Marketing Genius Unveiled: The FIRST Zoom Meetup in Cloudlandia – 10 Years of I LOVE MARKETING!

It took me 20 years, and I've said this many times, it took me 20 years to start to make the psychological shift of think of selling as influence and think of marketing as storytelling. And if you can tell a better story or a more compelling story or a real story that's going to lead someone from where they are to where they want to go first in their minds, then you can, you know, you can enroll people into whatever it is you're offering by that dream. And the goal, of course, is to deliver upon that.

Hey, everybody, I'm Dean Jackson.

And I'm Joe Polish. And welcome to the very first ever I Love Marketing Meetup Group podcast virtual bunch of awesome people.

Cloudlandia edition.

Yes. And I'll tell you real quickly how this ended up in, like, literally just a couple of days. So, Dave and Charlie, you'll see them up there. Where's Dave and Charlie? Charlie, say hello. So everyone can see your face. It'll pop you up on the screen.

Oh, hi, here I am.

That's Charlie and Dave. Where are you?

Hi, Dave. String here.

Okay, thank you, guys. Well, first off, they run the I Love Marketing Meetup Group in Scottsdale, Arizona. They do it the first or the third Wednesday of every month, and they were going to do a virtual one, and they let me know about it, and I said, you know what? Why don't we just do it and invite everybody, right? And so we didn't do a lot of heavy promotions for this. We sent out an email. We wanted to see how this one would come across, and if it was really good, then we'll do more of them. And so that's how this whole thing started. And I want to thank those two. And you guys can. I mean, as far as I'm concerned, we kind of hijacked your I Love Marketing, you know, meetup group, and we turned it into this. And now we have people from London and different parts of the world that are joining and staying up late and everything, which is great. And our goal with all of the I Love Marketing stuff is just to help business owners with their marketing with their businesses. And certainly we're in the middle of some very difficult times for a lot of people. And so we appreciate you all being here. And of course, this is free, so no one's paying for any of this, but we're hoping into this meeting you have a better idea of how to actually charge for your services, how to package your services, your products, your message, what it is, and if anything, I just hope you have some fun. And we're gonna try to make this enjoyable and, you know, just run it like we do in a regular meetup group, which is, you know, what's your problems? What are you trying to work on? And so we have a. We have some questions that my team assembled for me that I. That few of you that have submitted, and we'll make this conversational. Now, before we do that, Dave or Charlie, is there anything you want to say?

Well, I kind of wanted to just mention I grabbed some props here to show people that not just like a small gathering or whatever, Joe's really put a lot of ending and put so much thought into this. There's, like, courses that we've learned. This is the manual that they gave me to learn how to actually run and do the meetup and everything. So I don't know if you can tell how thick that is. And then I've got courses of the podcast in text and stuff. So I've probably studied more for this local meetup than I did in college. I just wanted to point that out that there's so much going into it. And when I first started attending these meetups, I didn't even have a tool company. And, you know, so everything I've learned through marketing and everything has been directly tied back to Joe and Dean. So just wanted to kind of put that out there. And as always, thanks, you guys.

Absolutely. Thank you, man. And you know what? One of the things we've talked about a lot are there's three ways to learn something. You learn through the school of hard knocks. You just go out and get yourself beat up and bloody. The second is you learn through the experiences of other people. You read their books, you attend seminars, you buy courses, things like that.

And.

And the third, and what I consider the most effective way to learn something is you teach it to other people. So we've encouraged people to start I love marketing meetup groups. And when we first started, I love marketing, if this is brand new for some of you, we started this in 2010. We've been doing this for 10 years now. The very first podcast I ever recorded was in 2005 with Alex Mendozian, when no one even knew what the hell a podcast was. But we never made it a consistent thing. I just did it for the cleaning industry. And so me and Dean, you know, we used to have all these conversations about business and marketing, and one day we were saying, you know, wouldn't it be interesting if people just eavesdropped in on the conversation we just had? How useful would that Be for a business owner to hear what me and Dean at the time. Because this is probably the only time we had a useful conversation. It was like 11 years ago.

No.

So we. We had this conversation and it was just really good. And I was like, man, you know, this would be so helpful. So that's where we started. I love marketing. And so we've been doing it for a long time. And, you know, the first few years, we really recommended a lot of people do meetup groups. And there were, you know, over 100 meetup groups all over the world. Every day, people were meeting and just sharing stuff. And I don't know if my screen has changed, but, like, all of a sudden, I disappeared. Can you guys still see me?

Kirk is doing a screen share.

Not sure. Kirk quit doing a screen share.

Yeah.

Is Gina on? I don't have the ability to take that back over.

Yeah, I'll ask Tarna if she can. Like, like, there we go. Yeah. I didn't know. I didn't know what's happening. You know, I'm not smart enough.

Supervision. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's great, though. Anyone that just decides you want to show your screen at any point in time, just feel free. So, yeah, I don't even know what I was saying other than we. We had all these meetup groups that were taking place, and it's a really great thing to do. And so if you actually like what we do tonight and you want to start your own meetup group, you know, we can. We can discuss that. We can help people that want to set them up. It's a really great way to bring community together. And there are many people who've transformed their businesses by starting or attending I Love Marketing meetup groups. Not just listening to the podcast that me and Dean have done. And certainly we've had millions of people that have downloaded I Love Marketing, which makes us really happy. And I'm the first to admit we have done a terrible job of monetizing the I Love Marketing podcast. I mean, we've never taken money for sponsors. We don't really have a sophisticated opt in strategy. Even though Dean Jackson created the Squeeze page back in 1997, many people don't know that. I like saying that about Dean. He invented the squeeze page. We enter your name and email and you go to the next page. And now that's become bazillion different forms of an opt in page. So we've got a guy who I've been doing the I Love Marketing podcast with. It truly is, you know, done stuff in the marketing world, that's phenomenal. So, Dean, why don't you say something and then we'll kind of go through these questions and just help some people out and we'll be super conversational, and I love it.

Yeah, no, I think this, right now, what we're witnessing is the new way that we're all going to gather. I mean, when you start looking, everybody, I'm sure on this call right now has been in more Zoom meetings in the last 30 days than they've been in their entire career up until 30 days ago. And that is the rest of the world. I mean, you know, I'm a guy who does live events and was scheduled. You know, I go all over and do these events in Toronto and London and Amsterdam and in Australia. And I had five events scheduled between March 15 and July 4. And then all of a sudden, every single one of those events is off the table and you start to see. Eventually people became really comfortable with this idea of getting together virtually. And, you know, we've. Joe's had genius network events that have gone flawlessly. You know, I'll say that flawlessly after the few little kinks worked out. But overall, seeing everybody, all gathered from all over the world, the first breakthrough blueprint event I did, we had people with someone from Las Vegas, we had Canada, we had the United States, we had Belgium and Bangkok, all in the boardroom. You know, 10 people in a Zoom meeting that felt like we were all together, felt like we were right there, very intimate kind of gathering. And so I think that people are getting more and more comfortable with this. You're starting to see every. Every late show, every late night talk show host is running the show from home, from their kitchen, from their living room. And everybody is loving. They're having a great time with it, you know, so I think it's. It's one of those periods where we're seeing this mass migration of the more people than ever becoming comfortable with virtual gathering like this. And I think that this is going to become more and more and more popular to the point that it's going to be extremely rare to get people to go outside, to go to a real meeting when you can snuggle up in your pajamas and watch and gather in your home. It's exciting. So I think this is great. You look at that leverage here. We've got hundreds of people on this call. When we do the I Love Marketing Live meetup group, we may have 20 people or 30 people at one meeting. So this is what a great opportunity. I'M excited to be part of it.

Yeah. We've got a few people on here like Steve Sims and Shannon and, you know, of course, Mike and Amber. Amber. We have a lot of people who've been on guest as I love marketing episodes, which is awesome. I don't think there's any question that can be answered, asked tonight, not answered, that someone on the line could not give a really legitimate answer to. Len Hume. Boy, I'm seeing all kinds of friends on here. This is awesome. Look at this. Wow. Is Annette on there? I haven't seen. Where's she at?

I don't know, but we're looking all the way back. I mean, there she is.

Yeah. Oh, wonderful. Hey. Wow. We're talking like piranha members from years ago. They even won. They still have the Corvette that they won in the better your best contest, which is fantastic. So let me say this, too. Certainly, we will answer as many questions as we can tonight as best as we can. And also, I am not going to minimize the difficulty that a lot of people are having in their lives. We have so many people that, you know, their businesses have been decimated. As Erin, who spoke earlier, her book is called Worth it. It's a book on poetry. I love this book. It's amazing. If you guys want to buy it, Erin Matlock, you can get it on Kindle. Buy her book. It's really great. But she helps with suicide prevent. And right now, we're on the cusp of the greatest mental health crisis I think, ever in human history. Suicides are up, child abuse, spousal abuse, addictions, vices, escapism, anxiety, loneliness, depression. I mean, you name it. And so in the midst of this, what does that have to do with marketing? Well, as our friend Richard Rossi says, you know, wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunity. And not that we want there to be pain and suffering, anxiety and bad news. The reality is, though, entrepreneurs are the ones that transform other people's bad news into good news, which is something that my friend Dan Sullivan says. And so it even says it back here, if you can kind of see where my fingers pointing, it says other people's bad news is your good news. And that holds a completely different meaning in the midst of this pandemic right now, because there's now a lot of bad news. And Dan Sullivan wrote a book called the Dan Sullivan Question, and he talks about a DOS conversation, which stands for dangers, opportunities and strengths. And by the way, Shannon Waller, who's think you're the only one from Strategic coach With us. You can speak to this if you want to pipe in. I mean, you're allowed to interrupt during this. I love marketing meetup group because that's what we do at the meetup groups. We just throw things at people and we interrupt. Right, Right, Dave. So what I was going to say was I want everyone to write down dos right now. Dangers, opportunities, and strengths. And I think that was Steve interrupting. So just keep him muted. He's not allowed. He's the one person we don't want talking. But. So, no, we'll have Steve talking in a few minutes. I'd love to hear from him. The dos conversation can be something that could address so many of the questions that were submitted. When people are asking, how do we make an offer right now? What do we say to people? How's things gonna change? Well, what I'm focusing on in Genius Network is the dos of my clients. So that dos, again, stands for Dangers, opportunities and strengths. Your clients always have opportunities. In our case, it's get better clients, make more money, you know, do a better job of conversion, selling your services. Those are some of the things we talk about all the time on. I love marketing, but there's real dangers, like cash flow or lack of business. And then there's psychological dangers, such as, I don't know how to write copy. I don't know how to make an offer. I don't know how to set up, you know, a landing page. So there are. There's. Your DOS of your clients is now changed in the last few weeks as a result of this pandemic. And so your clients, and even you, you don't reach your opportunities if you don't eliminate your real dangers and your psychological dangers. And the way that you help someone overcome their dangers to get to their opportunities is reinforce their strengths. And so if you think of your own dangers, your own opportunities, your own strengths, you can then utilize that to make yourself better and more capable. And I will reference that probably tonight on some of the questions where someone will say, well, how do I figure out what to say? Or how to say it? Or how is retail going to change? Or what's messaging? It's like, well, what's the DOS of your prospects? What's the DOS of your clients? And if you can understand the dos of the marketplace, you're going to be in a much better position to make an offer. I hope that makes sense. You want to say anything that. That, Dean?

Yeah, I mean, that's. You know, it's funny you say that if somebody's Bad news is your good news. When I was growing up playing tennis, a concept that we learned was that every shot makes somebody happy. And if we're playing tennis and I hit the ball out, that's going to make Joe happy. But if he hits the ball out, it's going to make me happy. But the person who's actually got the healthiest view of it is the umpire who looks at the ball, observes that it's out or in, and just has no emotional attachment to it. And you move forward. That's the best thing. Like, if you're in a situation where the things are happening, to be able to assess it quickly and to without getting clingy to what used to work is just assess what's actually the opportunity that we have right now. And what are the strengths that I have to apply to taking advantage of that opportunity. And so you look at the breakthrough blueprint events when live events are canceled. Okay, I can't do that. Let's just move on. That's out of the question. But what can I do? I can do zoom meetings. I went into action. I built out this room in my house. I've got a room that's about six and a half feet by six and a half feet storage. A room in my house. I've got acoustic foam over here. I've got lights back here. I've got these panels behind here. Instant Zoom Studio. Now I can go everywhere in the world, like, and be one push of a button, all the lights come on, everything is ready, and I'm ready to zoom. And that is, you know, being. Taking advantage of rallying my strengths, which are being able to communicate in the boardroom, in the conversations. That's the real valuable part, is being able to communicate and discuss with somebody to find their opportunities so that they can find the marketing breakthroughs in their business. Well, we can do that in a conference room just like this, just as well as we could do it sitting around a boardroom in person. So get, you know, get on with it and kind of re. Retool. And I'm learning now that a lot of people are viewing it as a superior experience to actually having to travel somewhere to get the same kind of experience, the same information.

So, yeah, it's so much more efficient. You know, if you think about not having to go somewhere, you're at your house, you get the information, you can implement it right away.

I love it. I'll tell you, it's so great that right through that door, I'm in my house.

Look, the fact is you're an introvert, Dean, so this is a dream come true for you. But people like interacting with other humans are like, get me the out of the house so I can let go.

You know what I said to Joe? That this is like. It's funny that now it's like, it's socially mandated that people live my preferred lifestyle, that you've got to stay home and you've got to not go around a bunch of people. It's the best ever. I mean, I love people here right now, but I'm going to turn it off and be home and done with it.

Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think what it boils down to is we're all being forced to adapt and be completely thrown out of our comfort zones. Gary Halbert used to say to me all the time, Gary Halbert, those of you that don't know, is the guy I first learned marketing from. He was a really deranged, crazy, brilliant copywriter. And some people submitted questions about, you know, there was one question about if we forgot everything and we could have to start over again learning what we learned. I would do the same exact thing that I did to learn marketing in first place. I would read Gary Halbert, I would read Dan Kennedy, I'd read Robert Collier, I'd read Claude Hopkins. I'd read all the original marketing books. What's that?

I still do. I mean, that's the thing when you reread them now, you know, part of the thing is you. You never step in the same river twice, right? You're reading every time you're reading it now. I've got so many different experiences that amplify the real lesson of what they were saying. Because when you hear something for the first time and you're hearing it theoretically, you get it intellectually and you maybe understand it or you don't, but when you've got a real experience of it, it's kind of like, you know, Mike Tyson says everybody's got a plan till they get punched in the face. Right. Everybody's a theoretical marketer until they've got a big mailing going out with their own money, and it's a different thing.

Yeah. Well, let's go into some questions. And again, Steve Sims, I think you were going to say something earlier, so, I mean, this should be an opportunity for you to set the stage for how this is going to out.

I have nothing of value or sensibility.

To say, well, Steve, so let me. Let me ask you a question, though. You are in the travel industry, which has been decimated Right. And so what are you doing? What are you doing?

No, it's not been. It's not been decimated. It's been stopped. Okay, so there's kind of a psychological difference. And most of us, bearing in mind we don't plan our travel for tomorrow, we plan our travel for, like, six months, for a year, you know, for our anniversary. That shit's still gonna go on. So now is the time where we can actually communicate with all of our clients and go, hey, I know you are home, but it's a great time to dream. Now the money's not coming in from the travel business. I'll be completely honest. I haven't received a century from the concierge business for. Oh, God, Wuhan. Because we know how big it was going to be, but things were slowing down already for us. Now's the time we reach out and go, hey, I know you're making good on your garden, because bearing in mind the people that we're dealing with, and I don't want to be rude, but they're not the people that have lost our jobs at Marshalls or Ross. These are the clients that have normally very good incomes and are now having to live off of some of our savings. So they're going to come out of it and they're going to go again. They're the ones that are making use of the ppp, the sba, all of the other dividends that we can get on the stimulus package. So we can't have them travel, but we can have them dream.

Yeah, no, that's actually good, you know, selling a dream in a lot of ways. Because isn't that pretty much what many. It took me 20 years, and I've said this many times, it took me 20 years to start to make the psychological shift of think of selling as influence and think of marketing as storytelling. And if you can tell a better story or a more compelling story or a real story that's going to lead someone from where they are to where they want to go first in their minds, then you can, you know, you can enroll people into whatever it is you're offering by that dream. And, you know, the goal, of course, is to deliver upon that. I want everyone to write something down early on because some of these questions. I'm going to point back to this. Dean Jackson has this great line where he says, and I'd like everyone to write this down, and many of you have heard it, if you have been listening, I love marketing because we've said it a lot, but a compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. A compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. And Dean, I'm going to ask you to elaborate on that a bit. I'll say it one more time. A compelling offer is 10 times more powerful than a convincing argument. And when you're trying to convince people to buy versus having something that's just compelling, it's a completely different thing. And the analogy that I've used probably a couple dozen times over the last decade on I love marketing episodes, I would always make this analogy and never in a million years did I think it would ever become true. Where I said, if you had. If the world supply of toilet paper evaporated, and many of you remember me saying this, I've been saying it for 20 years. I would say this when I used to use overheads, overhead projectors that were plastic before PowerPoint existed. And I would say, you know, to these carpet cleaners, you know, why do you want to learn marketing? Why do you want to learn how to write advertising? Why do you want to learn emotional copy and create scarcity and have powerful offers and the sense of, you know, urgency and deadlines and all of these different things that we would utilize in marketing testimonials and social proof? I said, if you have a. If the world supply toilet paper evaporated and you had a garage full of toilet paper, you don't need, you know, to have a brilliant sales letter or, you know, in this particular, you don't need a social media following. You don't need to be an influencer. You can literally get a cardboard sign and say, I've got, you know, toilet paper, $50 a roll. And people would buy it from you because you got supply and demand on your side. And humans need toilet paper, which, by the way, I think was invented in the late 1800s. I don't know what the hell they did before then, but nonetheless, so, and then it actually happened. There became a toilet paper shortage, and then you got supply and demand on your side. So if you're in a business where you have supply and demand on your side, and that's what actually happened, now you got to look at. That's a dos issue. Dangers, opportunities and strengths could be taken to toilet paper. Okay, oh my God, we aren't going to have any toilet paper. That's a danger opportunity. Let's go get it. And so the thing is, you can apply this psychology in anything because marketing is really applied psychology. It's what you say, who you say it to. And so Dean so many of the questions we were asked, if people just had a compelling offer, it would solve so much of their issues. But you have to have the best, you know, the best message in the world is useless if you shouted to deaf ears. And as Gary Halbert would say, only the hungriest fish are going to snap at the crappiest bait. So what is a compelling offer? How does someone create it? Because everyone listening, if they had that, it would give them an unfair advantage or just an advantage. So speak to that. Dean.

Well, part of it is like, that's the birth of this concept of more cheese, less whiskers that you're looking at. What is it that your prospects, your clients, your target audience, what is it that they want? What are the people in that audience? What are they compelled by? What are they seeking out? And there's nothing as powerful as tapping into the jet stream of personal compulsion that they're moving towards something. You know, I would say, like, you don't have to. You don't have to convince a mouse to try some cheese. The mouse is seeking it out at all times. It said, you know, you just need to put some out, and it'll come and seek it out and find it. And so often, one of the things that we have that we battle with is trying to convince people that they need to buy your stuff, that they need to give your stuff a try. And so often, if you can just make an offer that lets them experience something for themselves that is so much more powerful than convincing them intellectually that something that would be worth giving a try, because then they still have to take that hurdle of taking a chance on it. And so we use it all the time. I mean, this is a concept that, you know, goes all the way back. I was reading about this years ago about Cyrus McCormick, the guy who invented the reaper in the 1800s. It was.

Explain what a reaper is.

Yeah, I was going to say a mechanical reaper for farming. That was the precursor to all these combines and all these farm equipment that we have now. It was really the first mechanized farming tool, and it allowed one farmer to do the work of 14 men. But the machine was expensive, and the farmers couldn't afford it. So he came up with the idea of. He had no problem convincing them that this was going to be the right thing. They just couldn't. Couldn't pay for it. So he decided what he would do is he would offer the reaper to the farmers for the season, use it for the season, and then pay me from the harvest. And that paved the way to allow the Reaper to spread all over the country. And it was credited as being One of the three greatest, most important things in the 1800s, along with the telephone and the railroad. The Reaper allowed us to advance as a industrial that into the industrial age where we people were able to move out of the fields and into the, into the factories. So we became able to build stuff. But that wouldn't have happened without the compelling offer. The compelling offer of I know this machine's gonna help make me more money and that if I can pay for it with the money that this is going to help me make in the future, even better. So that's a. Whenever you can give somebody an opportunity to do something that is going to, that they'll be able to pay for in the future. That's amazing. If you have something that, if you have something that somebody's going to use again and again and again, that you giving somebody the first experience of it, that's going to convince them that this is the right thing, that it's as good as you say it's going to be. That they have that. We call it that confirmation moment that they experience something and it's as great as they were hoping it was going to be. Now you've got them easily for the rest of their days of buying that. And so that goes all the way back to Claude Hopkins. You know, was in, was introducing the idea of canned beans, pre prepared beans that were pre cooked in a can that you just heat and serve. And that was like, that was un, you know, unimaginable when that was happening. Everybody felt like you had to make your own beans. The housewives took great pride in, in all the effort that it took to properly bake the beans and to make sure that they were soft and not gassy and not all of these things. So what Claude did, he knew it would be a tough thing to convince housewives that beans would be as good in a can as they are when you bake them at home. And he decided in the advertising to give everybody the chance to try baked beans in a can. He ran ads and said, here's take this ad into your grocer. I've set aside cases of these beans for you and I'm going to buy you a can of these beans to try for yourself. You're not going to pay any money. Just take this ad, go in there and let me buy for you the beans. And they would go in and they would try them and then they would be hooked for life. And that would kick Start the, that would kick start the. The bean industry going that way. And so you start to think that his realization that I have used as one of the core go to foundational things that I use all the time. It made me aware that sometimes it's less expensive to get somebody a result than it is to convince them to give you money to get that result. So in the bean situation, it was less expensive to compel somebody to let you buy them a can of beans, to try them so that they could be convinced that they are the best beans that they've ever tasted and become an ongoing customer. Then it would take so much more money through advertising to convince you that the beans are as good and you buy the beans to convince yourself. That's been one of the foundational things that has been the key to a lot of the successes that I've had. And so I'm always, it always seems so simple when you, you've probably heard me say that again and again that, you know, sometimes it's less expensive to get the result for someone than it is to convince them to give you money to get.

Yeah.

And that.

And that pretty much is a compelling offer. And I mean, if someone really understands the psychology of what you just explained, explain it. That alone can change the entire positioning of what they do and how they do it. Because, you know, marketing is really positioning. It's really how you set it up. And you know, Shannon, did you want to say anything about dos or anything in particular or any. Or just, you know, tell a dirty joke? I mean, what you're into.

No, that's more Steve's territory than mine.

Okay.

Family's not wearing pants. Just saying. The thing about dos that's really interesting when you're asking about people's dangers, their opportunities and their strengths is that you have to be willing to ask questions you don't know the answer to. And I think that's where a lot of people get stuck. Often we're used to asking, I'm going to say, somewhat formulaic questions where we think we know. And this is one where you really have to suspend your own self interest and really just listen. You know, collaborative way talks about generous listening and just knowing that you don't know the answers. But, but frankly, those are by far the most interesting conversations. And out of that you'll understand what's most important to them, helping them summarize that, reflecting it back to them. They're going to find that conversation with you almost one of the most impactful, best conversations they've had. We also tend to put a future based question around it called the R factor, which is part of the Dan Sullivan question. And right now, people's timeframes are different. Normally we ask a three year based question, but it could be, you know, a year from now or 90 days from now, what have you. But you know, relative to that future, what are you worried about, what are you excited about and what are you confident about? Because those are the emotions. You know, the whole thing about, you know, a compelling argument is, you know, it has to be something where it's going to hit them at their heart, not just their head. And DOS is. Sorry, DOS is definitely the best way to do that because they're all emotion based questions. What are you worried about, what are you excited about and what are you confident about? But I. Now is the point you made earlier. People's DOS has changed. And assuming that we know what it is means that we're probably for sure going to be wickedly tone deaf in what we're offering them. And when you actually get current with people's dos, which is what a lot of coach clients know to do, they're just having incredibly rich conversations and new possibilities are opening up, new ways of value creation. It's kind of spectacular, but it means flipping from what you already know to what you don't know and being comfortable in creating that conversational opportunity for people. So that's what I would say to.

Add Joe, that's awesome. Love it. Love it. So here's what I want to do then with that set up, I think we should go in and answer some questions that people have and then we can talk. And then Charlie and Dave, if me and Dean get stuck, then you are responsible for jumping in and making us look smart. And that sort of. All right, just so you guys know.