Increase Your Marketing Capabilities With Dan Sullivan, and Joe Polish - I Love Marketing #408

You will become successful. You can become a very good salesperson. You can make a lot of money with sales, but you're limited because you can't multiply yourself. And what the equation is that allows you to multiply yourself is marketing, okay? Because marketing is everything that happens that doesn't require your presence, but is still making a sale. Okay? And so that's the real distinction here.

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I have to tell you, I've been around marketing and advertising and selling my whole life, and I don't think in one organized package there's greater wisdom, greater insight, more usable suggestions on how to market anywhere in the world. That would even compare to I love marketing. Two of the brightest people I've ever met in the area of marketing. And it's not theory, you know, this stuff just works. I mean, if you just do what they tell you to do, it works. And, you know, which to me, I mean, you go to Harvard and study marketing for four years and what you would get is some of the top theories in the world about marketing. Or you could listen to I love marketing. And you actually, you can skip the tuition, you know, you can skip the tuition. This is just the greatest marketing stuff in the world, you know, and both Dean and, you know, they're very open about the fact of who they've learned from, you know, like Dan Kennedy and all the other great people that you've learned from. So they're very open. Nobody invented the sun, you know, I mean, we inherited it from other people, but these are great ideas. So if you're going to have a great discussion about I love marketing, you got to start with the actual ideas that are in the program. So on an ongoing basis, there's ideas in every single module, every single podcast. But what they've done is that they've actually summed it up there. And this is a phenomenal structure that Dean and Joe have actually created. And there's another structure that goes along with this. And if you think of a matrix, so there's one side of the matrix that has the eight profit activators coming down the side, and there's another matrix that goes across the top, and that's before, during, and after. So basically, you've got the equivalent of 24 ideas. Okay? You've got the, you know, you've got each of the eight things before, each of the eight things during each of the eight things, and because each of these. So right off the bat, you've got the potential for 24 great ideas to actually talk about. So I can see, you know, as you guys continue with the podcast, but these discussion groups start, there's going to be this incredible intelligence that's actually going to form, and there's going to be people out in these discussion groups who are going to come forward, and they've got a slant on things that you've never seen before, you and Dean have never seen before. And they're going to come up with connections that the two of you never made before, but you gave them the intellectual structure so they could have their experiences and actually create the connections.

Yeah, it's a fascinating opportunity, and it's something that I love doing. And also, one of the things that me and Dean really want to do is, for lack of a better word, rebrand the way that people think of marketing. Because marketing is not respected anywhere near the level that I feel it could and should be. And the biggest obstacle, because there's a lot of obstacles to why people don't get success with marketing, and one of the biggest is they simply don't place enough value on it. They don't quite understand that it doesn't matter how good your product or service is or what it does until somebody buys it. And that there's no relationship between being good at what you do and getting paid for what you do. The getting paid for what you do is called marketing. And marketing is way beyond just selling something. Everybody markets. Anyone that's ever gotten a date, you did some sort of marketing. Anyone that's ever gotten anything all day long, people are marketing. They're positioning themselves, they are presenting themselves, they are persuading or they're repelling people. And, you know, because part of marketing is. Is repelling. Part of it, though, is you want the repelling to be your choice, not because you don't know what the hell you're doing.

Conscience repelling.

Exactly.

You know that it's actually the fact that they were a great salesperson that gave them the confidence to go out and be an entrepreneur in the first place. They know if they were in front front of somebody, they could actually get a check. And not everybody can do that. That's not given to everybody that they have the confidence and the ability to actually be in front of someone and get that person to write them a check. It's actually quite a fairly small percentage of the human race that actually has the confidence and the ability to actually do that. But what it requires is your presence. So you're limited that unless you can actually be present in front of people to actually sell, then you'll become successful, you can become a very good salesperson, you can make a lot of money with sales, but you're limited because you can't multiply yourself. And what the equation is that allows you to multiply yourself is marketing. Because marketing is everything that happens that doesn't require your presence, but is still making a sale. Okay? And so that's the real distinction here. So a lot of the, you know, the entrepreneurs that I have in the program make well over a million dollars, $2 million, $3 million personal income, but they're still trapped because there isn't any. They are the brand, and there's nothing bigger than them. There's nothing, nothing that actually is bigger than them. So when they're not there, nothing happens. And what they're seeing now, because of the amazing breakthroughs in technology and what we can do to get the message out to the world night and day, to many, many strangers, and preconditioning the marketplace to be very favorably disposed towards your value creation proposition, your message. We have this amazing explosion now of marketing capabilities so that a single individual with a bright idea and just a desire to create some sort of result of it in the world can actually, with a very small company, actually become a very, very large marketing entity out in the marketplace. These are two guys who get on the phone, you know, and basically they've created a worldwide movement called I love marketing. Well, you couldn't do that 20 years ago, you couldn't do it 10 years ago. The technological means were not there to multiply themselves. So you're hitting this. I notice that a lot of you are, you know, a lot of you are not as old as I am. And the beautiful thing about this age right now is that you're hitting the sweet spot in history right now for individuals being able to multiply themselves. But you have to have an intellectual structure for doing it. You can't just go out there willy nilly. There has to be, there has to be a process, there has to be a structure. So that's really what I'm seeing now. And that's all pure entrepreneurism, what we're talking about here. I started coaching in 1974, and I've spent roughly about 30, 40,000 hours in discussions with entrepreneurs about what works and what doesn't work. So I truly believe that if you're just starting out right now, you could not start out with a finer way of getting your head really, really filled with the right ideas and the right techniques than what Joe and Dean. It's a real gift to the world.

I've mentioned this many, many times and over the years I talk about difference between selling and marketing. Those of you that have never heard me say this, Selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get yourself on the phone or face to face with them or on your website, however you want to position it, so that people are pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and pre disposed to give you money. And so marketing is selling in advance. And if you do your marketing right, selling becomes easy and ideally unnecessary because you have accomplished so much of the rapport building in an elf manner, easy, lucrative and fun versus a half manner, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. So basically like you were saying earlier, it doesn't even matter if someone's making, you know, millions of dollars, they're still limited if they're the guy or gal. And so no matter how great of a salesperson you are, you're limited by the clock. However, the first job of the entrepreneur is to go out and get checks. When I was a little kid, my father used to, he was a locksmith and he had a locksmith shop and he used to prop me up on the counter and I used to smile and I was smiling all the time and I was crying inside. But anyway, I would smile and people would like come up and give me money. I mean, so I mean, whatever I was, my sales pitch was it's still working. It's amazing how long you can drag the shit out.

That's the fundamental structure of your life.

However, as I become an adult, you know, I really, you know, the fact is making the sale one time, the transaction is one thing, but the relationship is far more important because there's more money to be made in relationships than there are in transactions. And so, you know, people that don't respect selling and even see themselves as salespeople have a really difficult time transitioning into becoming a great marketer. So one of the first things that you need to know how to do is you need to sell. And so I, you know, and Gary Halbert had this great way of breaking complexity down, as do you. And, and he said there's three things you need in order to sell. You need a product or service is the first thing. The second thing is you need A sales pitch. And the third thing is a delivery system. And what I learned is that most people in business, including myself before I actually learned direct response marketing, which is the type of marketing that I love. Marketing is all about direct response, meaning instead of just getting your name out there, which is what brand building, image, advertising, institutional advertising, Most of the advertising and marketing they teach in college is about getting your name out there. Direct response is about getting your name out there and getting a response back. And so when I first started learning this, when Gary said, there's three things you need. You need a product or service. You need a sales pitch. You need a delivery system. Most business owners focus on what it is they sell their product or service, and how do we tell other people about it. Do we do that through the yellow pages? Do we do that through TV or radio? Do we do that through postcards, direct mail, the Internet, social media, Twitter, mobile marketing, whatever. But if you have a lousy sales pitch or a lousy marketing message, you're just going to be delivering not that effective of a message. Part of great marketing is being able to tell the story, communicating it in a compelling manner. No matter how many times I would tell people that, I would find people constantly having this negative perspective of selling, like, selling is a bad thing. And so one day I asked Dan years. It was probably like five or six years ago at this point, I said, dan, what's your definition of selling? Is getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. And so when I first heard that, I was like, wow, man, that is, like, really profound. This is a really important distinction. And, you know, I think about half of you here in the room probably are familiar with that and have heard me talk about it. But I got it from Dan. And the reason I wanted to bring it up here is because this definition actually changed my life, and it's changed the life of many of our clients when I allow them to actually discuss it and go deep with it. So definition of selling, getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. What do you think are the most important words in this definition?

What is that?

Take action.

Emotionally take action. From the standpoint of doing ethical selling or ethical marketing, what are the most important words good for them? Exactly. See, because if you say getting someone intellectually engaged in a future result and getting them to emotionally commit to take action to Achieve that result? Well, we see that all the time. McDonald's does a great job with Happy Meals, right? And you ever seen a beer commercial? The closest to reality you're ever gonna see. Good looking people all happy, no one's drooling on each other. I mean, that shit looks like, you know, they don't show the next, you know, the next day when they're hungover and hammered and they slept with someone they probably shouldn't have slept. You know, stuff like that. There's all kinds of marketing that is done to get someone intellectually emotionally engaged in something destructive like watch this pornography, smoke this cigarette, eat this crappy food, drink this soda, which is. That is liquid Satan. You know, things like that. So what I started doing is I started like posing this question to people at some of my events. And I would ask them, you know, what are the most important words here? And I said, okay, so let's say. And again, all this came from Dan. How many of you in the room have ever eaten at a restaurant, read a book, or gone to a movie and you liked it so much that you told someone else about it and they actually either ate at the restaurant, read a book, or went to the movies? Anyone ever had that experience?

Yeah.

Okay, so all of you, how many of you have an experience like that? Like weekly? Right? Okay, now, so everyone here is effective at selling. It's just a matter of your ability to persuade. Everything is selling. And so the bigger question is if you actually how many of you have products or services, whatever it is that you sell, whatever your entrepreneurial endeavor is, how many of you have something that creates value for other human beings? Okay? And how many of you feel that you would be able to impact the world in great ways if only you were to engage intellectually and emotionally more people into that bigger future which involves your stuff? Okay, so what is the vehicle? How do you do that? Marketing and selling? That is the old. That is the only vehicle. You can sit and you know, you can read the secret and you can wish and hope. You know, maybe to a certain degree, you know, attention and all that's good, but, you know, getting your. Getting off your ass and actually communicating something. I had a. I went to a restaurant once and there was like a little sugar packet. And I don't know why, I have a weird brain. I remember certain things and many things that help. And there was a sugar packet and it had a little caption that said advertising. And the quote was, he who has something to sell and whispers in a well is not as apt to make the shiny dollar as the guy who climbs a tree and hollers. And I thought, that's pretty cool, you know, because if you have something to share with the world, you have to get it out there. You got to put your message out there. And the way that you do that is you sell. And so part of it is, first off, really having a true respect and appreciation for selling. And salespeople are looked down upon by bureaucrats and by corporations, and in many cases, what they're. See, people love to be sold. They hate to be pressured. And so people confuse manipulating somebody in a bad way with selling. How many of you have ever had a friend, be it a family member, someone that was in trouble or was going down a path that really wasn't all that good for them? It could have been behaviorally, it could have been buying something that you had a bad experience with that you really stepped in and you started saying, talking to them, listening, doing whatever you needed to do in order to persuade them. How many of you ever done that? Okay, so when you think of some of the greatest salespeople in the world, who comes to mind? You, Me?

Children.

Children, Yep, exactly. Is there any child? Name some individual that you think of is like, when you think of a salesperson, what's the first person that pops up?

Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs.

Jesus. Jesus. Yeah. Willie Mays. Billy Mays. Billy Mays, Yeah. He was awesome.

Walt Disney.

Walt Disney, yeah. Was Gandhi a great salesman? Mother Teresa. Martin Luther King. Clinton. Yeah. Now, here's the thing.

Hitler.

Was Hitler a great salesman? Yep. Now, he got people intellectually engaged in a future result of murdering people. However, he was persuasive. So you see, it's not the selling or the marketing that's bad. It's the application of it. Marketing is like a gun. You can use it to go out and hunt for food, or you can use it to rob people. And unfortunately, people have a negative connotation towards it because everyone's had an experience where someone talked them in. It's like the used car salesperson sort of, you know, belief that someone has. You're going to walk into a car lot and some sharks going to come after you. However, every great thing in life, every innovation would not exist if someone was not incentivized for selling it. And so the carpet, the shoes, the clothes, lights, the Internet, all of that exists because some salesperson out there, some entrepreneur, was taking resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level. And my way of being entrepreneurial is actually making people more capable in the area of marketing, so they're more effective at communicating. And therefore, the way that I can impact the world is I just help people that already have great products and services to actually use more effective means of marketing, communicating it. And that's what I love marketing is all about. And more than anything, I would love to have everyone, even if it's just like, you know, 5%, you know, if you had a 5% more appreciation for marketing, how much would that change your income? How much would that impact the way that like, let's think about that. If you just. If you increase your marketing capabilities by 5%, just 5%. I'm not talking doubling, tripling, quadrupling 5%. Marketing is not an event. Sales is not an event. It's a process. And just like learning, you know, there's only so much that we can cover on one episode of I love marketing or one I love Marketing meetup group. But if you make the whole process of developing your skills as a better marketer, things are going to continually get better and better and better because it really is about consistency.

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