Marketing Wins and Roadblocks | Joe Polish & Dean Jackson

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

That's right, no expense is spared to bring you into I Love Marketing with Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. Today's topic is marketing wins and roadblocks. I honestly believe that you really can't have a marketing win without a roadblock sometimes. That's why we put these 2 together. We emailed many of you the opportunity, if you were on the right list, we emailed you the opportunity to submit some of your roadblocks and wins, and we'll be chatting about them. But we wanna start simply with Joe. I would love to hear a marketing roadblock you've had in the last 6 months and a win you've had in the last 6 months. And then we'll go to Dean with the same thing and then we'll go from the audience. And, um, we've got some that were sent in, but if you, uh, if you have an amazing one, put that in the chat as well and we'll see what happens. Joe, roadblock and a win.

Just learning, uh, about AEO, uh, answer engine optimization versus SEO and changing and shifting things. But luckily I have very smart people in Genius Network and people in my network, because that's kind of what I do. I connect people. And so I'm learning a lot of stuff of positioning and just making the transition. Another roadblock is myself. And what I mean by that is there are so many things now that can be assisted with AI. And when you have done— the analogy I use is if you were a lumberjack for 30 years of your life and then someone invents a chainsaw, And then all of a sudden you realize, well, an ax is an inefficient way to chop down a tree when there's a chainsaw. But now with AI, there's like 10 million lightsabers that can take down multiple trees and it's never-ending. The biggest roadblock is just letting go of the way we used to do things in the past and adopting that. So, but I think I'm managing it quite well and we're doing some pretty incredible stuff, which of course, some we may talk about that today. So that would be my version of a roadblock, mostly my own self-imposed limitations because I have not yet gotten my habits instilled in a way that allows me to just new game. Let's try it this way. Now forget all the— sometimes starting with a beginner's mind is the greatest way to get through roadblocks. The curse of knowledge. can be detrimental if you are attached to it.

I think that's a great analogy, the chainsaw. If you're a lumberjack and you've been chopping down trees, to think about AI is really exactly that. It's just a technology. It's an amazing technology. But the bottom line is if you're a lumberjack and you get a chainsaw, it's going to allow you to chop down more trees, of the same size that you've been chopping, or it might make you more ambitious that maybe you could chop down some bigger trees because you don't have the limit to what your personal capability is. I look at it as an amplifier like that. That's a good one.

No, thank you.

Thank you. What about you, sir?

Well, the thing I was asked about AI stuff is the question that I was followed up with is, to what end? And I think that what you were saying about, that's why I think the chainsaw is a good example because the core thing, a chainsaw is not useful unless you're chopping down more trees with it. And the same thing with AI is to what end? What are we doing with AI? What is this allowing us to do? And it still comes down to the bankable results, the end results of, are we getting more leads?

Yeah.

Are we converting those leads into appointments? Are we making more sales? Are we helping people get more results? And are we building long-term relationships and getting referrals with people? Those are all the bankable results that we could say, to what end are we applying AI rather than just learning the tool? Learning how to operate a chainsaw is only going to be so useful.

You could be an expert chainsaw operator, but someday you got to Like anything else, it's out of all the things you could do, you only need a few tools in your toolbox and how do you deploy them in the most intelligent ways? And of course, like most driven entrepreneurs, their ambitions can cause them so much internal angst and chaos. And as my friend Dave Kekich said, the world's highest achievers live with the highest levels of dissatisfaction. And the thing we've talked about all the time in Genius Network is the best thing about being your own boss is you're your own boss. The worst thing about being your own boss is you're your own boss. And so getting some direction, but you take Free Recorded Messages as an example. Both me and you relied heavily on education-based marketing and we still do. In a lot of ways, I love marketing as a podcast, The way this started, many of you that have been with us, and there's quite a few people that have literally from the very beginning when we first started this in 2010, so 16 years ago, we have a few people that are on here that have been listening to I Love Marketing when we started it 16 years ago. And I Love Marketing helped launch so many other podcasts. We always tell the funny story of arguing with Tim Ferriss before we were interviewing him on one of the podcasts why he should start a podcast. He's like, I don't want to start a podcast. I think I— It's a lot of work.

About his blog.

Yeah, yeah, it is. And like, but yeah, but you have a ton of people that read your blog and, and of course, uh, we've tried endlessly to find the original unedited recording so we could find that initial conversation. But you know, there's, there's so many people that have started I love whatever podcasts or platforms and stuff. But me and Dean were talking and it was around maybe the end of 2009 and we had this really killer conversation of just, you know, what we were doing in our businesses, marketing. And I'd said, you know, could you imagine if other people heard what we had just talked about for the last hour, other business owners, how valuable would that be to other people just to listen in on this conversation? And the reason a lot of people don't love marketing is they've not been able to figure out how to make it work. And the original website I registered was ihatemarketing.com because I was like, let's try to take people that just have not had success with marketing. They don't like it. They hate that they have to do it, which All of us need to do marketing unless you're in a situation where you're the only person in the world that has the product, service, experience, offer, solution, cure of anyone else, then you don't have to do marketing. However, if you have competitors or people don't quite know what you do, you have to do marketing. So one of my and Dean's objectives, and we did this and you can go back and look at the original reviews that people would put on I Love Marketing. And I said, let's not try to sell anything. So Paul just showed the housekeeping rules and suggestions that Anna and Chrishell, who are on our team, originally put together for us. So I wanna give credit to them. And 'cause we, every once in a blue moon, someone just pops on one of these things to be a problem, pain in the ass person, and they start pitching their shit. And so, but it's, most people are just really cool and awesome, which would be every single one of you. 'Cause I haven't seen the jerk yet. So that being said, I said, let's not try to sell anything. Let's just deliver and talk about stuff that's better than what people are paying for. And let's see what happens. And let's not mention any promotional stuff of any kind of what we do, what we sell, even though like that's where people are coming to I Love Marketing to figure out how to market and sell what it is that they do. I go, let's just give pure value. Let's educate people on marketing. And we created the, you know, this whole model about how we did that, which you can download, Breakthrough DNA. But we didn't even promote our own stuff on the first episodes of I Love Marketing for a while. And then people, I said, let's not promote anything until people start to complain. And then finally, like someone made a post saying, I don't understand what you guys are doing here. You teach all this stuff on marketing, but then you never try to sell us anything. And it became this whole new model of like, here's a good way to sell, just demonstrate value. And the reason I bring it up is if you become really valuable and useful to enough people, they will simply want to do business with you because of that. Now, if you need to pay the rent, if you need to make payroll, you can't obviously live on that. So, you know, I Love Marketing was never our core business. That's why other people have gone off to build giant podcasts, because it was always something that we never took sponsorship even though we've been offered it hundreds of times. We've done this more as a hobby to kind of keep ourselves sharp and just to talk to people and do things. And there are many people that have become millionaires that have never bought anything from either me or Dean simply from listening to the I Love Marketing episodes and stuff. So the reason I bring that up today, I wanted Dean, I want you to give that framing that We did it at a $100K meeting, one of my $100K groups on the last year where we talked about the signature result. What's the signature result that you produce? And as Paul presents questions and stuff, I want to deliver the framing where you think about it this way. Whatever someone is asking us today, how does it apply to your business? Ask yourself, how do I put— not, oh, this won't work for me.

Yeah.

But more how could it work for me? And what is your signature result? And then Dean will explain like how to think about if you could not charge for what it is that you deliver as a product or a service or an experience or whatever it is that you're offering to the marketplace, unless someone got a result or an outcome first, how would that change the way you think about it? So that's the framing I want you to deliver, Dean, because you're really good at explaining it. And I think it's pretty profound the way, if you do a good job today explaining it. And then Paul, we'll get into some questions and that everyone leaves here with a lot more direction on your business, no matter what technologies or AIs that are out there. We want to give you a little bit of some superpower. So, so go ahead, Dean.

Well, that concept of a signature result is a way of framing is what's the thing that you can do that excites you, that you have the best outcomes with, and that you would, if you were to set up a provocation for yourself. If I asked people, what would you do if you only got paid if your client gets a result? That points you in the direction of the thing that you absolutely know how to create for people. Every time that you are exchanging with people in an economic exchange. At its core, it's somebody giving you money for a good or a service, and we all hope to deliver an amazing utility outcome for people. And I love starting that way by getting crystal clear on what is it that you Would be able to do? I often say it in another way too, is what would you be able to do for somebody if they would just get out of the way and let you do it? Because so often we may have, you go through life with a fire hydrant of value that you could create for somebody, but you're forced to meter it out through the garden hose of the constraints of your current pricing model or the what you think people can afford to pay for something. And you've got way more value that you could add for people than what you're able to convert into a transaction. And if you were to— people, what I discovered by asking that question of what would you do if you only got paid if you get the result is that allows you to think silently Just kind of asking yourself, it's a great provocation to work in your journal and say, what would I do if I only got paid? Like, just kind of explore that idea because do you even know what people are paying you for? What do they expect that they're getting for what they're paying you for right now? And when you, it's a very interesting thing because if you look at what your current ability, your capability to create a result for people entails, then you layer that and look at what is your capacity for that. If that's the thing, if your thing is creating a model where you are delivering an outcome for people, certainly there are some Constraints on that in terms of if it's a service, there's some labor constraints on that. If it's a product, there's some manufacturing constraints on it. But what is the actual like capacity of what you could do if you were firing on all cylinders? Asking yourself, how high is high? You've heard me. I tell the story about Gamal Aziz. Who took over the MGM Grand Hotel. And the question that he asked himself always is, how high is high? He started looking. And by the way, all these clues are in your P&L right now. If you look at the line item revenue contributors to your P&L and you just ask yourself the question, how much, how high is high with this particular thing? So he looked at restaurants, gaming, hotel rooms, conventions, retail, entertainment, And he went down the list and he knew because he would stand in the portico of the MGM Grand night after night and he'd see people getting in limos and he'd ask them, where are you going tonight? And they'd say, we're going to Spago or we're going to Nobu or we're going to Cirque du Soleil. They're going somewhere from the largest hotel in the world to go somewhere else. And he realized— They had a restaurant in the hotel that was doing $4 million a year, profitable. Everybody loved it, was happy with it. But he knew that if we had a celebrity destination restaurant in this same footprint, that we could be doing $8 million a year. And in his mind, he booked that gap as a loss. And he said, we're losing $4 million a year because of our profitable $4 million restaurant. And he went to the board, got them to agree. They ripped out the restaurant, rebuilt, partnered with Michael Mina, opened up Nob Hill, and first year out, they did $11 million in sales. And when you look at, that's just the first thing that he did. But when you down those line items for yourself and you start to ask yourself, how high is high here? And then what is that? You have your capability and your capacity and the gap between what you're capable of and what you're actually doing is, I made up a term for it that I call it your cap gap. Your cap gap is the capability and capacity gap that you are Losing right now? You're losing money on these by not having that filled out. And that gives you a really good place to start from because now at least you know what is the signature result that I'm able to create. And then you go and look at who is the best person to do this. And that's where Before you even start.

Well, there you go. That was pretty darn valuable. You know, like the one thing I would have conversations with Gary Halbert about when it relates to the making of money, you know, we would talk about Operation Money Suck. You know, what are the, what are the things that you can do to set up your business to make as much money, especially when you need it? And those of you that didn't know Gary Halbert, Gary was the guy that I originally started reading that Exposed me to direct response marketing. I ended up becoming really close friends with him. And he was— I never met another person that had hundreds of millions of dollars in his life go through his hands and he never saved a penny of it. He was— and when he was in his 60s, I was like, Gary, what— you know, and I'm in my like late 20s and I'm like, Gary, what the hell is wrong with you? And like, how can you make so much money and not have anything to show for it? Because there are a couple times where I literally had to loan him money to pay his rent. It was the most ridiculous thing. And he said, I'm an edge walker, Joe. He's like, this is how I've always been. And which of course is a really— looking back at it now, I didn't understand it at the time, but it was a really good alibi and a really bizarre form of learned helplessness. Well, I just can't do this thing.

It's also, it's ADHD. I'm, I'm recognized that now that that's exactly what that, what that was.

Oh, is that why I had to loan you money for rent this month, Dean? Is that what— That's right.

That's exactly right. And I thank God for you.

The reason I bring up Gary is that, you know, people have this, I can't learn marketing, I can't make marketing work. And it's been one of the biggest roadblocks that I think we have, you know, do our best to help, help, help people with. But he said, One thing though, that like Gary was so brilliant though. I mean, he truly, there are so many people that became skilled at marketing because of him. And he said, you're in the arithmetic business. The business that you're really in is the arithmetic business. So however you want to look at it, if you can identify where is that gap that because you're doing things a certain way, what do you need to creatively destroy in your business or in your life that opens you up to have a breakthrough? Because in order to have breakthrough, You typically have to break something. And that oftentimes is your mindset. That's sometimes the business model you're in. That's sometimes getting rid of people in your life that you're no longer aligned with and that are holding you down, or adding people to your life that will bring in capabilities you don't currently have, or utilizing AI in a particular way that'll give you leverage versus being used by it. And I think with technology, most people don't use technology, it uses And that's just kind of the way the world works. And in any industry, if you look around, you know, 5% of people make all the money, the other 95% scrape around for the crumbs. I mean, that's just how most business industries work. And so in order for you to excel at the top, you know, there has to be effective marketing, there has to be the deliverables that are done in such a way that people are super happy and they keep doing business with you and tell other people about you. And It's packaged uniquely. So, it's all how we bundle and unbundle everything. Like TK, let's talk to TK real quick. You have this great product on hydrogen water. There's probably a lot of different hydrogen waters that are out there, but one's ability to package it and deliver it are going to make all the difference in the world. But, let's first talk not as marketers, but just what do you actually sell, TK, and why should Why should people care about what it is you sell? And then, after we go through this rant, Paul, let's go through the list of questions that we have from people. I'm putting you on the spot. I know you weren't expecting me to do it.

Oh, TK loves it. TK loves it.

Oh, thank you, Joe. Yeah, we have molecular hydrogen water. And, our goal was through the metaphysics of water, how do we raise the vibration of water to its greatest vibe to help people raise their own vibration and go through their own spiritual journey, but also providing them with the best from the hydrogen and the purest of the water.

So, what are the obstacles that you have? What's your biggest marketing obstacle with selling it and getting people to understand that? And, by the way, what kind of doctor are you? Let's first establish a certain level of credibility? What qualifies you to advise people that they should drink a particular type of water? And what's your obstacle with getting the world to know about that?

I'm a pharmacist, and I have a degree in functional anti-aging regenerative medicine with the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine. The biggest obstacle is getting the information across. The water takes a little bit of education for people to understand about the information and the theory that goes into with water carrying memories and all that stuff.

Got it.

Got it.

What I want you to test too is I want you to take your biggest marketing challenges and I want you, because I don't charge for it, is askjopolish.com. All my books, all my videos, lots of stuff have been uploaded. So, I have people writing business plans using my AI clone, to give them advice. Someone just sent me a message that she just laid out a whole platform for her TED Talk just using astropolish.com. So, try it.

Awesome. Yeah.

And, how many different waters are out there in the marketplace that are vying for everyone's attention? Here I am drinking like this. I grabbed the one water. It's in a glass bottle because I try not to do plastic, right? Icelandic. But, how many waters? Do you even know how many different waters there are in America as an example?

There's probably hundreds that are competing for room on the shelves and stuff like that. And most of them, some of the biggest obstacles that we go through is getting into like shelf space. So then you're competing against Pepsi and Coca-Cola who owns the subsidiaries of the other brands, and then they own the shelf space.

Yeah. And when I used to consult with Bill Phillips, and I was just texting with him last night, literally. So I'm still in touch with Bill for 31 years later. That's how long I've known Bill Phillips. And when he had EAS and I was his marketing consultant, we would talk about, in advertising they would say mindshare, and in his world back then it was stomach share. How much of a human stomach can a particular company have a share of? And this is the sort of conversations that go on at Coca-Cola or Pepsi or McDonald's. I mean, and it's unfortunate because a lot of the companies just sell poisonous toxic shit that they want put in people's stomachs. But that's literally how you think about how does your product or service fit into the lives of people that are going to give you money for it? And how does it enhance their life in a way to where they not only will keep giving you money for whatever it is that you're offering them, but they will tell other people about it so those other people will start, in your case, drinking your water or going to Disneyland if you own Disneyland or whatever the thing is. So just some food for thought, I guess, or beverage for thought. All right. So Paul, let's go into some questions.

Yeah.

By the way, I'll do this too, TK. Me and Dean are allowed to point out people and say, if you want to put a link for your product in there that people want to order to find it, feel free to put that in the chat. At times we'll do shoutouts to friends and stuff. So go ahead and do that. So go ahead, Paul.

But Cliff says, I'm newish to entrepreneurship and business ownership, getting out of the employee mindset. What's the best way to get clarity in this? I have a handful of ideas, some around relationships, others around implementation, but what would you do in order to cut through the noise to get to implementation faster, smarter, easier? And I'm going to do a little bit of editing here. I'm going to say to get to the noise, easier, lucrative, and more fun. We'll start with Dean and then we'll go to Joe, but on newest entrepreneurship, best way to get clarity, go Dean.

This is like, you set this up. This is classic. What would you do if you only got paid if your client gets a result? What is the signature result that you're able to create? That's the most important question that you could ask. I'd be curious to see in that transition where people get stuck is trying to pick a direction, trying to pick an option, and they start thinking about, well, how do we cut through and how do we get to people? Well, it depends how good your product is. I always think about Chris Rock very famously in one of his specials said, nobody sells crack. Crack sells itself. And that's exactly the way that you want people to think about your product is what is the crack version of your product that people would be lining up outside your door to get some at 2 in the morning? And so, but I think that goes a long way. The only thing, the thing that you should look at defining for yourself is completely— I can't tell you how many times I've mentioned Joe's book, What's in It for Them, that that model of thinking should be completely ingrained in you because what it does is you are absolutely in alignment with the number one thing that every person in the world is thinking about. themselves. So if you get online with that, it's like when magnets, when you're thinking about yourself, how can I get people to buy my stuff? And people are thinking about themselves, how can I get these things? When you're on opposites, there's that magnetic repulsion field that's there. But when you are aligned and turn your magnet around, to latch onto what they want, it's immediately the bond is cemented and very difficult to pull apart. So the meta wisdom of aligning yourself with somebody else's desires is it's magnetic. It's because that's what everybody else is thinking about. Nobody's waking up thinking, how can I help this guy do more business? As a customer, nobody's thinking that. They're all thinking about themselves. And we are, we're all very selfish, all of us.

Well, speak for yourself, you very selfish human.

Yeah.

No, but yeah, people operate from their own self-interest and that's why you gotta ask what's in it for them, right? Because no one's gonna, I mean, look, there, there's some people that based on upbringing or whatever will bleed for others and will sacrifice everything and they will not, they'll give away the farm instead of really caring for themselves. But there's different layers of human greed, ambition, motivation, ethics, integrity, behavior, et cetera, et cetera. One thing I want to speak to with what Cliff said is, I'm newish to entrepreneurship and business ownership, getting out of the employee mindset. What's the best way to get clarity? I have a handful of ideas, some around relationships, others around implementation. What would you do in order to cut through the noise to get to implementation faster, smarter, easier? I mean, I am a highly distracted person, so for me to pretend like I have some modicum of skill at being focused would be an absolute joke. I've had to learn how to live my life having a monkey mind and creating architecture and scaffolding and tricks and people to help me and all kinds of things. And I still suck at time management because it's really not about managing time, it's about managing priorities, and it's really about managing energy. For one, don't miss the fundamentals. Eat good food, drink water, get sunshine. Don't stay glued in front of screens all day that will scramble your brain. Have a health regimen in place to the best of your abilities. Get sleep because you can't focus if you are not a fit animal as well. Now, some people can, but you'll function always better if you are coming from a healthy environment, healthy people, doing something that you feel really good of. Like, I would do everything that I do today even if I didn't get paid for it. I just figured out how to get paid for the things that I want to do, which is different than do what you love and the money will follow. Not necessarily. There's a lot of shit that I love that no money follows that, right? So there's realism involved in this. But one thing he said, getting out of the employee mindset. Well, here's the thing. An employee mindset is typically time and effort. You get paid for how much time you're there and you're going to get paid by the hour. You're going to get paid salary. You're going to get paid for showing up. The entrepreneur gets paid for results and outcomes only. And you can work 100-hour weeks and be broke, or you can work 2 hours in a week and become a millionaire depending on how you deploy those skills and those abilities. And so the entrepreneur just has to really get themselves to a place of fishing. They don't eat if they don't catch a fish. Now you can have a lot of people that can work for you and there could be no sales coming in, and as long as you have money, you're still paying them, right? And so hopefully you can have people that work with you or for you that are entrepreneurial. They may not be the entrepreneur, they may not be the founder, but that's the thing. And then everything that Dean said, what I would say, my friend Keith Cunningham, who wrote The Road Less Stupid, Thinking Time, there's a chapter number 2, the whole process where you just sit down and you think and you write and you resource yourself. And it's Keith Cunningham, created a thinking time process for— he just likes living that way. That's what he says. He goes, I just like waking up and posing a problem or an opportunity or a question to myself and letting my brain work at it. Dean has this great clarity exercise called the 50 Minute Focus Finder. It's one of our very first I Love Marketing episodes. If you went to ilovemarketing.com, and typed in 50-minute focus finder. It's just Dean has a process of thinking and dumping things out of your brain. And if you're a new business owner or you're in a new startup, and I do think that even, how many of you that are here, raise your hand, feel like you're in a startup even though you may have been in business for decades, right?

Yeah.

So there's always something new. And so when you're going into something new, You got to give your brain time to percolate. You got to give your brain time to be creative, especially if you're ADD. Most ADD people go into the default mode network and they're very negative and they beat themselves up. And I say that because most of my self-talk in my entrepreneurial career has not been positive. It's been very negative. It's not been, Joe, really good job, all that effort you put forth. It's more like this internal dialogue. If I got Hungarian shadow self is, oh, you're a piece of shit. Oh, you're worthless. Oh, you're not doing enough. Oh, why are you making such stupid decisions? Why can't you focus? So, we've got this little devil and angel that are sitting on our shoulders. One's like, do it, go for it, you're awesome. The other's like, screw this nonsense, whatever. And so, part of it is harnessing that creativity in your brain and directing it into solving problems, For yourself and other people and reaching your opportunities. And so, but again, the moment someone decides I'm going to run a business, you are no longer in the time and effort economy. You are in the results economy, which is something that Dan Sullivan is one that originally turned me on to that understanding and that distinction. So that's how you cut through the noise is you just focus on what actually matters and make a list of the 10 to 20 people that would be the highest leverage relationships that you have. Give those people the time and attention that is needed to nurture something from the standpoint of what's in it for them. If you can help the most important people get what they want, those people will help you get what you want.

That was solid. I love the fact that you guys do such a good job at, you know, here's the next 6 years of your life to contemplate, you know, if that's the path you take. But also here's, you know, the immediate next step. The immediate next step that I heard for this loudly was just see it all through the lens of what's in it for them. See it all through the lens of what's in it for them. So we're going to combine the first 2 questions into one episode. And Wayne Hadder, we had asked everybody to give us a marketing win and then a question. Wayne gave us absolutely a fantastic marketing win. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, uh, because it's a bit specific to him, but I think the theme of what he said is really interesting. My biggest marketing initiative that I've implemented the last 6 months is what I call my Click Handoff website workflow system. Uh, he's put in a system, he's put in a process in place to sort and sift through what's going on. He says at the end that the shift helped me build a focused website and workflow support page.

Again, focus.

This is this term that we seem to be thinking about. So his question for you, Joe and Dean, is for a local service business with a small audience and a limited ad budget, how would you structure front-end offers and follow-ups so businesses aren't just buying clicks, but creating trust all the way from first attention to real customer action? For the next 6 months, I'm trying to figure out how to balance giving away real useful work upfront with building a clean, repeatable path that turns generosity into the right conversations. Without feeling like a pitch.

Wayne does the website integration stuff. And that was the very funny thing. A little funny story about Wayne Hatter. It's, I've known him for years. He used to live in Winter Haven and you know how sometimes you, my operations guy, Stuart and I would go to this Starbucks every morning and we would sit outside. They had a little patio area and then Wayne, would be inside at the big table there with his laptop working away. And Stuart and I literally like 4 feet away from him, just separated by glass, would be talking about some WordPress integration that we needed. And literally weeks later, we struck up a conversation with Wayne and it turns out that's exactly what he did. And he did a lot of really great work with us. But how funny is it that we're literally sitting 3 feet away from the solution that we were looking for, just separated by glass and not really realizing it. So when you know what it is that you do, and he had a crystal clear sort of, you know, thing that he did where he helps people with WordPress integration. So in the first interaction with him, he was able to articulate what he did, and I immediately recognized that as what we did. So I think that the lesson in this for you is to think about when we talk about your signature result, what is it that when you say in the first interaction with someone that they have a crystal clear understanding That this is what you do. So often people get paralyzed by having so many options of things that they could do that they can't even in conversation get themselves to clearly articulate one specific thing. So I think that goes a long way.

John Toomey, Amy, and Sohn on his team who say, thanks for doing this. Joe and Dean. Our team has a massive increase at income due to 2 of your strategies, Joe's What's in It for Them and Dean's 9-Word Email. We provide equipment and services for oral surgeons, periodontists, prosth, and other things. We adjust our LinkedIn messages to say, among other things, what would move the needle from your periodontal practice and built a whole marketing strategy around that and the various concepts associated with what's in it for them. It was a game changer. For those of you listening to I Love Marketing, you can go deep into search and find out about the 9-Word Email. That's a past episode. You can find about what's in it for them. Not only is it episode content, but it's Joe's book. A lot of great content about there. But here's the question. Then we applied the same concepts to our Hero Awards and I saw it get the number one page on Google for the team, even though others have used the same words for 100 years. All thanks, you guys. Keep up the great work. Oh, look at that. That's just a thanks. Well, that's a win. Great.

Well, let me, let me say to this though, you know, that's how you actually get value is you apply something. I don't know if it was Emerson said that, you know, You ask for a new idea when you haven't used the first one that I gave you. And so oftentimes people keep searching for what's the strategy, what's the strategy, what's the strategy? I cannot tell you, Dean, how many times we have sat in live groups, seminars, whatever. Someone will come up to the mic and they'll say, I did the 9-word email as an example. Could be anything.

Yeah.

And I sent out less than 100 and ended up generating all this business and all this sort of stuff. And someone else will come up and say, you know, I haven't learned anything here today. Like, what can I actually apply? And it's just like, huh, I wonder why some people hear certain things and other people don't. That's always the mystery, right? You know, why does someone get it and the other person doesn't? But I think it has everything to do with, from what vantage point you're listening to, or the worst is thinking you're above any of this quote-unquote marketing stuff. And, the only thing you should be above is when any of the marketing is unethical because certainly I see people all the time that do things that are effective, but they're not ethical. And so, effective is how do you measure effectiveness? Yeah. You can maybe sell something to somebody, but and leave them pissed off. You might have their money, but you don't have their trust. And so marketing is when you not only get the money, but you also get the trust, you develop the relationship, and people are happy with it because people love to be sold. They hate to be pressured.

Right.

But they love to be sold in the right way. If you're sold in a way that feels like you've been taken advantage of or you've been pressured in such a way, that's not very effective marketing. Real marketing from my My perspective of what real marketing is, is always leaving the client in a happy client experience, not in a worse situation. And it also repels some people that are incapable of being happy because I don't want to be remiss in knowing that every single one of us have had unreasonable humans that have become clients that you could not— there's nothing you could have possibly done to make them happy. And there are a small percentage, just like there's a small percentage of the population that Sociopaths and psychopaths. There's a small percentage of people that their entire existence is waking up every day and being a predator to figure out who they can take advantage of. So that's why it's even also important in your marketing to attract who you want and repel who you don't, even though there is no perfect system. So yeah, those are my thoughts. Anything you want to share, Dean? If not, we'll go to the next question or comment.

I just love that 9-word email, just asking that question so outwardly focused. You know, Dr. Joe, what would move the needle for your periodontal practice? That's a pretty great conversational thing, especially if you're doing it on the back of a, you know, starting a conversation with somebody or in response to them starting a conversation, being and appearing interested in their outcome, not in just pushing your solution. You know, I think that it's so much better when people are leaning forward.

Dean, are you saying a way to cut through the noise is to cut through the noise? Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, what cuts through the noise is that everybody's perfectly tuned in to WIIFM. What's in it for me? That's the favorite radio station. So if you come in with a crystal clear signal that they pick up that, oh, this is something valuable for me, that's much more, you know, you can whisper that, you can whisper that kind of thing and people will pick it up.

So the very direct strategy of the 9-word email is a great way to cut through the noise. And then this question goes well together with this. We'll make this an episode of the audio version of this as well. Rocky, who is Genius Network, Rocky, we love you inside. Thank you for being part of this. What he says is very true. Marketing's carrying more of a sales load than it ever used to. And we want your take on which channels are shifting, SEO, AIO, digital versus analog, and where are the buyers actually spending their attention now? So that we can cut through the noise. I see a lot of themes in what you've been talking through that. So we, we have these noisy areas, digital and AIO and SEO, but, but where, where's the audience looking and how do we leverage that data to cut through to the noise? Cut through the noise. Yeah.

And by the way, Rocky, do you wanna say anything to that? Unmute yourself. Oh, look at that.

Rock is here. Hey, Rock.

Hey.

No, I think it's just, there's, there's so many opportunities out there and you have limited time and money, so Where do we kind of go? Where do we spend our time? And how do we do that the most efficient way and cost-effective way?

Yeah. So Dean, if you could tell him exactly what to do and how to do it, so in case your advice is really bad, at least I won't be the one to blame for it.

Okay. Fair enough. I think, you know, I think it goes down back to, this is a perfect example, is what is your signature result? You know, do you know the thing? It depends, right? Who you are.

There's 2 parts.

We give them what they want so we can give them what they need.

Sure.

And so there's that, that back and forth of it's hard to sell them what they need. It's easier to sell them what they want. I work with business owners. What they want is more cash in their business. What they really want though is what that cash does for their business. And so it's also describing that in the right way to be able to land better, I think.

Okay, let's, no, this is very good though. And by the way, Dean, I want you to keep on the dialogue. I'm just interjecting my ADD interruptions for no other reason than it's, so yeah, it's very like if you take Genius Network, what I sell, What the hell do I sell? Do I sell masterminds? Do I sell groups of people coming together? No one wakes up every day and says, you know, I really need to join a $35,000 or $100,000 a year group. I mean, you know, and most people wake up every day hoping they don't run into anyone trying to sell them anything, right? So the thing though is that what I really want to help is high-achieving, successful, ambitious entrepreneurs reduce suffering. Reduce suffering of their own minds, their own addictions, their own ambitions that have taken them. But that's very hard to market. No one, like, hey, what's the headline? You want to reduce some suffering today? Come and join the— So people want money. They think money's going to solve— that's one thing. But Genius Network, the whole thing's not on how to make money. As a matter of fact, it's how to Build a better entrepreneur in the area of health, mental and physical wealth, not just making money but not losing it, which as you know are 2 different skill sets. And what I call ELF, easy, lucrative, and fun. But there's a lot of different ways that we have to message that and we have to convey that and we have to deliver that. So I think everyone here, Dean, that I'll tell you, there's a bit of a downside of being a very caring person, as weird as this is going to sound, and this is my opinion, that this is not gospel here, that many people can poke holes in what I'm saying right now. If you are genuinely concerned about making sure that your clients get a world-class experience, some person that has no empathy whatsoever can just come in and they don't give a shit. They'll just say whatever they need to say in order to make a promise and get people's money. So part of it, I guess, for my question to you, Dean, To follow up with what Rocky's saying is, how do you, out of all of the different ways that he can deliver value to his clients, what are ways to think about getting into the emotional engagement that's going to cause someone to pay attention first so that you can then deliver what it is that's going to ultimately help sell them what they want and give them what they need? How do you sell them what they want? While also giving them what they need without it being like a bait and switch.

Yeah. More cheese, less whiskers is what you're saying.

Yeah, exactly.

The thing, right, is that you don't need to convince a mouse to try some cheese. It's seeking it every day. If you can offer what you're doing as cheese, that's an amazing thing. So getting clear on the outcome that you're able to produce for people and aligning is an amazing thing. I just want to be clear that when I say, when you and I ask people the question, what would you do if you only got paid if they get the result? And then I often say to people, what's the best thing that you could do for somebody if they would just get out of the way and let you do it? And Rocky said that same thing, that he knows what they need, But feels like he has to sell them what they want. And the reality is if they were just to listen to you and to let you guide them and create the thing that I feel that you believe that they're going to have a better outcome than just focusing on a tactical thing. And I feel that same way about the question that you're asking. The question that you're asking of how do you break through or how do you get through to people is again, which mountaintop should I stand on and shout my message? That my message about things is a way of doing that. Here's what I know for sure, that we, as long as we have been humans, have a standard issue brain that is interacting in a world that moves at the speed of reality, 60 minutes per hour. If I had access to 100% of your attention, I've got about 1,000 minutes a day. That's the maximum attention that's available. All the studies show that most Americans are spending about 450 minutes a day on screens, that they're looking at screens. So there's a good chance that this is the pathway, the window to their attention. But the reality is that you're competing during that For every other thing that is trying to compete for their attention, right? There are 500 hours a minute of video uploaded to YouTube every single day, piling on top of a pile of billions of hours of content that's available. And our available thing, Eben Pagan and I were having a great discussion. We were actually getting out the scientific calculators trying to calculate the max capacity global attention units that are available on a daily basis. If you take 1,000 minutes times 8 billion people, that's all the attention there is. That's why it's the most scarce thing. So when you look at what do we welcome, what do we welcome into our lives? When you look at, I think one of the most intimate input vehicles that everybody checks is your email inbox. When you look at it, that inbox is on your daily cycle. Just by a show of hands, how many people check your email every day?

Yeah.

I mean, it's in there, right? And you are in the same inbox as your mom and your best friends and your spouse or your kids, or they don't have any trouble breaking through because you prioritize, you want that interaction with them, right? Your mom has 100% open rate on her emails. And so if you can get that level of relationship with people where they're welcoming you in their inbox, I think that, I still think that your inbox is the pinnacle of available attention units because it's intimate, it's conversational, and you can direct people to action. They can click here to watch this or they can reply and you can engage in a dialogue, right? And you own it. It's very different than building an audience on TikTok or Facebook or even YouTube, any of those. The whole thing is about steering people. into that first-party relationship where you can dialogue with them.

That's what I'm trying to say.

That's how you can send a 9-word email. That's why it has such great results is because we're cutting through. You're not speaking like somebody trying to shout at people. You're right up beside Looking them in the eye.

You've been listening to I Love Marketing Live. We found out why your mom has a 100% open rate and what that means to you and what it is that you're doing. Uh, thank you for listening. The next episode will be more from this live event. If you wanna come on to more I Love Marketing Live events, and we do have a fun time, and, um, you can head out to I Love Marketing Live as well to hear more about that. We've been taking, um, questions from the audience submitted in. In terms of marketing wins and where to go from there. We've got a really interesting one here from Chris from Clearfield Leadership. Chris is intrigued with the unique ability concept, which is a strategic coach concept that Joe and Dean both fully embrace. And so his question here is, how might we think about using unique ability to create marketing that stands out amid the noise?

How does unique ability intersect I've had a lot of conversations with Dan Sullivan about unique ability. We are also in process of determining if we're going to actually write a book together on unique ability. First off, you know, unique ability defined from Dan Sullivan, just for when people hear that term, let's give some framing on it. The 4 activities according to Dan is there's incompetence, competence, excellence, And unique ability. And you can be, say, excellent at public speaking, but it's hard. It doesn't give you energy and it could be very draining. Whereas unique ability is what is an activity that gives you never-ending energy and learning, and it energizes you. It doesn't drain you, and you find yourself really skilled at it. One of the things that Dan Sullivan has often found is that sometimes Sometimes what we are best at, we place no value on because it doesn't seem like we have to work really hard at it. And so therefore, sometimes our unique abilities we give away to the marketplace for free so we can charge them for things that appear like we have to do a lot of difficult work. Now, that's just one way of looking at it, but taking your unique ability, I've done my best. My unique ability is interviewing people. Curating discussions with high-level people, generating endless amounts of ideas because I'm a multiplier, not a simplifier. Dean tends to be more of a simplifier. That's why I think people often like the I Love Marketing podcast. But I'll tell you, Dean, I will say this publicly, I think Dean is one of the best marketing minds in the world. I mean, he's a fucking genius. And he's very skilled at it, but I'm a way more ambitious guy than Dean, and I think Dean would admit that too. So if you take the I love marketing podcast— Ambitious, neurotic.

No, of course.

No, the world advances on the backs of its neurotics. It's absolutely true. I mean, who's the richest person in the world right now? Elon Musk, right? Putin.

What's that? Putin.

Well, no, Putin actually could be, but I'm talking about people that—

Compared to Elon, he is for sure.

Yeah, yeah. Where you can actually trace it to a business, not underground activities and stuff. There's many very wealthy people that are not on the Forbes 400 billionaire list or whatever, which is now God knows how many billionaires. But that being said though, it depends on what your unique ability is. And when you can combine unique abilities of other people together and create something that— so one of my things, so first off, Dean, why don't you go ahead and respond to the question? Because those are my initial thoughts. I wanted to just define what unique ability is. But secondly, sometimes your unique ability combined with a process, combined with marketing, combined with something else is what actually makes magic. So how would you think about it, Dean?

I've been thinking a lot about this, that the ability is the next level in this where I talk about what's your capability that you are able to do? What's the capacity that you have for doing it? And the bridge to that gap is improving your ability to do whatever's necessary, whether it's reach, To find the people that you can help. And I think that this signature result ties in perfectly to your unique ability. If you look at it, if somebody has an outstanding capability to create a result for people, but they just don't have the reach to people to find the right people to be able to help, They have a capacity to take on twice as many people as they're doing right now. That cap gap paired with an ability that you may have to lead into filling that cap gap for somebody is what your business unique ability is. But we're saying that your unique ability as an entrepreneur is going to lean into your ability to create a unique ability as an organization or as a business that provides a result for people. And on the back of your signature result, that's what we're really talking about, right? Being able to clearly, so people can see where their opportunity to use your ability because you know how to do it is going to help them fill that gap.

Say your unique ability again because I'm going to reference something here.

Well, my unique ability is connection through the form of interviews. And I want to connect people with skills and capabilities that reduce their suffering and help them find peace and joy in their own existence. So I do that through interviews. I do that through groups and curating people. I do it through connecting other people. And ultimately through that, it's to help connect people with themselves because it's hard to be connected with other people, which is why I have everything that I do for a living to the best of my ability is I have connection companies. So Genius Network, connection network. Genius Recovery for addiction recovery is to— the opposite of addiction is connection. So it's connection. My Ghost Town, Cleator, Arizona. If you look at all of the books that I've written, they're all about the theme of connection and marketing. How good can you possibly be as a marketer if you don't connect with people, right? And how much will you enjoy doing marketing if you're disconnected from what it is you're selling or how you're doing it? So part of the congruency is finding ways to actually market that you feel very aligned with so that you can only align yourself with people that are aligned with you.

So what's interesting here is in your animated background where you have the link style of marketing and the book, What's in It for Them, you also have a link to the Genius Network annual event. And what's funny is the best possible description of the Genius Network annual event is some derivative of how you just described your unique ability. You know, you bring people together, you do the interviews, you make the connections. I would dare say there's even some attempt at some healing and some service in this as well. And, you know, Chris asked, marketing stands out amid the noise and where unique ability intersects with marketing. Unique ability becomes the offer. Unique ability becomes the marketing. And the more clarified you are on that, the more attractive you are there. You know, Dean Jackson, the guy who invented the 9-word email because he's so good at simplifying, his unique ability of simplifying is his marketing. If you want to simplify, you can take a look at Dean Jackson and go down that path. And you want to get these 2 guys together and listen to their show. It's going to be great. I'm seeing just fantastic stuff coming from the chat. I dare say some of the best thank-yous and best responses we've gotten from past chat on this. But I think there's a true connection. Once you know who you are, and once you know who you are, you know who your audience is. Once you know what your audience needs and you know what's in it for them, you can market in service to that in some ways that you just couldn't before. So Chris, thank you.

Yeah. And let me say this real quick, Paul, and this is just an exercise also for Chris too. If you just make an ELF versus HAF, you make a sheet of paper, you put easy, lucrative, and fun on one on the left side, and then put a column line down the middle. On the right, you put hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. Make a list of all the activities, the people, the projects, the marketing initiatives that you're doing, which the things that you do, what is ELF and what is HAF? What's easy, lucrative, and fun, and what is hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating? And if you can just make the distinction, like anything that's your unique ability is not going to be hard, annoying, lame, and frustrating. It's going to be easy. It may not be lucrative in the beginning, but even in personal stuff, even if there's no money involved, easy, liberating, and fun. ELF is liberating. Unique ability is liberating. It doesn't feel like freaking grunt work. And so you're not going to wake up and do things for long periods of time that you hate. Now, in the beginning, in order to set up an ELF business, it actually could be very hard. And there's things that are going on in my life right now that are not— they're the furthest thing from ELF. I mean, I still have nonstop tinnitus ringing in my left ear since March 15th this year. I lost 70% hearing in my left ear. I might have a slight fracture in my back right now in a transverse process. I injured my knee a couple weeks ago. I mean, there's a lot of physical pain that I'm dealing with right now that I didn't have before, and I have to learn how to navigate. But it's also metaphoric to stress that is happening in business, and we just need to navigate it. And business is hard enough in and of itself with all of the shit that we have to do. If your activities and the people around you are constantly hard, annoying, lame, frustrating, that's just life's way of saying, make a change. The first chapter of my book, What's in It for Them, is that pain is a messenger. And if I don't pay attention to things getting off track, life has this really funny way of creating a lot of pain till I wake the hell up. And pain is one of the greatest teachers, not that you want to invite it into your life. It's going to come into your life no matter what you do, no matter how well we try to figure everything out. A lot of life is going to have a lot of pain, but it's the ability to transcend that or to navigate it or to actually accept it and to deal with it. But the reason I bring up pain is that is what all of our prospects and clients are going through. And if you can be someone that wherever there's anxiety, there's opportunity. Our friend Richard Rossi says that. And if you're a pain detective and you see the pain in the world, like Robin PharmaPharmian here, I mean, if she really thought about what her business is, her business is finding pains that people have and helping to remove it, right? And a lot of you, that's what you do. You take pain away from other people. So I'm not trying to minimize Some people are in severe pain to the point where they cannot even function. And if you can actually remove your own pain and suffering to a degree, then you become more capable as an entrepreneur. But the reason most people don't run successful businesses, this shit's hard. And in order to have an easy, lucrative, and fun business, you got to set it up and it ain't going to be ELF right out of the gate. ELF is The result of setting things up in a certain way to get the condition of elf. Now, some people are really lucky and they just find exactly what their unique ability is early on in life. They're just tied into it and just everything flows. But that's not most people. You know, most people have to navigate a lot of stuff before they get to the, find the treasure. And some people never do. You know, a lot of humans, their lives will be nothing but suffering. And if you can be one of those people that can help remove or minimize some of it, I think you're doing a good service to the world. That's my thoughts on it.

Dean, thoughts on that or should we bring this part to a close?

I think that's good. That's a perfect summation there.

All right. You've been listening to I Love Marketing Live. This is a batch from an I Love Marketing Live event. If you want to attend an I Love Marketing event to do things like to get these final 10 minutes that we're never going to release on the podcast, head out to ilovemarketing.com. Subscribe to the show and find out what you can do there. Thank you so much. We'll chat with you next episode. All right, so now we have 10 minutes left before we close up, and I want to do a couple things. Number one, I feel there's a groove on this episode that I haven't necessarily felt in a while. I think we're really doing well here. Dean, Joe, I, I think what's interesting here is we have all these episodes of I Love Marketing. We have all this history, we have Astro Polish, we have all these things. But what's fascinating is it really is going back to the essentials. It is what is in it for them? What is the 9-word email? What is easy, lucrative, and fun? And then there was the other theme that we got today about how do I deal with social? How do I deal with AI? How do I deal with digital? How do I deal with the noise? Regardless of what happened here, this This was a call to clarity. This was a call to focus. And I want to hear a couple of thoughts on that from both of you.

To get good at marketing, as with anything, it is a process. So the way to get the most out of something like this is to give yourself perspective, immerse yourself in— it's sort of like sitting in a sauna. Sometimes you're just sweating your ass off and it's not the most enjoyable thing, but if you can endure and adapt To it, you become better and you become more conditioned. It's like eating a good meal or having a good workout, but you don't just do it once. So this is a process. And now it would be impossible for us to answer every possible question that happens at every point in time, but every time that we do this, it's just a little bit more learning, a little bit more progress, a little bit more understanding, a little bit honing it in. So utilize the time that we do here just to give yourself perspective. And I would encourage everyone, After you're finished listening to this, if you're here live with us or you listen to it, is to actually then say, okay, what's the one action in the— what is an elegant idea that I heard today that I can actually apply, that I could do something with, and how do I deploy it? And go deep with it. And then if you want a dialogue with astropolish.com as an example, you can do You can listen to other episodes. I made a post someone had mentioned about the 9-word email. Me and Dean have I Love Marketing topics on almost everything. And if you've not read Breakthrough DNA, you can download it at ilovemarketing.com. It doesn't sell anything. It's not buy a course or anything. It's just education. It'll teach you about the 3 units, the before, during, and after, and then 8 Profit Activators, which is what we have been teaching in I Love Marketing since the very beginning. And this crazy QR code above my head goes to geniusnetworkevents.com, which is our annual event for Genius Network. And that's for people that have a million-dollar-plus-a-year business. So that's about as pitchy as I'm going to be today. But yeah, just keep coming on these. And if you found this valuable, Well, tell other people about it, share the episode. One of the best ways to get good at marketing is there are so many business owners that need to learn and think about this and know it. And one of the best ways to get good at marketing is to teach it to other people. So at some point, we're gonna really have a lot of dialogue before we launch it. We're thinking about starting I Love Marketing chapters and meetup groups. All over the world. We used to have that at one point in time when we started. There were I Love Marketing meetings everywhere, all over the world. And every day there was at least 100+ people meeting back in the early, what, 2011, 2012, 2013? Every day, over 100 people would meet every day and they would just talk about what we would talk about at I Love Marketing. And the reason I bring that up is in this world of AI, stay connected to real humans. Go out and meet people.

Handwrite cards.

Don't let your brain get lazy. You're going to have such an advantage because freaking humans are going to disable themselves. We got David Jackson here who's been very transformative in the educational space. And one of his biggest things to the point where it angers him is having an educational system that actually works for kids and something that he spent his life doing. And part of education is be a human, be a real human. Don't outsource I don't want to live in a world where PsyNet is controlling the world. That's a Terminator reference, by the way. But so yeah, those are my thoughts. I mean, there's so much more. And if you haven't read my book, I hope you do. And if you like it, I'd appreciate it if you put a review, even if you think the book sucks, go to Amazon and put a review. I would appreciate that. But those are my thoughts. And Paul, you always do a fantastic job of moderating these things and we get a lot of comments. And Dean, I'll let Dean have a final say, and then if you want me to say anything else, I will.

I think the takeaway, when you look at it, you mentioned reducing suffering, and in order for people to be suffering, they have to recognize that they're in pain and everybody is, and we're wired that way. Pain is what actually drives action in most cases. And if we want aren't wired that way. I remember Joe Rogan said one time that if our ancestors had access to the drugs and the Xanax and all these anti-anxiety medications that we have access to, we would be extinct. And the last thought in the last caveman's mind would be, Wow, that bear looks pretty close. I wonder if he could get to me before I get these blueberries. It's so funny that if we weren't wired to immediately, as soon as we see a bear, to run away, that's our survival instinct, right? We're wired powerfully. That's why I think recognizing your cap gap and framing it as a loss, we're losing this amount of money. Imagine if you were Imagine if you're Gamal Aziz and you are literally, your hotel is losing literally $4 million a year because of this restaurant. You would do something about that. And I think recognizing that for yourself helps you put that in perspective and rally yourself into the right action.

I just have to call out something that happened in the chat that I think is just absolutely amazing. You were chatting about opening up I Love Marketing. chapters. And Bantu responds with, I'd love to lead the South Africa chapter, immediately followed with by Ramon who says, I would love to start a group in South Africa. So we're reaching South Africa really well.

Wow.

But I think this is amazing. And the two have been introduced and they're going to interact with each other. I did also see someone said they really appreciate this felt more like community than it did necessarily Joe and Dean monologues, which I really appreciate. And then, what's really funny is Gina gave us some numbers. I'm not going to give the exact numbers, but the amount of people who signed up for this and showed up for this is a tremendously higher percentage than we normally see in these types of events. A lot of people sign up and if they can make it, they can make it. But, the fact that the majority of you who signed up came means you know what you were looking for, and I'm really proud that we were able to provide it.

Yeah.

I hope you like this little bit that we're not giving out to the general public. So only you get this because you were here live and we definitely want to reward that. And I think it's just been a good time. So thank everybody for attending. Content really, really solid here. Thank you so much, everybody. Bye, Dean. Bye, Joe.

Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Gina. Thank my team.