. See, the copywriter does a lot of very disciplined things, okay? All designed to move the prospect forward. So we agonize over a word, we agonize over a phrase, and words matter. I pointed out on Renegade Millionaire in Diane's ads. She's got a great headline. There's two ways to do the headline. If you change one word in the headline, you make the headline dramatically less effective, dramatically more effective. Well, what's true in the headline on paper is true of the headline said. It doesn't matter. It's still a headline. My Peter Law presentation, one of the things I fought at those events was I was the last guy I was after the last famous, the last guy after the last famous guy. So how many of you were ever at a Success event where I spoke? Let me see your hands. All right, fair amount of you, okay. You kind of noticed a whole lot of people left, right? I mean, there's a stampede when I'm coming on stage. You don't want to be in an exit door, 'cause they all stayed to see Gorbachev or they all stayed to see Schwarzkopf. They didn't leave it, you know. So the first 30 seconds of my presentation were designed to stop them. 'Cause you can't sell to an empty seat. So I had to have certain things I said that would stop certain people who were already doing something else. Butt up off seat, coat under arm, heading toward door. My job is to freeze them and put them back. Right? Well, you don't just go out there and wing that. You don't just do it different every time. You work real hard to figure out what'll work, and you only got about 30 seconds. What'll work? And then once you figure out what'll work, you memorize it. You could wake me out of a dead sleep. My clothes from my Success Track seminars in the '80s, because we took a $25 deposit for you to be in your seat, and then we refunded it. You— I can do that close right now. I'll die knowing that close. I doubt I could expunge it if I chose, because I did it the same way every single time once I got it to work. Not only same words, same body language, same gestures, same everything, because it's a performance, right? The copywriter part gives you the discipline. See, you all understand it when you write copy. You understand words matter. You understand structure matters. You understand inflection matters. How do we get inflection in copy? We choose what we boldface. We choose what we italicize. We choose what we underline. We choose what we indent. We make this paragraph 12-point, this paragraph 10-point, right? That's how we get inflection. We all understand it matters in print, right? Well, it matters in person. Now if you have people, if you have humans, you have to help them understand that it matters, and you have to get them that good. In other words, you want your people and yourself as good as your best sales letter. Doesn't happen by accident. So the best sales pro— next one— almost— the best sales pro fumble fingers— will craft and prepare his presentation as a copywriter and then learn and deliver it as a performer. Skip the next one. Okay. The best sales pro will craft his presentation as a copywriter— don't put it up yet— no, and deliver it as a performer. Now you really got something. Now you've got the process connected. Now your sales part can be as good as your advertising and marketing part. Not only as good as, but congruent. Okay, a couple pieces of BS that get in the way. For those keeping count, Bill, I would say I'm gonna go 10 over. Number 1, in our business we have a long sales cycle. Industrial business-to-business people tend to believe this, okay? We have a long sales cycle. Nah, you just have a crappy process, okay? See, you've accepted the fact that in your business there is a long sales cycle, okay? But really what you got is a process that does a poor job of accelerating the sales cycle. And you're probably wasting a lot of time talking to people who aren't mature yet, ready to buy. Next one. We don't want to use canned, rehearsed presentations because we will lose spontaneity and energy. Hear that all the time. Understand the translation of that is that we are perfectly willing to leave our results and outcomes to random chance. So as long as you're okay with that, fine, ignore me today, ignore what I'm gonna offer you today, and don't spend any time whatsoever on this part of your process. As long as you're willing to go stand in front of your mirror, your banker, your spouse who would like you to increase your income this year, and your kids who want to go to college, as long as you're willing to stand there and say, "I've made an executive decision to leave our sales results up to random chance. That's what I've decided to do." And by the way, if you employ a sales manager who comes into your office and tells you that, may I suggest, shoot him on sight. 'Cause if that's your answer, it's the wrong answer. Next one. We can't get our people to do that. Grossome. Who's working for who? Well, my favorite radio moment. John Lanigan, who's the morning person in Cleveland, Ohio, who replaced Don Imus in Cleveland, Cleveland, Ohio, when Don got fired in Cleveland and went to New York and started his career in New York. Don didn't get fired there for what he got fired, he got fired in Cleveland for cocaine, but. Lanigan has John Gray on one morning, who I devoutly, I don't dislike him personally, but I dislike him generally. You know, John Gray, the Mars Venus guy, you know what I'm talking about? The little wimpy, You know, you know what I'm talking about. As a piece of trivia, by the way, he and Barbara DeAngelis, the other love relationship person, a lot of people don't know this, they were married and divorced from each other, and very acrimonious to this day. But anyway, so John Gray's on Lanigan's program, and John Gray is explaining all the stuff, you know, the Mars-Venus stuff that you— And Lanigan blurts out, "I got a question for you. Does she have your balls at home in a jar on the mantle?" I'm like— I'm in the car. I got the car pulled over to the side of the road, you know, so I don't hurt somebody while I'm laughing. Well, I have occasionally said the same thing to a client about their employees. I mean, you know, gross out. Who signs the paycheck here? In reality, of course, the customer signs the paycheck, and then it passes through your hands to that person. I mean, so either you got no cojones, and your inmates are running your asylum, or you provide such a terrible opportunity for your people that you can't grow any. Those are the two problems. Right? You gotta fix that. Because you've gotta be able to enforce a system. You have to. Okay. Put the next thing up there. This one. Why? Yes. Why improving your selling is so valuable. It's what I talked about at the very beginning. Okay? If your sales part of your process has too many holes, It handicaps you financially. It forces you to obsess over lead cost. So I have this— see, now we're back into marketing. This is how you can't disconnect them. It's because one of the first questions I have to ask a client, one of the first questions I have to ask somebody in a coaching group is they explain their goals. So Charlie Martin says to me, I want 100 doctors in my coaching program. This person says, "I want 50 customers a month coming into my showroom." As soon as they can enunciate what they want, the question I have to ask is, "What are you willing to pay for each of those sales?" I gotta have a cost, a CPS number, a cost per sale number. Then I gotta figure out how many leads it takes in order to make one of those sales. I gotta know what you're willing to pay per lead. So a lot of people now obsess over trying to have the lowest lead cost they possibly can. Okay? So now we're into, "Oh, I can't use that media. I can't use this media. Oh, I can only use a 4-page letter, 'cause if a 5-page letter would be a lot better, but it pushes us to 2 postage stamps instead of 1, I can't do that." This is now the discussion everybody's in. This is not a marketing discussion you want to be in. This is not the position you want to be in. You don't want to have, you don't want to be up against competition and you be the cheapskate of the bunch. You don't want to be that handicapped, okay. I don't want to be in a head-to-head competition with Hopkins right now in a sales environment because I'm like a little handicapped here. He's okay. Well, this is similar. Conversely, What you really want to be able to do is spend like a drunken sailor on leads. Be able to outspend everybody. How do you do that? Plug all the holes in the sales process so there's no waste over here. That allows you to be incredibly more aggressive over here. And if you want to grow your business, if you want to dominate a market, if you want to confound competition, if you want to do You know, just incredible things. There's the formula. There's the closed loop. Oh man. Well, I gotta tell them this. Go to price mistakes. I'm almost to where I need to be. Yeah. Yeah. Let me tell you a little story about what goes on if you don't plug this hole. This is true. This is an actual case recorded Transcribed, actual salesperson represented to be one of the best in a real selling environment to a real prospect. The prospect says, "I don't feel right about spending this much money." Is that a price objection? Well, here's what the salesman did. He agreed with what he thought the prospect was saying, and he said, "Well, yes." Yes, our product is expensive. Now he didn't then qualify that at all. He didn't say our product is the most expensive but it's also— he didn't do any of that. He just agreed, yes, it's the most expensive. So there's selling mistake number 1. Never agree with anything that doesn't move the sale forward. Then he responded to this as if it was a price objection. So now he went into the let me tell you why it's worth every penny. But it wasn't a price objection. This was a person who didn't feel right about spending that much money. He didn't say, "Geez, I think that's a lot of money." He didn't say, "Gee, that's more than I expected it to cost." He didn't say, "Gee, I've seen cheaper ones advertised somewhere else." He didn't say that. Put up the next slide. Here's what he meant. He meant, I'm 72 years old. I have a grown son and a grown daughter, each with their own families. I want to leave them and my grandkids as much as I can when I'm gone, and it just doesn't seem right to me to spend so much money on myself. It's really out of character for me. I lived through the Depression. I buy my clothes at I live very frugally. Now that's what he meant, that's what was going on in here, okay? It wasn't a price objection, it was a 72-year-old person concerned with their legacy and feeling bad about spending money on themselves when they should be spending it on their families, which just about every 70-year-old person feels that way. If you got a 70-year-old parent or grandparent right now, Okay, you give them a gift, they go when you're not looking, exchange, get a refund at the store, and put the money back in the coffee can that's gonna be there on the kitchen counter when they pass. Okay, that's what's going on. So the salesperson turned it into a price objection when it wasn't. Out the door goes the sale, nobody knows what happened. What gets said about what happened? I closed 68%, that's pretty good. What gets said about what happened, well, you know, the advertising we're doing right now is producing all these old fart cheapskate leads. That's what gets said. That's what gets— but that's not the problem. To fix it, you need better, deeper understanding of the prospect, and then you need training. You need for that to trigger in the guy's head what kind of objection that is. Oh, when somebody says this, that connects me over here to what? This script. If he says this, I go here. If he says this, I go here. Those synapses can't happen if you don't engineer them, and you don't train them, and you don't drill them, and you don't enforce them. The next slide in just a minute. Not just yet, just a minute. I have a question for you. How many of you are in the room in part, at least in part, because following some piece of my advice has directly and measurably profited you? Okay. Keep 'em up if more than once. Okay, all right, remember that. I haven't too often steered you wrong. You're here for a reason. You came because you took it, you used it, you got results. There's two kinds of people who aren't in the room, by the way. 'Cause by the way, this is pretty dang good turnout, right? It's double what we had last year. But keep in mind, we got some 20,000 members. So there's two kinds of people who aren't in the room, right? There's presumably some people who have found my advice not to be profitable. There's probably a lot less of those than those who have got it and done nothing with it. So, A, you're to be— therefore, there could be no ROI. So you're to be congratulated because you did something with what you got. That should embolden you to get more because you know you're going to do something with it. I haven't steered you wrong before. I am now telling you that the greatest single thing you can go work on in your business is what we've been talking about this morning. Is this spot in your process where all your advertising, all your marketing, all your publicity, all your public relations, all your effort gets to the sale, however the sale occurs in your business. Then on the other side, there's a whole bunch of marketing, right? And we can go over there, and there's a lot of work we can do there too. So there's all kinds of work we can do over here. There's all kinds of work we can do over here. Where most of you aren't working at all is right here in the middle, and focusing on that can give you financial yield without additional financial expense. It ain't about running another ad. It ain't about running more ads, okay? It's about optimizing what's happening already. So this is important. I'd put your slide up. I'd like your permission to help. Here's what I'd like to help you with. Slide it up. Systems design. That means what's our whole system look like? What are all the systems within the systems within the systems within the systems? What are the steps? When someone does this, says this, shows up here, calls here, doesn't do this, what's supposed to happen? Right now, if I offered you $5,000 for you to produce your systems in a format that you could come up here and show everybody and teach everybody, how many of you could claim the money? A few. I didn't see a lot of hands. Alright, a few. Script structure. What's supposed to be said? How do we arrive at the point of the most effective way to ask that couple if they'd like to have dessert? Because once we arrive at the most effective way, we go from, in this particular example, 32% of the customers getting dessert to 78% of the customers getting dessert. All that changed? The opening question. That's important. Script language. Stuff or high technology phone? Language. Presentation of price. Didn't even have time to talk about it this morning. I skipped over it. But there's a whole issue about how we present Price, offer structure, how you create and structure offers, closing strategies, and performance.

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