Reinventing Your Successful Business To Become Even Better

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen to Bill Glazer and Robert Scrobb as they interview Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller. Now there's going to be a whole lot of lessons during this entire episode. My suggestion is that you should listen into ways that you can take your original success and take it to the next level, AKA how to take your successful business and turn it into an extremely successful business. What are those things that you do to make sure that what got you here takes you there. Because often a lot of things that got you here won't take you there. There are new ways you should be looking at your business that are going to help you take it to the next level. With that said, 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.

As we start the new year, today's program is all about making the necessary business changes for today's economy.. We're covering advanced info marketing strategies, namely how to go from a successful business to continue to grow after your original success. I'm Robert Scrove, President of the Information Marketing Association, and co-hosting today's call with me is Bill Glazer, author of the best-selling book, Outrageous Advertising That's Outrageously Successful. Welcome, Bill.

Great to be with you, Robert. I just like being with you on these calls just to keep hearing my introduction.

Well, I try to make it better. Better and better every time. You know what?

You must be taking voice lessons or something.

Well, it always gets better, Bill, because you just never stop.

There you go.

Thanks. Well, we've got two special guests today who actually you guys called in on the normal line. So if you would, press 1, and our operator Shane will grab you so that you can participate in the call. So Jimmy and Travis, you guys press 1. And we'll get you unmuted. But Jimmy and Travis started their career within an advertising agency. And after they created their information marketing business for used automobile dealers, they discovered that there were opportunities to revive some of their ad agency services in a more efficient, done-for-you environment. So their agency serves to enable Jimmy and Travis to help their customers get better results by actually implementing the marketing on their customers' behalf. Plus, Jim and Travis are co-authors of the book Gravitational Marketing: The Science of Attracting Customers that I've enjoyed so much. It's actually published by Wiley, one of the 10 largest book publishers, back in 2008. If you don't already know Jimmy and Travis, you'll recognize their letter from Dan Kennedy's Special Report #40. Dan featured a letter from Travis and Jimmy to Dan thanking him for helping them in their business. Today's call is really dissecting what Jimmy and Travis did in order to get that done. Today we're going to discuss quite a few things: how to make more money with fewer customers, important transitions in what you sell in today's economy, crucial decisions about who you sell to, choosing your best customer, and advanced sales techniques how to improve the results of everything you do. So Jimmy, we were going back and forth, and I think they had told me that they were on the line. We're here now.

Yay!

Yay! Finally got in.

Glad you did.

Welcome.

Glad we were able to catch up. You missed your wonderful introduction though.

Oh my gosh.

Man, I'm mad about that.

So we're glad we got you in and you're all set now. Thank you, gentlemen. So we're ready to get started. We've got Bill Glazer on the line with us. How are you guys?

Hey, Bill, how you doing?

I'm doing great. How are you all? We are great, man. Good to be with you.

So Jimmy and Travis, you already had an info business, a book, a bunch of followers on Twitter, which of course is the mark of— any good marketer, of course. Naturally, yeah.

Absolutely.

A weekly online television show. Why was this reinvention important?

That's a really good question. You know, it sort of goes back to the idea of what got you here won't get you there. You know what I mean? And, you know, it actually reminds me— and thinking about this, it reminds me of a conversation that we had when we started our business in March 2004. When we started with $200 in the bank and really didn't know what we were going to do. My next-door neighbor was a graphic designer. He was seen pretty successful. He had a boat, a motorcycle, and a jet ski, and had just put a big home theater up in the bonus room at his house. He was a single guy. Here we are, we were just soon to be married. We didn't have any of those kind of cool things, and we didn't have any prospects. "Man, why are we killing ourselves trying to start this business? Maybe we should just be a graphic designer like he is. We're not graphic designers, but maybe we could become graphic designers and do what he does and have all those cool things." I remember so clearly having this conversation and saying, "What are we going to be? What is this business going to be? Is this just going to be us in a room doing something and constantly looking for the next job trying to get some money and then spend it all on toys? Or are we going to actually maybe one day develop some equity and turn it into something that's valuable that could benefit our family?" our future families, which we didn't have at the time.

I'm with the toys.

The toys almost won, but we decided let's go for the bigger prize. That really took a swift turn again. Our first reinvention when we went from doing stuff to getting into the info marketing business, which was in 2005 after a year and a half in business when we decided we needed to take it up a notch. Get more leverage, which we've talked about that before. But a few years into the info marketing business, and certainly by all measure, by any measure, we were successful, doing well, now had families, had a bunch of toys, and didn't have jobs, and we were more than just two guys, but not much more than just two guys in a room doing stuff, except we weren't really doing all that much. We were just having some fun, making some money, but once again we asked ourselves that question and said, what's our vision here for what we want to become, and is it really just Do we want more of the same or do we want to get bigger? Is this maybe one day a business we could sell? Are we looking for equity? Are we looking for importance or significance? Again, we said, "Yeah, you know what? We're going after something. We're going after a bigger prize than we even set up for the first time." Dreamed of. Ever dreamed of. What we realized that, yeah, we got this stuff going, but we've kind of got this— the whole business kind of seems glued together with a little glue stick, not even super glue or duct tape, like a glue stick. It could really fall apart. Fall apart at any moment. We'd already lost a business that we had in the big mortgage crash, and had already experienced it once and didn't want to experience it again. Our market being car dealers, well, we know how volatile that market is. It could fall apart at any time, and it already has fallen apart.

Certainly, if you go back to the timeframe, this was all during the General Motors bankruptcy. Absolutely.

You know a big shift that happened for us, which is interesting, and Dan would appreciate this a lot. I was reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and reading about, you know, Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon and them, you know, building steel and then building this transcontinental rail system. And I remember I came in one day and I was just— this is where the reinvention started. And I said to Jim, I said, I think I figured out what's going on here, what we need to do to get bigger and better and change, why we need to reinvent here. He said, okay, what is it? I said, so I told him about the rail lines and the steel and everything I said, we don't really create a lot of true value. We're not huge value producers. We create valuable information. We have valuable ideas. But because of who our audience is—

And because of the normal human nature of information product consumption, which is it doesn't get consumed.

We know from looking at it, the stuff is not being consumed. It's not being implemented. It's not being executed. And as a result then, our ideas are sort of falling flat because they're not going out in the world and creating a lot of value.. And so we said we've got to come up with a way to do the same thing but somehow turn it into, you know, have more value production. Because, you know, Hank Reardon was a captain of industry because he was making steel. So what can we do to make steel? And of course in our case we've got to actually sell cars, not just CDs and books. And so that's when we went back to the drawing board and said, what can we do to sell more cars?

A book on the shelves and all this other stuff may help us gain some credibility and get some clients, but it doesn't change how much value we produce.

So that was the need for the reinvention even though we had all that stuff.

That's an awesome— it's a very interesting measurement because a lot of times we focus on the number of people we have in continuity or the number of people on an email list. We're not really thinking about it from a business standpoint, which is how much value are we actually creating here? And a lot of that gives your business a lot better sustainability over the long haul.

Yeah, absolutely. Robert, as you said, we did have a lot of people on continuity. We were making money, and we were thinking, okay, great.

That's all great.

But if we want to move to another level, We've got to change something, and this was the revelation. It's like we've got to produce more. We've got to produce more, something that delivers something more.

I've got 2 questions for you guys along those lines. One of the first questions is, when you say you needed to deliver value, how would you define that? I mean, what is your measurement now of delivering value?

Let's put it this way. We needed to contribute to the GDP beyond just the money that we made. We needed for, by making money, other people needed to make money and a lot of it. We had a history of doing that. That's what we grew up doing at the agency we came from.

And I think on the same level as that, but separate from an actual profit production standpoint, we needed to impact. We needed to have a greater impact. So we needed to impact our clients in a greater way. And basically what we came up with is if we can impact our clients in a greater way, then they'll have a greater impact on their employees and their communities and the people that they serve. And by doing that, we'll almost get like a trickle-down economics effect, which I know many people would debate the veracity of.

I call it V-nomics. It's Jimmy V-nomics. It's very cool.

Effect, you know, in the world. And that, I think, which is what happens when you build— when you make steel, which then gives us used to make a railroad, which then is used to move people across the continent, then used to populate new areas, which is then used to create new businesses, and then, you know, the cycle goes on.

So would it be fair to say that— so, I mean, and just following through with this concept of being able to deliver value, is it fair to say that— to rephrase what you said is you needed to be able to demonstrate to your clients the return on investment they were getting from their investment with you?

Is that fair? I would say that's certainly the first of it. Like, they, you know, we want them to get more from what we give them, but then we want them to sort of go out in the world and do more with it. So there's not only an ROI to them, but there's an ROI— it just gets, you know, it's a rolling ROI, you know. So, you know, in our case, again, the manufacturers make money, the workers make money, the banks make money. When we— when If all we did was inspire, motivate, and a couple of people tried some cute direct mailer ideas that we gave them, we made money, we had some happy people, it was like this lovey-dovey little universe and it was nice and comfortable. But if we wanted to go back, our clients over the years have— we've sold over a million cars. That's the kind of value that I'm talking about. To sell a million cars, there's a lot of activity going on, but what I realize is at the peak of our information marketing business only, what was happening is we were selling books and tapes, but we weren't pacing anywhere near what we once did. We were not selling that many cars, not because the ideas weren't good, but because the information wasn't being consumed.

It wasn't being used. To continue on what you were saying, Bill, we not only showed them how what we were giving them was helping them make a bigger impact, we actually then tuned ourselves up to ensure that what we were delivering, sometimes that meant by, and we'll talk about this a little bit later I think in conversation, doing more done-for-you services so that our ideas actually got implemented rather than just giving them the ideas and telling them how valuable they were and showing them how valuable they were, but actually then making sure that more of it got done so it could have a bigger impact.

Yeah, and there's no doubt, and I believe we've had, I think we've had previous calls, the IMA calls where we've talked about the power of the whole done-for-you. But I just want to just focus on this one more point before we move on, and then I'll even ask my second question I'll ask later on the call. But getting back to this point of value, were you now showing the value to your clients more so than you were before? Were you actually demonstrating it? In order for them to clearly see it? Were you making a shift in that?

Do you follow the question? Yeah, and I think that that absolutely happened. Perhaps it wasn't our goal, but it was a byproduct. And realistically, one of the changes that we made, one of the changes we made was we actually started having physical meetings with our clients. Group environment.

That brought a lot. On the same vein, like I remember when, you know, I'm involved, I'm a very small part, I'm involved with Roy Fatt in the Royalty Rewards program. Roy is actually, it's really his business. And early on, we found a very interesting phenomenon, which was the fact that we were delivering great value to our customers, but most of our customers weren't realizing the great value that they were getting. So we did a shifting where we actually put things in place on a monthly and quarterly basis to actually demonstrate and show them the value they were getting. As soon as they saw it, it was a game changer. Now they just loved it. Loved us more so than they loved us before. I think it's a really important point about, you know, you guys make about, you know, your shifting was to adding more value. The thing that I'm always fearful of there is sometimes we add more value but our customers don't realize it. We've got to make sure that they do realize it. I don't want to get too off topic.

That's a really important point, Bill. I think that for us it was less about adding value because we had tried that once. What else can we throw in our coaching program? What if we added another weekly fax or one more conference call? We could stack up what we in the business call a value. The flip side of that is how can we be more valuable? Instead of adding more stuff, let's be more valuable. And frankly, let's add less.

Yeah, and that's what I think what you're kind of talking about, Bill, is then taking the value that you're already giving them, that they're already getting, and creating metrics and mechanisms in which you're reminding them of how much value that they're getting.

Yeah, making sure that they see it. And you guys are 100% right because More stuff doesn't necessarily, you know, delivering more stuff doesn't necessarily relate to happier customers. But the customers seeing a return on their investment in many different ways, not just financially, in other ways, that makes for much happier customers. Now Robert, I don't know if we derailed your entire call. You might want to, you know, rope us back in, okay?

No, I thought it was an important point because I mean it's a little bit of— a change from what Dan Kennedy will often say is you really can't take responsibility for whether your customers, or you can't have an emotional response about whether your customers implement what you're doing or not. Whereas Jimmy and Travis really kind of saw it a little bit differently in their business and said, you know what, we are going to change our business so that we are having a demonstratable effect on those customers, not only for their sake but for ours, because our business will be more stable if we're actually selling cars for our customers rather than only entertaining them with CD programs.

Yeah, and look, you can run the business model the other way. We were doing it successfully, and I know many others are too. But we wanted, as you said, to take it to another— why reinvention?

We wanted to take it to another level.

So one of the big changes that you wrote about is being valuable, being more valuable to fewer people. So what do you mean by that? How did that change your business and why?

Well, you know, we were just talking about being more responsible for the actual value that was produced and in turn their ultimate success. So if that's going to be the goal, we knew we couldn't that be the goal for everyone, right? Because there's just not enough time, energy, resources, money, or anything to go around.

And there's some of them that we'll never implement.

And then there's some you can't do anything. And as I believe we've talked about, Robert, in the past, a couple years ago I think, we for a long time were involved in a lot of stuff, you know? And a lot of good stuff. We met a lot of wonderful people. We had some winners, some losers, made money, but we never lost money. Everything was always good. It was always moving forward in the right direction, but we found ourselves sort of spread thin and fragmented and to a degree, you know, the greener pastures phenomenon, always looking over saying, "Oh, that looks better. Let's go after that." And once, you know, by being more valuable to fewer people, what we did is we said, we sat down and made some hard decisions which were to carve out specific part of our business that we wanted to grow, but in carving that out, actually letting a lot of even a bigger part of our business go.

Yeah, and you know, a lot of people say, "I'm going to focus on this," and they have a bunch going on, and they still kind of tend those fields. If something crops up over here, I'm going to harvest that plant. I'm going to, "Oh, that needs some water over there. Let me go put some water on that," even though it's not the main focus. We've done that in the past before, too, but when we did it this time, We did more like the burning the ships analogy. We said this is the one and we're going to torch the ground over there. And if anything starts to grow, we're going to stamp it out.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, in fact, we oftentimes said, and this is a pretty crude analogy, I don't think it will get me in trouble though. With this crowd? Okay.— the car business was like our wife and everything else we did was, you know, were 1,000 mistresses. And what we look back year after year and we'd say, look at, you know, 85% or 80%, 85% of our revenue is coming from the car business. We're really not putting any time there. We're spending all of our time with all these other fleeting ideas and projects and opportunities that most of which ultimately go nowhere. What if we took all that time and stuffed it back into our focus, just focus on something? And by the way, you know, we were, We were loaded with a market I wouldn't recommend to other people because it's tough, requires specialized knowledge, and like I said, could collapse at any time, and it has a bad reputation. Whatever market yours is, whoever's listening to this, to think about if you've got that and you've got a couple hundred other things that you're thinking about, pick one and get married to it, and then be faithful to the marriage and be truly committed. That's when we said, instead of going wide, we're going to go deeper. In fact, I'll tell you, we have, you know, we just wrapped up 2010 and our revenue is, you know, 4 times greater than it was 2 years ago, 4 times what it was in 2008. But we have fewer members right now than we had in 2008. And so what it was about was to stop selling, you know, lower-priced programs. For us, our method was to stop selling lower-priced programs, to systematically and basically constantly raise the prices By doing so, what we did is put ourselves in contact with businesses. The businesses who could afford to pay more, and in this case it's car dealerships, were those who could get greater leverage from our stuff because they would also advertise more. The business that advertises more gets more benefit from marketing guys like us. That's a hard pill to swallow because we all want to help the folks that don't have a lot of money, but what good is marketing for someone who can't afford to run marketing?

Specifically, we're we came from advertising agency, so we're ad guys. We write advertising.

We place advertising.

That's what we've done, and that's what we've done to make people successful in the past and make ourselves successful. When we're running around talking about marketing to people who don't just do a little bit of marketing and don't do any advertising, it was very frustrating for us because that's not our wheelhouse. Our wheelhouse is spending money on advertising. We said we need to focus on the people who spend money on advertising, and by doing so we could provide more value, and then we can actually make more money.

What happened is by rearranging what we offered to be designed for the business that actually runs advertising, those businesses that didn't run advertising, they disappeared. They weren't right for it anymore. The businesses who did run advertising realized that the money that we were charging was really a bargain, where that would have been 5 times too expensive for the person who's not running advertising. We started working with someone different and being more valuable to the right person instead of— because the guy who actually wants to— I think we're jumping ahead here, Anthony. Perhaps, but the guy who wants to advertise is really frustrated with the conversation about, for instance, social media. Social media is important, but it doesn't come close to doing what $100,000 on the television this weekend will. We decided that we're going to put our allegiance with the folks who want to advertise because we felt like we could go back— going back to what we were talking about earlier, we could create more value, be more valuable to those people.

It sounds very similar to what happened in my business a few years ago, probably 7 years ago now.

We were—

we had— we went from 20 clients down to 8 clients, and I was a whole lot more profitable afterwards because I was working with the ones that that I was a lot more successful with. So we were able to grow them and grow those opportunities a lot faster. I want to talk about making that transition because I know it's very scary and it's also a great marketing lesson of how you went out and sold those higher-priced programs. But first, let's kind of talk about what they are. So you increased your— it says in the letter to Dan that you increased your continuity programs from $469 a month to $24.99 a month. How are your programs different and what do you provide now?

Well, the key thing that we provide is a marketing campaign written every month for all media, radio, television, print, email, direct mail, telephone. Each month we write a single campaign and write supporting material throughout all media for it. That includes the graphics and design work and everything. It takes a team to pull it off. We have a very unique method for marketing in the car business, which is different than what anyone else does in the car business. What we had realized for years in selling that $469 thing was that we could talk about it, talk about it, and talk about it, and talk about it. All we were doing is talking about how to come up with these campaigns, but nobody could ever come up with them. Once we switched it and now charge $24.99 and give them the campaign, they can run the campaign we gave them. They just couldn't learn to come up with their own.

Yeah, and you know what? Honestly, we were doing that for the $1,500 fee, but we just weren't really talking to the best people, the people who advertise.

That's not even mentioned here. There was a midpoint in between $4.69 and $24.99. Which was $14.99.

We stopped that for a while. Yeah, and then we just raised the price.

We didn't provide anything additional. And then, but I mean, when you— and now you are— before you were providing these spots and things that they could use, but then you were leaving it up to them to adapt it and get it out the door, whereas now you're doing all the creative in order to get I guess is it area exclusive?

It is area exclusive. And reality is right now they still are responsible for getting it out the door. They're good at that.

The part that we took off their shoulders was the creative, coming up with it. Yeah, and for a lot of our people, we then take— we come in as almost a full-service advertising agency, so to say, and we do the media buying and we do the placement of the ads. So if they can't buy or won't buy or don't want to buy, we'll do it and we take it over happily. Again, we have a team of people who do that here. We make more money from doing that.

It's great because it gives those people an outlet.

I have a question for you guys. In identifying these now better customers of yours— and by the way, I think it's very smart, the direction you've taken your business. Good for you guys. But in identifying this now new direction, do you have a minimal spend requirement of your clients that they must spend on marketing advertising each month or each quarter or something like that?

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. We don't per se have that in place, but in the conversations that our Rich Dealers Advisors, that's our sales staff, when they're talking— we have 4 of those—

when they're talking to prospective members, we found that we basically train them to listen for cues. When through these cues they can identify, they can get an idea of what they're spending. We don't come out and say, "What's your marketing budget? How much you spending?" Because then it sounds like you're trying to take their marketing budget over and sell them and make a commission on it. That's not the model we work from. So what we do is we ask questions that give us the answers to that without directly asking it. And if you said behind closed doors, do you have a number? Yeah, we have a number.

But sometimes we get surprised.

Sometimes the cues will lead us to not the right answer, and the guy will end up signing up and he'll surprise us.

Well, price plays a big part of this for us because One thing that we do tell a guy is if he's running a smaller business and has a smaller marketing budget, we say, "Listen, this cannot—

you can't—

this $2,500 to us, this is not marketing. It's not advertising. It's ideas. It's guidance.

It's direction and it's support, but you have to spend a multiple of that to actually make it work for you." It's interesting listening to you guys, and I'm certainly not trying to reinvent your business. I'll just throw this at you though, that I do have one client that I work with as a one-on-one client that's in the business of managing people's Google AdWords campaigns. And he's actually had in the year and a half I've worked with him, he's doubled it. He doubled the minimal spend that his clients must spend each month with Google AdWords. He's doubled it. And it's a requirement for being a client of his. Much like you guys, where you've raised your fees, he's raised his fees as well. He's doubled his fees. As he's raised his fees and now dealing with people who are actually spending more money on advertising, his business has gotten much better in many, many ways, including having much more happy, satisfied clients that he works with.

Sure.

Because like you guys pointed out, if they don't spend, if they don't do the marketing and advertising, they're never going to get a result.

That's right.

It's frustrating for everybody.

Bill, I love that idea. Yeah, I mean, you might, I mean, you know, with him, he doesn't even hide it. He just comes right out with it. He says, you know, in order for me to work with you, you need to, all my clients must spend at least X number of dollars. I don't want to mention how much, but X number of dollars a month on Google AdWords. And he says, because quite frankly if you don't spend that much you're not going to get the kind of value out of using my service.

That's a perfect parallel.

He flips it. That's great.

So how did you make the transition?

By the way, Travis and Jimmy, my job is to derail Robert.

That's kind of like what Jim's job is around here.

I was actually very impressed with you guys. Travis will stop talking and then Jimmy will keep right on going and then vice versa. You guys complete each other's sentences and paragraphs.

It's almost as if we're interviewing one person. I know. Unfortunately, after you said that, he just mouthed and signed to me, "You complete me." So now I feel very uncomfortable.

How did you make this transition? So you had all these customers that were paying you $4.69. You raised them to $14.99.

Did you send out an email one day? No, if only. We did not raise them. We did not raise the members. What we did is we launched a new program which added the creative campaign monthly and some other stuff like quarterly mastermind meetings. I think we put I think we moved 15. It was just like an ascension model. For a year we ran where we were basically putting people, signing people up at $469 and then ascending them to $1499. The big difference for us when this occurred, we said, "You know what? Forget it. We no longer sell the $469 thing. That's over. That's done.

We're not going to cancel anybody." What we did was we paraded the new guys at the new price and the new value in front of them. And then sent our sales staff after them to upgrade them.

For the most part, majority of them moved up. I think we have 10 people still paying the old rate over a year later after we got rid of it. We no longer sell it anymore. It's an old thing. At the time it became $14.99. That's what we started selling. Here's what's crazy, we didn't see a dip in sign-ups. We said, oh my God, we could have been signing people up at $14.99 all along. Then when we switched to $24.99, we saw an increase in sign-ups. Oh my goodness.

I think one of the real geniuses of your program, in an ad agency, you have to come up with 2 or 3 ideas, take them to the client, the client says, I don't like this, or can you merge these 2 ideas, or take a little bit of that and merge it with that and give me something different. Whereas instead with this program, you're doing all the creative. You're positioned as a guru, so whatever you produced each month is effective and going to work and valuable to them. Because of the positioning, they're not questioning your expertise and judgment in the marketing programs you produce for them each month.

You nailed it.

That is the genius of it. Our idea is the final answer, and we say we help them remove Remove the burden of choice. It's a sales line.

Well, more than that, it's a benefit.

Speaking of leverage, we talked about, you mentioned in your letter about selling differently. You jumped in with both feet on creating a telemarketing operation. What did you see that told you this is important?

Well, the real roots of it are kind of funny. We were speaking at a Ryan Lee seminar some time ago, and we were sitting at lunch one day, and Mike Littman came up. You guys know Mike, right? Sure.

Yeah.

It was the first— we had talked to Mike before, but had never actually met him. He recognized us, came up, we started talking, and then we sat down and had lunch together. We were just chit-chatting back and forth, talking about the business, and we had a couple of sales guys. He said, "You know what you guys need?" I said, "Nope." He said, "You guys need a sales manager." I thought, "What? That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. A sales manager? We've got 2 sales guys who are barely hanging on. We don't need a sales manager. More fat to feed around here." You know what I mean? So he said that. It kind of hung around for a couple of months. We decided, "Let's get serious." When we really analyzed everything, our sale, we realized, it used to happen by people faxing back. An order form that used to be what it was, but that had long since disappeared. We hadn't signed anybody up like that in years, and now everyone signs up by talking to somebody. It just makes sense that if we could beef up the talent in the sales aspect of this, and for a while we did it ourselves, and we're really talented at it, but that's pretty much the worst thing that you could possibly do because we had no lives. We were like salesmen working here, which is not what we call ESP, enjoyable, simple, or prosperous. That was just a pain in the ass. Mike said, "You guys need a sales manager. You don't need more salespeople, you need a sales manager." We ran an ad on Craigslist for salespeople and started interviewing. Our idea was to hire a couple of salespeople and then let the manager emerge from within.

[Speaker:STEVE] Survivor?

[Speaker:JAMES] Yeah, like Survivor. [Speaker:STEVE] Yeah, exactly. Then a guy— we also then emailed, sent an email out to our email list which is, I don't know, whatever, however big, 40,000 emails about the opportunity. Someone actually who we had met when speaking at the Orlando IVA chapter, Novus chapter, he had seen us speaking there and he got the email. He then recommended, he then sent the email over to a buddy of his who didn't know us and didn't know anything anything, you know, Glaser Kennedy or anything like that. And he, of course, we had the process was you had to call an 800 number and give us a pitch for why you would actually, why you should have an interview. That was the process. And so this guy just called and said, I heard you guys were looking, give me a call. And we ignored his call the first time. And so then he called back like a week later and said, you know, I took a closer look at the email that my friend sent me and I realized I didn't follow the instructions here. So let me try this again. And he laid it out why we should interview him. We heard this and said, Oh my God, this is the guy. This is godsent, right? Knows the business, has worked in the business, worked in telephone training, has developed sales rooms and sales phone rooms and everything, phone sales rooms. We had an interview with the guy and after we met him we said, "This is the sales manager. We don't need to hire him as a salesperson. Let's hire him as a sales manager." We did and that was last summer.

That was a big deal for us. I mean, sales manager came with a salary and a decent one. It was a jump. We were definitely making a commitment at that point to this process.

Not to mention, if you have a sales manager, he came along with a plan for adding 8 people in the sales department. So we had him plus had to go out and get 6 additional people and desks and phones and computers and all of that. You know, you can add up the money.

It's not inexpensive. You guys have a real business now.

We have a real business, Bill. We do. We have 11 people here. Last week we just bought 2, with the help of Chris Herron, by the way, just closed on 2 commercial buildings that are next to each other. We're moving the wall between them and moving into commercial space and the whole 9 yards here.

Congratulations. Thank you.

That's great.

So are you still— I know a year and a half or so ago you were doing weekly online videos and things like that. Are you still doing those or are you focusing more on your other marketing programs?

[Speaker:JASON] We're not. We were for a long time doing daily videos, and those are by the way highly effective. We developed a training program, Fast Forward, Fast Forward online video and social media training. We've sold a ton of copies of that and spoken around the world talking about it. It's highly effective. We've done it ourselves multiple times, multiple rounds of our daily video. It's amazing. What we found though is that we've gotten into the more leverageable stuff. It's a lot easier for 8 people working in the phone room to call all day and sign people up than for me to make a video every day. We're focusing more on playing the CEO role than the direct— I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say because it's effective, but it wasn't as effective as some other things we did.

It wasn't the best use of our time. You'll start to split your time up and your resources up and your dollars up and say, where's the best use of my time, energy, and money? And we said, after trying all the Twitter and the video and everything, we said, look, that's good. That works to some degree. Direct mail works even better. What can work even better than that? And that's when we came up— that's when we decided to test the phone room. And I would say by far it works better than anything else. Now obviously there's an upfront investment and then you've got to really be in real business. There's some drawbacks to it, but from a leverage standpoint, there's nothing better. We've been plugged into a phone room into many of our private clients' businesses and have seen an explosion in their businesses as well from the method.

It's a great conjunction, especially if you're doing other marketing. We continue to advertise in trade journals and send direct mail and support that with the phone effort. It's a great combination.

We're staying busy, that's for sure. Yeah, and our plan is to loop around this year and come back and fill in the cracks with more video and more social media.

I think the weekly video is a really great idea. We've done weekly video for a while and daily video. I'd probably be inclined to go back to weekly video if we can get to that part of the marketing plan. Just like anyone else, we've got a list a mile long of stuff to do.

I think it's also interesting what you said about the leverage. If you're trying to quit trading time for money, then the best way to do that is stop doing work yourself and get other people to do it. If you've got a phone room with 8 people, better to find offers and you focus on getting offers and lists and lead sources for them to call rather than creating a video, even though that certainly has its place.

Yeah, and these days, as anyone who's been through a construction project can tell you, we spend a lot of time suffering through that too.

Oh, I thought all those builders were honest now that—

Oh yeah.

The recession put all the dishonest ones out of business.

Yeah, right. We must work with the same guy, Robert.

What are some things, I mean, you had to, we see the success story. You know, we've got the great $1,400 program that we moved up to $2,499. We've got this phone room. We've got, you know, direct mail, a lot of successes, but what are some things that you tried that didn't work out as well as you would have liked?

Yeah, well, I'll tell you. We used to rely on and we used to get a lot of great results from Google AdWords and for some reason our last several attempts with it have not been fruitful. That's very frustrating because it's a great source for a number of our clients and we just can't get it to go right. We've also struggled, a lot of trade magazines that used to be very effective stopped being effective. One of the things that we struggle with right now is that— is the difference between— how do I say this briefly? Basically, the difference between perfect 2-step advertising where the ad is for a widget and the widget makes the sale for the thing versus having the advertisement being closer to the sale where they're requesting a free consultation that's relevant and they know something from the ad about what we're selling. Because we've gone through a lot of frustrating time where you spend a lot of money in ads You know, you run a $10,000 ad and get 4 people request a free CD, that's just not real promising.

Well, I think it also has to do with the person you're selling. I mean, if you're selling an upscale thing to somebody who's spending a large amount of money marketing their advertising, the free CD isn't as interesting to them as somebody to help them answer their specific questions.

That's right. That's right. So that's one of the things we continue to struggle with is really good front-end offers that are compelling. Some of the best things we use are direct mail that literally talk directly about what our program is and have people call to talk about signing up, which seems very unintuitive to us because it's not how we would usually think to do it.

It's not how it says to do it in Gravitational Marketing. No, it's not.

No, it's not. I have one more question for you two guys, if I can, Robert.

Sure.

Is that okay? So I've seen you guys sort of evolve over the years. It's obvious that your skills have significantly improved over the years, although I'm sure you— I don't think you— I think you guys had good skills when I first met you because you came out of the out of the advertising genre. But how— I want to ask you a question about, you know, how you've learned additional skills/media. I mean, you talk about the fact that you use online video now. You guys have become very smart on social media. I mean, not the traditional stuff that you guys learned in advertising when you guys were doing automotive advertising. Talk about how that evolved with you guys. I mean, did you very deliberately be looking for new media? And how has the new media benefited you or has it not?

Well— Very interesting question. That is an interesting question. And when we were at the agency working and doing all this, you know, heavy media spend advertising stuff. We would get the occasional call from a client that didn't have the big budget and didn't want to spend that kind of advertising dollar. Basically, the agency smartly turned them away. Now, at the time, sitting there going, well, you know, we could probably help that person too. There's a bunch of other marketing avenues out there for a lower budget. Probably help them. We were saying, "Yeah, we could probably help them." So we went off on our own. We ended up working for the smaller business. Our first crack at the whole thing was a small local agency business, and none of those people had the big advertising budgets that our automotive clients had at the agency. So we had to figure out how we can help them and how we can get them some kind of results with little to no money. We started plugging in and researching and using new media. At the time, this time, it was email marketing was the emerging new technology. We started using email marketing and autoresponder stuff and we started developing that and making a formula for using that that small businesses could actually implement and handle. It would work for them. Obviously not to the scale that that a $50,000 media buy would work for a car dealer, but it would work for them on a relative scale. Through that and through working with those types of clients, we had to hone our skills at using media that was costless and quite frankly less effective. Google AdWords was really pretty emerging at this point too, so we started using Google AdWords. We were actually using it ourselves and learning it for ourselves as well as using it for our clients because we had $200 in the bank. We didn't have the automotive media budget either. We were looking for ways in which we could market ourselves effectively for a low cost and then we were in turn learning that and then turning around and selling it to our clients and doing it for our clients the same way.

Yeah, we usually use ourselves as guinea pigs first for our own business and then would go out and to take what we learn and apply it to our clients. Realistically, our interest in online video and social media came about when we were saying, hey, we want to get in on the action here. Let's come up with something. Let's come up with something that people aren't talking about. We literally spitballed for a couple of months coming up with different ideas. We just started testing them. We came across the one that really worked really well and said, well, let's teach people how to do this. But that's a big part of what we abandoned to move forward with this other part of our business, leaving that all behind because although it was effective, it was interesting, and our audience liked it at the time, we realized that the growth for us was going to come from another part of our business.

You attributed, you also talked about in your letter to Dan about the marketing to the affluent workshop and the Seven Figures Academy that you attended. That Dan Kennedy through Glaser Kennedy produced, what— how did those impact your business and these changes?

Well, you know, first of all, one of the most— one of the primary ways that it impacted us was through new relationships we developed and people we met there who helped us clarify our thinking and— Expand our thinking. Expand our thinking, right.. That was big. Content-wise, they were excellent as well, specifically the Seven Figures Academy, which got us thinking about the whole concept of being more valuable to fewer people and the idea of extreme value and extreme status and extreme leverage. How we began the call by saying, "What got us here won't get us there," and understanding that to become a seven-figure income earner you would have to do things differently than you had to do to become a 6-figure income earner.

That really opened our eyes to say, "You know what? We're doing well now. If we want to get to that 7-figure income earner stage, we've got to rethink the business a little bit." Extreme status, extreme value, I don't think we're providing extreme status or providing extreme value.

I think we've got to figure out what that is and how to get it. Well, he certainly delivered extreme value today. Thank you. I appreciate your extreme status as Bill and our guest on this call. It certainly delivered some great food for thought. Jimmy Travis, thank you so much for being our guest today.

Thank you, fellas.

It's our pleasure.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, guys.

Bye-bye.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. Now, this free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.