Trust Based Marketing

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today we get to listen in to Dan Kennedy as he interviews Matt Sigula. Now, if you've ever wondered, how do you make sure that your business is recession-proof? How do you make sure that you are able to continue in the best way possible in your business without feeling spammy? How do you make sure that when you speak to your customer, they automatically accept not just what you're saying, but your pitch itself as value? This is going to be an interview you don't want to miss. Now, Matt is an author, he's a financial advisor, and he's a marketer. He started his own firm and now he's a top advisor and coach for advisors. He understands this world extremely well, and he's going to be revealing to you his strategy and process for appealing to and acquiring not only middle market, but well affluent, high-paying customers. The customers that you're going to want in any time of a downturn. And the way you not only get their attention, but get them to buy is all through trust-based marketing. Let's listen in as Matt reveals all the principles and strategies that he uses so that you can use it in your own business.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws. 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 your monthly diamond call. I have with me and we will very shortly get to my friend Matt Segula who if you don't know him by any other means, you should know him because of the No BS Guide to Trust-Based Marketing book which Matt co-authored with me. And we've also done some training together in that area. Matt, thank you for making time, doing us all a favor being with us.

Hey, Dan, I'm just pleased to be with you, my friend. Always enjoy any opportunity I get for you and I to do some work together. So hopefully we can provide some good content and share some of what we're doing here that I think is applicable to any business owner, quite frankly. Cool.

So we'll get to that in just a sec. Tell everybody that you and I intend to go relatively short and then have lines open for questions and stuff people want to talk about. Anything within sort of the two topic categories I guess would be trust-based marketing and will be making high-fee, high-dollar sales to affluent clients. And just in case somebody hasn't done their homework and isn't fully cognizant. Matt, I'm going to let you basically do your own introduction, kind of give people a feel for your businesses and not all the way back to 9 months in the womb, but sort of your origin story and where you came from. And then you and I will get started.

That sounds good, Danny. I'm pretty lousy at that, by the way. Self-promotion is probably my worst thing. You know, I've had some good fortunate experience. I'm a financial advisor, I guess, first and foremost. My retail business is in advising, which I think uniquely set me up to become a good marketer because of the limitations that we have on what we're allowed to do with the prohibition of not using testimonials. And, you know, a lot of the things that are persuasive are taken away from us. So it kind of makes you think a little bit outside the box. My early origins were in the insurance industry. That's when I first read Magnetic Marketing and began to write pieces which quite frankly today would probably get me thrown in jail, but they worked. I became kind of famous at a very young age in the high-end insurance selling and distribution business and had a pretty successful practice. I was doing what the guys who were 20, 25 years older than me were expected to do, which was mentoring groups and having great success at Guardian and Northwestern Mutual. And it's funny because Guardian Insurance was a general agency where it was run very entrepreneurially. It was very— oh, I wouldn't say Animal House-like, but it was a little Animal House-like. I mean, it was based on fun and, you know, a lot of client experience stuff that we now know is very important. And then I was recruited over to Northwestern Mutual, and it was like going to the military. It was a nightmare for me.

Guardian is a lot more our kind of folks.

Yeah, for sure. And this one particular general agent was this— he's the top in the country. He's a Pittsburgh guy, Earl Lutner, and he's a character. I mean, he's just a different guy, and he has more charisma than anybody. He was my first— that was my first job. I worked for this guy first. So he just had a lot of swag to him. I'll just say it that way. He had a lot of presence about positioning. I learned things through observation from him, but I couldn't get the leads to come in, so that's when I started reading your stuff. Boy, did I have leads come in, and everybody in that agency— there was about 70 of them— they all wanted to know what I was doing. Of course, I didn't tell them. There was a leaderboard, and that was the beginning of understanding where you rank in my mind. When you're a kid and you're coming out of college, you don't know. All of a sudden, I'm in this— ultra-competitive organization, and all I can think about is, am I going to be number 13 this month, or can I work my way up to number 5? And I think it had a really positive psychological effect on me because it was a pressure stack, and I realized I liked it, and it made me perform better. But when I went to Northwestern, it was completely different. It was miserable. So I started my own firm. I was doing pretty cutting-edge marketing when a lot of advisors were pushing income planning and other things I thought were stale and really bloody ocean of competition. I swam to sort of the— a very blue ocean in estate planning, working with estate planning attorneys. I built a network of 40 law firms around the country, and all of a sudden here I am, I'm in a little town in West Virginia. I mean, it's a little depressed old steel town, and at the time I probably was one of the top 5 producers in the country of various insurance business, and quite frankly, I had no idea until somebody told me because I was isolated on my own little place out here. I didn't even know I was doing these big numbers. I thought I was tiny compared to other advisors in the country, guys from Chicago and New York, but I guess I wasn't. And quite frankly, a lot of my law firms were in Chicago, New York, and Overland Park, Kansas, and big, big communities, and they were the best firms. So we were kind of killing it through a differentiated message, and I think that was really the key. And I give tremendous amount of credit to what I learned from you. And later on, I had the opportunity to work with you directly on a coaching program for a couple years with top advisors in one of the biggest insurance distribution companies in the country. And I think the work that you and I did literally changed the face of how advisors in what today is labeled the safe money advising business do. I think we laid a framework of a much better approach. And I don't know if you'll remember, I won't say the guy's full name, but there's a fellow named Jim and he was from Seattle and he was an $8 million a year producer. And he called me out of the blue a number of months ago and said, hey man, I want to thank you. And I said, well, I appreciate it, you're a great guy, you know. But he blew up to over $90 million in new business a year from $8. And he credits that program that you and I did. So I've had quite an experience in advising and coaching advisors. In what's a really tough market to market to.

Well, I want to back up and just take note of one thing, and that is a lot of people don't really realize how comparatively fortunate they are to people in a few niches like yours where so much of effective marketing, advertising, and sales techniques that we all tend to take for granted are actually prohibited.

Yes.

Or so constrained as to be nearly prohibited. I mean, most people have the advantage of using social proof in every which way it can be used and default typically to testimonials and aren't very creative about other ways to use social proof because they don't have to. And in your field, that and certain ways of making claims, there are a lot of very painful restrictions.

And Dan, I think that there's something you teach that is so universally true that for some reason no one wants to use this. I consider it to be one of maybe 3 tremendously huge secrets, and that is completely to differentiate yourself in your marketing message. So when you think about it, financial advisors today will buy people dinner, they'll do anything to get in front of them to tell them their story. Of course, the way that they're positioning this, they're coming from a position of weakness, not of authority. One of the things I really learned from you, and I got stuck on it, and I think you even maybe scolded me at one point, "Hey, man, there's more to this than that." I just became obsessed with, am I positioned correctly as the authority to where I don't look like I'm begging for business, or I don't look desperate, or I don't look like I'm selling them, but I'm literally selling from a position of complete advocacy to where they're going to buy into everything I'm saying, right? So I learned that completely from you, and I think that people miss that all the time. So compared to every other advisor who's doing everything just to get in front of somebody like an at-bat to have a high degree of failure, I charge anywhere between $4,200 to over $8,000 advance fee before we ever get to the money. So there's money exchanged before we talk really about the money. There's only one guy that never paid that fee, and I think I had to pay him. And I think it was you, Dan. I think he made me pay you one time for advice. I can't remember, but it was— I think you brainwashed me. I went under your spell.

Yeah, but you know, your, your model is basically my consulting model as well.

Absolutely. Yeah.

And many people think they can't do it. They don't understand it. It violates everything they see peers doing around them. You know full well it's hard to get financial advisors to do it, but when the person pays for the first piece of advice, they are much more likely to accept the second piece of advice and the third piece of advice and the fourth piece of advice.

No one wants to sell, Dan, right? Because it's like a dirty word. So what you've done in your consultative process that you really laid out for all of us, and I've refined a little bit to specifically for my market just because of the marketing limitations, but basically it's a carbon copy minus what I can't do, is you really have taught us, okay, you have a differentiated marketing message that leads to a first response that leads to an agreement to meet. So what happens is that you need to delay the sale. And this is what no one wants to do because everyone, you know, puts themselves into the desperate hole. But even if you are almost flat broke living off a credit card, you have to delay that sale. And then you have to be willing to go out and build deliverable materials that are built around the ACE principle— the authority, celebrity, and exclusivity. So, you know, you have a differentiated marketing message that makes you stick out. There's a response. You flex your ACE before you get to that meeting. And it just takes the selling away. There's an— I walk into these meetings not with the expectation of are they or aren't they going to do it. I get kind of upset if it takes more than 30 or 40 minutes for them to start signing the engagement letters and give me money. Because there's an expectation because I've built a process that dictates that's what's supposed to happen. There's no selling involved. It's the outcome that's supposed to happen. And if it doesn't, usually, for time's sake, I'm able to get out of there in 15 minutes and say, hey, look, you know, it's not that, you know, you're a bad guy or I'm a bad guy. We just may be incompatible. I think I learned that from you too, Dan.

So flesh it out just a little bit more.

Sure.

What has evolved and sort of is now your process for acquiring a client?

Well, the first thing is I really have an intense focus on the marketing message. So I'll give you two different examples. Work really, really hard now to get to very specific core messages. So for the estate planning business that I'm in with my family, my sister, she's attractive, she's smart, so we use her sort of as the poster child. I'm not nearly as attractive. I may be almost as smart, but not quite. And so we put her out there into the market, and, and our message is very simply: stop, don't go broke in a nursing home. Because we're going after the middle market, we're not going after the ultra-affluent. And we put that everywhere. I mean, that is literally everywhere. And then what happens is we go immediately from there into a program that I developed called Aging with Confidence. And so her and I teach this at local universities. And why more business owners that are selling high-value services, whether that's in the IT profession or, heck, any profession, are going to universities and colleges and local community colleges. You rent a room for $100 or $200. You know, but I've created very polished materials. I've trademarked them and copyrighted everything so that when people come in, we have a class, but the class is fun. It's not intimidating. We use stick figures and cartoons and things like you do. You know, you're— the material's deep, but you lighten it up with some humor. You lighten it up with the imagery so people aren't intimidated, so they'll take action. And I mean, at that point, you know, that differentiated message brings these people in. We give them our book, Invasion of the Money Snatchers, which I've written and now rewritten a couple a couple times. We give them our shock and awe, our paper shock and awe. They say, yes, we want to meet, and then in between we're sending them an electronic version of shock and awe so that when they get response remorse and say, hey, I don't know if I want to come into that first appointment, we hit them with a personalized message. Hey Betty, hey Bob, it's Matt and Pam. We just wanted to, you know, we've attached some directions from your house, you know, just so you don't have any question on how to get to our office, plus a few other collateral pieces based on the information that you said you were most interested in. And it's just another personal touch, but by the time they get to that first appointment, they're coming there and, Dan, they know we're the Insight leader. They know that we know what we're doing. So now it's a matter of getting through their personal information, their stuff, and getting them to become a true believer and referring us like crazy. And again—

Have you done anything before the appointment? By the way, response remorse is a great term.

That's good.

Have you done anything to soften sticker shock to prepare them for the existence of a planning fee?

You know, um, I know maybe I should, but you know, or here's what I actually do, and I think it's kind of, um, in estate planning the worst thing you can do is wait and die. So if you die and you go through probate, you know, there's all kinds of studies that talk about how expensive that is, or if you do nothing and end up at the nursing home. So I particularly display the fees in a reverse way. Say, now look, if you do nothing and you die, here's what's going to happen. It's outrageously expensive. And then we go down to, hey, look, if you do nothing and you become disabled, here's what it's going to be. And we keep on working back to the proactive planning. And that's actually how I sell it. I haven't— I mean, we get referrals where people come in and say, hey, my neighbor, you know, Janie Smith told me you guys are the best, but you're expensive. And I say, "Well, is that a problem?" And they'll go, "No." I say, "Okay." And we just work, you know, it's kind of, it's funny when I'm asked to talk on the psychology of selling because it's really about process. People think that the reason we sell so much is because there's some magic, you know, NLP strategy, that black art that I've mastered. And it's so not that way. I mean, we just go in there like a bunch of country bumpkins from West Virginia with smiles on our faces. Been enough steps in advance that nobody else looks like us. So we're kind of in a category of one. If they don't hire us, they feel like there's nobody else that's going to be able to do what we do. And that's by design, just following what you've taught for all these years.

So are you applying the same process to the higher fee, higher net worth individual?

Yeah. Now there, I will tell you, on the higher net worth, what I've become really good at And I'll get specific because it's you, although I don't, you know, this is something that I'll talk to you like it's just me and you and you can share it with your thousands of closest friends. But I've become very specific in the information that I send to them. So I'm actually looking at a letter on my desk right now. We have a fiduciary service business. I would rather maybe take the bridge than manage a 401(k) plan in the future. That I'm seeing. So, but there's a great business in helping, um, the people who are plan sponsors, the business owners who have this tremendous fiduciary liability, personal liability that you can never get rid of. You can never insure it away. You can never hire professionals away. So I find for higher net worth people, if we wave the, um, the flag of opportunity, they're like, yeah, I'm rich, I got plenty of opportunity, right? So They're like, yeah, whatever. They say, you know, now you have to elevate the claims. Well, the more you elevate the claims, the more you're likely to put yourself into a position where you can't deliver. That's bad positioning. So what works much better, and it even works better at the higher net worth, is to say, hey, I'm going to help you move away from a really significant problem. So I'm going to give you a headline right now, and it says— you'll be like, geez, this is a horrible headline, but it's been extremely successful. So the business owner's first name is Don. So in a highlighted box at at the top of the letter says, Dawn, you are responsible for $5,438,198 of other people's money and are personally liable based on fiduciary law and the information contained on your 5500 filing forms from your company, blah, blah, blah. This letter is about how to best manage that significant risk and personal liability. Now, you know, we don't send a lot of these. We only send 10 a week in FedEx.

That'll scare the crap out of somebody.

Yeah, it's terrifying. And then, and then the bad thing is we, we put the 5500 form in it, so they're like, they can't like refute it or buck it, you know. And then I've managed all the objections in there, like a word of caution, you know. Your advisor is going to tell you not to worry about this, but by the way, you know, the IRS has you pegged as a non-404(c) compliant company, which just enhances your personal liability. They're not going to tell you that's a good thing because it's not, you know. So we just really get into their heads real deep, and it You know, 10's plenty because out of those 10, you know, there's a bunch of them that don't care about anything and they're, you know, they're great for the trial lawyers that are going to put their teeth into them, but for the other 2, you know, one of them will be significant and we move forward. So literally in a year we could get 40 or 50 significant clients to pay us significant fees for our fiduciary-focused services. So it's a new world, buddy. It's not like it was even when you and I worked together just a short few years ago.

And you're doing that homework out of public records?

Yes, that's all available in 5504. That's what I think the biggest problem with marketing is, Dan. And you, man, you really taught me this, and I really appreciate it. You know I think the world of you, buddy. Uh, you know, differentiating the marketing message sometimes is about work, and people don't want to do anything.

And remarkable how sales professionals refuse to prepare for either the prospect or the presentation.

Well, it's amazing to me. There's marketing organizations out there that say, "Hey, we're going to help you with your marketing," but they have 3,000 or 4,000 advisors. Well, Jesus, how differentiated is that? You've got the same people in the same market telling the same story. You have to get good at what your story is. You've got to educate yourself and be committed. Then once you are, once you have differentiated yourself and it's real, it's not marketing bullshit, it's reality, then you build your authority, your celebrity, and exclusivity of process. Then good things happen. Then all of a sudden everybody's going to say, man, you're a selling guru, and really you're just a regular guy, but you did the work. You know, you dug the ditch. That's why you get to put the pool in and enjoy it. You don't get it without putting the backbreaking work in in advance.

Well, you know, you— we were— I had a meeting here yesterday. There's some people you know, some people you don't, and we were really into data crunching and data mining in order to to do direct mail effectively in today's world. Again, it's not that it's not doable, it's just that most people won't invest the time to understand how to do it or invest the money to get it done. Then they're markedly unsuccessful because they're mailing too many pieces to too many bad prospects.

I have so many stories that are popping in my head. I'll comment on the last thing you said because I think it's important. So a lot of folks today in the financial advisory world are trying to go to these university programs, and there's companies popping up all over. They're going to help them with their marketing. It never ceases to amaze me, Dan. Now, and this may— I don't know how this is going to resonate with the crowd, but I'm going to be honest here. It never ceases to amaze me how many people consider themselves themselves to be professional marketers and how few really are. It comes down to not some God-given talent, but the unwillingness not to do the work. What I mean is that I'll face against these companies that create turnkey marketing. I may have a one-on-one client in the financial advisory industry. We're sitting there and I'm looking at this stuff and it's utter crap, right? But they can't necessarily immediately differentiate differentiate between what I'm doing and what they're doing. So I said to an advisor, I said, this is crazy. This is how I started doing the university program. I said, I can't do it the way you're doing it because I don't know what you're doing, quite frankly. I'm an estate planner by my nature, so I'm going to rewrite something. And literally within 12 minutes I had this piece designed. And I said, now here's what I'm going to do. You're mailing how many? He says, I'm mailing 15,000. I go, and you're getting what? And it was bad. I said, great. I said, I'm going to mail 3,500 of these. He said, you're going to mail 3,500? I go, yeah, but I'm going to mail them I'm going to mail them twice. And he goes, what do you mean? I said, I'm going to mail them twice. And he goes, well, why would you mail it to the same people? I said, well, because it's going to work better. And so what I did was, he goes, well, what are you going to change about it? I go, you're right, I'm going to make a change. So on the second one, I put a little tagline in it that said final notice. I go, there you go, that's my change. And we had over a 2% response. And then the light bulb went off, and I actually ended up sending this guy a thank you card, and then I didn't. I didn't bill him for that time that day because ultimately I realized that there's nothing greater to create authority than writing a book or being a teacher in an academic setting. Those are two powerful things. Then if you mix them together, now you have this powerful combination that positions you in the marketplace. It's been unbelievably great since. The book is another thing that I don't understand how everybody that's in the business of marketing services or selling products with enough margin origin aren't authors. You know, I know that there's Nick Manton that helps. There's Adam Witty and there's others, and I may be missing some and you know them, and they should refer to you and GKIC for the referrals, but those are the two that come to mind. But when you close a piece of business and a new client retains you, especially when you're selling financial advisory services or if you're in a competitive market, perhaps it's real estate or something like that, At that moment, that client had to bolster your importance up as high as they possibly can to justify getting rid of the other advisor, getting rid of the other professional that they used to trust. So you have to become that much better than that person. And what's going to happen is over time, your staff isn't going to call back on time, you're going to miss a letter, you're going to make mistakes. And you know this, Dan, as people are more affluent and maybe even getting a little bit older, Their tolerance of any of that is very small. So what happens is that, you know, that book is such a powerful referral tool because, you know, we created that script, you and I, all those years ago sitting in Cleveland. And I just hand two books to each one of them when they're taking the paperwork to move their money with us. And I hand them and I say, look, I don't like referrals because they're uncomfortable, but you may be talking to friends or family members or neighbors about this kind of stuff. And you want to mention us, I would prefer that you did it this way. Just hand them one of these books and say these are the people we like and trust. Just hand them a book and say these are the people we like and trust. Dan, I've had so many— I mean, I have millions of dollars of business of people coming back saying, hey, Bob Smith told me you're the people that he likes and trusts. So, you know, these are small things, but there's a much better, more— I don't know if it's a sophisticated approach, but it's a logical approach to doing business the right way.. And it really starts with differentiating yourself and building your authority, celebrity, and exclusivity around it. And then just following what you have given to all of us as marketers as a roadmap on how to do this stuff right.

So let me switch gears for just a second. Okay. You had a chapter in Trust-Based About It. Tell me a little bit about where you are with online lead generation and online media in your business?

It's a disaster. It's funny, I view— and I know we may be going a little longer than you want, so you cut me off anytime you want. No, no, it's okay. I'll tell you, it's funny, you know Pam in my office, of course, and Pam is my right-hand person, and quite frankly, I mean, you know it, and now everybody's going to know it. She's one of the smartest human beings you'll ever meet in your life, exponentially smarter than me. But from time to time I'll get an idea and I can't let it go, so I hire an open source programmer. And it's like thousands of dollars a month. And Pam, you know, she has some skin in the game, so she walks in and says, "Can I ask you why we're spending all this money?" And I said, "Yes, you can." And she said, "Well, what project are they working on?" I said, "I'm not sure yet." And she said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, look, I'm sure of one thing." that I will never lead Jen effectively online. But I will tell you this, I will make comments online that people can find. My presence online is pathetic, so if somebody's on the call going, let me check this guy out, there's almost nothing there. I'm almost more like a sniper than I am like omnipresent. I'm looking at who do I want to bring into this company as a client. So I'm more stalking them than making myself noticeable. A little bit by design because my industry is making me more and more nervous and high-profile people keep on having more and more problems. So it's more by design than my inabilities. But quite frankly, the economics of online marketing for financial advisory is a complete joke and people are just selling advisors because as a group they're high, you know, they kind of make a lot of money. So they can waste a lot of money. But you know, you would be much better off sending 10 FedExes to the right people with the right words on it a week than to do that. I mean, the ROI on that's proven, and the ROI online is questionable.

Just wanted to see, you and I hadn't caught up, just wanted to see if you had changed or discovered anything new that I didn't know, and obviously—

No, I've dropped a ton of money trying, don't get me wrong. I've made my sacrifice to the online gods and Google and everybody else. As a marketing method for high-dollar, big kind of game transactional stuff, it's not a good business. I mean, my business is built on this middle-market estate planning. We literally have— we book 33 appointments a month. That's what we do. And our closing ratio is real close to all 33 of those. And I gave you a range there, so that pays the bills. Takes care of everything. These fiduciary cases, what I did, Dan, was the programmer, I built communication systems so that the participants in their 401(k) plans would be getting specific information about their accounts that was done purely automated. So if they were not diversified, their cell phone would ring and it would come from their employer and say, Participant Insight is the name of the company, and it says, hey, Participant Insight, your investments are very similar. This may hurt your long-term ability to retire. You should call your advisor, Dick Newman at 304-797-1113. Now, I'm never the advisor. I don't want that business. So what we're doing is we're forcing the advisor to do his or her job on behalf of the employer who's paying for the service so that they are not subject to the personal liability that comes with having a 401(k) plan. I don't think anybody understands how much risk is in these things. And as these plans get bigger, it's just a compounded amount of liability and responsibility. So, you know, there's some elephant hunting mixed in with what I would call high-margin, relatively lower-time-constraint business. Again, going back to time vampires and your book on No BS Time Management, possibly the greatest book of all time. I'd love to say the No BS Trust Base was ours, was great. Your parts are better than mine, but at the end of the day, I think that you have put a curriculum out there that any business owner that's serious about making money would be a fool not to follow. I got no skin in that game other than I appreciate you and I feel like I owe you every compliment I'm giving you, my friend.

Well, thank you. All right, my friend, thank you very much for your time. And I enjoyed it. Peace and, and, and compliments. And your $5 will be in the mail. And, and for everybody on the call, thank you for joining us, and I'll talk to you next month.

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