It takes a village: by Dan Kennedy - eLaunchers.com

Welcome to Now It Does Take a Village, a message about successful marketing in an increasingly complicated environment. This special audio program is presented by eLaunchers.com, the leading implementation company in the automated marketing field. On this program, celebrated direct marketing expert and strategic advisor for the small and midsize business communities, Dan Kennedy, describes a sea change in the way marketing and economic success has to be achieved in the current and coming environment. Dan Kennedy is a multi-millionaire serial entrepreneur, an active investor, a world-famous and popular speaker on these issues, author of more than 20 published business books that have earned spots on the Inc. Magazine 100 Best Business Books and Amazon and Business Week bestseller lists, and is one of the highest compensated direct response copywriters and direct marketing consultants alive. His endorsement is avidly sought by a great many and granted conservatively to a rare few. The sun literally never sets on the membership organization for marketing-oriented entrepreneurs, business owners, private practice professionals, and sales professionals that he founded, for which he continues to contribute, nowgkic.com. In total, through it, a network of niche industry thought leaders and experts birthed or advised by Dan and select specialized service providers like eLaunchers.com, he connects with well over 1 million business owners each year. His work has been favorably recognized in Entrepreneur, Success, and Forbes magazines, and over 50 different industry and professional trade journals. He literally created and led a movement bringing direct marketing to non-direct marketing businesses. Now, here is Dan Kennedy.

Hi, this is Dan Kennedy. I've been asked by Partiv Shah of eLaunchers.com to talk about how to Think to Grow Rich about your business and the current and coming conditions in which we all operate. All success begins in your own thinking about your business and about the world in which it lives, and few entrepreneurs actually slow down and really deeply think about such things. Maybe in the short time we have today we can do that. But first, I want to talk about the gathering of information, ideas, and opinion and the fallacy of learning in place of thinking and as an end unto itself. You are listening because, to your credit, you are a lifelong learner. While that is admirable and important, it also contains hidden hazard, especially now. My friend Jim Rohn, one of modern America's favorite success philosophers, no longer with us, cautioned not to let your learning lead to knowledge Instead, let your learning lead to action. This is actually a big problem from both sides of the equation. On the receiving end, people routinely confuse knowledge with power and feel like they are gaining by knowing more and more and more about something. Yet what is the difference between having a car powered by a hamster in a wheel or a monster engine that can take a gigantic SUV from 0 to 60 in the blink of an eye if you never turn on the ignition, or if you are racing like a maniac on a road leading nowhere. In the academic community, and too often in my community of the commercial authors and teachers, learning, the acquisition and accumulation of knowledge, is sold as an accomplishment. This is a very deliberate confusion of activity with accomplishment. That's why, shockingly often, the smartest person in the room is the poorest and least accomplished person in the room, even the least useful person in the room. If you are stuck overnight in a dark, cold, wet woods and you can only have one Crusoe, would you rather have the guy with a PhD in fire or the uneducated woodsman who can and will start a fire with a few sticks and a stone? These days, who you find and assemble around you to aid you is at least as important as what you know, its quality and its quantity. You can actually be extremely knowledgeable and smart and still be rendered impotent by the complex demands of today's marketing environment. A eunuch gets little benefit from polygamy. Ideas and marketing media and opportunities can be like too many wives, all demanding simultaneous attention, paralyzing rather than empowering. Not that I have any experience with my analogy. For the record, I have trouble with one spouse. Anyway, I say if you have done nothing with what you learned or were provoked to think about by the last seminar you attended, it may be best to skip the next one. No one else in my business would ever whisper such a suggestion. Those selling learning often say that if you can read but won't, you're no better off than the illiterate bum who can't. And Jim Rohn often said, notice rich men have big libraries and poor men have big TVs, but there's an unspoken secret about that. People who read but do nothing because of what they read, and people with impressive-looking, pristinely neat, undisturbed libraries for show, not use, are all no better off than the illiterate bum who can't read. Productivity is the issue. Profit is the objective, not knowledge. Implementation matters most, not information. Getting the fire going with sticks and a stone matters. How much the PhD knows about the history, the chemical makeup, the facts of fire matter little in real-world situations. So let's not worry so much about how much you know, but about what you do and can do and how much you get done, about implementation. The unpleasant truth is that today it does take a village. Once upon a time, you could conduct a respectable and productive advertising and marketing operation, getting people to the point of making a purchase yourself. I know, I did it. I grew up in business doing exactly that. This began to fall apart right around the 1990s. The first response was to automate and use software. By the 2000s, marketing automation grew to robust, capable levels. Ingenious software systems came along, like that of Infusionsoft, in which I am a founding and present investor. But we are now into another evolutionary period. First, there is so much media, it's impractical to even list it all, let alone organize, integrate, manage, and use it all. Yet the pressure to use it all is enormous, and the opportunities in using much of it are great. Second, the competitive clutter and chaos is epic, in part because the internet has erased capital-related barriers to entry. But this doesn't just fragment media, it fragments the population of your eligible consumers. So third, price and profit are under massive assault with many surrendering them, mostly en route to bankruptcy, or subsidized by fake money from venture capital firms and Wall Street that will one day run out. So, fourth, systemization becomes ever more vital. What I call random and erratic acts and events of marketing are no longer affordable. You must have a complex and sophisticated complete system for taking an eligible prospective consumer for your product, service, or business out of the chaos, clutter, and competition, and placing him into and moving him through a place and process unique to you that by its nature alone sets you apart from and above all others, and lets you nurture, create exclusive trust with, and ultimately sell to that person alone, thus preserving premium prices and profits. There's a lot in that sentence, so I'm going to repeat it. You must have a complex and sophisticated complete system for taking an eligible prospective consumer for your product, service, or business out of the chaos, clutter, and competition and placing him into and moving him through a place and process unique to you that by its nature alone sets you apart from and above all others and lets you nurture, create exclusive trust with and ultimately sell to that person alone, thus preserving premium prices and profits. This is called a conversion platform, and you can get a look at it at Partiv Shah's site, ultimateconversionplatform.com. A properly constructed conversion platform combines message and media inside your own exclusive and proprietary place and process. You take prospects from other places— Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, print media, broadcast media, trade shows, everywhere and anywhere— and move them into your exclusive place, to your conversion platform. If you do not have an organized, effective system like this and you are talking to people who are roaming around like free-range chickens, you are going to see your prices, profits, influence, and attraction and retention of customers collapse. You will find yourself on a downward spiral, trying to spend less and less to acquire leads because they are worth less and less to you, so you must spend even less until you can't afford to get any. It is now a matter of survival as well as prosperity to have a fully functioning conversion platform working for your business. Nothing less will do. But this necessary system, featuring this necessary conversion platform, is much more complicated to create and make work and keep working than it has ever been. Candidly, everything I have long taught and teach about how to do smart direct response advertising, how to use the principles of direct marketing in non-direct marketing businesses, how to successfully sell at prices and profits substantially higher than industry norms or consumers' expectations is all severely sabotaged in value by the individual business owner's inability to implement it by himself or with only his company's internal resources in today's complex and fragmented media world and marketplace. Everything I taught and provided in the 1980s and the 1990s gave instant dramatic and lasting advantage to just about any small business owner or mid-sized company CEO who would use it, and they all could use it. My Magnetic Marketing System fueled a literal movement in hundreds of categories of products, services, and commerce, from pet stores to restaurants to dental practices to B2B and industrial products, and on and on. It is still the bedrock of that movement. It, but I confess that today a great many business owners actually can't use it by themselves for themselves, at least not to the extent it can and should be used. Even if you come to understand that you are actually in the marketing business and not the shoe shop, bakery, spa, industrial chemicals, real estate, or financial services business, and even if you stop confusing your deliverables with your business, you will still find it overwhelming to coordinate all the applicable online and offline media that can bring customers to you in any cohesive, manageable way, just with commonly available tools and methods or with ordinary employees. This overwhelm is the obstacle to implementation. This is why I have increasingly been introducing entrepreneurs and marketing professionals not just to my strategies, but to carefully chosen implementation and support vendors they can use, collaborate with, buy speed from, and recreate competitive advantage by using. It's in that context that I am happy to suggest consideration of Parthiv Shah and his organization called eLaunchers.com. They can build or repair or replace your conversion platform. And here is why they are uniquely qualified to do so. First, Partiv himself has the mind of a systems engineer, yet is the extremely rare creature who is not creatively compromised by such a mindset, and further fully understands the direct marketing process, and in particular my direct marketing process. He has been acquiring specific methods for automation of my marketing principles and methods and broader direct marketing methods since 2009. All organized into very unusual and proprietary mind maps. He has invested in virtually every course and seminar I've ever presented, with the methodology extracted and organized into over 50,000 pages in a wall of binders, a million-dollar wall of binders. But as he has said, any moron with money could buy the same source material. What he has done arduously and brilliantly is micro-index it all, so if advice or an example from me about a specific subject or strategy is needed, he can quickly locate it by its subject or its known timing, such as session number 3 of the 2013 Superconference. Partiv has made himself not only a serious student, but a serious and capable practitioner of every strategy of mine applicable to automated marketing. He can analyze your business and can then be the able architect of just the right conversion platform for it. He and his company are certified partners with the best marketing automation providers on earth, including Infusionsoft. And while they are not Walmart, their work is reasonably affordable because they are creating semi-customized solutions from already proven components not starting from scratch. Also, their capabilities include teams here and in India. There is the cautionary tale about monkeys with typewriters. These days, any idiot can create websites, email sequences, and other online media and tools, and a great many idiots do. The technical know-how is one thing, but having it married to direct marketing know-how is a very different thing. One summary of all this is that they can provide your small to mid-sized company with the kind of sophistication and organization for your marketing and lead management that has previously been available only to big companies with basically unlimited sums of money to spend. But as importantly, they do it married to my direct marketing methods. I will strongly caution you against monkeys with typewriters. They can be had cheap, paid in bananas, but you can waste a lot of bananas on them. I'll also caution you against online-only conversion platforms. Every business owner and marketer wants this, and many wizards promote it because so many want it. But that is exactly the same craven desires and pandering that permit one Madoff-like Ponzi scheme after another after another to rise and victimize. Watch a week of American Greed episodes on CNBC. The desire for high, steady returns, far better than the market, is so universal, even among people who should know better, and it is so ridiculously easy for promoters to pander to it, that it is an unstoppable, constantly repeated crime. The lust for online-only permits the same sort of nonsense and financial wreckage. I do not have time here to deliver the overwhelming facts and evidence of offline conversion superiority to online conversion, but I assure you it isn't even a close contest. All of e-commerce is a teeny tiny sliver of all of offline physical world commerce. The death of real-world selling is greatly exaggerated. Your conversion platform should be engineered to enable and integrate online and offline. In this, Partiv Shah excels. So here's what I would suggest you do. Explore the opportunities, the solutions, the speed of progress that can come by adding Partiv and his team to your implementation team. Get your business's marketing systems analyzed. Start by visiting ultimateconversionplatform.com. And if you haven't read his book, Business Kama Sutra. Ask for a copy or go get it from Amazon. This is a way to start thinking differently about your business and the world in which it lives that can lead directly to practical, profitable implementation. You might also want to check out ultimateconversionclub.com where Parteev operates a marketer study club and shares his ongoing research. The famous movie mogul Sam Goldwyn once said, It's an impossible situation, but it has possibilities. That's the truth of marketing a business in today's complicated environment. Without the right implementation partners and facilitators, I'm afraid it's almost an impossible situation. With the right implementation partners, it has great possibilities. It is now your chief mission as an entrepreneur to find, assemble, organize, and use such partners and facilitators. I have to say, nothing I've said here should be construed as a warranty from me of your satisfaction with or successful results from working with Parteev and eLaunchers.com. I have no interest in, control over, or involvement with their business or delivery of services. Ultimately, you must make and be solely responsible for whatever decisions you make about your business and your selection of support vendors. Certainly, individual results do vary. All of this is imperfect science. As I've said, there is a special kind of expertise and capability at eLaunchers.com, but only you, in consultation with them, can judge whether or not they are the right implementation partners for you. I would also, of course, suggest you learn more about my methods starting with one or two of the books in my No BS series, available at Amazon, or a look at everything the membership organization and resources company I founded, built around my methods, has to offer at GKIC.com. I'll close up shop here today with this: there are four parts of success in business. One, clarity about what you want to get done and have happen. If you can have it your way, what does that look like? How does that work? 2. Knowledge and understanding of what is practically possible, of what can be done. This shouldn't be limited to what you already know, or to the norms and common practices of your industry, or the ideas and beliefs of your peers. This is one of my roles: broadening and expanding your knowledge of what works and may be borrowed and brought over to your business from a far more diverse perspective than you can have on your own. Starbucks exists because of an idea Howard Schultz got in Europe, not in his home city, and Starbucks pricing strategies defy all previous industry norms. You probably don't have time to roam around the globe to find your next big idea. I give you that kind of expansiveness, but efficiently. Third, you need to be able to convert your vision of what you want and your knowledge of what is possible into plans, strategies, and tactics, into practical how-to. You have to know how to do it. You have to be able to map it out, get it engineered, and scale it without being overwhelmed by it. Finally, fourth, you have to be able to get it done. And as I've said, as a realistic and practical matter, the days of getting it done by your own devices and efforts are gone. You will need implementation partners and support not just the right information and tools. And to that end, you may want to look into how Parthiv Shaw and his team can assist you, as I've suggested. I have been at this a long time, some 40 years. In these 4 decades, I have witnessed and grappled with, for self and clients, an enormous amount of change, now accelerating at a faster and faster pace. It has brought enormous opportunity, but it has also brought a great deal of disadvantage to small businesses against giants, the exact opposite of its promise. It has also brought an enormous amount of confusion to the marketplace and commoditization to all sorts of products and services, including many nobody imagined ever being so commoditized. To be perfectly candid, I personally prefer not relying on others and being the guy who converts knowledge to action absent middlemen, or a village of support. I won't deny personal nostalgia for those days, despite most of my own wealth having been accelerated and multiplied by the demise of those days and by their replacement with today's much more complicated and challenging environment. So I understand reluctance to involve outsiders in implementation, but I have to tell you, not doing so is crippling. One last thing, one last point I want to leave you with: income comes from things you do, wealth comes from things you own. For most, advertising, marketing, and selling are activities people do, not assets that they own. My entire career has been about getting entrepreneurs, business owners, executives, and sales professionals to think differently about this. And as a top-tier copywriter, I have always worked to develop marketing assets with long-lived value for my clients. One of the most vital marketing assets you can ever own is a well-engineered, complete, and effective conversion platform. If you lack one, or yours is porous and inefficient, I hope you'll explore getting a top-notch one built for your business. Thank you for listening.

That concludes Mr. Kennedy's presentation for eLaunchers.com. Copyright by Kennedy Insider Circle, Inc. and eLaunchers. With all rights reserved. Partiv Shah, CEO of eLaunchers.com, may be contacted directly by email to its site. To contact Mr. Kennedy directly, fax 602-269-3113.