How to Succeed In Business No Matter What's Going On In The World with Jay Abraham, Dean Jackson, and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing Episode #421

You have to be able to examine, evaluate, understand, appreciate, acknowledge and respect how the other side is seeing life. Not just the superficiality of the veneer of what the buzzwords that you're trying to use and what you think they want. But where are they at in their life? What's their life like? What do they really value?

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Geni network, go to geniusnetwork.com this week we are revisiting a previous episode. Here are some of the best highlights.

We've got our dear friend in one of the most brilliant marketing minds, business minds on the planet, Mr. J. Abraham. What is the most financially dangerous situation you or maybe one of your clients has ever been in and how did you or they get out of it?

I've been involved in so many industries, but when gold was first legalized, I had the largest gold brokerage in the sector and we were devastated. Gold dropped in one period, not unlike the stock market. It went from 800 to 300. And my client was exposed terribly. The market froze. He was my only client at the time. I just bought a new house. I put every dime I had in it. I was making $200,000 a month from him. And this is 40 years ago. And it was very, very tenuous. But after we freaked out for a couple of hours, we realized that reactive, impulsive type response wasn't going to really solve it. Pragmatic, strategic, and what I would call innovative response. And there's a concept I was going to offer, but I was listening to YouTube much more respectfully and interestingly. But I think there's a concept you have to adopt and it's not immoral, it's very moral. I call it ethical opportunism. There's always going to be opportunity inherent in adversity. And I mean, I'm very blessed in a bizarre way because I've done a thousand industries, so I have a context of reference and have seen lots of possibilities and lots of scenarios. But you have to know that in any situation there's always a solution. The solution may mean you have to take your business in a different direction. What we did just in the gold business is we instead of selling, we started buying. There's always a market for something and we started offering different investments that were instantly in vogue. And we made partnerships because we had 500,000 buyers that all of a sudden didn't want to buy hard assets. They wanted to buy something else, but they didn't have brokers. So we went the other way with it. And we didn't leave our posture that we believed in gold at the time. We, we acknowledged that gold was in a funk. Big funk course in a big funk. It was in crisis and chaos. But we basically said, if you're going to hedge yourself, let us get you the best price selling and then let us partner with the best. We made. We took an ombudsman approach and we turned it around and we made millions of dollars helping people do what they were going to do anyhow.

We're talking about marketing. And I'd like to get your definition of marketing, like right now.

I think it's probably, first of all, identification and articulation and affirmation of problem or an opportunity and an outcome somebody wants that they may or may not have even fully recognized and the education to them of the implication of that problem or opportunity now and what the resolution of that can be worth in the future and the fact that you understand and have the ability to resolve it for them in a way that will produce that.

The number one thing that we're trying to do in anything that we're doing is just like you said, Jay, articulate the problem, articulate our solution in a way that lets them realize that we've got it and then the memory of that.

So that at the time that they.

Need that, that they reach a now decision, meaning now's the time that we need to buy this, that they're buying reflex is I need this. I need J. Abraham, I need Joe, I need whatever your business.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Is.

And Dean, may I just really quickly add, I think what I believe you want, and I think you will, hopefully you'll acknowledge, I think you want to be preemptive.

Yes.

And I don't think most people understand that preemptive and preeminent and prominent, they're all different dimensions. Preemptive means that you are able to positively. I mean, you could do it negatively, but you're able to block the mind's eye of the target audience from thinking there's any other viable, you know, viable solution. You're the only one. They see you and they don't see anything else even coming close. You've blocked it either. And you could block in many ways. It gets a lot of. It gets into. Excuse me. Lots of methodology can be, you know, more beneficial, more better, you know, better risk reversal, more bonuses. I mean, there's all kinds of ways. But you want to be so definitively preemptive. That there's, you know, you've elevated your offer, your business, your perception ahead of the maddening crowd. Preeminence is being seen in the mind of the target audience and I've done lots of work on that, as you know, as the only viable solution. The most trusted advisor who has their best interest solely and predominantly at heart, not their own for life, who is giving them the most well reasoned, objective perspective on the good, the bad, the ugly, who won't let them buy less than they should, less quantity, quality, frequency, not because you want the profit, but you want them to benefit to the ultimate. And that you're going to tell them what they should do, including not buy. And that's sort of preeminent. I'm giving it to you distilled. Prominent is just being significantly known in your sector or market. But prominent, I think is probably the lesser of all these three.

You need to be a result leader. Right, right. And if you're able to produce a result, now's the time to really marketing to me is storytelling. You know, how do you tell that story? What do you say?

How do you say it?

Who do you say it to? And you know, the only thing worse than singing the wrong note is singing it louder.

I love that.

Yeah. And you know, and a lot of people will be singing the wrong note, knowing they're singing the wrong note and they'll be saying it just because people are desperate and they're following it and they will buy from it. But that's not the way to treat humans. And that's not the way to create a result for someone. And that's, you know, and it may be short term, there's financial gain, but long term, what are you really doing?

How much more value can you create that is that is recognized, prized and desired from the other side. And in a way that they see you as understanding them, appreciating them and having their best future interest. So you have to be able to examine, evaluate, understand, appreciate, acknowledge and respect how the other side is seeing life. Not just the superficiality of the veneer, of what the buzzwords that you're trying to use and what you think they want. But where are they at in their life? What's their life like? What do they really value? And unless you can appreciate and empathically understand it, you really can't be great. And you certainly can't be great in an adverse environment like this. I don't believe value usually is denominated, as we both are, all three of us know, in a benefit, it's not really features.

It all comes down to being able to deliver a result to people. That's what we've talked about, right? What would you do if you only got paid if you get the result? That is an instant clarifier to determine do you have the ability to deliver a result to somebody and are they going to be better off for having done business with you? And do you have the confidence in your ability to deliver that result that you would put your compensation on the other end of getting that result? It's less expensive sometimes to get somebody a result than it is to convince them to give you money to get the results.

And you all know that I got started strictly on performance. Our whole motto was don't pay for marketing, pay for results. And everything we've ever done for clients has always been based on not only hoping that they would get results, but making certain that was the denominator of everything. But most people don't realize and we used to do, we did a quarter billion dollars of seminars one cycle of my life. And our whole premise was we would make sure that they got a financial breakthrough from either the promotional material or things we would share before and physical, not online, digital before they ever had to commit. And it's so much easier to make what you're already doing, who you're already doing it with, who's doing it for and with you more high yielding for less time, effort and money. And that's a big area that most people don't even focus on. They do that, you know, the online optimization. And I'm not diminishing it, it's very brilliant. You couldn't do that when I started out without spending a million dollars and years and years. But now those are the things people think about. There's infinitely additional elements that you can maximize before what I call multiplying. Multiplying is, is innovating. But yet innovation and optimization are polar opposites. One is trying to break and eliminate the old. The other is totally. I mean it's a really interesting integration of two different schools of thinking.

What is the thing like really get down to simply what is the result that you are absolutely best at helping people to create.

First thing is that I talked a little bit about being preeminent. And the key to it is it's leadership. You're a leader to the market you serve. You're a leader to the team that is on the mission and the crusade with you. If you don't have a certainty and a confidence about the future, a future and you can't convey to your audience, your market that you are their leader, no matter what you're doing, then you're already losing the battle. Number one, with leadership goes this concept of risk reversal. And not risk reversal just in the terms of, of making it easier to buy, but assurance and certainty and confidence. You convey that you understand the issues that are the deterrence or the concerns constraints in their mind. It can be many things. The other things I would say is we have a concept called access denied and it's understanding why if you're not getting results, people are doing it. And there's lots of reasons, but I think you want to identify what else are people buying before, during, after instead because there's enormous qualitative ethical opportunity in all of those areas. One can be additive revenue, one can be pre emptive access to markets before they would buy what you buy. One would be monetizing people that don't buy. Partnering galore. And I think the other is if you establish you want to basically you want to fortify the relevancy and the trust that you can get from the people that you already are dealing with. And the thing I was going to say, that's something that I believe very big. And you see it, Joe, in your group of people, there's a lot of soft skills that produce leverage, trust building. Sally Hogg said how you're seen people like Roger, love how you're heard and all those have been, have been data based, proven to increase results up to 300%. If there's five or six soft skills you can master, incorporate into how you communicate, whether it's online, offline, in person, however it is up and down the food chain, meaning to your market and to your team, you're going to get greater yield from whatever you're doing right away. And my analogy has always been if you were flying somewhere and it's like it's marketing mistakes, when you stop them, you automatically improve. But the point is there's lots of things you don't know that you can do right now that will multiply results. And if the market is dropping, but you can get everything you're doing two or three times more effective, you are going to be at least at par. Everything you do, you have to be doing it at the highest strata of integrity. And you have to, I mean integrity is a subjective word obviously, but you have to be looking for. You're either a value creator or you're diminisher. You really are. It's still the only concept of grow or die. It's physics. You expand or you contract. You're either continually creating value, you're a multiplier or a diminisher. And I think that you're making it and everything you shared and I'm not saying, Dean, it's implicit, but you Joe, it's more explicit that everything you're saying is always that I've heard is predicated on a foundational really sort of a fortress of this has to be honorable, ethical. It has to be contributing the greatest value to the other side. And I think people have to look within themselves. I'm going to do more of it and see if I've deviated from my own values. Because when you are not focused on the other side and when you're not just listening and hearing, but when you're seeing and seeing is I mean, there's a lot of really interesting there. These are intangible things. So I may not be saying what you want to hear, but I think it's very profound.

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