I Love Marketing in Cloudlandia, Part 2: The First-Ever ILM Zoom Meetup featuring a Q&A with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #370

You can't tell what's going to happen, so you focus on the things that you know are not going to change. You can't go wrong hitching your wagon to the things that you know are going to be true in 10 years and 20 years, no matter what technology comes around. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and this is the I Love Marketing Podcast. Foreign.

Got questions? You're not alone. Listen to Dean and Joe as they answer the audience's most burning questions in the first ever I Love Marketing Zoom meetup in today's episode of the I Love Marketing Podcast. This episode is part two of a three part series, so be sure to listen to part one first and stay tuned for the release of part three, which will be a continuation of the special Q and A session. If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network annual event, then apply today for your invitation to attend. If you'd like to learn more about the Genius Network Annual event or to apply, go to geniusnetwork.com?

Best way to get a team of independent contractors to use marketing and branding consistent for the company and is Nick Sonnenberg on here? I think I saw Nick yo. Okay, so Nick Sonnenberg actually owns he's the founder of a company called getleverage.com and I have to disclose this. I actually am part owner of the company. I'm an equity partner in it. Tell everyone about get leverage and then answer that question because that's pretty much what you do all day long is you have a group of virtual assistants. You do a bunch of stuff for different companies. A lot of people that are on here today use your company to help their businesses run. So how would you answer that one? We consider ourselves now we started off.

As a virtual assistant.

Now we call ourselves and it's a work in progress but a tech enabled growth hacking agency. So we're best utilized where you want to increase your open rate, get more leads, conversion, SEO, content creation, that sort of thing. We do have branding people but we can do that. But we're more uniquely situated for getting you a result or an ROI as it comes to conversion lead gen or things that help you get operationally efficient or set up to be more efficient and virtual. So I hope that answers your question. Yeah, and I'd like Dean to speak to this. But Mike wrote make sure all vendors have SLA service level agreement. It creates alignment and clarity. So Mike, why don't you say something so you actually have a very big company a $30 million plus service business in H Vac. And you're one of the top coaches in the world for service businesses and you certainly work with a ton of people. Yeah, I mean share.

Yeah.

Well, I don't have the service company no more. I sold it two and a half years ago to a $40 billion company, which was a good thing.

Shows you how much I obviously stay on top of what you're doing, then clearly that's okay.

It's perfect. But what I found out with accountability and clarity is with every vendor that you work with, you want an sla, a service level agreement. It's the same thing as if I worked with Nick or anybody else. I say, what are my expectations on, you know, the delivery of what we agreed on, why I'm hiring you for, what's the relationship? So when you have a simple agreement, it just creates alignment with everybody and it solves a lot of problems. Because then it's just like if you have a culture, a team, if you have a problem, you just go back to the agreement. Hey, did this change our relationship at all? It just makes now probably better than ever. You need it just because of the crazy emotionalness of businesses. You should get realigned with your service level agreements.

Isn't it interesting all these buzzwords? I mean, I don't really like these Silicon Valley buzzwords like monetizing stuff versus make money selling shit. Right. But like pivot seems to be the one that gets used the most right now. So Dean, what have you learned about working and training? Not even just the best way to get a team of independent contractors to use marketing and branding consistent for the company, but anyone for that matter, because part of it is, you know, here's the beauty of marketing is marketing actually replaces a lot of salespeople because if you don't have marketing, then you're doing manual marketing, which is called selling. And good marketing makes much of selling easy and in many cases unnecessary. Because like I've said a million times, selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get someone 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 and predisposed to give you money. That's shtick that I've been saying forever. That's true though. So if you have really great marketing, you're less reliant on having a really sophisticated, you know, salesperson because of the stuff that you've done to can and clone yourself. That being said, Dean, what tips and suggestions would you have? And then we'll go to the next question.

Well, I think, you know, working with your team, I think that, you know, my approach is that, you know, I have a who that, you know, you've sent about the having an integrator, if you're a visionary, having that one integrator that is your buffer between you and the managing of independent contractors and the expectations and the team like that. If we were dependent on me to do that, it would be a problem because I'm useless at that. But I'm pretty good at vision and pretty good at marketing, messaging and delivery of our core products. Does have the right support team that allows me to just focus on being the cow, on being the one who's just coming up with the milk.

Okay, you're going to have to explain a little more for new people being the cow and focusing on the milk because that's going to sound a little weird to anyone that doesn't have a contextual understanding.

Everybody here, there's some inside baseball going on that most of the people in here hopefully are at a point where we know what the self milking cow is. That the whole concept of that. We find entrepreneurs running into a problem where the frustration that I see them running into is that they're trying to do it all. They're trying to make the milk, they're trying to milk themselves, they're trying to package it and pasteurize it and take it to market and clean up the shop and send out the invoices and do all of it. And they don't have opposable thumbs. The thing that the cow can do is make the milk and that's the ideas and the vision and the creative stuff that you're actually doing. And so what mind. My mission is to help people embrace their bovinity and allow themselves to support themselves with a farm structure that allows them to be happy cows. What cows should be doing is they should be out in the pastures, roaming the pastures, coming up with new ideas, getting inspired, germinating these ideas, making the milk and then coming into the milking shed to get milked and put it into a package that you can take to market. That's really the essence of what we're doing. So I've been kind of embracing it and setting myself up as the lead cow in our neighborhood and spreading the word about it. You know that everybody, I try and support people in being cows themselves. And that's why everything that we do. Like even this whole idea of supporting people in doing things where they don't have to. You don't ever have to learn how to do anything if you've got the right who you just need to know what you want to do. And that's the most entrepreneurial thing you can do is expose yourself to lots of new what's so that you can see what the possibilities are and then have an integrator that you can express your desires, the what's that you want to get executed and that who can then take it from there and they'll be as happy as a pig in you know what.

Joe, can I share something?

Yeah.

So I think when you talk about accountability and culture, what I found out is everybody kind of talks about culture and they align it with like just their team culture. But there's three cultures in every company. There's your team culture, your customer culture, and then your vendors culture. And then your goal is to align all three cultures into, you know, one big culture that creates self accountability. And then you don't have to try to reinforce anything. The three different cultures step in and reinforce it themselves. So just step back and look. And most people are only paying attention to one and they don't look at it as an ecosystem. And that's how I would step back and start to look at any disconnect that's happening.

That's a great conversation for Jason Korman too. You know Jason, right? No gaping void. So behind me is like a culture. Yeah, so they do these culture walls. But I love that, you know, the team, the customer, the vendor, breaking it up. That's awesome. Question, how do you start and what would you advise others to starting and providing results? Well, here's what I would say. I'll make some book recommendations. My buddy BJ Fogg, his latest book is called Tiny Habits, the Small Changes that change Everything. So this book is brilliant. And BJ Fogg is a professor at Stanford. I actually spoke at Stanford last year to his group of students and he does behavior design. And one of his students is the co founder of Instagram that used his model to create Instagram. There's famous authors like James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, which is a great book. That's one of his students, Nir Eyal, who's written a bunch of great books. He's also been on the I Love Marketing podcast and spoke at Genius Network. He wrote Hooked. So this is all behavior, like my behavior, your behavior, everyone's behavior, motivation, ability and prompts that if you want to change behavior, you need motivation or ability or prompts. And what most of the coaches and speakers and books of telling people how to make change get more motivated, you know, do this, do that. And the fact of the matter is, the reason why people are so addicted to phones is as an example. They're way more than phones. They're like these little addiction devices that you listen to music on, you track your sleep, you find everything. They're little cash registers and they have built in prompts that keep you scrolling endlessly because they know how to prompt you to do things and keep you sucked in. So if you want to, you know, it's probably not the way you thought I would answer the question, but how do you start? And what advice would you advice to others? Starting providing results is to study what causes us to behave in ways. So I guarantee you the bad habits. And I say this as a person who spent many years of my life embroiled in addictive behaviors as an addict, because I spend about half my time helping people that struggle with addictions. And many of you know that high motivation to escape pain, because what addiction is, is it's a response to pain and trauma. As my friend Gabor Mate says, the question is not why the addiction, but why the PA underneath the pain? So there's ability. You can drink alcohol, look at porn, gamble, eat food, gaming, workaholism, all the different forms of addiction, there's abilities to do those and then prompts, things that prompt you to do stuff. So be it a good behavior or a bad behavior, you got to look at the motivation, the ability, and the prompts. And if you like. For instance, one of the things he describes in Tiny Habits is if you're not flossing your teeth, start with flossing one tooth. If you want to exercise in the morning and you find yourself forgetting, put your shoes in front of the doorway where you're going to put them on, or put exercise shorts right on your bed or, you know, right on the mirror. You know, whatever is going to remind you to do something. Create a prompt. Because there are many companies that have built in prompts in your marketing is the same way. In order to get people to do certain things. What are the prompts like? For instance, if we didn't prompt you by sending out a Facebook message or an Instagram message or an email or a reminder, none of you would be on this right now. I mean, no one would be here. So all the different ways that we get people to do certain things or get ourselves to do certain Things is how we, you know, that's how you start. And the reason people have such a hard time starting is they try to start very big. Like, I'm going to start journaling for an hour a day. And you've not journaled, like at all for the last six months. And you ain't going to journal for an hour today unless you're highly motivated. And that'll last maybe one or two days and then you're back to the same shit, right? So that's how I would answer it. Would you say anything else or you.

Say that thing even just an hour a day? You're thinking about when you were hearing about thinking time. You hear Keith Cunningham talk about thinking time. Everybody's in there thinking, yeah, I'm going to set aside an hour a day.

For this book here.

Yeah, I'm going to set aside an hour a day for thinking. And you realize, man, an hour a day, it's like impossible to get yourself to do anything for an hour a day. It's crazy. But, you know, it does take some real maneuvering to get that. And it's funny that now that we're all in captivity and we're all like, certainly, hopefully everybody's getting great sleep. They're getting, the more sleep. You've got no excuse for not getting.

Sleep now, I can assure you that is not happening for most people.

Okay.

Really?

I think I find that one of the greatest things about it, you know, the idea that now this. There's all this time gets spent. I said to Dan Sullivan one time, that is in my observation that we use, as I look back on me, that I use every single minute of the day. I never skip minutes. I never skip anything. I use every single minute of the 16 waking hours that I in a day. And I'm always constantly doing something, you know, and that's really what the trick is in that those things are things that I've set up ahead of time, you know, or set up the things. Really the idea to. I've been calling it time travel. The thing that we have the ability to time travel in is to look at your. Even in little things, to look at things like, I knew we were doing this tonight and so I came in earlier and I set up some water bottles there so that I knew that when I get here, I'm not going to get here and not have water and be the thing. So I affected in a positive way this moment by time traveling from the past into my anticipated future, which was going to require these bottles and set them up in advance. And so I've been really having great experiments with time traveling for tomorrow and started to think, I always, I've always said, Joe, my thing about I know I'm being successful when is that I get to wake up every day and say, what would I like to do today? And so I've been adding to that, that every day I try and think about what am I doing tomorrow that I could make better today. And that's really a. It's been fun and really interesting to observe it, you know.

Joe, can I add something on results?

Absolutely.

So I think if you look at it by something that I call like subtraction by addition. Right. So most people, when they're trying to get a result, they're trying to subtract something. Like, I'm going to not eat chocolate. I'm not going to eat this thing. And there's normally pain attached to it versus if you added something. Like in the morning, you said, you know what, tomorrow I'm just going to get up and drink a green smoothie. Well, by adding something, you drink the green smoothie, you feel better. Now it's easier to avoid maybe the cup of coffee or something else you normally would. So just kind of ask yourself, what could I add in easily that will move me forward to a better result than have to take away and feel like I'm pulling something that's been part of my body or soul away from me.

I say something on the thinking time. I'm a big believer in all the morning routines and everything I've changed. One little shift is now when I wake up, I'm actually just staying there, laying in bed and kind of meditating or thinking and sometimes 15, 20 minutes or something, sometimes longer.

But I'm just.

It's normally when I wake up, even just from the walk to the coffee maker, something's interrupting me or changing my thoughts or whatever, whether it be from the phone or any kind of distraction. Whereas when I just open my eyes and I lay there and think, man, I'm getting some of the clearest visions and thoughts on.

That's Jean Paul DeJoria's thing Joe and I had him on. I love marketing. And that's one of the things he said. First thing he does in the morning is he lays there and gets acclimated. Just kind of looks around, pays attention and kind of eases in, acclimates himself to the day.

Yeah, well, you know, Teresa just actually posted. Everyone should definitely check out Miracle Morning if you're interested in upping your Morning game, you know, Hal Elrod. And of course we have a book here, me and Ann and David, who's also with us, the Miracle Morning for Addiction Recovery. Letting Go of who youo've Been for who youo Can Become Forwards written by Dr. Drew. But this is a great book on, you know, the miracle morning and doing morning rituals. And we're having that funny conversation the other day, Dean about like Robin Sharma who we've had on I love Marketing. He wrote a book called the 5am Club. And there's this whole movement about people waking up at 5am and everything. And the truth is it's really not the 5am Club, it's more like the 9pm Club. Because if your ass ain't getting to bed at 9pm, waking up at 5am is a real pain in the ass. Or if you're going to bed at 2 in the morning, waking up and having a miracle morning is probably unlikely. When I was a drug addict and used to freebase cocaine and everything, I was usually going to bed around the time that I wake up up today, many, many years ago. Not a good thing. Also this is a weird aside but as you know I go on tangents. A lot of you would probably be fascinated to listen to the. It's a very short audio book by Michael Pollan called Caffeine. It's all about caffeine and those of you that drink a lot of caffeine, considering this is the largest probably not thoroughly studied drug experiment in human history, the consumption of caffeine, many of you put it in your bodies. Every probably be a good idea for you to do a little bit of research. And I think the book's like a couple hours long and it's fascinating. So read the book by Michael Poland. All right, I'm going to go the next question. Have you any cunning idea? And this is from Sally Bartlett who's in London and she's in the retail industry. She's the owner of a retail place, I don't know what type. Have you any cunning ideas to help the so called dying in quotes Retail industry dying just means we need to reincarnate in a slightly different way and still serve our customers with our specialists expertise and knowledge that we currently do. So who wants to take that one?

I know so Sally is they have a ski retail store, they sell ski equipment in London. You know, here's the thing for any of those kind of retailers, you're starting to see it right now that the need for physical retail space for almost for most things is really, the need for it's going down like Neiman Marcus and you're seeing all these big box department stores that this is. Probably a lot of those are not going to recover from stuff from this kind of turndown and maybe for the better, because what we're also seeing is that for virtually any physical good that you can imagine, we have now the infrastructure in place to be able to get anything that's available basically at the very latest, tomorrow afternoon. And so I think that when you have a specialty retail, I think specialty retail is going to be a particularly successful thing to be in if you embrace the. The totality of the experience of what it is. Like if I were running Sally's Ski Shop, that I would be looking at embracing all of the adjacencies to just the equipment. I would be embracing the skiing lifestyle. Like, you have to be a real, you know, if you're in London, London's not, like, known for its skiing, but you're just on quick hop and you're in the Alps, the French Alps or the Swiss Alps, where there's, you know, maybe the best skiing in the world. So I would be embracing for London, all of the ski community, to create all kinds of ski experiences and things, even outside of just selling equipment and clothing, but to start thinking about the. All the services that go along with that that are going to make you a better skier. Performance training for skiing, putting packaging trips together, all the spots for owning ski chalets or ski fractional ski places, ski memberships, all. Everything to do with the skiing as a passion. And I might start a reality show, you know, on in. That's on that encompasses the skiing lifestyle. It's really, I think, great opportunities for everybody in all kinds of things like that. If you're a retailer, you know, even bookstores, if you are a mystery bookstore to totally embrace that and create mystery experiences, or a business bookstore, you know, all. All of the things. I think there's lots of opportunities within categories for really going deep on building an audience that you are, you know, thinking of it as a. Like, almost like a media company is our friend Vaynerchuk would say, yeah, I.

Think what a lot of people are maybe not considering now or should think about is surveying the clients they have and asking a couple questions like, what do you miss? What could replace that gap? You know, how do you see the near future and stuff? So if you could just ask the right. If you could ask a better question, you could get a new opportunity. And then what if everybody just says, like, I'm Missing the connection.

Okay.

Then they could put on. It's almost like what's his name did with like, you know, where he's talking about wine and cereal. Right. So maybe if you could think about how can you show off your skis? Well, I think what you're finding out, Joe, what everybody, what most experts have been ranting on for the last 15 years about authority and frequency marketing and making sure you're a credibility, credible voice out there, now all of a sudden, they're forced to create it immediately, which is okay because everybody, a lot of people are online. So I would just tell that person, like, think of survey first and then take intelligent information and strategize off of that.

Yeah, I want to actually read. I'm trying to find where it went. Andrea Ann says retail is not dead as long as you aren't focused on selling your products, but instead focus on your customers and providing that perfect purchase for them. Well, here's what always fascinates me about the power of the list, the power of the relationship that you have with your clients. And if you think about Amazon, Jeff Bezos obsession with customers and making sure that serving up to them everything that they want. So is he really selling products or services or is he just making it so darn easy to recommend different things that their buying habits demonstrate that they actually want? And if you're in a business right now and you actually have a client list and they can't come to your store or they can't, you know, you're a carpet cleaner and you can't go out and clean their carpets as an example or something, which many actually in that business are doing. Well, especially people in restoration. You know, you do have the rapport, and the rapport that you have with your clients makes you able to do things for them and with them. You know, right now my focus has been on serving and not selling. And we are still selling some things. But I haven't been putting a real emphasis on, you know, trying to get people to buy and stuff. Like, for instance, tonight, you know, the emphasis is, yeah, I'll talk about books and things. But, you know, we're not going to do a sales pitch here. We're not going to try to get anyone to buy a course. And even if we wanted to, I mean, I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with that. That's just not what we're doing here. And the thing is, is. But we have this relationship with the group of people that we have built for many, many years. And so with you know, two days notice, we can send out some messages and we can get, you know, the people that are on here. And then we'll put this up as a podcast. A lot of people will listen to it. Well, all of you have a sphere of influence to a certain degree. And so the more that you do marketing in the future, if something happens, what's the value of that relationship? And if you were to recommend something else to the client? So if I was in the retail business and I had a client base and there was something that these people would actually want and I needed to make money, I would be doing joint ventures and I would be recommending things, or I would be selling, you know, future products or services. I would continue to be developing that bond. I would be doing virtual events and things like this. Anything to just be helpful and useful. And I think a lot of people don't realize the power of the relationship that they may have with their company, with their, you know, with, with the individuals within your company, with you, that sort of thing. Anything else you guys want to say? And if not, I'll ask the next question or I'll read the next question.

Oh, I think there's a place for both things there. I think there's a place to serve and I think there's a place to allow people to purchase value from people. And I think that people should consider not stopping people from buying value because people feel rewarded by being able to purchase value from somebody.

Right?

That's why they go buy a car or they buy things for the sense of feeling they're going to get. And I think there's a fine line everybody between make sure you serve with your heart, but don't allow people to have an empty feeling like they can't reward because someone else, because it really fills something inside of people.

Yeah, well, totally. Like Theodore wrote home, that's interesting. Rather than convenience, how about retail, where the prospects and customers are coming to the guru, as Dan Kennedy talks about, or a similar thing. Why do people go to marketing conferences when there's so much is online? Because of the camaraderie, the deals JV's made in the bar between talks, etc. Yeah, here's the thing too, because I've been thinking about this a lot. There's communication, there's content, and people say content is king. Content is king. And there's a shit ton of content that is out there. I don't think content is king. I think context is king and how you frame the content. I think communication is valuable, but Comprehension is really valuable. How many of you have communicated things to people or have had things communicated to you, but you didn't comprehend it, or they didn't comprehend it, or it didn't land? So, you know, I think a lot of people come to Genius Network not because of who's in the room, because we got some pretty famous successful people that a lot of people would want to meet. What I have found, though, is most people that join Genius Network join for who's not in the room versus just who's in the room. They certainly want to meet great people, but they also want to be an environment where it's filled with serious players and people that are, you know, I'm trying to literally create the highest level group of non narcissists that are trying to better themselves. Because so much of the personal development world is filled with gurus that think that, you know, they're God's gift to God and it's, you know, they may be smart, but. But it's annoying to me. So I like a room of givers. That's why there's an emphasis on you can get anything you want. Just be very helpful and grateful and useful and don't be salesy and you'll sell really well by not coming across as just like, I must get my agenda met. If you can help other people get their agendas met, those people will naturally want to help you get your agenda met. And I think it's just a better way to do relationships. So let's see a bunch of stuff. All right.

Can I say something real quick, Joe? I think a lot of people are buying right now for that feeling, more so than the products. You have something to look forward to and anticipate it coming and there's connection. And I know I'm a big fan of trying to make my transactions personal. I grew my whole business on the handwritten note. It's the best marketing thing I've done. Steve Sims was on earlier and when he first launched his book Blue Fishing, I bought a stack from him and when he sent it, he included a company hat for me and handwritten note and everything like that. And it's that personal connection. And especially right now, we're really lacking that. And so I think that's another thing that people are. It's not even about the product. So much is the feeling of, hey, I can buy this thing right now, even with all that's going on and something to look forward to. So much more of the emotional reasons.

No, absolutely. Like, I've always Liked the quote. You know, people don't buy from you because they understand what you do. People buy from you because they feel understood. You know, at the end of the day, so much of what we do and you don't. People don't refund relationships. And if you have a really strong relationship, it's hard to give that away. But if you don't. So that's why bonding is really critical and important. So no, thank you. So this came from Rohan. Hey, boys, what is the formula for creating a promise to my customers that I could deliver on every single time? Like the slot machine Dean talks about, it feels like there are pieces to the puzzle missing, and you have the pieces. So I think, Dean, you kind of spoke earlier about the compelling offer. Is there anything else you want to say to that one?

Well, the thing that you talked about, the slot machine, what we talk about is that most of the time, people think about their marketing and it's or their results that they're able to get any. Like a slot machine, they're going to put money in, and sometimes they get a result, sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But what we're talking about with marketing certainty is to focus on creating a vending machine so that when you push the button that you know that when I send out this many postcards or when I do these Facebook ads, I generate leads for this much and these many people will convert into clients. That's what we're looking for, is that kind of vending machine certainty, not the slot machine gambling emotional roller coaster.

When they would talk in business school about a marketing budget, 10% should go to marketing. And I'd be like, the only time you would want to put a restriction on how much you would spend on marketing is if the marketing doesn't work and you don't want to go broke so quickly or you simply can't keep up with the amount of sales. Because, you know, like Keith Cunningham says, some companies die not from starvation, but by indigestion. You know, sometimes you can get too many sales and it can throw your. But that's rarely what happens in most companies. Most people want more sales. And so it's like if you had a slot machine, that is your marketing, your message, your offer, your ad, your promotion, your campaign, your podcast, your book, whatever vehicle it was that was driving leads and sales. And, you know, if you had a slot machine where you put in a dollar and every time you pull down the handle, $5 would come out, you would shove money into that thing as quickly as humanly possible. And you would never budget it. I wouldn't be like, oh sorry, I can't put more money in this producing slot machine because you know, 10%. So some of the shit that people are taught about marketing is so ridiculous. Jared from Calgary says question how do you see industries like real estate changing when buyers and sellers buying and shopping habits that could be changed during COVID times with the use of technology. And so Dean, obviously you, Charlie, Dave, I mean all of you could speak to this one. What would you say to that?

Well, there's the short term things like we're in a situation right now where you physically can't go look at houses. So doing zoom tours or virtual tours is going to be one thing. You can't do homebuyer workshops, but you can certainly do homebuyer zoom meetings. That's something that is going to be sort of for this period of time. But the better question to ask about how are these things going to change? Real estate is really looking at what Jeff Bezos, his whole approach or mindset to technology and the way things are going to change is you can't tell what's going to happen. So you focus on the things that you know are not going to change. And so we see in real estate the things that are true now were true 40 years ago. People want to, when they're selling their house, they want to get the most amount of money in the least amount of time, with the least amount of problems or hassles, the most convenient way. So when you project that forward, you can't go wrong hitching your wagon to the things that you know are going to be true in 10 years and 20 years, no matter what technology comes around, you know, no matter what happens that way. So allowing yourself to take advantage of all the technologies that develop, but only as much as they're in service of helping people reach the core goal, which is to sell the house quickly for the most money with the most convenience.

Okay, next question. This is from Renate in Williamstad. I don't know where that is. Is that in England or something? Question. I'm an artist. I see a lot of marketing for online courses, et cetera, but never something I could really use for selling my paintings. So I did a lot of stuff myself. I did online courses in painting, et cetera. But painting is what I love the most. My friend Wylan, who's a very successful artist, we actually, you can look at my watch, my interview I did with him over a decade ago. Boy, at the time he was doing about 100 million a year in sales. He has galleries all over the world. And so Wylan is a very successful artist and he wrote a book which you can get, I think for free on his website, Wyland W I L A N D. It's called don't be a Starving Artist. And so I would recommend reading that book. Secondly, if you're an artist or you're a. And I think everyone's an artist, you know, that is creative and creates something that is valuable and unique and that people appreciate and admire. So if you think of yourself like a corporate athlete or an artist in business or music or writing or whatever, I mean, copywriters are incredible artists. Part of this is packaging up your art with like, if I was selling an online course to artists as an example, and I like painting, I would package up my painting with the stuff that I was selling. For one, you could sell it for a lot more money. And secondly, it would be very unique. So there's, you know, an artist sells their art, model, sells their beauty, a doctor sells medical service. The bottom line, we're all selling something. If you've never seen my video, is selling evil. If you go to YouTube and type in is selling evil. This was over 10 years ago. They were interviewing me for a documentary and they never put this footage in the documentary. It was B roll in a guy named J.R. who works with me, he saw 30 minutes of B roll footage. He saw a three minute and 50 second clip where I answered the question, is selling evil? He uploaded it onto YouTube and it's just now like taken off. And it's been around for a long time. But I give Dan Sullivan's definition of selling that I got from Dan. I asked Dan Sullivan one day, you know, what's your definition of selling? And he said, get someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and get them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. And I emphasize that the words good for them is what makes the difference in that definition. Because you can get someone intellectually engaged in eating crappy food, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, watching porn, whatever, and you could argue that's probably not helpful for the person, but you can get them emotionally engaged and intellectually committed in that future. But if what you're selling is good for someone, it's all how you sell it, the formula for how much you charge for something. I always like playing this joke on audiences. I'll say, would you like to know what the formula is for pricing, how much you Charge. And people like, yeah, the formula for how much you charge for something is based on your ability to sell it. That's the formula. The more effective you are at selling something, you know, in the marketplace will tell you, I sell $25,000, you know, discussion groups. I sell hundred thousand dollar discussion groups. People don't wake up every day saying, you know, damn, we really need one of these hundred K programs. You know, they just looking in the cupboard saying, honey, you know, along with the peanut butter, we're missing the 25k group. You know, some things are bought, other things need to be sold. And so, you know, part of this is, this is going to sound so weird. I wish we didn't have to do any of this marketing shit. I wish we didn't have to write offers. I wish people would just do business with us because they just intuitively know that we care and we're, you know, they would think I'm a nice person and I work really hard and I've spent, you know, 20 years of my life and over $2 million reading over a thousand books, attending more seminars than anyone I know. I just wish people would just automatically throw money at me because of all the work I've put into my business over all these years. But you know what? Life doesn't work that way. And so you have to create a process. You have to use a selling formula. Now the beauty is, me and Dean have put out more information for free on I love marketing than what most people charge for in courses, and it's all free. And that's a blessing and a curse because if you don't pay, you don't pay attention. And sometimes if people don't make a financial commitment, they're not going to take it as seriously as if they do. And some people argue, no, that's not true. And give me all the 14 reasons why that's not the case with human behavior. But the fact of the matter is I like buying stuff because I think people should get paid for what it is they do. I actually do take it more seriously when I buy a book versus if it gets sent to me because there's just something about a level of commitment. But the end of the day, you know, we have to structure and package. So going back to this question, marketing is what you say, who you say it to, what's the offer, what's the list? It's bundling and it's unbundling. It's always impossible to teach, you know, 20 plus years of, of marketing experience over a single podcast if you've not read breakthrough DNA, that's on ilovemarketing.com it doesn't sell anything. It's literally just a report. You go up there, click on the Breakthrough DNA button, opt in, you'll get a PDF, and it goes through. The eight profit activators that Dean originally came up with. We go over before, during and after. So you want to not just look at your business as your business, but there's a before unit which is, you know, get generating leads before someone, you know as they come into your, into your world, into your funnel, into your pipeline. There's the during unit once you start engaging with people and then there's the after unit after somebody has given you money. How do you deliver world class service? How do you orchestrate referrals? And so if you look at all those aspects of your business, there's some area where you probably are doing the best in an area where you're doing the worst. So not everyone is perfect in, before, during and after. And frankly, most people don't even think of it that way. And so, you know, I just wanted to throw that out to give some context and to give some framework. Is there anything else any of you guys would like to say, anyone would like to say to that question?

I'd like to touch on kind of with the selling is sleazy and the stories we tell ourselves. So when this first started hitting, I shut down all my marketing, all my ads, thinking that was a little sleazy.

I don't want to be, you know.

Selling stuff when people are losing their jobs and, and everything was crumbling down and everything. And actually it was on my strategic coach meeting where they, you know, my coach said, dave, I know you, your ads are funny, they're educational, they're uplifting. Like that's, you're pulling it away right when people need it the most. And so you say, you know, convince me that, you know, going on like normal is the best thing you could do for your people and stuff. So I turned it back on and it's like the sales started rolling back in and actually more, you know, and I had, I told myself, well, nobody's fixing their dents in their cars, so nobody's buying dent tools. And that wasn't the case at all. And so it's actually been a really good blessing. But it was that mindset where. So, Joe, you've taught me that if you truly believe you have the best product or service, you're doing your customers a disservice, letting them go somewhere else. And not selling to them, not convincing them to use you.

I mean, whatever it is that you, your business is, whatever it is you're selling, I mean, the number one sales job that we have to do first is the one we do on ourselves. I mean, I think people underestimate the value of marketing. And so the people that don't seem to do well with marketing, they treat it just like this.

Yeah.

You know, kind of do this little marketing thing. And you don't have good marketing, you better have supply and demand on your side or you're not gonna have a business. It's just, that's the reality. That's just the deal. And so like I said, I, I wish we didn't have to work discovering all these interesting ways to compel people to want to do business with us. But the fact is, the better you are at marketing, the more likely. I never made any money in my business because I was good. There's no relationship between being good and getting paid. There's only a relationship between being good, being good at marketing something and getting paid. Because I used to read a bunch of books on positive thinking. I worked really hard. I would like to think I cared about my customers and my clients and I put in a lot of effort and I was competent at what I was doing. And when I was a dead broke carpet cleaner, I worked just as hard cleaning carpets when I was not making money than when I was making money. And what made the biggest difference is I actually learned how to create advertising that worked. And that's, you know, that's the deal.

We all have a service, we all have a business that needs to be marketed right. And marketing isn't really our passion. I mean, maybe for David is, but for most of us love our business. We have something to sell that we love. So spending that 80% of the time marketing versus, you know, 80% of doing your product and 20% marketing is not going to work. You know, you've got to market more. So whether you find that person to do it and help you or, you know, you, you outsource it, however you're going to do it, you have to know that you have to market. There's no option.

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Sam.