From Marketing Frustration to Marketing Foundation with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #473

I'm Dean Jackson. He's Joe Polish. And this is the I Love Marketing Podcast.

Welcome to I Love Marketing Live with your hosts Joe Polish and Dean Jackson. Joe, give us one word to describe today.

Incredible.

Dean, one word to describe today.

Delicious.

Now, for those who listen to the podcast version of this, you don't get what everybody's about to get here. What we're going to do is we're going to ask a question, and the question is going to be a little bit deeper than we've done in previous versions of this. But we want to give a chance to get deeper and we want to give you a chance to think things through. So I'm going to ask you a question. And it's gonna be a simple one, but there's a little bit of depth to it. What's your biggest marketing frustration right now? And what does it actually feel like?

So Tyler is building a community, frustrating to gain trust. Aaron, censorship of sex education. It feels like being constipated by someone else. Andrea, Is consistency and outreach. Randy Brill, too many ideas, too little time. Oh boy, me and Randy are like, you know, we're peas in a pod here. Susan, record keeping and tracking, it feels like I have pain all over my body. Now, I told him in advance, I'm always going to mess up his name. How do you pronounce it properly?

Schwa.

Schwa.

Okay.

Lack of clarity to hit my target market. Mario, people, the ones who don't get it, the ones who get it but see it for themselves. Lute, missed calls. Robert, creating and clarifying my content. Fred, overspending on stuff that I can't confirm is really working or needed. Omar, yeah, so it's like that, what's that famous line? You know, 50% of my advertising is working, I just don't know what 50%.

Which half?

Yeah, which half? Overspending on stuff that I can't confirm is really working or needed. Omar, nobody responding to marketing in time and it felt frustrating. Gina, technology crossovers and creating the content in time. Jim, determining the best platform for starting my new business. Mike, finding a lead generation source to replace Meta ads. Pete, what's up Pete, how are you? Poor organizational skills. Robin, Robin Farmer Farming, who's been a guest on I Love Marketing, ingenious, she's brilliant. How so many of platforms like LinkedIn is obviously written by LLMs and it's boring and annoying. Nate, my company just fired their marketing person. Wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunity. Branding, getting more exposure. Rebecca, where did it go? You know, we have tons of information available, tons of resources, make it consumable. It's difficult, feels overwhelming. How many more are these? Okay, I can't obviously read all these, but let's stop there for now. Wow, that gives a good sense. And what is, uh, so Dean, where do we go with all that?

There's, uh, you know, it's interesting, I think, because Mario is right out of the gate with people, but I look at the fact that marketing is about people as the biggest advantage than frustration. Because when you realize that all marketing, whether it's business to business or business to consumer. It's all human to human. And the recipient of your messaging is a people. They are a people. And the one thing that we can rely on, as long as people have been around, is our guaranteed pursuit of self-interest. That's the absolute thing that you can depend on. And if you try and fight that, you're in trouble. If you embrace it— I mean, well, look at up above Joe Polish Polish. He's nailed it. Like, I, I don't think this book gets as much credit as it deserves, but What's in It for Them is the secret to life. It's certainly the secret to marketing. And if you can really embrace it and understand it, that, that is the biggest advantage that you can have. And it's almost like having a cheat code when you realize that people are going to do what people are going to do and you can engineer a situation so that your communication makes it feel like it's their idea. Once you start, we always say this, and I say a compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. A compelling offer is people moving in the direction that they're already moving. If you can get in that jet stream, there's less friction. When you have to convince somebody of something, you have to pull them in a different direction than what they are naturally thinking. You're trying to convince them that they should do something that ultimately you want them to do, not what they want to do. And I think, you know, it's very— when you tap into that, you're on to something.

Yeah.

You know, thank you for the shout-out on the book. And the thing is, is learning what's in it for them actually came after many painful moments of realizing that no matter how much I wanted something, if I did not get other people what they want, if I didn't focus on that, then the focus becomes on myself and my own needs, not on being of value and useful to the other person. And the— I was on a— Jay Abraham was interviewing me on Monday for this, a whole bunch of people in Japan. I'd never done anything like this before. So, it was later in the day. And it's the first time I ever did a live interview with a translator. So, they would ask me a question and then I would respond, and then their voice would get dimmer, and they would, you know, translate so people could overhear over the question. And Jay, they asked me about rapport because of the difference with the culture in Japan and how— I guess I've never been to Japan, and I really want to go. It's one country I've never been to that I've heard is amazing. And the cultural difference, you know, less reserved, more polite is the way that they're explaining it to me than Americans, right? And what I said, and I write about this in my book, and I actually got the line from our friend Neil Strauss, the author. And it originally came out of the book he wrote called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. And then 10 years later, I helped Neil with his book called The Truth after he went through the consequences of The Game. And what, what, what the line is, uh, rapport is trust with comfort. And so, you can build rapport quickly with an audience. You can build rapport pretty quickly with most people depending on how you talk with them, whereas trust takes time. And trust is not instantaneously granted. And I'm sure every single person here has experienced giving someone trust way too quickly. And they took advantage of you or they lied to you. Like, Evelyn actually made a post here. Trust has recently been destroyed in a 12-year heart-based community of entrepreneurs by the founder with a skonding with funds. And Jonathan, sorry to hear that. Hopefully you— and I think we know who you're talking about there. And because, you know, I've gotten a bazillion messages about this individual. Now, I know him, you know, and all that sort of stuff. And it's unfortunate because where, you know, it takes a lifetime to build a great reputation and a moment of stupidity in order to destroy it. Although it's rarely just a moment of stupidity. Sometimes that does happen. Someone gets in a reactive state, they pull a Will Smith type of moment of anger, and he goes up and slaps Chris Rock, and all of a sudden you've got a whole world that spends, you know, years talking about it. And, you know, those things often happens. But, uh, trust is rarely eroded just in one moment. It is a series of things that are happening. Most of them don't bring themselves to the surface. Well, the same thing with marketing. Marketing effectively is not an event. It is a process. And you have to create a process. And so what I'd like to speak to, so we answer a lot of the questions and to go back to Paul's really great question that he asked from the very— let me go back to it and see how many comments we had there. And if I, if I'm inept at finding this, I'll just ask Paul to—

and Joe Dean, we both have a link to a Google Doc with all the questions sorted out by AI. So that's in your chat. You can take a look at that.

Well, lovely.

Perfect.

Well, look at you.

The question was— so I put that in your chat messages.

No, I got it.

Well, we paused. The question was, what is your biggest marketing frustration right now? And what does it actually feel like?

And, you know, here's the thing I would say to this, and I want to get your perspective on this, Dean. So, you know, frustration is a combination of fear and anger. That's what I learned in therapy. There's different people that'll say things, but there's fear and there's anger. And when we get frustrated and I'm pissed, and if you don't feel very good, you're going to, you know, what does it feel like? Feels awful. And I hated marketing before I actually learned marketing. And the reason I hated marketing, because I didn't understand quite what it was. And I had this opinion of what marketing was based on either salespeople, like, and I make the distinction, selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face-to-face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get somebody on the phone or face-to-face with you properly positioned. So, by the time you're talking to them, they're pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, predisposed. To do business with you. Me and Dean have— I've said that a million times on I Love Marketing Podcast. Dean has talked a lot about it. But ultimately, I think bonding with prospects and clients, people that have the ability to, you know, give you money, people that have the ability to seek you out. Now, how do you do that? You know, if you, if you're hungry and you need to, you want to eat like you want to eat a— let's say you want to eat a fish, right? And you're going fishing. I want fish. Well, you could sit next to the lake or next to the ocean or next to the creek or next to wherever the fish may be, but if you don't go fishing, if you don't throw in the bait— and it has to be bait that the fish are gonna bite on, uh, you know, it, it's not going to work. And so people often wonder, you know, why is no one giving me business. Well, first off, are you fishing? Secondly, do you even know what you're fishing for? So, it goes back to the first profit activator, which is select a single target market. But ultimately, I think it has to do with bonding and connecting. And every question that someone posted here has to do with people and it has to do, you know, in how they respond and what they're responding to and how do we find them and how do they find us. So Dean simplified in a far better way than I could ever do because that's what you do best.

Yeah.

By the way, our buddy Neil Strauss is living in Tokyo now. Did you know that?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

No, he's been texting with me and he told me when to come, when to see the cherry blossoms.

Got it. Yeah.

Yeah.

The spring, apparently. You know, I love like one of the things that helps us stay on track with this what's in it for them and You know, for 30+ years, there's been a through line that I follow of every time I'm like guiding my thinking towards creating marketing. And I got these 4 words from Geoffrey Land, who was, as you know, one of the great marketing minds. He passed away but he's, uh, wrote a book in 1995-ish called Cash Copy. And in this book, the thing that sums up all of your thinking is if you just focus on these 4 words, you get benefit now. And if every word and statement that you're saying in your marketing does not tie back to one of those anchors. It's got to be buoyed to something that is you. It's got to be buoyed to something about you getting something, taking some action, or, you know, getting is different than learning how to do something. We always talk about the destination, not the transportation, and the benefit being the outcome not the mechanism, the outcome of what you're going to get. And now being the only time to do something, what can you do now to get this benefit? And so, when you run that kind of a filter on all of the communications that you're saying and you're looking, am I directing my conversation to one person? And it's so funny because where people go, where people go wrong in this is trying to make it convenient for you by bundling a group of people together. We're called— like, if we say blue-collar home service workers, that's a nice convenient single umbrella, but it's not the same as electricians.. And it's not the same as carpet cleaners or plumbers or real estate agents. When you're focused on one particular person at a time, it makes an amazing difference. And we're in a digital world now where there's no reason not to narrow your focus like that. We even—

can I, can I say something real quick, Dean? Because there was one comment on here. Let's see, from Ryan, that said, after talking about marketing concepts and philosophy, can we go over actual tactics? And then Jeffrey said, second this. I wrote, yes, for sure. And the best ways to have any tactics work, we have found we need to have a foundation, or people just use tactics sometimes recklessly or very non-strategically. And so with the setup of all of this, with, you know, I was talking with Paul Culligan here and Dean and my team yesterday, saying how we would love for all these I Love Marketing calls to truly be like masterclass where people walk away and they find it incredibly valuable. Now, sometimes people just want, how do I make a sale? What's the ad? What's the, what's, what's the technique? Now, if anyone wants just to understand foundationally what we have taught since 2010 with the I Love Marketing podcast, there are tons of episodes that are very tactical, that have, you know, lots of different tips and techniques and strategies that we can deploy. The 9-word email, as an example, is something that's made I Love Marketing listeners tens of millions of dollars. And you can go type in 9-word email, you can download Breakthrough DNA on ilovemarketing.com. It doesn't sell a course, it doesn't sell anything. It just lays out the 8 profit activators. We have all that stuff. But when it comes to you talking about going one-on-one with someone right now, I was sharing this, uh, Yesterday with some couple of young people. And so we have genius youth and we live in a very digital AI world right now. And there's some old school things that have worked, always work. I even teach this in my book. And I had dinner with Robert Cialdini last night and his wife, Bobette, who've been friends of mine for like 30 years now. And they're great. And So, I have this stack of basically thank you cards. And Anna, who's one of my VAs from Argentina, she's on right now. I bought a whole bunch of these, believe it or not, at Walmart. And so, they're just simple thank you cards. Now, I have Genius Network cards, I have letterhead, but it just says thanks, right? And I've taught people for years that if you want to build an incredible network, then send 10 handwritten postcards, cards every single day, 5 days a week. You can take weekends off, but that ends up being 50 a week. And it could be, you know, friends, it could be prospects, it could be clients, it could be people that have done anything for you. Sometimes people are like, I don't know 10 people I could send it to. Well, freaking find 10 people you can send it to. But, you know, look at— this is not that hard once you get the momentum going because it's a lot easier to maintain momentum than it is to create it. So, what I did is I pulled these out today, Son. You know, I send probably, oh God, 20, 30 personal videos or audios every single day. So, that is really powerful touchpoints. My company sends thousands, tens of thousands sometimes of emails every week. We have lots of different campaigns and everything going, but to literally sit down and handwrite, not AI, but to literally handwrite a thank you or a note does something for your brain. And I think that will make— so, when you're talking, Dean, about getting in touch and writing to one person, Gary Halbert, who I learned marketing from, would have people come up to him and say, "I want to learn how to write world-class copy." He's like, "Do you really want to write world-class copy?" "Yes." "Are you willing to work to learn how to do that?" He's like, "Yes." So, he would give them 8-page, 10-page, 12-page, 25-page. Peter Lewis, who— Pete Kaczynski, who's on this Zoom somewhere right now, I saw his name. He actually got trained by Gary Halbert. And I guarantee you, he'll tell you one of the first things that Gary had him do was go and handwrite sales letters. So, Gary's like, "You want to learn how?" to write world-class copy, he would give them one of his own sales letters. He would tell them to handwrite it and write the whole thing. And sometimes, he would make people that he was training in marketing write the same sales letter 5 times. And he's like, "What happens is if you write the words, it penetrates into your language. It penetrates into your thinking. And then, all of a sudden, you slow down." long enough to understand the psychology of what is being communicated. And that's what's going to get lost with people that just simply use AI is they'll maybe get the words, but they don't get the understanding. And so I just wanted to mention that. So from a tactic, although this seems very arduous and something— don't poo-poo this as a bad idea. If you want to make your network absolutely incredible, Think of all the people that, what's in it for them? What would you need to say? What do you want them to feel? Who are people that are buyers? You know, focus your efforts on buyers and subscribers and just communicate with them and do it one-on-one. And, but the handwritten thank you cards, start doing this every single day. Even if you start with just one a day, do it. And I guarantee you, if you, if most people here will not do this, But if you did this for a month and we reported back on the next I Love Marketing Live that we do, what reactions you got, what happened, I guarantee you it's going to be positive. And if you do it for a year—

Certainly, you know, that's one of the— I've been talking a lot lately about lead conversion love languages. And, you know, when you think about the 5 love languages that everybody feels love and gives love in the— in 5 ways. It's either words of affirmation, physical touch, acts of service, gifts, or quality time. And when you can— when you send somebody a handwritten note that you took time to do and you put words of affirmation and you're sending it physically to them, It's like a love bomb. They're not going to get that from an email. They're not going to get it from a Facebook post. You're reaching out to this one person. It's one of one and authentic and real. So that makes a huge difference.

Well, and also Gary Chapman, I write about this in I Love Marketing. And what's in it for them is I was having a conversation with him. He's the author of You know, the Five Love Languages. And he said to me that if you want to know what someone's love language is, listen to what they complain about, because complaints are actually people often begging for attention. And if you hear someone complain about something, within that complaint is what it is they actually want. And so, a lot of people find complaints to be annoying, but to a marketer, to a person who wants to solve something, A complaint could often be a cry for help disguised in a very negative way sometimes. And I'm not suggesting people write 10 handwritten cards just because you're going to send out 10. This will make you better at marketing at all levels. It will cause you to connect. It's really about connection. And if you connect with somebody, sometimes it's not even what you say. It's often the energy that comes along with it. And that's how you build rapport and that's how you build trust. And if you do that consistently, it can become a very magical thing. Every day I'm sending happy birthday videos to people on that, just, and, and, and some there, yeah, you know, and I do that. I've been doing that for, for years, and I do it with like sometimes famous people. So if you just go to YouTube and type in Joe Polish happy birthday, you'll see a whole bunch of videos with me with people, but I've been doing that for years And people are like, I can't believe you do this. I mean, yeah, but it's not that hard. That's the whole thing. And people love it. And what I want people to feel, I want people to feel hopefully a memorable, positive, sometimes funny connection to me and not a sales pitch. And so, most people don't view me as someone that's trying to sell them something, even though when I am selling people something, the people that I built rapport with actually find it kind of ingratiated in a lot of ways because of all of the ways I attempt to be useful before I ever ask anyone to give me money.

Mm-hmm. You know, writing out these handwritten things is a lot like a musician playing cover songs, covering hit songs that you learn the rhythm and you learn how, you know, what it feels like to perform and play and sing a hit song that's proven to work, it's the same kind of idea of what Gary was saying, is when you're writing them out, you're building the neural pathways that you understand, uh, what's going on. And that's something, you know, that does— all of that stuff guides your tactics, as, you know, people always say. It's, it's a very, um, you know, how, how do you turn these philosophies, these approaches, like our questioner said, how do we turn this into actual tactics? And Joe Polish gave you a real tactic there of looking at sending, you know, handwritten notes to individual people. And it's really interesting, you know, the concept of, um, you know, Putting more into, more effort into things elevates the way that you are perceived as well. Like, we're so, we can get so lazy now that everything is impressions and, and, uh, you know, it's so easy to, to get in front of a lot of people, you know, get eyeballs on, on stuff, but Sometimes if you have visible prospects, the very best thing that you can do is narrow your focus. When I, when I talk with people about, you know, I've got this concept of setting up a prospect vending machine, which is what we're looking for compared to a slot machine, which is what most people are doing. They're putting money in, pulling the lever and going, Come on, 7, hoping that something's gonna happen. But a slot machine is wired very differently. You first of all select what you want. You look what's there in position 1A on the vending machine and you go over and there's a price attached to that. And you say, I'm willing to pay that price. And you put the money in and you push A1. And then out comes the bottom, exactly what you wanted. You imagine if all of the products in a slot machine or in a vending machine were just jumbled all up in there and you put in some random amount of money and hopefully something comes out, you know. So when you look at, tactically speaking, if you understand the psychology of what people really want, you don't need a huge reach to be able to have an impact. I was working with a financial advisor and I had this realization. It's describing who the ideal person is. And, you know, they wanted somebody who is retired and going into retirement, transitioning and turning their assets into income. And so we came to this realization that the best person is someone who is 62 to 67 years old. And we found exactly in their local area, within a 20-mile radius of their office, we found people who were 62 to 67, married homeowners with $2 to $3 million investable assets, living in a million-dollar-plus home, and conservative voters. And guess what? There were 4,300 of them within a 20-mile radius of his office. So whatever you're doing, if you know who it is that you're trying to attract, you don't need to try and reach everybody. And that's where the more that you can make it seem like it's a personal outreach to somebody, I would say, you know, I look at those things. We started referring to 1,000 of those people. I had the realization that 1,000 people with $1 million is a potential billion dollars of investable assets that are available there. So when you look at that, we started— if you're a fisher, a fisherman, you know, to refer to a honey hole where all the fish are. But we described that as the billion-dollar honey hole. And all you need to do is be able to focus in on those 1,000 people. And guess what? Even that, if you narrow that down to 100 of them, what would you be willing to pay to push the button to get the ideal client that you're looking for? And how can you deploy that amount of money in a group of 100 people to get that that outcome. And that's where this getting really, really, uh, tactically invested in helping those 100 people at the very beginning, even though you know there's 4,000 of them that you could help, but you're going to learn by focusing just on the first 100.

Yep. So let's see what Paul— so I want to share this. So we have our AI guy Parth, and then we have Paul on here. And I want to talk about the utilization of AI because it's beneficial for what we're doing here right now. And also, like BJ Fogg, who's a good friend, he wrote the book Tiny Habits. He runs the behavior lab at Stanford University. And Stephen Michael Crain, who has been an assistant professor for Robert Zempalski for many years, for BJ Fogg. So he— I've also known him for quite a while, and he sent me some reports recently about the, about the penetrating of memory when you're using your thumb and forefinger, because I remember Dan Sullivan years ago had talked about some sort of research that had been done. And I'd asked him, because he's a great researcher, could we— could I find this? Because I cannot literally easily find this with using AI and stuff. Where Dan Sullivan had said he had read something that you retain 40% greater when you're handwriting with a pen or pencil versus typing because of using the thumb and how it's tied to memory. So, he sent me over all this research and stuff. And so, one of the things, I'm going to leave it far away here because I don't want anyone to read it, but like I have, I've been, you know, I handwrite a lot of stuff into this notepad. And part of it, that is like doing a journaling thing on an exercise about a very difficult moment in my life, something that's passed. And if you, there's research on this, if you do 20 minutes a day for 4 days straight on a particular subject after 4 days, and it's quite fast, it actually works. And it's handwriting. But one of the things I'm wanting to get myself to do is to train my brain to be 3 hours a day in a world of AI when everything is becoming easier. I don't want to lose the ability to write, the ability to not default to camouflage laziness, which always happens with a technology that can make you more productive when it comes to the brain, and to actually read regular books, not read anything on a screen. Be it a Kindle or an iPad or a phone or whatever. And part of it is why, you know, and even part of that 3 hours is handwriting notes and cards to people because I want to stay away because I guarantee you with the incredible shit that we're able to do with AI, it's going to mutate so many people's brains. And I think there's just going to be—

I agree.

It's a bad time.

Joe Polish, you know, we talk about the, handwriting stuff. How many handwritten notes have I sent to you recently? All the stuff we've been brainstorming on, or a lot, a lot. That's exactly what I do. I'll— yeah, I remember the other day, 28 pages of handwritten, uh, stuff. There's something about this, uh, on, uh, getting detached from the matrix, you know. For me, the idea. I lock my phone in a lockbox from 10 p.m. at night till noon, and I only spend those times in analog things— reading, writing. The highest tech thing that I use in that period of time is my reMarkable tablet, which is the same as writing by hand, but it's not attached to the internet. It's not, uh, you know, I can just write on, uh, handwrite. But the good news is that then when I do get connected back, I can email them to, uh, whoever you want. I can send an email from my, uh, from my reMarkable. And that's— I, I, I have found my brain works so much better when you are when you're disconnected, you know?

Yeah, and let me say this too, is that this is not to poo-poo AI. With all the stuff that we can be done right now, it is stupid to not use so many things. I mean, like, we're literally automating things that we never could do. For instance, well, let me just give you an example. So I was setting this up. So Parth, Partha had taken all the comments. So Partha is on our team, Paul Colligan here. So common themes from all of the responses that were shared in the beginning of this meeting. So 5 clusters that jump out. Clarity. Who's the audience? What's the message? That was a summary. 2, overwhelm and paralysis. Too many ideas, shiny objects, where to start. 3, visibility and leads. Getting seen without a team. Replacing meta, more discovery calls. The fourth is consistency in systems, outreach, cadence, tracking, organization. And then, five, trust and connection, building community, people not just seeing it for themselves. Underneath all of it, and this is what I find interesting, underneath all of it, people know what to do. They're just stuck on focus and follow-through. So, the ability to focus on what matters and the ability to follow through on it. I mean, we had a meeting on marketing with a couple of my team members. Dean, was that yesterday or the day before? Yeah, yesterday. Like you went over, we've been talking about something since December that there's hardly been any action taken, but there's been a tremendous amount of— and part of that is because, you know, people just getting stuck in ideation versus, you know, execution. Now, that could be done with AI. Wow, this is beautiful. And there's all kinds of things that I can take from this, which we are, which I think, you know, part of what we're doing with these I Love Marketing podcasts, doing them live, is we're actually testing what is working. We're wanting to communicate with people in real time and we're wanting to really get a gist of what people actually want and need so that we can so we can make this better. So in a lot of ways, you're all coming along with us for a bit of an R&D experiment. Hopefully we'll make this valuable and useful for you. We're obviously not charging anything for this, so we're going to devote our time and our energy to do this. We don't have some grand monetization plan with anything. What we're actually trying to do is figure out what people want and need and identify the DOS of the marketplace right now, meaning that's a Dan Sullivan term Many of you, like Randy Brill, totally understand what a DOS conversation is. You know, what are the dangers? What are the opportunities? What are the strengths? Because it is a very different world right now. And it's the same world, but it's very different with the fears and the dangers and the things that people are concerned about and what's working and what's not working. And at the end of the day, the last thing that Evelyn just put up here, connection matters. You got to be able to connect with people. And with all the AI slop, one of the things we said is like, you know, let's just talk to people. Let's just talk to long-time listeners of I Love Marketing, to Genius Network members, to people that know us. And then we're also, you know, we're also getting friends in there, but we've not started running ads for this. You know, we could put 5,000 people on one of these things live if we wanted to, but we're not going to do that right now because we're still trying to figure out how to be most useful and valuable. And yeah, so Dean, I think we should do—

So Joe, Joe, let's take the spirit of what you said here. I'm sending those 5 clusters again into the chat and we've just done some targeting to the group. This is what they're most interested in. Let's have them vote on which the 5 clusters you guys talk about. So the numbers are in the chat. But again, number 1 was clarity. Number 2 was overwhelm. Number 3 was visibility and leads. Number 4 was consistency and systems. Number 5 was trust and connection. Shout out to Parth Polish for getting us that. Let's see what happens. Looks like visibility and connection is pretty high up the list right now. But yeah, looking, looking pretty good. 3 and 5 seem to be the big ones. Yeah, no, 3 is winning. 3 is winning by a, by a landslide here, Joe Polish. So, you know, using AI to parse the personal connection with the most of the audience, you know, you know, let's take a look. Talk about visibility and leads. Getting seen without a team, replacing meta, more discovery calls. Talk to us.

So Dean, why don't we talk about, you know, to go back to that great thing you said earlier, a compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. So if people are trying to convince people why they should pay attention to them versus being able to say what you want to say in a compelling way, you're going to get completely different results. So maybe you can speak to, speak to that.

Well, I think, you know, it goes— if we take this overlay of you get benefit now and you start thinking about that one person— I saw in the chat somebody's asking, how can you, as a big organization with lots of possible things, can it work for that? And I always point to Procter Gamble as the perfect example of that, right? A big, big organization, the biggest with 23 individual billion-dollar brands that are all focused on super specific, unique markets. There's a lot— you see it all around. Like, um, there's a— one of my favorite websites now is, uh, mymetalbusinesscard.com, and there's another one called myplasticbusinesscard and another one called mywoodenbusinesscard. And guess what you get at all of those? It's exactly what thinking. So practically using that, one of the advantages that you have as a digital thing is I was doing some Facebook ads for a friend that owns a bike shop here in Winter Haven, and we were doing an e-bike catalog. And there are many— again, first of all, they sell lots of different bikes, but we narrowed on, I said, We always start, select a single target market, and that starts with what would be the dream come true? What's your best client? If you could get anybody, the most expensive bikes they sell are the e-bikes. So I said, let's focus on that. So we put together the e-bike catalog and we ran ads, and instead of just running to everybody in a 15-mile radius, we ran, we ran different ads for different people. So for a 25 to 50-year-old man, we had a single guy on the COVID off-road on a trail with his e-bike. For people 50 and over, we had a cover with a couple riding together on a path around a lake. For women 25 to 50, we had what we called our Supermom cover, which was a, you know, mom-looking woman with an e-bike with a basket on it. Very practical. And that was our top-performing one. But It would have been very easy to just have one focus of the, of the things, you know. So whatever people are only focused on their own things. I mentioned to you, Joe, you know, we've been working with Beacon 40, the, the, the 40-hertz light that is great for originally for people with cognitive problems, with memory, Alzheimer's, dementia, those kind of things. But one of the big benefits of it is that it helps with sleep. And when you look at the, the things, having each of those markets and speaking differently to each of those, uh, people, it— that's what makes your marketing really, makes your marketing really work.

Yes, that's what I'm trying to say.

That is what you're trying to say.

Randy Brill, where are you? Trying to find Randy.

I am here.

What— all right, what do you have to say about all this?

Look at the sign behind Dean about horse for sale. How clear is that? The ability One horse. Well, I would have many, but I have many.

I got a whole pasture full of them.

I'm sure you do, my dear. No, the key to all of this, guys, is picking something. When you think about that note writing, when you think about any one thing is the place to start. One of the things I always say about brand design is it doesn't matter where you start. It only matters that you start. The same thing is true of marketing. Do something and don't flit. You know, don't be spaghetti on the wall, although sometimes that's delicious. The reality is if you pick something and as Joe Polish says, you make that a habit, then you own that and then you're elevating the expectation. But don't forget to delight. That's something Joe Polish and I get into serious mischief about. And if it's not gonna delight people, and it's not going to engage them and say we value you, you're putting on postage stamps for nothing.

Yeah.

So that's what I would say. And then, sir, I have this for you. Look at that quick flash. I made Joe something. Just came in, and I won't show it unless you want me to, but it's very exciting.

I mean, I don't know what it is. So if it's useful for everyone, sure. Oh, you do.

It's for CoachCon. And one of the things that we're doing at CoachCon is Joe Polish Polish is having a raffle where one person can win a ticket to come to the annual event. And so thank you. We have a little cool swag, which is a magnet that is lucite that's nice and thick, and it says, make a genius decision and join us for the annual event. Your Ticket to Success. And they just came in this minute, which is why I jumped out. And I'm like a child with a new toy.

So you should see, like, Randy is just got the coolest freaking factory of creativity at her place in Chicago. Like, unbelievable. And she's incredibly creative. And by the way, I shared this with our Genius Network members, because Randy's in Genius Network. We've known each other for 20+ years. We're in Strategic Coach together, and we just approved with her— she's overseeing the whole thing— $150,000 worth of mailings over the next 12 months, just started to work members. And part of it is we're— so, everyone that's a Genius Network member every month is going to get something that's designed to engage them for increased retention, for enrollment, for referrals, etc.

But here's a sneak of this one. This is what's coming out first.

Mm, love it.

That's awesome. I've not even seen that yet. That's the first time I've seen a glimpse of it.

You approved it.

No, I saw the PDF, but I didn't see the actual you holding up the box.

Pretty cool.

We saw— I didn't know how big it was. That's great.

So we like to keep Joe Polish in the dark, you know.

Well, and like, I saw the sun because my favorite flower is sunflower, which Basically, people should start insulting me now as I'm saying all this ridiculous shit. But, uh, yeah, look at that.

My favorite scent is lavender. And I really like—

the next box is just going to say— it's going to say gay right on top of it in big bold letters. It's going to be awesome.

I have to pick a font for that. Give me time.

Um, so anyway, but the point is, is that, uh You know, the way to deploy money is if you spend money and you send it out and you, you know, and it works, you just deploy it. You keep spending more money. And, you know, at this stage, there are certain people— everyone here is going to spend time. I write about this in Chapter 2 of my book. What can you spend? You can spend time, attention, money, effort, and energy. Everyone here, you're spending attention right now. Some of you are very focused, others are multitasking. So, you got your time, you got your attention, you got your energy, you got your effort, and deploying that on the right people. You know, Peter Drucker had this great quote, many great quotes, but there's nothing more useless than doing really well that which need not be done at all. And the other one is the primary purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Marketing and innovation produce results. All other business functions are cost. And when it comes to focus, he also had this great line, you're either working or you're in meetings. And there's a lot of fake work that— one of my biggest obstacles is my brain loves to run away from productivity. It loves to meander and think that you know, listening to a podcast or oftentimes just doing and talking or even like, for instance, you could be completely wasting your time listening to us right now if it doesn't evoke some sort of behavioral change after you're done listening to us. Because, you know, most people don't use social media, they're used by social media. And that was from an I Love Marketing meetup where it really dawned on me about I don't know, 2026 right now. This was in probably 2012. And we had about, I don't know, 60 people at my office and we were doing an I Love Marketing meetup. We used to do these I Love Marketing meetups. And I remember asking people, how many of you spend at least an hour a day on Facebook? Because Facebook was way more used by, you know, there were less social media platforms back then. And it was relatively new. And I said, "How many of you spend at least an hour a day on Facebook?" And probably 80% of everyone in that room raised their hand. And I said, "How many of you actually advertise on Facebook?" And there were like 2 people. And so, I was like, "So, the rest of you, you're using an hour a day of Facebook. You all have businesses. You're all sitting here because you actually want to learn about how to use marketing." but you're spending an hour a day minimum on Facebook, but you're not utilizing it to generate any business or do any sort of advertising. And that's not like that you should be on Facebook because that's a right fit for some people. It's not for others. But the point is all of us have the same 24 hours in a day as everyone else. The question is, what are we spending our time, attention, money, effort, and energy on? And who are the people that are getting that attention and who are we communicating to them? And are we really sitting down and saying, out of everyone that I know, who are the ones that really make the most difference in my life or could? And I would love to get them to do things for me. I would love to have them do business with me. I would love to have them refer people to me. But the only way that you will get people to do that is not because you want that. It's because they want something.? And if you think of what's in it for them, what do you need to communicate, say, do, offer, provide to those people in a genuine way? And can you remove what it is you want them to do for you from the equation and just come at it from a place of genuine giving as much as possible? Because we all want something. I'm aware of that. So, I'm not saying disregard your wants. What I always The distinction is I want a lot of stuff from people. I would love it if every single person on this call gave me money and gave me referrals and joined my groups and all that. But that is a stupid, ridiculous notion unless I can provide something to every single person, which I can't. That would be impossible. I can do it for some people though. And if I focus on what's in it for them, so I want to make sure that my want is not above my give. So, you want to have your give be equal to or greater than your want. And the way to get people to give you what it is that you want is to give them something greater or equal to what you want. That's what commerce is. That's what collaboration is. That's what doing business with someone is. That's what having a friendship is. You know, the friends that you really like and that really like you is because there is something that you represent genuinely that is not taker energy, it's giver energy. And if you can focus your giver energy because you only have a limited amount of it on the people that actually matter and the people that genuinely you're aligned with and that you're a right fit, all the better. Because sometimes the best way to help people with their marketing is to help them get rid of all their annoying clients that they don't like and that the clients really don't like. And so, you know, because the 80/20 Pareto principle applies here. If you really did an analysis of who are your best referrers, your best clients, your best friends, and you removed yourself as much as possible from the ones that what I call HALF, hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating, and you focus your attention on the people, the activities, the strategies that are easy, lucrative, and fun. You will have plenty of time to do marketing. So, with someone that feels overwhelmed, so part of it is just selection. It's literally just selection, which goes back to the very first Profit Activator. Focus your efforts on a single target market because if you're trying to disperse all of that energy on 15 different target markets or everyone that exists, I mean, you don't have the ability to focus. You don't have the ability to be selective or talk specifically to that, to that target market. And that is the hardest thing for ADD quick start entrepreneurs like me and Randy Burrell is an example. I mean, we're hyperactive, we get very distractible. FOMO is one of our worst enemies. We're curious. That's our gift, but it's also our kryptonite. It's also— so if you become aware of that and you build in mechanisms to address it, you can transform your business pretty quickly. When I was a dead broke carpet cleaner, I didn't clean carpets any better once I learned marketing. That didn't change. The deliverable was always good. The problem was I didn't know how to get people to give me money for it, and I had to figure out How to Successfully Package, Position, and Sell Something Nobody Wants to Buy. No sane person hopes that a cat is going to piss in the corner, or that the husband's going to spill the coffee, or the kids are going to tramp mud through the house, or the house doesn't smell good before your boss is going to come over for dinner, or the family's coming over for Thanksgiving or Christmas, or the kids are going back to school. Like, no one you know, like as excited about calling a carpet cleaner. And I had to figure out how to successfully sell something nobody wants to buy. And it really made me realize that no one gives a shit about carpet cleaning. It's not the carpet cleaning they want. It's the smell. It's the clean carpet. It's the safety. It's the newborn baby that they're going to have. You know, there's a variety. So you have to get into what's in it for them, not what it is you sell. You know, what you sell is just one thing. What they're getting from the thing that you're selling, the pain that it's removing or the pain that it's creating, because some people want more pain. But, you know, that's one of the ways to think about it. But the biggest enemy is not the thing you need to do. It's all of the things that distract you from the things that you need to do. And so, How does one market themselves, Dean, in order to get focused? Because your 50-Minute Focus Finder is sort of like an internal sales letter to yourself to help you get back on track when people are not having success with their marketing and their time.

The biggest thing for me, like the reason that I created the 50-Minute Focus Finder is because I realized that, you know, like you and like Randy, we've got so many ideas. Ideation, you can shapeshift, you can, you can see the whole thing completed in an instant. Once it all clicks into place, your imagination can create this end vision. But the reality is that things get done in the real world and life moves at the speed of reality, which is 60 minutes per hour. That's the, that's the physical limitation, right? You look at when you, when you see these things that you feel so much like overwhelmed when you've got all of these ideas, like they're like, if you were to look at the, the browser of our brains, I don't know what a non-ADHD brain looks like, cause I only have access to my own. Is you can imagine it with all these open windows in your browser, right? All these windows that are stacking and stacking and you're like, yeah, that's a good idea. And then you're over to the next window and the next window and the next window. And when you get overwhelmed is that all of these windows are competing for your attention just the same way that— have you ever opened a window and then something starts playing in one of those windows and you can't find which one the sound is coming from. That's kind of what this is like, is what this 50-minute Focus Finder allows you to do is to exhaust and list all of them. My vision of it was that we're, we're in this confined space, right, of our brain. Which is our immediate ability, our working memory, our ability to hold things in, you know, in our focus. But if you think about the 50-Minute Focus Finder as going into, like in The Matrix, an infinite white room where there's all the space that you need and you can lay out all of the stuff that you have, all the stuff that's on your brain, each thing can get its own distinct little pile. And you don't have to worry about running out of space. You put it all out there. What you'll find is that within, in the first 10 minutes, you're going to exhaust your brain of all the things that are immediately on your mind, the things that are urgent. And what I've actually found is that most of the things that are the most urgent or most pressing are things that involve other people. That it's somebody else, that someone is expecting something or waiting to hear from you about something, or there's some imposed impending deadline for something. Those are the ones that, that have the biggest, loudest kind of voice. And you'll get through those in the first 10 minutes. But if you keep going, I, you know, I always say to people, if you take a yellow pad and just start— make it your goal to list 100 things that are on your mind with no particular organizing of them, just rapid fire as soon as you can. It takes a little work, you know, by 10 minutes, the immediate things you're going to think, I think that's it. And then you keep going and you go deeper. And by 30 minutes, you're into the proactive things that you've wanted to do, the things that are— that you could do. And then it comes back to looking at them and overlaying real time on them. Like, the only— if we had access to every available minute that you have in a day, it's 1,000 minutes in one waking day. You can't spend any more than 1,000 minutes. That's 16 hours, basically, or 16 waking hours. Now, if things that are going to have to be executed or done that require your TAMMI, which is, you know, real things— your time, your attention, your money, your energy— those things only happen in real time, and you have to allocate them, uh, in the thing. That's why I start Everything that I do, how I am able to get anything done, is with 50-minute focus finders where I can define this is the one thing that I'm going to work on in this 50 minutes. And I set up an optimal environment for it where I have no distractions, no other things, but I can only get to that spot. When I've exhausted my belief that everything— that I'm not missing anything. I've emptied my brain of all the possible things. I've evaluated in the second 50 minutes of which ones are the priority. And it's really interesting when you start asking yourself, what are the consequences? What's the timeframe of this? I've started to think of it like like a Tetris game where, you know, you're standing there and time is continually moving and everything is coming at you and you're trying to juggle it in. Now, Joe Polish, you're the very best Tetris player that I've ever seen because you keep tossing all the stuff in and you are— we've talked about it, uh, as a daily maximizer. You squeeze as much possible things as you can into a day and you constantly instantly got all these things coming at you, right? And it's like, that's one way of looking at it. But where it feels more relaxing is I like to approach it like Guitar Hero, which is the same type of a game. It's a constant moving thing. But I would like to prearrange that this is the song I'm trying to play. And if this is the song I'm trying to play, these are the notes that I need to play in order to have that song come out the other end. And it's a very, you know, I mean, that's what goes on in my mind, you know? I mean, it sounds out there. It sounds out there. But I'll tell you what, it works for— it works for me.

Well, yeah. And let me say this too. Like, so for instance, thank you, Chris, for posting this. So I have astropolish.com and he wrote, and he is going to teach me to write so my words sell while I sleep. I need more to hit my competition goals. You can do it too. So, if you've not tried Astro Polish, it's free. You can have people write in business plans. It could help you think through a target market. It could come up with, you know, give me 10 tactics for marketing my whatever, my— the love guru, Jonathan David, who was just on a thing with Brian Kurtz on the book Breakthrough Advertising, which is a fantastic book written, I think, in 1966. 1966, one of the greatest, uh, marketing books ever written. And Brian Kurtz, uh, who's been a buddy of mine for over 2 decades, uh, has been doing a course for his Titan Group on the book Breakthrough Advertising. But if you— at Astro Polish, I've, um, loaded it with over 1,000 videos, all my books, uh, numerous articles, numerous things related to marketing, and it it oftentimes is way more— not often, it's always more focused than I am. And it's, it's a very interesting use of, of AI. But the thing that I, I'd like to figure out moving forward is— so I want to ask everyone here a couple questions. For one, uh, would you prefer we keep these I Love Marketing, uh, Zooms to an hour, uh, 75 minutes, or 90 minutes? Uh, put your preference in the chat. Because we're going to gauge that whatever ends up being what will work the best. And we're going to play around with different timelines. We're not going to specifically right at this moment say it's going to be an hour next time or it's going to be 90 minutes. We're still playing with this, but I want to get a sense of it. Secondly, if— would you rather us teach more tactics, more strategies, or do things like hot seats? Where we ask, do Q&A and questions. So whatever you think would be most valuable and useful for you, go ahead and put that in the chat. And then finally, on a scale of 1 to 10, where we're at so far, 10 being very useful or the most useful, 1 being not useful at all, how would you rate this that we've done so far? And yeah, take 30 seconds or so to do that. And then what I think we'll do, Dean, I think we'll wrap this thing up in a few minutes. So we'll kind of keep this one towards the— between the 75-minute to 90-minute mark.

But—

and I'll let Paul go ahead and wrap this thing up. But what final things, Dean, would you say need to be said before we wrap up for today?

Yeah, I think, you know, hearing— I saw a couple of people posting in the chat about, you know, whether your preference is for, you know, structuring your life like Guitar Hero or playing it like Tetris. And I think that there's room for both. I mean, you can sing. I think it's an important thing that you realize what is the main thing, what is the song that you're actually trying to play here in the day, what's the thing that you're intentionally trying to get happen, but also having the flexibility to realize that there's going to be lots of stuff coming at you and your ability to adapt and to, you know, get that stuff, I think, is— it's the skill. It's the thing. Absolutely.

Robin Pharma Pharmean, are you still with us here?

Yeah, I'm right here.

What'd you get out of this?

Well, I think that I just, I've known you and I love you so much that I think I just feel like I'm having coffee with you. And so that's like the biggest reason I show up, right? And I like to see Dean as well.

No, no, thank you. And by the way, I'd love for, because you gave, you came to Genius Network and gave a really great talk on agentic AI. AI, right when most people didn't even know what agentic AI or agents even were. What have you— I mean, and you do a ton of stuff in, you know, I mean, you know, all these Silicon Valley tech leaders, you've been doing this for many years. You, uh, most of what you work on is in the health field. Uh, what are some of the things that you've learned and discovered that you would suggest people, uh, pay attention to that would be very valuable?

Okay, so The first thing is most people still don't know what agentic AI is. I mean, I'm talking, I do this, I do that keynote or variations of that keynote all the time. Even last week, I was like, raise your hands in the room. Two people. And these were like CEOs, right? This was not like random person from the street. So first and foremost, people don't understand that yet, which means there is a way you can now take advantage of that. Because there's far fewer entrepreneurs than you realize that are actually working in the space, right?

Okay, well, there you go. So you know what, it's very similar to an ad is brand new for someone that's seen it for the first time, and we have the curse of knowledge where we can be so absorbed in something and actually assume that people understand what we teach, what we do, what we offer, and they. And one of the greatest marketing books ever written was Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. And there was a famous story where, what was it, Schlitz beer at the time, what used to be one of the top beers in the country, and it had slipped its marketplace positioning. And I think, do you remember, Dean, was it like number 8 or 9 or something?

Whatever it was.

Yeah.

Yeah. And they get Claude Hopkins, who was like the father of modern advertising. And they give him a tour of this beer plant. And they want to— because he's like, if you want me to create an advertising campaign for your beer, I need to understand how you make beer. And so they gave him a tour of the factory, and he started taking notes. And he writes about this in Scientific Advertising— things like they had darker bottles for the beer to prevent mold from growing. They didn't just clean the bottles once, but like 4 different times. Uh, they had the mother yeast cell that was over 100 years old because it had the most pristine pure beer. They, even though they were next to Lake Michigan or whatever, which was not polluted at the time, they dug a 4,000-foot deep artesian well to get the very best water. All like a whole bunch of other stuff I can't remember right now. But basically he made a note of all of these things that they were doing, and, and all they were saying was, uh, what, pure beer, I think it was. Don't Have Beer that has that skunky, right? Yeah. And, and he, he said like, well, you're— you got the 4,000-foot deep artesian well, you've got all of these things that you do, uh, but you're not saying anything in your ads except pure beer. He's like, so people don't know all of these things you're doing, so we need to tell people what it is we're doing, you know. And, and they're like, so, you know, why are you not telling people all this stuff? And they're like they said to him, well, this is how everyone makes beer.

But he doesn't.

Yeah.

So, he's like, oh, well, I didn't know that. And if I don't know that, the marketplace doesn't know that. So, all what he did is he created a campaign explaining all of these amazing things that they do to make their beer, which every other beer company was doing. But because they're the ones that told the people why, they went, I think in a very short period of time, they went from like number what, 8 or 9 down to number 2. So, they were regaining. To think that Schlitz beer at one point in time was like considered one of the best beers in the country. Right, right, right. So, anyway, but the point is we have so many things that you're doing right now that are just obvious to you that you live, eat, and breathe them, just what Robin says. But like she said, I just asked a room full of people and only 2 people raised their hand and these are CEOs. So, the point is, you know, there's a lot of opportunity in the world for all of us. You just need to, you know, identify it and you need to communicate to them and you need to share with them what it is you have and offer in a way that's what's in it for them. And, you know, that's what we'll continue to talk about on I Love Marketing. And if you're brand new to I Love Marketing for whatever reason, we have— how many episodes is this now, Dean, that we've done?

473 today.

473 episodes. And there's some of the best marketing stuff. And we, we took a hiatus for a period of time and we're now going to bring it back in better and more powerful ways. And I appreciate everyone that came here to give us your time and your attention and everything. And we hope that what we deliver gives you perspectives. Gives you strategies, gives you ideas. And if you want to really understand the 8 Profits Activators, go download Breakthrough DNA on ilovemarketing.com, read it, and then you'll get a whole sense of the foundational approach of the before, during, and after unit that we've been teaching for many, many years. And it is not timely, it's timeless. This will always apply. If there's AI, it doesn't matter what happens. That, you know, I've got Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler. They have a— I interviewed them recently. If you've not seen that interview, I did it with them a couple of weeks ago. It's on their brand new book called We Are As Gods. And I've got both of them coming to this year's Genius Network annual event, which is in November, November 5th, 6th, and 7th in Scottsdale. And, you know, they're basically saying that in, I don't know, by 2040, there will be 10 billion humanoid robots in the world. 10 billion, right?

Yeah.

And so, uh, the world is going to change quite dramatically. But at the end of the day, uh, Peter and Stephen, they never would have been a New York Times bestselling author had they not come to Genius Network and we not arranged a group of people. You were there, Dean, during that time. We literally made the book, his very first book, Abundance, a New York Times bestseller. And now, they've had multiple versions of that, but it all comes down to marketing and communicating. You could have the best solution, best food, best clothes, best doctor, best dog trainer, best whatever in the world, but you still got to communicate it to real humans that you need to bond with and connect. So, don't forget the human element. And as I've sat here with my thank you cards, every time an idea came from something, I just wrote the first name of the person on the thank you card. And now, that's great cards that, oh, I got to send this. So, even always have a stack of thank you cards next to wherever you work the most. If you go to a coffee shop, put them in your backpack and put them out while you're doing— when it comes to your mind, do it and send out 10 of these. And that being said, let's turn it over to Paul Colligan. And Paul, you can kind of wrap it up.

Following this show wherever you want to is great. We love it at Apple because it goes up the charts. They're paying attention to the show over at Apple, just like you are. So follow the show, follow up with those written sales letters, and you know what? Have a great day, everybody.

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