Removing Fear From The Sales Process (2 of 2)

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In this episode, we get to continue listening to Dan Kennedy in part 2 of removing fear from the sales process. Now, obviously, if you've missed part 1, definitely go back and listen to it because it was extremely worthwhile and it changes the game. This episode is going to do the exact same thing. See, there's 2 different approaches that you can use for selling and there's a scale, and Dan Kennedy is going to show you how you tip that scale in your favor.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what 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 I became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Now, if you look at selling sort of in big broad terms, here you go. You got two big approaches that everybody uses. One is sort of the classical traditional approach to selling, which is here's all this resistance, we will overcome it. And really great salespeople do this very well. Pretty much selling by brute force, right? So like this afternoon we're going to talk about, as part of the sales design process, we're going to talk about a thing Sidney and I call sales choreography, right, the choreography of the process. So like a brute force choreography, those of you who know Zig Ziglar, you know Zig came out of the pot and pan business. I sold a similar product in the home, and so the first thing you learn in terms of choreography is at the beginning of the presentation, you unpack the entire thing all over the living room floor so that there's 300 parts. It takes 45 minutes to pack it back up to get out of the house. So even if 15 minutes into the presentation they're throwing you out of the house, you got 45 minutes more to sell. 'Cause you gotta pack it up. If you take it out one thing at a time and show it to them, you're DOA. 'Cause a lot of the sales are made after they've told you to pack up your shit and get out. Well, that's brute force selling. And you can sell that way if you're really good and immune to criticism and pretty much have a bulletproof self-image or you're deaf or whatever. People sell, they overcome resistance by simply bullying people into buying. Okay? That's, there's, if you get a book of sales closes, like if you get the book The Closer, how many of you own the book The Closer? Okay. And you should, by the way. I'm not saying you shouldn't study this stuff. Don't misunderstand me. I'm just saying there's a different context now to use it in where it works even better is when you remove the resistance. If you get a book like The Closers or you get Zig's Secrets of Closing the Sale, okay, how many of you own that? Okay, great book, okay. You'll find the challenge their manhood close in both books, okay. Now that's a bullying close, right? That's some version of— I had, of all things last night, I had Deal or No Deal on, which is like the only way you could build a dumber game show. You know, is if we've hidden money here on the stage under a bucket. You got 3 hours, find the bucket. That's like the only way you could build a dumber— and you'd have the family going, I don't know what to do. Should we look under the stool? Should we look under the table? I don't know. I mean, there's a computer— there's a home game version of Deal or No Deal. What? I mean, take 4 5x6 cards, write a number on it, stick them in an envelope. You got the home game. But anyway, I'm watching Deal or No Deal, right? And you guys all know the shtick, right? You know the deal. The banker guy keeps trying to buy them out as they get closer and closer, cheaper and cheaper, right? And so what's-his-face, the host, Howie Mandel, the couple last night was getting close because they had $4 million briefcases left and only 12 things. I mean, it was up there. And he turns to the head of the family— so this is the whole family was playing— and he turns to the man, kind of isolates him with his body from the rest of the family, which is choreography. And he says— so there's choreography and there's language. We're going to talk about this afternoon. Most people don't pay enough attention to either one of them. So you're really going to have a great opportunity this afternoon. So he gets between the guy and the family. With his body that he says to the guy, "The banker doesn't believe you have enough guts." Now, in a living room selling with his clothes, you would have said balls. On TV, he couldn't, right? He said, "The banker doesn't believe you have enough guts to turn down $213,000." Decision made. Okay, done deal. Okay, the guy hit the red button so fast your head spun. No discussion with family, no nothing, right? That's called the challenge your manhood close. Okay, it's a bullying close. That's what it is. You just bully them into buying. And you've seen people sell to you one-on-one that way. Or sell to you from the stage that way. You can do it. There's the sleight-of-hand sale, with a nod to Dave Dee. That's where I, like, confuse you, right? I make you ignore one thing and pay attention to another. There's momentary suspension of disbelief, right? That's where it makes no sense, but I convince you you want the thing so bad. Say, See, Charlie wants— Charlie Brown wants to believe. He wants her to be a decent human being. He wants to be able to kick the football. And so all of his context, he suspends his disbelief for a moment. Now you can only get it suspended for a moment. In the early days of Personal Power, the first Tony Robbins show, we focus-grouped buyers. These are people who had bought. And they all told us, "We don't believe the castle is his. We don't believe the helicopter is his. We believe all the testimonials have been paid." Yada, yada, yada. And they bought anyway. They wanted this thing over here so desperately. It was portrayed to them so magnificently that they were willing to suspend their disbelief long enough to pick up a phone and read a credit card number. Now, not for any extended period of time, you understand. But you could overcome all their resistance with these kind of tactics. The problem— there's problems with these, with this approach. Number 1, it requires a relatively exceptional individual. You may be able to turn yourself into it, you may already be this, but it'll be hard for you to get 10, almost impossible to get 100. That's why there's a bell curve in every sales organization. Why don't you just have the ones at this end? Because you can't get enough of them. So it requires an exceptional human being, which is the exact opposite of the way you want to build systems in business. You don't want to build systems that require exceptional people. You want to build exceptional systems that can get satisfactory performance out of mediocre people. That's why McDonald's is a success. This is Imagine this investor meeting. We're all going to pony up some money. We're going to start a business. We're going to open stores all across the country. And we're going to completely staff them with pimple-faced, hormones-raging, completely unreliable, grass-smoking teenagers and let them run the business. How many of you are writing that investor check? Not many. But they got exceptional systems. That allow them to put mediocre, unreliable people in place and still have the whole thing function. Most people build their sales process and turn it over to the salespeople. That's what they do. Okay? They do all this advertising and marketing to get this guy to this point and then they like hand them off to a salesperson and say, "Have at 'em." It would be okay if you had all exceptional salespeople, but you won't. If you had somebody who was really good at all this stuff, that'd be fine, but you're not going to get 10. You're never going to get 100. You're never going to get 1,000. Hard enough to get 1. So it's real, real important to build exceptional systems that don't require exceptional people. So the other sales approach is what I call the psychological approach, which is where we change the context. We change the environment. We change how the person is being handled so that they can forget about all the times the ball had been pulled away. Now we can still use some of these other tactics, by the way, in that other context, and they'll work even better, but the good news is they're usually not required Or they can be used at a mediocre level rather than a high performance level and still get great results. All right? So the salespeople who go to a sales seminar to learn another sales close, they miss the point. And the people who put their— the owners who put their salespeople in another program to teach them another close, they miss the point. This is really a very simple equation. We succeed or fail depending on the tipping of the scale between trust and fear. That's how we succeed or fail in selling. Where the scale is between trust and fear. And here's the evidence of it. In a stampede sales environment. Like, how many of you were ever at the really big, like, Peter Loew events where I spoke? Okay. You guys saw— how many of you stayed to see me? Okay. Well, look, I'll be— see, that's an inside joke. The rest of you won't get it, but the first stampede was 3/4 of the place leaving. We start, you know, there were 30,000 people. I spoke to 6. But then the second stampede was everybody running back and buying. See, in that environment, the vast majority of the people don't know what they bought. If you offered them $100 to enunciate what they just bought, they haven't the faintest idea. They just trusted me by the end of the 59 minutes. They bought me. They didn't buy the specifics of the thing. And so I did things to tip the scale in a very, very difficult environment in order to make that happen. For example, I sort of made fun of everybody they'd heard before during the day who they now felt they hadn't got any content from. I immediately created a level of trust. So when we tip this scale, we change the context. So this is not so much technical, all right, oh, a new closing technique, or a new demonstration, a new— this is broader than that. This is contextual. So in the remaining time we have, I'm going to give you some tipping points. And here's the most important thing to know about this. And this is true of our advertising and marketing, and then it's true of our sales, right? So go back to our friends who have a 40% closing rate in an environment where they should have a 90% closing rate. The rest of those people were what I call almost persuaded. Charlie Brown actually let her have the football. He let her set it up. He backed up 20 steps and aimed at it. At the last second, he chose not to run towards it. See, and you got to understand, for every person you get to answer your Yellow Pages ad, to respond to your sales letter, to come into your sales environment, to permit a sales presentation to be delivered, and then to either buy or not buy, for everyone you get, there's probably more who were almost persuaded. Almost. It would only have taken just a little, a little more. I talked to somebody the other day who was shopping for a major banquet kind of event. Big dollar thing. Not a wedding, but a social party thing, not a business thing, but huge. Probably $25,000 check. And she went to 4 different facilities and she met with 4 different chefs and caterers and all that stuff. And she bought the most expensive one, which is— there's a lesson in that in and of itself. But then I didn't buy— I said, so tell me about the ones you didn't buy from. Why didn't you buy from this one? Why didn't you buy from that one? Why didn't you buy from this one? Now most people can't enunciate these little things. They're there sort of in composite. Most people can't enunciate them. She was able to enunciate it, right? And it wasn't even the chef. The salesperson, which has some highfalutin title, you know, event something or other, consultant something or other, said she had dirt under two of her fingernails. I said, "That's it?" She said, "Yeah. All things being equal, could have gone this way, could have gone that way, could have been this one, could have been that one." She had dirt under two of her fingernails and I just, I couldn't get it out of my mind. Almost there, $25,000. All she had to do was have clean fingernails. That's all she had to do. All she had to do. Sales guy goes on an appointment, shoes aren't shined. It can be all it takes. It can be all it takes. Now, we shouldn't be that way. We are that way. We're very judgmental. And we've been betrayed so many times, so we're looking. We're like looking on a subconscious level for any sign that we're going to be betrayed again, that these people aren't what they portend themselves to be. So the car salesman takes the customer around to show them the service department because he wants— big part of buying a car, right, if you've been betrayed before, is you want to know they're going to service the car. And he takes that person around to the service department to introduce them to the service manager, and the service manager who's busy with 17 problems running around is brusque. Service manager says, "Nice to meet you." Oh, nice to meet you. Are you going to be joining our customer family? What kind of car are you buying? Do you have children? Do you have a dog? Oh, what a great choice. He doesn't do that. Everything they did up to then is ruined. The $100,000 a week they spend in advertising, the phone tree, the websites, The sales guy, the show, Taj Mahal showroom, it all got screwed because the service manager didn't slow down for 30 seconds, ask 5 scripted questions, and at least pretend to be interested in that person. Now that ain't gonna happen by— it might happen by accident. If you hired enough service managers, you'd wind up with a guy who did it instinctively or experientially. But you're going to have to hire a crapload of service managers. No, you got to put that in place. You got— as we'll talk about it this afternoon— you gotta, you gotta create that language. So you got to create the 5 questions, you got to make them memorize them, you got to make them show you that he knows the 5 questions, all right? And you got to choreograph what happens when the car salesman walks back there with the customer. What does the service manager do? He sets his clipboard down as a means of showing I'm going to pay attention. And he turns to face you and he slows his speaking speed and he has a conversation with you. But you ain't going to get that by accident. You ain't going to get that by hope. You're going to get that by design. So let's talk about the major tipping points that just make the difference between 40% close and 60% close. Ultimately make the difference between your cost per sale being bad, good, so low you make a fortune. These are the tipping points. Here's the first one. Who is selling to them? Who they perceive is selling to them. So there's 4 things that help. 4 things that help. One is authority. So does the person who is selling to them have any authority to tell them what to do? That's why— and some bungle it— but that's why doctors have such a sales advantage. Because the doctor has the authority to tell you what to do, and you say, okay. Oh, you need to go get these tests. Okay. Not, why do I need to get those tests? What happens if I don't get those tests? Can I get those tests for less money over here than over there and get the same test. The guy that owns Whole Foods grocery supermarket chain, I saw him the other night on 20/20. And he was explaining they changed their health plan last year and basically took free paid health care away from their workers and switched to the medical savings account kind of matching funds approach. And he said all of a sudden employees are like shopping their diagnostics. Well, of course. They're paying for it with their own money. Right? But see, most of the doctor says, here, you go do this, you go, you go do it. Everybody, oh, okay, I'll go do it. And you go do it over here. Oh, I'll go do it over there because you told me to go over there. Right? No questions, because they have incredible authority. It's a, it's a place to aspire to be. It's a place to aspire to be. I for years had a automobile salesman who I was very good friends with and who we bought all our cars from, and I took him a lot of referrals. And one of the things he was very good at was getting somebody financed who, you know, had problems. And at the time, I was running a sales organization where we had a lot of salespeople who had a lot of problems, you know, like credit scores of 3. Yeah. Yeah. And so when I sent that person to him, I said, do what Bill tells you to do, because he knows how to fix this. Well, see, that's a laydown, right? They go, they do what Bill tells them to do. Bill says buy this car, okay, I'll buy this car. Get it financed here, and where do I sign? That's an authority sale. It's the thing you want to aspire to, because if you're not questioned, you should be able to sell well. Then there's the credibility issues. Now credibility means less, younger, more, older. See, credibility is like the difference between a bricks and mortar bank and an online bank. My father would no more bank with a bank you can't see and go into, then fly to the moon, right? I do it like grudgingly. Somebody 35 doesn't think anything of it. That's what you do. But so credibility means less based on age of the customer. But so credibility is essentially acceptance within a marketplace. So if you are accepted by the prospect in advance of trying to sell to them. So how many of you were at the Super Conference? Well, a bunch of you are new. How many of you were at the Super Conference last year and saw Nido Cabane speak? Okay, good. All right. Well, Nido, as you saw, I mean, he like oozes stature, right? So many moons ago, I took over a very troubled, failing company that kind of does what your company does, that produces— that produced audio cassette programs, the kind of information products that we do now for speakers. And it had a miserable reputation, deserved. Poor quality, unreliable delivery, you name the problem, it had it. And so in this niche, one of the very first things I did was identify, well, who in that niche is the most credible person to the rest of the people in that niche? Well, at the moment, it was Cabane. He was president of the association. He was, although younger, but he was, as you saw him, like if you casting directored He cast him, and everybody wanted to be like him in the entire profession. So I went and got him. And we gave him umpteen amount of production at less than cost. We paid, so we had him as a customer because we bought him to be a customer. And you'll put up with poor quality and bad delivery if you're getting it for nearly free. So, I mean, part of my story to them was we don't have all this fixed yet. So, you know, for a while we're still going to be delivering crap and we're going to be delivering it late, but the good news is you're going to get it free. You know? And we're going to get it fixed, right? So I went and got them. And so the first thing I did is have them as a client. Then we did a seminar tour together and invited everybody to come to the seminar for free. And so I borrowed the credibility because we didn't have any. And I paid for it in ways nobody was aware I was paying. Celebrity buys you a lot. Pretty much today the market can't tell the difference between celebrity and credibility. They're interchangeable. But in many cases it changes everything. The whole industry of sports agents pretty much didn't exist until Mark McCormick, who is now— he's dead, but it's now IMG. Mark McCormick really created the industry, and it wasn't very well accepted, and nobody wanted to have a sports agent until he got Arnold Palmer. Changed everything. My suspicion is his deal with Arnold Palmer was quite similar to my deal with Mr. Kubay. I don't know. It's just my suspicion. But it changed everything. That Success event that you went to, what changed everything for Peter was Ronald Reagan. As soon as Ronald Reagan agreed to do those events, then everybody wanted to do the events. Before that, it was like pulling teeth to get a world leader and pretty much most celebrities to want to be on those events, even though you paid them, and you paid them well. It was like weird to everybody, you know, and so they viewed it as something they shouldn't be associated with. As soon as Reagan did it, everybody was like in a big line, how do we get on your events? So celebrity changes things. Personality changes things, and the personality has to be matched to the prospect base. All right? Now, so here's something. Sidney did a bunch of research It doesn't surprise— it shouldn't surprise anybody. Sidney did a bunch of research in the cosmetic surgery industry and followed a whole bunch of patients and talked to them and focus grouped them and all that stuff. So 50-year-old women— oh, this is a great place. I got to tell this joke. This is like my new current favorite joke. So this woman's in this terrible accident. She's in the hospital. She's in critical condition. Gathered the family to fly in from every place because she's probably not going to make it. God appears. And God reassures her that she's lived a good life and she's going to be fine. She's going to come out of this. And in fact, she's going to have 28 more years, 6 more months, 4 more days, and they're all going to be great. Really no ill health, nothing. You'll just, at the end, you'll go. But you're going to come out of this. You've got 28 great years left. So a couple days later, she comes out. And she really is feeling fine. It's like miraculous. She's up. She's ready to go. And then she thinks about it. I've got 28 more years, right? So while I'm in here, I might as well tummy tuck, boob job, butt lift, lipo, varicose veins taken out, nose job, ears, anything you can get done, right? She leaves the hospital, gets hit, run over, and killed by an ambulance. Arrives in heaven, demands to see God, says, hey, you told me 28 more years. He said, eh, I didn't recognize you. I mean, it's a good joke, isn't it? Okay. So, so, so Cindy interviews all these cosmetic surgery patients, right? And so what do you think the 40 to 50-year-old female patient is most disturbed by? In the entire process of buying and getting cosmetic surgery? Anybody want to guess? Oh, who said it? Yes. Young perky nurses. Staff talking to them who are significantly younger than they are. How can these people empathize with me? I'm uncomfortable even talking to them about my issues, right? And so personality— now admittedly, legally it's hard to hire, okay, but so there's this issue of matching, right, the personality of yourself. It's called mirroring in NLP language. The matching of the personality of yourself and your salespeople to your prospect in a way that is synchronized, right? So all of those things about who's selling to them are important. So let's go back up to authority and credibility. What you want is not only— you aspire to authority. That's where we tell them what to do and they do it. Just because we told them. One important part of authority and credibility is relevance to the prospect. So not only personality match, but relevance to the prospect. So let's take our service manager example I did before, right? And so we give him 5 diagnostic— we give him 5 questions to ask The person— when the automobile salesman brings Billy and Barbara back to meet the service manager and see the beautiful service department with the latte machine and the big screen TV, but really what they're caring about is are the service people going to pull the damn ball away, all right? It's nice to be able to watch a plasma TV, but what I'm really trying to figure out is are they going to pull the freaking ball away when I actually need my car serviced. Now they might not enunciate it, but that's what they're doing, right? So we give him 5 questions to ask. So he brings them back, and here they are. And this is our service manager, Howard. And Howard says, oh, it would be great to welcome you to our customer family. And now he's going to ask 5 questions. So one of those questions is, do you have kids? Do you have grandkids? Do you have a big family? They're either going to say yes or no. If they say yes, there's a next step to that. If there's no, there's a next There's a step to that, right? If they say yes and Howard happens to really honestly have a big family, that's a relevant point of information that immediately builds his credibility with that prospect. Oh, I do too. I've got 22 grandchildren and, you know, 6 kids and 4 dogs and that's why I love the minivan that, you know, the seats flip 47 ways to Sunday and you will too. That makes him relevant. Now, if they say no, then all that about Howard is irrelevant. There's no point in him saying it. Not only doesn't it help, it damages his credibility with them. How can he understand me? He's got a bunch of kids and grandkids he's concerned about. We're just concerned about trying to look younger in our sports car and zip from one side of the city to the other. So you make yourself relevant to the prospect, the client, the customer, the patient in every way that you can, and the more relevance you have— so I wanted to show you a couple of examples. Now these are copy examples, but remember, selling in print, selling in person doesn't make any difference. So I'm going to use me and I'm going to use a couple clients. So these are copy examples, but So I have this long, let's say, resume, right? You do too. You probably have more than you know, more than you think about, more than you might use. But I got a big resume, 30 years, not only one job, but a bunch of stuff. So 30 years of stuff to choose from. So every time I'm going to a new market, a new audience, now there's some generics stuff, right, that you want to tell everybody. But then there's ways to either make yourself more relevant or less relevant to every market. We work on this a lot. So here's— this is for dentists with a program being introduced to them called Dentistry for Diabetics. So here's now what's important to them from a credibility standpoint. Number one, I'm going to mention health-type companies that I've had as clients. Now if I'm going to go over and talk to automobile salespeople, I'm not going to mention any of those clients. They don't help me. Not only don't they add to my credibility, they diminish my credibility. But in this environment, they add to my credibility. So I want to talk about them. I borrow credibility by talking about the gurus of their industry that they all know who are my students. None of those names are useful to me anywhere but this particular environment with this particular group of prospects. The authority stuff is generic, right? I pretty much use that anywhere, okay? People pay me a crapload of money, more money than you can even imagine. There's a long line of them. I don't need you, okay? That's authority. That's sort of starting to do takeaway selling. Here's some more dentist-relevant stuff. This is all copy from Tom O'Rentz boot camp stuff, I think. So borrowed celebrity, okay, I don't have a celebrity dentist, but I got a celebrity cosmetic surgeon. Better than nothing, close enough. Doc's a doc. He's the guy on Beverly Hills, he's the old guy on Beverly Hills 90210. Even if they don't watch it, everybody knows what Beverly Hills 90210 is, so I pull I pull that out of my whole pile of stuff and I use it here because we're talking to Dennis. You've never heard me use it with you before. There's no reason to use it with you. There's only reason to use it here. So it's in my little dental chiropractic doctor file.

Alright?

There's language issues, you know, you gotta be very, very careful. Like not to call them customers. You got to call them patients. You don't use sales, you use case presentation. So there's real language issues. There's— and so you'll see here, here's like some generic bullet points that move. I'm giving the same speech. If you will, I'm selling the same product, just to different audiences. But I say case presentation here, case Acceptance. See, I don't say, "How many sales did you close?" I say, "How many cases were accepted? How many case presentations were accepted?" See, if you don't get that right, okay, you ruin everything. So your credibility goes up or down based on the relevance you create to the specific audience market in which you're talking to. So now these are chiropractors, okay, so, and they're getting in the weight loss business. Well, so Weight Watchers and physicians' weight loss centers is a real, real useful thing to me. If you had these things to compare, you would see I dropped some corporations that were mentioned in the dental one that I didn't mention here because they didn't help me from a relevance standpoint, okay. My borrowed credibility here, because we're doing weight loss, I borrowed more from Guthrie Ranker than I borrowed anywhere else. So there's differences. Also, I went back— now these are chiropractors, remember— so here I want to mention some gurus too. Now in the dental example, the gurus I mentioned are people I work with currently. In the chiropractic example, I mentioned, for example, Larry Markson seminars. I think I did a bunch of work for Larry in 1983. Okay? I don't even— I haven't talked to Larry in 20 years. Don't make any difference. He's a name they know. And it's a factual truthful reference. I just omitted the fact that, you know, it was 20 years ago. Okay? But I wouldn't mention that to you. I wouldn't mention it to the dentist. See, it doesn't help my relevance. It doesn't build my credibility with the dentist. 'Cause they don't know the name Larry Markson from Adam's house cat. It only helps me with chiropractors. Here's a client of mine who markets to financial advisors who recently started to sell a program with a partner to lawyers. Yes, I did my best to talk him out of it. Well, do we have any of them here? Any attorneys? See, here's the deal. There's 2 of them back there. See them? And the one's really trying to disguise himself. So he's like, he's wearing a bright colored shirt and a funny cap. See, he's trying to con you into the fact that he's a nice guy. The other thing you gotta notice is they all sit together. Anytime they go anywhere, they sit together. You know why that is? Nobody else wants to sit next to them. And so we let them in here anyway. And so Dennis is marketing to attorneys. Now Dennis is not an attorney. He doesn't have any attorney clients. It's a brand new program. He does have this partner who is a fairly famous attorney. So we have to deal with borrowed credibility. But when we get to authority, say, we can take stuff out of his current experience that is relevant to what it is that they aspire to. So Dennis has put X number of thousands, 200,000, 300,000 affluent seniors, executives, and entrepreneurs in seminars. Well, that's what they want to do too. So that moves just fine. That helps credibility. Now the fact that he's also putting 100,000 people a year who are young marrieds in seminars, I don't mention that. Why don't I mention that? It's not relevant to this audience. They want rich seniors in seminars. They don't care about young marrieds in seminars. If I mention it, not only doesn't it raise his credibility, it lowers his credibility with this audience. Here's a foreword I just gave to Jordan McCauley for his book on using celebrities in your market. So I wrote a foreword for his book. Well, there's a whole bunch of stuff in here that I don't talk about pretty much anywhere else because I want to make myself relevant to his subject now. So why have me write a foreword about a book on celebrities if I don't know anything about celebrities? So I drag out every reference I got, every dead celebrity I've ever worked with, every, you know, use every part of the pig. I grew up next to a pig farmer. He said use every part of the pig. Nothing ever stops being used if it can be useful. So here's— I just went and spoke for Ron LeGrand's Real Estate Investors in the beautiful city of New Orleans. So now here's a bunch of stuff. So here, real estate related. So I gave him bullet points to use about me. That would be relevant to his guys, to real estate investors. Some of it is stuff I don't— it doesn't appear anywhere else. You can go look at the website, you won't find it. You can look in the catalog, you won't find it. You won't find it in promotional material about me. Why? Because it doesn't boost my credibility with you, but it boosts my credibility with them. Language again as well. So here would be generic bullet points. Okay, so how to make every other buyer, investor, real estate agent, any and all competition irrelevant. So I said buyer, seller, investor, agent. You could make that a blank line and stick anything in there you want. How to make every other plumber, home contractor, remodeler, and guy who works out of the back of his truck irrelevant. Irrelevant, okay? But I've got to change it. If I just say how to make all your competitors irrelevant, I haven't boosted my credibility near as much as I did by using the most appropriate words for them, okay? Here's some— this is Roy Fatt's next boot camp for restaurant owners, okay? Now the first guy, I think. Who's the first guy? Yeah. The first guy, Farrell, he is organically and naturally relevant and has credibility with restaurant owners because he was a restaurant owner who built up a chain of restaurants from nothing and sold it to Marriott for a ton of money. Okay? I can use his bio pretty much the way it comes across the table. Okay? He's a natural match. The next guy is the guy who wrote the book on Starbucks. He's not quite as easy because he's given a book report. It's a good book report, but it's a book report. He's not Howard Schultz. He's the guy who wrote a book about Howard Schultz. I got to work a little harder, okay? And I don't take anything for granted. He's also writing a book about Ritz-Carlton. Well, first of all, I got to tell him what Ritz-Carlton is. I can't assume. And then I got to make him relevant. I got to give him authority on that subject. So it's the only officially authorized book about Ritz Carlton. See why that's important? I just gave him more authority than he had if I didn't say officially authorized. Now the next guy has no direct relevance. Okay? Mike Vance. Some of you have heard Mike. Maybe you were at a Super Conference where Mike spoke for us. So he's a creative thinking guy. But he's never owned a restaurant, yada yada yada. So I gotta dig deeper there. Now it so happens he's had a bunch of hospitality industry clients. So here I talk only about his hospitality industry clients. I didn't mention the non-hospitality industry clients. It doesn't do me any good to tell them he's done a massive amount of work with IBM. They don't care about that. It doesn't help his credibility. If anything, it harms his credibility. Because of my business is different. All right? What does the fact that IBM paid him $1 million last year have to do with my bagel shop in Botsfontein? Right? See? So not only doesn't it help, it hurts. So I'm constantly— so this copywriting job is about, for example, going through 12,000 pounds of stuff about Mike Vance Looking for the stuff that is relevant that will build credibility and getting rid of all the stuff, including stuff that they normally would like to brag about a lot, getting rid of it because it's not relevant, therefore won't build credibility with this particular audience. Translate this now not just to your marketing. It's easy to do in marketing. I mean, it's work. But translate it to your selling thing. So anything that is being said or shown, if I'm trying to sell you something, anything that is being said or shown to you that you judge not relevant to you diminishes my credibility with you, takes away authority. Now I haven't built the platform on which I can say you should do X. And you say, "Well, I'll do X." Right? Anything I show or tell you that isn't relevant, it ain't a neutral. It's not helpful and it is harmful. If for no other reason than it took up space. It took up minutes. It took up time. It distracted from the relevant. Conversely, everything and anything I say or show that you judge really, really relevant to you, boosts my credibility and moves me closer to a point of authority where I can say to you, here's what you ought to do, and you nod your head and go do it.

All right?

So why are before and after pictures so important in selling weight loss? Because nobody wants to buy weight loss from somebody who's always been skinny. Tough deal. Tough thing. Why do people listen to Oprah about weight loss? Most influential person about weight loss there is. Why? Because she's been fat, thin, fat, thin, fat, thin, fat, thin, fat, thin, you know. And it's like in football, it's like in that Cleveland Browns-Bengals game, whoever's got the ball last, right? Whether she's fat or thin the last week of her life, that's that's how big a coffin they're going to need. Okay? Because the only thing that's for sure is fat, thin, fat, thin, fat, thin, fat, thin. All right? But see, she wouldn't— nobody paying attention to her if she, you know, if she had a 14-inch waist, you know, little skinny thing, slide under a door and she's going to talk to people about— no. No. Okay? So what's relevant builds credibility and authority. What's irrelevant diminishes credibility and authority. So now you got to get clever. So you got to design your processes in a way that put relevant stuff in front of people and get irrelevant stuff away from them. In face-to-face selling, that requires diagnostics, right? Big overriding principle for all that, here's the last thing you ever want to be in selling. Last thing you ever want to be in selling is another salesman. Why? Because when they look at a salesman, what do they see? Lucy. Ingrain it in your head, okay? If you put a salesman in front of them, they see Lucy waiting to yank the ball away at the last second. That's what they say. Don't matter how you dress the salesman. Don't matter how nice the salesman is. If he's a salesman, if she's a saleswoman, they see Lucy. So the first thing you've got to do is not be Lucy. When Charlie finally Someday he won't do this. He'll absolutely refuse to run up and kick the ball. But if Linus offered to hold the ball— Linus ain't Lucy. So if you want to immediately improve your results, just don't be this. All right? So you can't look, smell, talk, be titled, You can't be a sales— but—

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