This SIMPLE Mistake Is Costing You Money (Here's How To Fix It)

Dean Graziosi explains why your marketing fails during downturns: you're selling aspirational dreams when people need survival. During the 2007-2009 real estate crash, he shifted from "fastest ship" messaging to "life preservers" and became the dominant educator. Match what prospects fear right now, not what they want later.
Chapters
We must always enter conversations that are going on in the mind of our prospect this very moment. In a shifting world, do you want to be healthier? If you're stressed, do you skip workouts? Do you eat a little crappier? I know I do because I was up at 1. I skipped my workout this morning. First time I think I've missed in about three months. And I'm pissed. But I got to get it done. I'll go do it tonight. But it happens, right? Like, can relationships suffer? Do you eat wrong? Right? Do you want to have a better mindset? Do you lose your purpose? Like, mostly all the niches, I can't imagine hardly any niche. Even if you teach art, piano, guitar, like, when things go, you want that something different, you want that alternative, you want to find something. And I think that's why this, the tide rises. It lifts all boats. When this, when things shift, this industry lifts. So I think it affects everybody. But I want to, I want to give you a high level picture of the message, the visuals I had in 07 when the world shifted the last time I was teaching people how to invest in real estate and I saw what was coming. It didn't take a rocket science scientist to see like, kind of like where we are now. And I was teaching people and I was watching all the other competitors. Back then, it was Carlton Sheets was my biggest competitor and he had been on forever. And it was his infomercials because there was no Internet. That's why we had infomercials were very aspirational. Get in real estate and get the second house and buy the extra car and go on more vacations and wow, that's great for an aspirational market. But the world was shifting and I was thinking less speedboat, more life preservers. And I'm going to give you this analogy. Take it, adjust it, change the framework any way you want. But back then, and I really want you to hear this, this is what helped me be a really good marketer. I did have the luxury of targeting my ideal client. It didn't exist. I couldn't go on Facebook and said, I want single moms who do yoga and like peanut butter and jelly. Like, that's the target market. I want to go after and, you know, do Pilates after five. Like, we can fine tune and narrow our niche so much. We could speak on Instagram just about our niche. We could create a Facebook group just about our niche. That didn't happen for Tony. And when I started, we couldn't narrow down our niche. We had to go on an infomercial and just broadcast to everybody who watched CNN or Fox News or was on the Discovery Channel or ABC in the morning, like it was just a wide net. Does that make sense? I had to be intuitive or learn to be intuitive on what people were feeling. So here's the analogy I came up with. Think of the Titanic. It's in the harbor in Leave London. It was England somewhere, right? It's in the harbor. It is the biggest ship that's ever built. It is the fastest big sh. Ship ever built. It is the maiden voyage. It is gorgeous. It is light years ahead of anything that was ever created prior. That's. To me, that's like the economy over the last few years. It's aspirational. This is amazing, right? And if I were selling a seat on that, imagine you'd be like, everything I said, it's the fastest. It's the biggest. It's the most beautiful. It's got marble, it's got fancy food. It's got music. Aspirational. It's perfect, right? That's how I'd sell it. If it was like the way I looked at it, if it was 2005 or 2006 before things turned, that's how I would sell that. But then after the Titanic hit the iceberg. Iceberg right ahead. Would anybody care about the fancy meals or how fast it was or how beautiful it was? What would people care about once it hit? All they would care about is a lifeboat or a life preserver. Safety, right? Look at every survival. Survival, safety, the lifeboats, right? So what happens is, in 2007, the economy hit an iceberg, and here's what I noticed. I want you to hear this. All of my competitors were still selling aspirational. They were still selling faster boats and bigger dreams. And in my head, I'm like, I drove down the street the other day. Every other house, every third house in this neighborhood's got a foreclosure sign on it. So what did I do? I shifted. I wrote a book called Be a Real Estate Millionaire. But I shifted the contents. I was in the middle of writing the book, and I just wrote a book. How to do one deal every month or one deal every couple of months. It wasn't about getting rich overnight. It was called a wholesale process where you found really good deals either through foreclosure or other ways, and you sold them to investors. Do you remember? Was anybody buying a house in 08? No. Everybody was like, I'm not buying crap. I don't Want to see where things are going? So everybody's like, how can you sell real estate? Guess who was still buying real estate in 08 and 09? Investors. I bought like 500 houses in 08 09. 2010, right. So what I did was I taught people, this is not a time you're going to get rich for doing nothing and buy a house like you did six months ago and hold it for six months and it's worth more because appreciation wasn't going up. But investors were buying. So I taught people how to go find cheap deals cheaper than everybody else and just make a little bit of money in between. 3, 5, 10 grand most and hand it off to an investor. And guess what I did? I sold life preservers. And in my ads I was like, guys, this is a shifting world. I know you're thinking, you know, I remember saying, you know, Obama was the president at the time. I said, I think he did everything he thought was the best thing he approved. Back then it seemed like a lot of money. $750 billion. Now that's like, that's all you're giving us. Let's go for the trillions, right? But I remember saying, the government just issued $750 billion. Has any of that gone into your bank account? I don't know anybody. They were saying back then it went to Wall street, not Main Street. That was the headlines. And I said, if that's not positively affecting you, I don't have a way for you to get rich overnight and make millions. But I have a way to preserve yourself in this shifting world. And in that year, most my competitors went out of business. They stayed aspirational. I turned to life preservers. And over that three year period, I went from being one of the guys in that space to I own the entire space. When the dust settled, there was no one else in the industry but me. I became the biggest real estate educator in the world. Be a real estate millionaire, went on to sell over a million copies. I don't think there's another real estate book, I don't know. And we can't find one that has sold over a million copies. And we changed lives all over the country. And a time where people were struggling, there was nobody using my book. I shouldn't say that we had some really successful, like took it to a whole nother level. But we helped so many people survive and thrive in winter rather than showing them how to get rich for doing nothing. Now, I know not everybody's showing people how to flip houses or make money, but the mindset. I had to read that mindset on a big level because I couldn't target market my ideal client. My intuition was, hey, people are scared as things turn. And again, I just, I'm kind of a little ADD today. Maybe it's the lack of sleep, but I was just in a meeting in the other room. I always say that, but in the other room we have our mastermind meeting and we could put a hundred people in there, but a lot of times our teams will be in there. We had a great team meeting just a week ago and as I talked about how the world is shifting and how we can serve you and serve our high ticket academy clients and project next level and all of our the mastermind academy, how do we serve you? I want to make sure you guys are knowing where we're going and we're doing the best possible right with our messaging and our thoughts and our training. And as I'm talking, I realized everybody in the room that was under 35, especially those in their 20s, we have a lot of young, amazing people on our team were like, yeah, I mean, nobody's really talking about that. None of my friends are. And I'm like, I know, I get it. Because we all get naive and even some of us who went through it get amnesia on how things really shift. You have friends that have amnesia, like, oh, it's not that big a deal. And then you fast forward. Especially people that are in like the banking business or the real estate selling business, things shift. It doesn't just keep going faster, quicker. So I'm sharing that because what I want to do today is just give you a subtle way to step back a little and say, okay, as I sell my product, as I sell myself, as I start messaging more or do videos or influence or write an email, how do I write and lean into and you heard me say this a lot. And I would write this down if you could. We must always enter conversations that are going on in the mind of our prospect this very moment. Right. That's our new. That's, that's the slogan for today. We must enter conversations already going on in the mind of our prospect today at this moment. Because over the next three to six months, I believe the internal conversation, like the one in my head all last night is changing. Yes, we went through Covid. That was a shift and definite uncertainty. Yes. It's so sad that there's a war going on in the world right now. And I send prayers every single day. I wish I could do more. There's a lot of craziness going on in the world, but I think we're gonna add winter on top of it. And when that happens, conversations definitely change.










