Quality Over Quantity Lead Generation

Every once in a while, it's nice to celebrate. And today we're really excited to be able to have you on because this is our 100th episode of the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. If you've enjoyed this at all up until this point, we guarantee you're going to love what continues to come your way. And if you wouldn't mind letting us know how things are going, send us a review. We would love to hear it. Go ahead on whatever system you're using and rate the podcast. We'd love to hear your feedback and love to know what you would like to hear more of. And now for today's 100th podcast, we get to listen to Dave D as he interviews Darren Spindler. Now, at the time of recording, Darren was America's number one lead generation specialist for small businesses. He was a contributing author in Dan Kennedy's No BS Price Strategy book, and the options and ideas that he's going to be providing to you in this podcast are going to give you so many different venues and paths to help you creatively grow your own lead generation processes. That includes online, it includes offline, it includes what you do when you get them on your list and so much more. If your business needs leads, this is an episode you don't want to miss. Welcome to the 100th episode. Let's listen in.

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. Laws that you live by.

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

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

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

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Hey everybody, this is Dave D., Chief Marketing Officer of GKIC, and welcome to your Gold of the month. I'm really super excited about the call we have today because we have a longtime GKIC member and a star Dan Kennedy student, Darren Spindler, on the call with us, and he's going to give you some information that you can take and that you can use immediately to increase your profits. And so we're really super excited. So, Dan, let's give you a little background on Darren. Darren has been a serial entrepreneur, starting with his first business when he was just 15 years old. I got to ask him about what that business actually was. He's owned and operated multiple multiple businesses at the same time for the past 18 years. He's done a mobile DJ service. He's most famous, I believe, in the GKIC world for the bowling shop and bowling alleys, restaurant, retailer, and on and on and on and on and on. The thing is this guy gets results. He's all about getting results. He has a very complex set of marketing systems. We're going to go over that. One of his greatest abilities is that he can get a lot of things done fast. One of the things that Dan always talks about is successful people can implement things very, very quickly and that their marketing is not simple but complicated. He's also the contributing author to the No BS Price Strategies book with Dan Kennedy. He's America's number one lead generation specialist for small businesses. Last year, he and his business partner, Andy O'Meara, generated over— check this out now— 5 million. Let me repeat that, 5 million new customers for small business owners. He kind of knows what he's talking about here. In addition to his business interests, Darren is the proud father of Presley, named after his mother's love of Elvis. Darren recently competed in the Miami Marathon. Darren, you're just like a stud. I mean, that's basically what it is, man. You're just like a stud. So, you know, completed in the marathon and received his private pilot's license and on and on and on. He's also purchased his first airplane. So let's get right to it. Darren, welcome to the call. I'm really excited to be talking to you.

Thanks a lot for having me this morning, Dave. I appreciate it.

All right, so I want to know first of all what your business was that you started when you were 15, because I also started a business right around when I was 13 myself. But so what was your, your business when you were 15?

Yeah, so my first business was actually my mobile DJ service, and it's interesting, a lot of people that I talk to actually surprisingly had a mobile DJ service at one time or another. I know like Mark Imperial, actually he's a GKIC guy, and a few others I've met inside Glaser Kennedy had started there. But I actually started my mobile DJ service really with a set of home speakers, a little CD player, and a whole bunch of borrowed CDs. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for my girlfriend at the time, her mom's restaurant went out of business. I lived in a very small town of about 300, and our neighboring town had about 2,000 people in it. Her restaurant went out of business, so we actually took and cleared out all the tables in her restaurant, and I started selling tickets to have dances there on Friday nights and sold some soda from behind the counters. I actually grew that business from just that little shady speaker setup to— I had an enclosed trailer with my business name airbrushed on the side of it and big speakers with a huge light show. At the time I was doing weddings and fundraisers on the weekend, getting a few hundred bucks a night when my friends were working for $4 an hour at McDonald's.

That's awesome. It's very similar to what I did. I started, as you might know, as a magician. I was cold calling the local Burger Kings to do magic shows at their— my pitch was, "Hey, have an advantage over the McDonald's by having me come and perform at your restaurant when there's kids' birthday parties." Very, very similar. It's really, really cool. I actually sold an info product to that market, the mobile DJ market.

Yeah, so I know it was a fun business and it got me started.

Now you are like a lead generation King, and it is the lifeblood of the business. So many people don't know how to do it. They pay a lot of lip service to it, but they really don't know how to generate leads. That's what I want to talk to you about on this call, and we're really going to dig deep here so we can give the folks listening some real usable nuggets that they can take and that they can implement and get results from. Let's start off. Let me ask you this question to get started. What is the biggest mistake a business owner makes when they attempt to generate leads or attract new prospects?

Well, you know, I think there's a number of big mistakes that they make, but, you know, I think one of the biggest ones is really a failure to really clearly identify who you want to attract, really a customer profile. And I know some folks talk about creating avatars and really not only talking about, you know, is it male or female, but some of the psychographic, some of the demographic issues of who do you want to attract. Do you want to attract parents that have young children? Do you want to attract seniors that own their own home, or do you want to attract seniors that maybe rent? I think one of the big mistakes people make is they put together an offer way too far in advance of thinking about who do I really ultimately want to turn into a customer. So what they do is they put together a really, either a lousy offer to attract leads, or they put together the wrong offer, and then they end up attracting a bunch of leads that they can't convert, or even if they do convert, really, they're not their ideal customer. So I think before anybody gets started, you really want to sit down and think to yourself, you know, a year from now, how many leads do I want in my bucket? But who do I want in that bucket? So it's not really about the quantity, it's about the quality of the people going in first. And I think people really, really miss on that one.

So what are some of the things that— there, what are some of the things that people should be looking for on the psychographic thing. So they're creating their avatar, but again, most of them are doing it just based upon demographic information, and it's not really digging deep enough. So what are some— give us like 3 things from the psychographic aspect when someone is creating their avatar.

Yeah, sometimes, as an example, what are some of their hobbies and interests? As an example, Andy and I recently bought a canoe company. And neither one of us knew anything about canoeing. But when we go in and look at where we can generate leads for that now, it is, okay, where else could these folks use a canoe? So now we're in with the hunting and fishing magazines and things like that. So we've gotten to places where those folks are at. The other things you want to look at, are they charitable? A lot of times if you take a look at some of the biggest direct mail folks doing direct mail, A lot of them are buying lists from charitable organizations. Is there a charitable element to it, or do you want to find folks who have maybe raised their hand or donated some money to a nonprofit organization? That's a place. Are there folks that have a bent towards travel and leisure? A lot of times you can buy lists that you can overlay and then find people that maybe have travel and leisure, so maybe they've got more expendable income. It really depends on A, what type of business you have, but you really want to look at a lot more detail rather than just saying, "Hey, I'm looking for females who live 5 miles from my business." Unfortunately, that's what most people do.

When you say list overlay, explain exactly what you mean by that.

As an example, you can buy list folks from, let's say, You know, you go to SRDS and you can find a couple of lists. So you can go there and get a list of American Express cardholders, and you can get American Express cardholders who have, you know, spent money, let's say, at restaurants, and they'll have a list of that. And then you can go and find another list, as an example, of folks who maybe are subscribed to one of the travel and leisure magazines. And what you do is you overlay those and say, okay, who's on both of those lists? Who might be the most ideal prospect, and then you send out the mail to those folks.

Got it.

You really can whittle your way down to a smaller list and really get bigger results.

Okay, so let's assume that we have the list. We've gone deep. We've really created a really great avatar for our prospect. How do we get them to respond? How do we get them to raise their hand? What kind of bait should we be using?

[Speaker:ADRIAN_WILSON] Well, yeah, and this is another big mistake. Look at a lot of folks, even if you had the best avatar on the planet, if you don't give them a good reason to respond or in many cases any reason to respond, look at all the stuff that you'll see on TV. As an example, recently I kind of watch what other big names are doing because they're spending a lot of money, so why not watch what they're doing and then try and either replicate or do the opposite of what they're doing. In the past, look at Match.com. They were running ads and it was just go to Match.com, right? Go to Match.com and set up an account. Now I can see they're testing a website called TryMatch.com, which gives you X number of free day trial and all kinds of other stuff. What they're really doing there is they are baiting you over there with a free trial versus just saying go to Match.com and find the love of your life. What people really want to do is create some piece of bait, be it a free trial of your product, some free report, some free gift, something that the people can really say, "Hey, yeah, that's cool. I'll go there and check it out." Give up their name, their email address, and we'll talk about this later in the call, but preferably get a mailing address and a phone number also, so you can really follow up with these people.

Absolutely. Why do you think that— there's so many business owners, first of all, that don't do any lead generation and they wonder why they're hurting and why they're going out of business. What about for the business owners that are trying to generate leads, but it's just not working. They're only generating a few leads. They're not generating enough. What are some of the things that they should be looking for, some of the things that they might be doing wrong that they could change or apply that would turn that around for them?

Yeah, I can give you a number of examples here. One of the biggest things, and you know Dan always talks about this, one being the worst number in business. It's not just lead generation or marketing, it's like every phase of your business. Look at how many people only do online lead generation, right? Or they only do TV, or they only do radio, or they only use magazines. They should be trying to use all of them, not just one of them, and that's a real big mistake. Recently, most people are trying to get by on the cheap and they are going online. I think it's— most people think that I'm fairly famous inside the online marketing world, when truthfully the only thing that we really do online to generate leads is really register folks and collect their information. The rest of it really happens offline. What can you do to drive traffic to a website or to a phone number or to the mailbox? But you've got to do it in more than one place. And the folks that think they can do it just in one place, especially only online, they're really just fooling themselves. So that's a big mistake. The second thing that I think is a result of that is lack of data collection. Dave, I mean, for years now, we're going on probably what, 10 years since web forms have been invented, maybe even longer than that. How many websites do you go to where A, there's no form, or B, the thing is buried somewhere in the footer or somewhere on a third page, and they wonder why nobody registers, right? I mean, you can set up a landing page today in about 13 minutes if you've got a techie that can do it, right?

Absolutely.

If you're not sending a person to a singular landing page to grab your bait or your free gift, You're crazy because sending them straight to your brand building or brochure website is just an enormous mistake. I'll give you an example. Andy and I had recently put together a site selling hair care products for females. We wanted to get it off the ground, so we knew darn well that initially just sending traffic to the shopping cart was going to be a problem, but we wanted to get it live. We, like everybody else, took and did some pay-per-click ads and drove them right to the shopping cart to buy stuff. We had the same 1% or 2% buyers. All I wanted to do was make sure I had a deadline to just keep pushing myself. After 2 or 3 weeks, we had it to the point where we were sending people to a product-specific landing page where they were getting a coupon code for that specific product. Then they go to the shopping cart and redeem that coupon code. Well, at that point we were getting 15-18% buyers instead of 2%.

Wow.

So using landing pages or specific pages is just a huge deal.

So what you're saying is, so let's say I have, I'm going after multiple markets and I know my friend Matt Zagula does this. I just want to make sure we're on the same page and that you agree. Matt is a financial advisor and he does different things, so he goes after veterans and he's got a separate landing page for each of those specific markets. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, every single market— so like inside of Matt's business, he's got financial planning, so he's looking for folks to do financial plans for. So let's say he's going for seniors that are just retired seniors. I mean, that might be one page, but retired seniors that are veterans, now he can go buy a list, send out direct mail, which I'm assuming is exactly what he's doing, sends them to a page that could be themed with red, white, and blue could have very specific, very specific language in there that talks about veterans and things that veterans experienced and honoring the country and all the other great things that the veterans have done for this country and convert one hell of a lot better. And, you know, I think that's a big mistake. Most people, you know, they're just too cheap and they don't take enough time to version it. And honestly, versioning stuff today with the way the web is, it's so simple that you're crazy not to do it.

Okay, well, so there's really no excuse. Like you said, it's so easy to get this set up. I want to talk to you a little bit more about your system. You're using a lot of offline media to drive people online to specific pages, correct?

Yes, so as an example, one of my businesses is the Kids Bowl Free summer bowling program. So with that program, we actually print and produce about 15 million cards a year that are 4x6 postcards that get sent out to our participating bowling centers, which then get distributed through churches, schools, youth groups, YMCAs, businesses, etc. And it drives traffic from that postcard, which is a flyer. It's not like a put it in the mail postcard. And it drives traffic online to our site. We then collect registration data and then email coupons out to our members every week. That's one of ours.

Let me ask you this because this is such an important topic and the advice that you're giving is just dynamite. Is website the only means of response that you're giving them or do you still use toll-free recorded messages? Do you still allow people to fax something in? What have you found in your experience, and I guess it depends on the business, maybe it doesn't. What have you found in your experience? Should there be one call to action? Should there be multiple ways that people can respond?

Yeah, so let's just— I'll isolate for instance my Kids Bowl Free business. There's really two sides of it. There's the consumer side, which is generating leads for the bowling center. In that instance, we actually have the website as the only way they can register. However, we have added an 800 phone number to the website, so if they have questions they can call us. And it's an automated phone call and they can, you know, there's 3 or 4 selections to get information about how to register. Then there is also live chat on there now, which we have really started to do on a lot of our sites, which has really helped convert, especially in some of our sites where it's more of a high-ticket sale. You know, Kids Bowl Free is a registration, it's a free registration., and we have an upsell for $25, but there are still questions that come in. That live chat has really helped out. There might only be one media way to respond to that specific offer, but there are a lot of things happening there to facilitate it also.

I'm sorry, go ahead. I was going to say that's brilliant, Darren, because again, what you've done is you're driving them online., but then they have multiple ways once they're online. They can call an 800 number, they can do live chat, so there's multiple ways once they come through that single entry point.

Yeah, absolutely. And then if they don't buy our upsell, there's a bunch of things that happen to them. And then if they do come on and buy, we've got a whole referral campaign. We've got people who haven't referred yet, so there's a lot of things happening behind the scenes on that system. But what I was going to say, on the flip side of it, you know, in order for us to get bowling centers in that program We've got a whole system to get leads in for that because we need to get bowling centers to participate. Now in that campaign, we use direct mail, we use fax, we use email, we use live human beings on the telephone, and then one of the cool things we've done this year, which is when we send out fax and you know you've got to have the opt-out on the bottom of the fax. Well, we've been taking those opt-outs and we've been putting our live telephone people on it. And we've been converting 50% of our opt-outs from the fax into the program, which has been pretty cool.

So people are wanting to opt out. They're calling in to opt out, and then you guys are converting them?

I actually call that the first step of the sale. So it's been pretty cool. They opt out, and then we— at least they took the initiative to opt out of the fax, right? So now at least you got a phone number. Or you got an email address from them. So we take that and we get on the phone and say, "Hey, we're sorry we bothered you, but we want to really make sure you don't miss out on this opportunity." We get them the information. We've been closing about 50% of those folks, which has been pretty neat.

That is absolutely brilliant.

Yeah, and the other thing, on all of these pieces, last year we did some direct mail and we forgot to put a phone number on it, right? It really goes to thinking about who is your customer, right? Our customer in this specific business is primarily the white males, 60+, they've been in the business a long time. In the first 2 pieces of lead generation we sent out last year, the only thing we gave them to reply on postcards that we sent out was go to our website, right? Well, most of these guys don't even have an email address. So we ended up putting a phone number on the postcard, and then we actually took it a step further and now every piece we send out has a different phone number so we can actually track every single phone number and every piece. We're getting 3 times as many leads from the phone calls as we are from the website.

Really?

So it just shows that you've really got to think about How many ways can you give people to respond with the specific media that you're sending out? So even if you're sending out a postcard, don't just send them to a website. Give them the prerecorded message. Give them an 800 phone number where there's a live person. Give them other opportunities. You know, maybe you can't have a fax-back form on a piece of, you know, on a postcard, but on our faxes going out now, we have a fax-back reply. We have a phone number. We have the website. We've got all 3 different things happening on that specific piece.

Wow, that's just great. I hope the folks listening to this are taking a lot of notes. I am, as I always do. One of the things I love about my job is I get to talk to smart people. Basically, I'm asking the questions I want to know the answers to, so it's really great. One of the things, Darren, is that business owners, especially online, folks that are primarily online, are always talking about the size of the list that they have. 'Now I've got a 100,000 person, I've got a 50,000, I've got a 20,000 person list.' They are satisfied or even proud of the fact that they've created a huge list of prospects or a huge list of leads, but in many cases it's not the proper list. Talk a little bit about that.

Well, yeah, this is very often, and unfortunately a lot of these folks have They're sharing the same list with 54 other people online and they really don't have a— they don't even have really a list of their own. I mean, they've really got a list that's shared between 50 other people and they're constantly getting people opting out of their list and it's really, I think, troublesome. But what I think is important is that you create a list of ideal folks so that you can spend more money converting them to customers. And really as little as possible on a huge list, because who has enough money to convert tens of thousands of low-quality leads or kind of tire kickers? Wouldn't you rather have 100 great leads that you could really invest in and take care of them and make sure that they get actual results with your product or service? As an example, one of my businesses is really a done-for-you marketing system. For bowling centers. We provide them a website, we provide their direct mail done for them, we do automated calls for them, and a whole bunch of other things. That business is an initial investment between $1,500 and $3,000, and it also has a monthly $299 to $1,495 a month membership. With that business, we're doing one-on-one private telecalls with these folks. And private webinars, and each one of those typically takes an hour. Well, you don't have enough time if you've got thousands of leads to do that, so it's far better to have a smaller list of people that are actually interested. And I think I'll talk about it, um, maybe a little bit later in the call because I think we've got a couple questions about that, uh, maybe later. But I think it's so important that people have a smaller list that they can actually care for than to try and building enormous lists that they don't care about.

You said something at the very, very, very beginning of the call which was really important, and that is to think about what you want this customer or this client or this patient, who this person really is and where do you want them to go. You really need to think about, and I just made this realization, that not only what you want to sell them on the front end, the first thing you want to sell them, eventually where they're going. Where do you want to sell them on the backend, right? I mean, because you could generate a lot of people, a lot of leads for your frontend, but that are not really good prospects for what you really want to sell on the backend.

Yeah, you know, I always give an example of like restaurants, you know, and I know Dan had talked about restaurants in his Giorgio letters. But let's just talk about, you know, a high-end steak or seafood restaurant, right? So if they wanted to offer, and you know, most of them are pretty soft on Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night starts to pick up. But if they want to attract traffic, what do most restaurants do? Maybe they put out a free meal offer on a Monday night. They can advertise on radio, TV, Groupon. What do they end up attracting? They end up attracting a bunch of losers who aren't going to come in there and pay full price on the weekend. They're not going to pay $50 to $100 to $150 a steak. They never will, but they'll take advantage of the free one, right? Sure. But what if you take that same offer and you send it via direct mail to households in that area that have a household income of $150,000 and plus, limit it to 10 people that can take advantage of it on Monday night. Well, now you've got the ideal person that you could have for a returning guest, and now you can send a great birthday direct mail piece out to those 10 people, right? You could create really a nice 3D piece of mail that you could ship out to them. You could maybe even send them like a dessert via post office on their birthday. If you attract hundreds of people each Monday night, you could never do that, plus they're all the wrong people.

Again, it really goes back to defining who specifically you want as not only a short-term customer or client or patient, but as a long-term customer. The other thing, the underlying thing here is to spend more time on list selection. Spend more time and money on list selection. So hey, maybe it costs you more per name if you're doing direct mail. However, it's actually in the end costing you less because you're ending up with a better prospect.

Is that true? Well, yeah. There's no doubt it's going to cost you more on the front because it has to. You've got to take proper care on the front side. But the wasted money on the back side of people just rushing into it and trying to attract anybody, they're just fooling themselves and they're going to waste a bunch of their money on the back end.

Let's say now I've done what you said. I've got a good lead generation magnet, as Dan calls it, or bait to get my ideal prospect to raise their hand and say that I'm interested. I've really targeted my list. People are coming in. Why do most business owners fail to convert those leads, turn those into customers, and then turn them into lifetime customers?

Yeah, so there's a couple of steps to this. I mean, first of all, most business owners don't follow up at all. I mean, even as simple as it is to now to do a simple auto-reply email, which I don't recommend specifically just being your only piece of follow-up, they don't even set that step of it up. So there's no immediate, hey, thanks a lot for grabbing this report. They put up a web form and there's nothing there, right? Then the other thing that's troublesome is they do set up the autoresponder, but they only set up one email and it's only through email. They don't set it up to be multi-step, multi-sequence, all kinds of other things. Like I said before, our Kids Bowl Free campaign now, just to get bowling centers into our program, I believe we have over 35 steps. Like I said, there's emails, there's faxes, there's live phone calls. We've got 3 people now that they get on the phone with all our leads. We also have teleseminars, and we've actually niched out our teleseminars to state by state, so we'll do state by state teleseminars, so they're niched down. We'll do webinars. We've got a shock and awe package, which you send out a 16-page book with a CD and a bunch of testimonials. I wish I could do it in a single email because it would be one heck of a lot easier, but it's simply not realistic. I think the other thing that happens is as soon as a customer raises their hand, what do most business owners do? They pick up the phone and try and close the sale, right? I can always remember this back when I first started getting Dan's stuff. He would always talk about how when he really needed business, it was very difficult not to pick the phone up like the second they opted into your list and call them. I can always remember that, but most business owners, especially folks that are trying to sell what I would call a higher-end sale, something that's $1,000 or more, instantly they want to pick the phone up. I think it's very important to delay that sale. I'll actually talk about that maybe in a few minutes, I think, on one of the upcoming questions. The other thing that I think really happens is new customers are often treated fairly poorly or they have a really, really lousy experience. As you mentioned, I got my pilot's certificate back in December. About a year ago, I think in July last year, I had never flown in my entire life, but I travel a fair amount doing seminars and events and stuff. And it's a pain in the you-know-what to fly around the country now. And I finally got peeved enough that I said, well, I'm going to go see if I can figure out how to do this on my own. So I went to the flight school. I had— they didn't attract me by any specific reason. I went to the one flight school in town because I knew one of the owners. And I actually talked to him. I bought a couple of books from him, right, that were required for the initial flight experience, and then I had scheduled my first lesson for a couple days later. Well, I show up, and this is a— it's a really an investment. I mean, to get to just your pilot certificate, it's probably between $8,000 and $12,000, the initial investment. And I show up for my first lesson and the instructor doesn't show up. No phone call from her, no nothing. So I wait there a half an hour And I was peeved because I wanted to start that day. So I actually went across the airport and I went to the other flight school. And fortunately, the guy was there and he's very nice and now he's a good friend of mine. And I signed up with him that day. Now, even though I was peeved, how many phone calls do you think I got from that first flight school which I bought the books from and I showed up for my first lesson and they didn't show up? Uh, one? I got a singular voicemail. Once on a $10,000 or $12,000 sale. Now I'm further along in my training. I've probably got $20,000 invested in this and they missed it because they made a singular phone call, voicemail. They didn't even talk to me live to try and recover me. So there's a lot of, I think, elements that go into this and I think business owners are very sloppy with the follow-up.

Now one of the things that I see a lot of business owners doing is only collecting email addresses. You talked about how this is a big mistake. This is something that I teach when I do the GKIC Fast Start Implementation Boot Camps. I want you to drill it home. Why is this a mistake? Secondly, how do you actually go about collecting their full contact information? Do you ask for it up front? Do you use a 2-step process? Let's talk in detail about this because I think we really got to get people to start doing this because it's so critical.

This is about as annoying as it gets, especially for people who are retail locations or local business owners.

Owners.

Some of the guys that are selling online, make a bazillion dollars overnight, those folks, they're only sending out emails and they don't really have interest, and they should have interest in getting other information. I think that's really where it spawned from because unfortunately most people only look at those people and say, "Well, how can I replicate what they're doing?" If I'm a local business owner and the only thing I want to do is communicate with my prospects and customers, just doing it via email is an enormous mistake. I mean, at best, you know, you're going to probably have 40% open rate. I don't know what the current, you know, GKIC experience is, but my Kids Bowl Free program as an example, in order for them to get coupons, they have to open our emails and print them every week. At best, we still get 40% to do that. The average around the country is 7-9% now as open rates.

7-9%.

So if you've got 10,000 on your people, on your list, only 1,000 open it, right? That's pretty bad. Now on the reverse, if you can do a 2-step process, what I mean by this is when you drive traffic, let's say to your offer online, we might ask for Dave's first name and his email address on step 1, right? They enter it and they hit submit, and on the second page it pops up and it says, hey, this is Darren and I'm We really want to invite you in on your birthday. So Dave, why don't you give me your mailing address. Just enter it below. Put your birth date in there. On your birthday, I'm going to send you a really cool birthday gift. Well, you know that hair website I was telling you about before, the hair product site? We did that on that and we told them we were going to send them a birthday gift in a package on their birthday with some free samples and other stuff. We were getting 80% of the folks who took step 1 to do step 2. Which is enormous, right? Now we've got their mailing address so we can do direct mail. We also collected phone numbers and cell phone numbers, so if we wanted to, we could do text message. We collected their birthdays so we could actually tell how old they were. If we wanted to go out and find other customers like them, we knew somewhat what our buyers looked like.

Wow, that's just beautiful. By the way, that's exactly the percentage that I have found as well. It's 80% of the people who opt in to take the first step absolutely take the second step. For the online marketers, this is a huge strategy which a lot of online marketers are— some of them are starting to come over from the dark side and actually doing this. We have found that you can increase your profits 5, 6 times by collecting that full information.

Just think about it. These folks are inviting people to a teleseminar or a webinar. What if you had a salesperson on the phone just saying, Following up with 200 or 300 of these the week before and say, "Hey, I'd like to invite you to my free teleseminar." Boom, you get on the phone with them, you call them, and you say, "I'm going to send you an email invite." Now you've got them in two different media. Even for the online marketer, it's an important strategy, but I think if you're a local business owner and you're not doing this, you're really making a mistake.

Let's talk about a subject that a lot of people don't even think about, which is generating leads inside of your current customer list.

Yeah, I think, you know, I like to call this the biggest crime of them all because really you've already got these folks as customers and most of them are happy and nobody asks them to do more business with them. In fact, you know, last night my girlfriend and I went to Barnes Noble and we were going to get a book and I had to get a lap desk for the couch downstairs and we were going by one of the day spas. Over on the main street. I said to her, they finally got a new sign. They finally got a new sign because their sign was in really bad shape and they got one of these LED ones and all the bulbs were out. I said to her, you know what's interesting is they never send me an offer to come back. None of the places, and I like to go once a month, maybe twice a month, get a massage. I sit at the desk and type all day. One of them sends me email offers. None of them send me any offer to come back. I mean, I'm happy, they were nice, they just didn't happen to have an appointment the day that I wanted to go back, because typically I have to call. But what if they were sending direct mail and they got me hooked? None of them do that, and I think it's just a huge mistake, and people are leaving so much money on the table all the time. Another example of this is, you know, the flight school. So as an example, I took what's called VFR, or visual flight rules, so that's what I'm certified for right now. The next step is IFR, so you can fly in bad weather or through clouds and stuff like that. So my flight school actually just sent out a quick email, and they actually got 13 people to pay $225 for this instrument class. Now, if they would have sent out a postcard and they would have got on the phone, they probably could have had 40 people, but at least, at least they had invited their existing customers to come back.

You've got some really fascinating numbers, though, from your bowling website business.

Talk a little bit about those because I think this really drills the point home. As an example, currently we probably have about 1,000 bowling centers participating in the Kids Bowl Free program. Like I said, I've got another business that provides done-for-you website, direct mail, all kinds of follow-up and things like that to their customer list because they're like most business owners. They're just short on time and they don't have time to do do the proper marketing. What I did is I sent out a free offer, which is what I call my report card. I created this rather cool report card where my computer junkies go in there and they evaluate the bowling center's current website. It's pretty simple because most of them stink. They don't have search engine optimization. They don't have data capture. They don't have a blog. They don't use any video. Basically, anything that is good they don't have. So it's very easy to show them that they don't have what they need to be successful. So I created this report card. I got 3 levels, 0 to 48, you know, it's really bad, and 49 to 60 or 70 I think is one level, and 71 to 100 is another level that you're good but you could improve on a few things. Well, nobody has gotten over, I don't think, 60. And what we did is we sent out a free offer. We said, hey, Hey, let us do a free report card for you for your website. Well, we got like 60 centers to say, hey, do the report card on my site. Well, my techies go in there and they do what they need to do and they do the report card. Then we send them a bunch of information. In fact, we give them enough information that if they don't do any business with us, they could instantly go improve their website or their web presence. It's not just a complete, "Hey, I'm going to have some smoke and mirrors to just sell a website." They instantly recognize that they're not going to be able to do this on their own properly. We've converted a dozen of those 60 into my $1,500 to $3,000 program and then my $300 to $1,500 a month membership. That was all done with a singular email. Now we're going back because we just— upgrade to the entire system. Now we're going to go back and do it again. My guess is we'll have the same results, but think about how much money was just put into my business as a result of putting out that free offer to my internal list.

Right, because you've already— the hardest part, the most expensive part is attracting the customers for the first time. Selling them something else, quite frankly, it takes a little thought, but is relatively inexpensive and the profits that you just made were enormous on that.

Well, it's very expensive to get, you know, to build that list initially.

It's very expensive. So let's talk about another way to generate leads. Let's say I'm a business owner. How can I work with other business owners? I've heard about this whole joint venture thing and that, but can you give us some specifics about how to really make it work?

Yeah, so I think this is one of the opportunities that are most underutilized, and I think it's because a lot of the business owners think that it's a quote-unquote online or internet marketing strategy. In fact, I think joint ventures are best at the local level, and they can be very powerful. Let's just talk about maybe the day spa that I was just talking about. What they could be doing is giving every one of their new customers or existing customers who just had a treatment or a service, like a car wash at the local hand car wash. So the day spa has already got customers. Most of them skew maybe to the affluent side a little bit because they've got that expendable money. I mean, not everyone going there has got the money, but most of them. The car wash down the street could use a few more customers, right? So what could happen is the car wash gives them, let's just say at $100 certificates for the month and the first 100 customers get this free car wash down the road, right? Now the customers from the day spa are over at the car wash. There's other examples. I mean, new car dealers, right? Wouldn't it be great for a new car dealer to give a free massage at that day spa to a person who just bought a new car? I mean, think about it. If you had a Cadillac dealer. Who's selling high-priced cars, working with the day spa who can then connect the customers between the two, and they're sharing customers, they're non-competing, and when that person comes in, what should they do? They should upsell them to some sort of a membership program at the day spa, right? I work with my bowling centers. In 2 weeks, actually right after I fly back from the Super Conference, I'm going to be going to Madison, Wisconsin., and I've got 7 bowling centers there participating in our program. We're going to distribute 300,000 cards in that community, and we're going to work with a lot of restaurants and retail locations to hand out our free bowling passes, and in return, they could give us some free appetizers to hand out to our customers at the bowling center.

It's a pretty simple idea, but most people don't take the time to do it. Absolutely. And obviously you are the man when it comes to lead generation.

So thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks a lot.

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