Traits of Legendary Leaders With Tony Rubleski

Hello there, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen as Dan Kennedy interviews a thought leader on how you become a trailblazer. Now, right now, the internet world and everybody on their devices is just drunk on data and information, and they're looking for somebody who can stand out. They're looking for a leader. They're hungry for it. How do you become the person that stands out? What are the key traits that you need? What are those things that are going to make sure that you not only stand out, but you stay around for a long time and what types of marketing should you be really leaning into? Today, Dan Kennedy interviews Tony Robleski, author of Trailblazers: Leadership Lessons from 12 Thought Leaders Who Beat the Odds and Influenced Millions. Now there are gold nuggets all the way through this interview with Dan and Tony, so make sure you lean in and pay attention, especially if you're looking for a way to be able to break out as a leader in your marketplace.

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 became obsessed with marketing.

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

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Diamond Call. I have with me today longtime friend and colleague Tony Robleski, and amongst other things, the newest book in his Mind Capture series is out or coming out or has been out or is out, and it's going to be Out Again, some combination of those things. It is Leadership Lessons from 10 Trailblazers Who Beat the Odds and Influenced Millions. This particular book includes in-depth interviews with a rather eclectic bunch of people he classifies as trailblazers. That includes Dave Liniger, the co-founder of RE/MAX, I think the largest real estate franchise organization in the world, in which I've had a longtime client, Craig Proctor, who many of you know. John Stossel, host of The Stossel Show on Fox TV, which is one of the best shows on television in my opinion. The head coach of the NHL Buffalo Sabres, a hockey team, as if anybody cared about hockey, but at least it's not soccer. And Buffalo, of course, is our, you know, that's our motto in Cleveland is, hey, at least it's not Buffalo. And another friend of mine, New York Times bestselling author Sally Hogshead, and the sales business permission marketing guy with the blog. You probably all know Seth Godin and others. So Tony, it sounds like you did an enormous amount of work putting that book together and I'm sure everybody is going to want to get into it particularly after our conversation. Well, thank you. So I really want to talk about two things with you today before we open phone lines a little bit later. One is the whole Trailblazer leadership thing and the other is looping all the way back to mind capture in a crowded and cluttered marketplace, something we all deal with. So let's start with the book. Other than for money and self-promotion, the reasons we all do books, I assume you have a third reason why you picked this particular type of book and book to do and picked these people. Why don't we start there?

Dan, thank you again for having me on. Your description to set this up was very correct. It's an eclectic group. I think a third reason, Dan, is simply that the market is hungry for leadership. I know being around Planet Dan for 20 years now, I bought Magnetic Marketing back in '96 or '97. You said find a starving— find that audience and magnetically pull them to you. And leadership right now is never in short supply as far as people wanting to know how to study, assimilate it. Jim Collins chronicled it. There's Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. But I wanted to bring a 21st century digital ADD world, as I call it, perspective on it with what I call trailblazers. So that's my way of unique language in. The term leadership and interchange it with trailblazer, which is simply definition, one that blazes a trail or an innovative leader in a field, a pioneer. So I want to look at it more from as you would describe the Renegade Millionaire perspective, Dan, which I was around many years ago when you first rolled that and it was brilliant. So I'm not doing things per se new. It's a new wrapper on something that people enjoy. It's how do you lead. How do you stand out, get mind capture, as you would say, become a renegade millionaire in an age where no BS is not welcome, Dan? Most people don't like the truth. If you go back to the scene from Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, they can't handle the truth. However, there is a unique audience that wants the truth and will pay for the truth. They want people like you and I to come in there and say, "Look, what can we do differently in an age where everything is so politically correct?" So how's that for starters?

Well, you know, it's a— look, it's a very interesting thing. And you and I are both watching Trump closely. And you might judge by that that there's a 35% of the electorate market for the truth. The, you know, the old— it's been attributed to Barnum. I don't think Barnum actually said it, but somebody made the point that there's a very small market in America for the truth. And by and large, huge swaths of the population in general or the population of any particular business niche, industry, profession, I think prefer not being really confronted with reality, particularly harsh reality, and really challenged. I think that's so. I also think that you've got your finger on something very important, and that is that there is a segment of every market that is in every case a minority, can be a significant minority, it has in the 35% polling number. A minority that really is hungry for the arrival of a truth teller and for encouragement perhaps to be one themselves, and that often money is made by high resonance with a relatively small number rather than broad and universal acceptance by a very big number. It's certainly the strategy I used many, many, many moons ago marketing to the members of the National Speakers Association with whom you are familiar. High resonance with a relatively small percentage rather than broad and universal acceptance by a big number. And from a marketing standpoint, I think that's important. But we'll stay on leadership for just a second. So one, of all the people you did interview, who did you get that you thought you wouldn't be able to get? Who did you try to get that you couldn't get? And what's the most surprising thing you found? Okay.

This— that is a great question. I've never been asked that, Dan. The hardest interview to get was I believe Brian Tracy because I got him at the wrong time. I know Brian, I tried at the wrong time because I caught him when he was in the middle of traveling and I got busy and then he went through a different publicist but then he had a book come out and then I got him a couple of years later. So it was just a matter of timing. And what I've learned, like trailblazers that are in the book, you've read the book, Dan, is you have to be persistent. So I circled back a couple of times and I finally got him in the right window. But it challenged me because I know a lot of my peers that could get Brian on the phone pretty easy. I thought, okay, don't take it personal, move on. I would say the most surprising interview was Stossel from Fox Television because I thought he would have much more gatekeepers, higher access, they would do a lot more credential search on me and background on me. But I got him literally through about 2 phone calls that I retraced through Barnes Noble book signing he was doing in Florida. They gave me the name of an agent who flipped me back to New York who got me on the phone a couple days later with his agent for the book and sent him an email with all my credentials. And then a week later we're on the phone. I was shocked initially. I thought it'd be much harder. Stossel has in the ballpark, Dan, about a 10 million view audience per week on television. That is huge, as Trump would say. That's around the topic of Donald Trump. And you think that the hammers he would have would be much more difficult, but I'm a big believer you don't get unless you ask. And I'm not afraid to ask, and I'm grateful that a no has never killed me because I get a lot of nos, Dan. But Stasa was the biggest surprise, how easy it was. Um, favorite interview, it's hard to say that because I always glean some wisdom.

Don't give me the favorite. Give me, give me the thing out of all of it that— because much of it, much of it would have reinforced what you already thought and believed. Give me the thing out of all of it that surprised you the most.

I would say W.M. Paul Young. I coined him as a spiritual trailblazer. He was one that very last minute made the edit for the first version of this book. The reason is he's much more about spirituality. I'm not afraid to go there, but I know that some business groups can get teed off with that topic. I put him in for this reason. The guy was a long shot, a dark horse as you would say in racing. Writes this book purely for his kids and a few close friends. He's dead broke. He has no money. And in the interview, which we include all the full audios at the end of each chapter of the book, he describes how he's shocked the book went on to do 15 million copies several years later. That's a monstrous amount of book sales. Again, he's a fiction writer, but the book is about God, and it's a reinterpretation which literally ticked a lot of Christian groups off because he had a re— A re-examination of the faith. And the story is gripping. It grabbed a lot of people from celebrities to Main Street America that love the book. And I sent him an email, Dan, and it took months to hear back. And then he responds basically, "Hey, I get several thousand emails a week. Yours seemed to get my attention. Let's do the interview." I was floored because again it was one of those, "Hey, you never know until you ask," similar to Stossel. But he took many months to get back to me. And I think if anything, his story— is a great example for all of us on this call about never giving up. And sometimes doors open when you least expect it. And literally someone slipped him a $100 bill under his— where they were living at the time, like the side of a grocery store, him and his wife and like 6 kids, Dan. You can't make this up. Right around Christmas, he had the manuscript done. He had no money. So he took the $100, went down to Kinko's, made 10 photocopies of the original manuscript of The Shack. That's the book he wrote, The Shack. Then it just went crazy the next couple of years. People were making copies of it. How do we get it? He self-published it, which is not uncommon at first. Then they got picked up by a major book publisher. Then it sold millions and millions. I think what's unique was how humble he was, but yet the story resonated at such a deep human nature level that it went crazy and it just took off and gathered a life that he even couldn't see of its own, 16 million copies later.

So the, the game is always in part search for commonality. So you interview all these different people and different backgrounds, different personalities, undoubtedly, uh, different perspectives on leadership. But are there one or two pretty universal commonalities that, that they all share, exhibit, rely on?

Well, there's 7 of them that I determine in the book, but I'll give the Diamond members 2 distinct ones. The second is persistence out of the 7. You've talked about it for years and years, and here's why, Dan. You have to have it. I actually pulled a quote this morning that I put up on Facebook that you wrote many years ago, and here it is from your mouth. "how you deal with failure determines whether or not you ever get the opportunity to deal with success." That was spot on. It's a core part of the entrepreneurial DNA of the Renegade Millionaire is you have to know that the road to yes is paved with lots of nos. You get smarter. You get more strategic. You get more of a Rolodex as you play the game longer. But there are still nos that I get that shock me, Dan. And then there are still some surprise yeses like the John Stossels in the book. Dave Linegar, you know, from RE/MAX agreeing to do the floor. But every one of them, if you look at the commonality— that's why I'm like a detective— is what do they all share? And that persistence has got to be there. And everyone on the call that are probably almost all business owners or high-level C-execs in your Diamond Group, and they have had to really move forward. And, you know, another trait of the 7 is you've got to Really focus on your strengths. Okay, I started as a newbie 20 years ago in marketing. Thank God I came across you at a Peter Loewe event, because I was doing bloody, bloody, you know, hand-to-hand combat door-to-door cold calling. And I thought, there's got to be a better way at this. So your system to me was like this huge epiphany that, okay, I'm okay to ask, I'm not afraid, I like people, but my strength has got to be more fine-tuned on getting to better people once I, you know, versus cold calling. My strength is dealing with people. I had to find a better way to get to more of them. To me, magnetic marketing, the no BS system that you trained and perfected, was a shortcut. Why in the world would I not focus on my strength with someone that was similar, that had already been down the path? Dan, you and I are Midwesterners at heart. We work like mules, man. We may not be the smartest, but we'll hustle you. That was something that drew me to you in my 20s. I'm in my early 40s now. This guy, I can relate to him, you know, door-to-door and having crazy stuff happen and being bloody persistent and not the best looking or the most smartest, but I will work until the midnight hour to win. So the Trailblazers, a lot of the book is I'm in the reminding business, Dan. Almost everyone in Diamond will know most of these people. Many of the 7 characteristics they already exhibit, but that reminding business that you and I are in, Dan, is to let them know amongst all this age of digital advertising and social media, and I call it shininess, that if you strip it down to some core commonalities and you work on those, when you utilize them and can them, you can have much more reach, power, and influence in the marketplace if you go back to your core disciplines of what made you successful.

You know, there's a link between those two points, and that is perseverance about just finding the better way. There's pretty much like anybody then and anybody now in selling who has been taught and is using the, um, hunt, capture, and beat to death, then walking away with the wallet model, uh, cold prospect. Anybody with a pulse counts, just go out there and hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt and finally get your hands on somebody who will pay attention to you and then beat them to death and take their money. Anybody who has ever been taught and lived that model has been walking around with, is walking around with the exact same conclusion you arrived at. Right, which is there just has to be a better way than this. But, but the overwhelming majority of people do not persevere at all in finding the better way. They are repeating their first year of experience 22 times, 22 years later. Um, the speakers were doing it, chiropractors when I started working with them were doing it. Salespeople do it. You just see it over and over and over again where, well, why are you doing it this way? Well, because that's the way it's done. Well, what do you think about that? Well, I sure wish there was a better way. Well, how many hours, how many flights have you taken, how many people have you hunted down to talk to, how much trouble have you gone to to try and find a better way? Well, not much. Mike Vance used to tell this great story about— I believe it was Marriott, but that might be unfair because I don't remember, but some big dumb company. And he's visiting with the CEO and he says, what's your most vexing, like your worst problem, your biggest challenge in this business? And the CEO answered and Mike said, well, who's working on it and how are they doing? And the CEO says, we don't have anybody working on it. Well, why not? Well, because it can't be solved. And so they're off working on, you know, other things. And so, you know, the two points you made when you put them together, it really is about any time you say to yourself in any environment, Jesus, there has to be a better way to do this than this, you're right probably.. But it may take some perseverance to find it and make it happen.

Well, Dan, you're exactly right. And you look at one of the other interviews that is probably the most, I would say, name-branded person or trailblazer in the book was John Stossel. Stossel, when I was a kid growing up and in college, was on ABC with Barbara Walters and Peter Jennings, 20/20 with ABC. Now that used to be 50 to 60 million viewers. That was like dominance when there was just a few options. The interesting thing in the interview with Stossel was how he said, "Look, I'd walk down the aisle and Peter Jennings would turn away with disgust." Because Stossel opened his mind to become a libertarian in a very liberal newsroom of ABC, which everybody knows is far left. So he was the trailblazer for almost 20 years that was despised by his own peers. And he revealed in the interview with me, and again people can hear the full interview, that Barbara Walters actually felt bad for him. I kind of liked him. I think what's also interesting is a lot of these trailblazers have learned to deal with their fear and move through it. Stossel— Dan, you can relate to this— has a major challenge with stuttering. He says, "Tony, there were times I would be deadly afraid on live television to stutter." He had to block that out of his mind not to have that happen in front of 40 million people. That's intense pressure. That's where you know if you're really driven to commit. I think everyone on this call knows that Sunday night insomnia, that key employee that steals from you, that wife that after 20 years you think is your best friend turns into the devil and leaves you. That's when the rubber meets the road. That's what I want to know from these trailblazers is how did you push through when the chips were down, when you went from the top of the mountain to the bottom. Dan Bylsma in the book was the head coach of the Pittsburgh Penguins. He won the Stanley Cup as a rookie head coach in 2009. 3 years later, he's bounced. Professional head coaching positions are the toughest, I believe, in the world because of the media. So he went from king of the hill, celebrated in Pittsburgh, to unemployed. Now he took over Buffalo, who we were talking about, you know, before the interview started. He's got a lot of rebuilding to do. However, trailblazers don't stay down for long. Folks on this call have faced intense setback. That's what I want to learn from. That's what I want to go out and teach and share with the world is Hey, we've got millions of people, Dan, that have great ideas walking around, but they don't believe or they've been told no by someone close to them or someone they work with. I want them to have the permission, the balls, the kahunas to say, you know what, damn it, I'm going to try this again. I've got a new way of looking at it. I have a new boss. We have a new CEO. We have new leadership. I'm going to try this idea, and damn it, we need it. So I'm giving people permission to go on the offense, to get inspired. You can't motivate people, but you can get them maybe to think a little differently. These interviews from these people that are mega successful inspired me, Dan, to realize I'm not alone, that they go through a lot more adversity than we might imagine.

Years ago I interviewed Tom Monaghan, co-founder— well, yeah. Domino's Pizza. Domino's Pizza. There was a period of time Domino's took off like a rocket and then it almost went bust., and then recovered and got its legs again. And, uh, Tom said, you know, there, there's not a lot to be learned from paying attention to me when I was the Boy Wonder. There's a lot more to be learned from paying attention to me when I suddenly became the village idiot. And, and in most highly successful individuals' lives, there was the rocket up and there was the village idiot phase. If you think about Steve Jobs being thrown out of his own company. And then there was the comeback, better than ever. And I think that's a recurring theme and it's a theme that people can learn a lot from. Let's, um, let's shift gears and kind of loop back to the overarching, um, uh, life of yours, the, the whole mind capture thing. And, um, here we are some years since you began to talk about capturing mind space and controlling mind space. And all we've had happen in the interim is more chaos, more clutter, more confusion, more media, more fragmentation. You know, in cable television we're pretty much on pace to arriving at a point where there is one reality show for every viewer and, you know, a 1-to-1 ratio. Uh, true. I mean, their shows— I don't know how many viewers— somebody was telling me last night in the driver's room at the track, they're infatuated with a show on National Geo 2, which I guess is the second channel of National Geographic, that is a weekly show all about, uh, people who raise and live with snakes. And I'm thinking, you know, really? What, what, there's 500 people in this subculture? And so 500 of them are going to be guests on the show and 500 of them are going to watch the show. I mean, that's, but that's the world that we live in, you know. And people get 12 bazillion emails a day and they get 12 bazillion texts. And plus all of the traditional media that surrounds them. And so certainly the idea of, you know, your tagline standing out in a crowded world, not just getting somebody's attention but being able to hold a place on their top 10 list gets tougher and tougher and tougher and tougher. And that's, you know, that's where you've done the most work. That's where you work the most. So what's your best advice of the moment? What are you telling clients struggling with this that is most useful to them?

Well, I'm going to give a couple of quick thoughts on that and give some credit where credit is due. I mean, I wrote the first Mind Capture book. We're at book 4 right now, back in 2003. I was a noob to the whole industry. I was in my early 30s. Dan, you graciously, to do some historical archiving here, did the foreword. Shocked me. But again, even back then I wasn't afraid to ask. And we had some other big endorsements that came through. Because when you put your word out there in print, it can be scary to say the least. And I knew, learning from you and Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield, other mentors, you follow those that are successful to the T. They said, look, find a brand and stick with it and make a series. Chicken Soup is a great series. So I said, all right, let's follow the path. And mind capture was literally something that Jay Abraham had coined at one of his events in LA. And I just said, I love that term. That's it. Those two words. That tagline describes what I see is that we're in this war of attention. Or how do you get mind capture? I couldn't have foreseen, Dan, from 13 years later with all the digital cell phone technology, how it advanced so quickly that— this problem will get infinitely worse. And it continues to get worse. I see my 3 teenage children now that have cell phones. And I'm literally like, Dad's kind of like the dinosaur. He tells us to shut the phone off at dinner. I'm like, you buy dinner then. They shut their phone off. When Dad says, you pay for it unless you shut your phone down, they listen to me. But they reluctantly move away from that mobile device because they're like a digital addict. I believe— and this is real critical for your Platinum members to listen— that We're in this age of digital advertising deficit disorder. Okay, it's a playoff of the traditional ADD. It's not going away, but it's going to require that tried and true marketing methods that you and I know, and I learned many of these from you, Dan, okay, is the sequence attack. You're going to have to hit them with online and offline, the blended, or what I call layered. This is an advanced one you might want to know, and I'll give credit where I learned this. It's a layered approach where you're using traditional offline direct marketing. Phones, telemarketing outbound, a lot of direct mail, postcard sequencing. Now it gets frustrating. I can bet almost every Platinum member on this call knows us, members. It seems like some days you're like, God, is anyone paying attention? They are, but the number of impressions hitting us is so high now. I'll go into some of Sally Hogshead's knowledge and training, which is very current. As you know, 5,000 to 6,000 messages per day. We have about a 9-second attention span. The difficulty of the attention task is getting more and more challenging. Here's a good description on this call. You're in the right room, the right group, because you understand you don't give up and quit. You don't walk away from it. You adjust. So tried and true direct marketing sequencing works. You add in the new tools of influence or try to capture. You are far, far ahead of those that are specially doing, only doing digital.

Okay?

You said something a few years ago at a seminar I was in, I almost laughed and fell out of my chair. A lot of these internet marketers are very successful. The challenge is a lot of them don't tell you, they're almost like pirates. They go from one big list to another and they play the law of numbers. They have huge numbers, so low response rate, they make a fortune. Okay, what about refund rate? What about those people coming back again? What's the deliverable? I want a lifetime relationship with my client. Something I learned as a noob from you, Dan, and some of the mentors you were around is I've got folks that have been with me for 20 years. I've been in Planet Dan for 20 years. I'm in California right now. We flew in last night for vacation. It's like Hotel Danifornia. You can check in, but you can never leave. Seriously, Dan. So I model the best. Thank God I got around you in my 20s, you and Jay Abraham and some other mentors, Ben herd and other various mentors from the bookshelf. I wasn't raised like this, Dan. I was a very middle-class GM family, blue-collar. I was the rebel that broke away and won this business. That lean more conservative that wanted to build something versus wait for something. So say all that because the attention problem is going to get more and more challenging. You need other compadres or Diamond members or people in your herd. That think like you, absolutely, because the rest of the marketplace thinks you're crazy doing 3-step mailers. But I get the best return on using lumpy mail grabbers with CEOs still. Still today, man, I had a CEO of a company call me 2 weeks ago and say, "Yeah, I'm laughing about the broken record you sent me, the pieces of an album." He goes, "Our whole team was laughing. Hey, we were busy. I know you tried to reach me, but the grabber grabbed the CEO." He's a shiny, Gen Xer in his early 30s. So the ones that say, well, direct mail doesn't work, they still respond to it if it's done effectively.

You know, the whole— as the landscape itself is the very front-end challenge of getting somebody to pay attention to you and raise their hand one way or another, as that gets uglier and uglier and messier and messier and more and more democratized. It is what you do with that person after they raise that hand to separate them from all that and give yourself an opportunity to talk to them one-on-one. It's just so important. I had a call this morning with a client, and so this is a very current case history.— when he's marketing through preview seminars, free or very low-cost multi-hour seminars. And his closing rate to appointment in the seminar went from a tick below 50% to a tick above 80%. By doing one simple thing, and I'll preface it by saying the result is never universal, it's why you test. Correct. But the free book that they get when they come to the seminar being rushed to them ahead of the seminar and then being urged to read the book before they get there, close to appointment from 50% to 80%, and close at appointment doubled from what it was, and average transaction size doubled from what it was. All by the only change, putting a hard physical object with 200-some-odd pages in it that require you to actually sit for an hour and read something. Before you get into the actual sales and buying activity. And, you know, most clients, most marketers would classify that as antiquated to the point of dinosaurs roaming the earth. And nobody's going to read 200 pages anyway. And why don't we just make it an eBook? And, you know, on and on and on and on and on. But now I don't think you can really win the mind capture business at the very front. I don't care how cool your Super Bowl commercial is, you lose the attention as fast as you got it, and most people don't remember the product that was advertised.

Mm-hmm.

Etc., etc. You got to win this battle once you have your hands on a lead and then what you do with them once you have them.

Well, Dan, I agree. I'm going to give you a quick example, and again, this is probably reminding for many of your Diamond members, but in our own business, what I do as a speaker and author and a consultant I have weekly messages that go out in an e-letter of value to a list. It's very content rich. Some people say, "Look, we've been reading your e-letter for 3 years. We need a speaker now." I didn't realize they were reading it that closely and sharing it at their sales meeting for 3 years. I do daily updates on Facebook and social media, multiple pages with our team. We also have a monthly CD. We do webinars. We do publishing. I do a couple of small events per year. I speak on the road a lot. There's a lot of movement, a lot of moving pieces that people can dive in and out of. Some are more responsive to other forms of media than others. I don't know what's going to grab them. But we never stop producing content of value. We obviously have offers in there for events and books and webinars. And we've moved from the free line of just free preview webinars to paid webinars because we've been testing. And people will pay if they see great value. The challenge is We're drunk on data and information. We're short on what I would say experience and knowledge base. When I interviewed you, Dan, in Denver a few months ago, you said something kind of offhand. I'm just paraphrasing here. Oh yeah, they pay me for my 40 years of knowledge because most of them have that range. You were spot on, Dan. And again, we underestimate our value. What you taught me as a newbie in the business 20 years ago is what you take for granted people will pay for? Absolutely, if it's positioned properly. Free content is easy. Moving over to the paid line gets trickier. But the advantage we all have listening is we understand how to market and build relationships. So again, I commend your Diamond members and folks of mine that will hear this interview as well in the Mind Capture Nation, I call it, because you're the rare bird. You're that trailblazer that says, look, market's saying I'll run this way. I'm like, wait a minute. Human nature is to look the other way. There's opportunity when everyone is going that way to zigzag the other way. And again, you've got to hit them with more impressions, Dan. There's just too many more media options. The attention span has been fragmented even more now to where we're almost like mice. You know, oh, there's a piece of cheese, a piece of cheese, a squirrel, a squirrel. So you've got to keep the intensity up and use what I call that layered approach. The core foundation is the direct response offline marketing. I'm just going to say it. I have clients that go, "Yeah, yeah, we reluctantly, you know, we wanted to fight with Tony about this at first, but we started adding direct mail in and oh my gosh, our customers loved it." So you have to be that wizard that comes in and says, "Look, trust me on this. This is why you're paying me." Then I walk away from clients who don't get with the program right away. If they're too much of a hassle, good luck. You know, there's plenty of people on the planet that have marketing challenges that are looking for people like you and I and others on this call.

Well, and really people need to be that way with all their businesses. You know, it doesn't matter whether you're in healthcare or financial advisor or you're running a high-end restaurant or you're running a catering company. You've got to create enough deal flow for yourself. That you can focus on really appropriate customers or clients, not needing every customer or client and not being able to afford to say no to anybody. You really have to get into a position where you don't care as much about the ones you lose as you do about getting avatar customers or clients. And that's really all about deal flow. It becomes numbers. So the sales thing itself, I mean, you are still— and I'm going to ask you about everybody you interviewed for the book. So you are still at some point making a one-on-one sale to a client. Correct. For your business. You are still having a phone conversation to get the interview you want. You are still standing on stage and making a sale. I'm in the same boat. My most successful clients from $2 million a year to $40 million a year businesses, their owners are using media extensively and yet at some point humans are on the phone, face-to-face, on stage one way or another. They are closing sales in a diverse variety of businesses, not the business you or I are in, but in healthcare, in financial services, in travel, etc., etc., etc.

So, Dan, you said something very profound. Absolutely, yes. I do a lot of work with some major John Deere dealerships throughout the US.. It's a vertical market that has really seen what I do. It's like the wizard coming in. They're implementing, number one, but two, they know they need to change. I remember training a group of sales reps about 4 weeks ago near Houston, a little town called El Campo, Texas, about 25 seasoned John Deere sales reps. I said, look, here's the good news, guys. I know everyone's scared about the internet. We can't ignore social media and websites. Farmers now have cell phones. But they're still going to want to come to a dealership here in South Texas and negotiate for combines. That's where the human element, eyeball to eyeball, comes in. That's where I need you to be a master closer, to ask the right questions, to anticipate if they're bluffing you. A lot of what I do is sales training, again. Because if you get good at selling, you can transfer that to print, to digital, to whatnot. Okay? And they look at me like, wow. That's right. They still need a human to buy a $3 million set of combines for their farms. So that's not going to disappear. The education process or the steps to get them into the dealership may change. They might go online for a few months and look at JohnDeere.com. They might go to that specific dealership's web pages or social media. When their trigger comes, people that pay for value still want a good human interaction. I don't see that changing.

Changing.

Okay? So that's the good news for all of us. I will tell you one thing that has been really in hot demand right now from a lot of my repeat clients, Dan. I think that's the key indicator of success is if you're rebooked over and over and over again. Okay? I'm seeing a lot more soft skills sales training being requested. And in addition, customer service training. I think that is the next marketing battle. I'm going to throw it out here a little bit, a preview of my fifth book about customer service. We're in the final age of where everything is becoming commoditized, or as you would say, Amazon effect, Dan. Now the last differentiator, I believe, besides good marketing is great service. Because if I like you and I know you and I can trust you, I will refer the hell out of you. It gives you a unique distinction in that marketplace. Great customer service is hard to find. When you get it, you write books about it. Okay, and I just am amazed that more businesses are calling me for things that I would think are common sense. They're not. And as much as I'm on the West Coast, I live in Idaho and I split time in Michigan, I'm in California now, when I find great customer service, my jaw drops because it's usually the other side of the pendulum, Dan. And most businesses are being destroyed by their employees that have hidden employee resentment. I'm going to go a little advanced here for your— excuse me, your diamond members, is that hidden employee resentment kills great marketing. It kills repeat business. It kills referrals. Most business owners do not walk around and manage their Indians. They don't realize, okay, yeah, Dan brings all these leads to us. Tony brings leads to us. All of a sudden their staff is sabotaging the lead deal. Attitude's not there. There's no system of tracking. There's no incentives for them to be good to the customer.— and those customers never come back. They Google somewhere else. They Yelp somewhere else, and they're gone. So marketing and customer service to me are very much intertwined more than ever.

Well, and I think— so I think what's happening— there's a couple things happening that are significant about what you just said that people need to be very aware of. And one is that as businesses get more and more dependent and in many ways more and more adept at using media, particularly online media and social media, to ultimately deposit still a customer or a prospective customer, a patient or a prospective patient into a four-wall environment. Paid more and more and more attention to that side of the equation, and they are ultimately more effectively, more efficiently, and in many cases more inexpensively depositing more people into ultimately an environment they have paid less and less and less attention to that is wholly unsatisfying and off-putting. And I think the second thing that's happening is they're increasingly getting an entire generation of employees who, to your point, don't have any of these skills and have disdain for these skills, may resent needing to use these skills, and they are letting this happen. I called this morning. Today's my phone day. I'm on the phone all day. And clients have a number they call me at, but if there's some oddity, like in this case it was somebody who qualified for a call via a voucher, I call them. And this person's a terrific business owner and a terrific marketer, and they're in IT, but I made the— the inbound call. And so a fellow answered the phone, and he announced the company name and his name and 'May I help you?' But he said it in a tone of voice that was unbelievable. I mean, it was thoroughly annoyed at having to answer the phone, and ask you if he could help you. That's what was conveyed. And I thought to myself, if I was a prospective client and this is how this guy answered the phone, at best my anxiety level about doing business with this company would be through the roof because, you know, if they're not even happy about taking the inbound call, not knowing what the call is.

How happy are they going to be when I actually need something? Yeah, Dan, I want to— going on, this is going on. Yeah, I mean, it's going on everywhere. I want to build off something. I'm going to share this because, um, you've, you've helped me in so many ways. I— there's not a day that goes by, and this is serious, you ask my coaching members, Dan would say this, or Dan Kennedy taught me this. So I'm very liberal about giving credit credit where credit is due. To give you some real-time data, something that I've done as an experiment last year, a client demanded it. It was— they were open-minded, they paid me well, and they worked around the timeline I gave them. So it was a dream client, okay? They said, all right, to make the deal go, we want you to mystery shop though. We want you to go to a few of our locations and also do some telephone ordering of parts. So I did it. It wasn't too much extra, and they paid me well, and it fit into the scope scope of work. Okay, we learned so much. What's that? Painful, wasn't it? Oh my God, the things we learned. The ownership group— this was in the agricultural space because of non, you know, confidentiality, I'm not going to name them, but they're in the John Deere world. Okay, they were floored. They had sensed it, the ownership team, several families that merged this company over a period of 30 years. They were like, wow, Dan, there are literally millions of dollars per month going in on a business that they're not even tracking. They're not even doing any logical upselling to, what I call a consultative approach. We built some scripts and we role-played with them. We said, "All right, here's my report of findings where you did some things okay and here's where the fortune was lost." I remember the skeptical partner that didn't want to hire me looked at me and said, "What's the one thing you would tell us to do, Tony? Strip it down for us that we need to do." You need to find out when every customer calls in, emails, or walks through your dealership, mainly the walk-ins. How did you hear about us, or is this your first time here? That's a pivot point question. And they're like, because none of them did it, Dan, in all the locations. And they go, why would we do that? Because if they said it's their first time here, well, how'd you hear about us? Hey, great, you heard from Joe Smith, the farmer down the road. There's the referral. You thank the referral. Now here's your first step. Secondly, you get them in your database. "Hey, to keep you updated on our promotions here within John Deere, we have a special VIP mailing list. Would you like to be a part of that?" That's not high pressure. That's just making value. If they walked into a dealership, Dan, they are serious. They didn't just show up for fun and games. They've been looking around or they have a specific need. So those two tweaks, he goes, "That's what we paid you for. All that mystery shopping, you trained all of our staff on other sales training stuff.". But that's what we needed to know. But going undercover like the show Undercover Boss, I did it mystery shopping. I was like, oh my God, they're not the only one. So many businesses, and you said it, Dan, the bigger they get, I believe that the dumber they get because they can't scale.

Then it becomes all these errors start to occur because humans aren't trained properly and there's no system to measure.

Right.

I mean, the gap between what people think is going on in their business and what's really going on in their business is generally huge. You're right, and you're right, it does get bigger the bigger the company gets. You know, it's one thing if you got 6 telemarketers and you're trying to keep track of what they're saying, but when you get 60 and you have 10 managers and you have 6 managers over the 10 managers, pretty soon you haven't got a clue what's going on. And yet it's remarkable that the owner of that company will go an entire month without himself picking up the phone playing prospect and at least seeing in one isolated incident what's going on. So, you know, the fallacy of marketing, I mean, the place— marketing ultimately, no matter how good it is and no matter how good somebody gets, at manipulating media and using social media and all of that, at some point in time it actually deposits a customer into human hands and often into a physical environment and often into a sales or service situation. And none of what you did up until that point will make up for that being blown, that being mishandled. Tony, thank you very much for stealing minutes out of your vacation.

Thank you everybody for being on the call.

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