The Arianna Huffington Case Study - Episode #30

Hello, everyone.

It is Joe Polish and this is Dan Sullivan.

Here we are 10x talk and we're ready to talk about things that will hopefully have you think about how to grow your company and your life 10 times, or at least just make everything 10 times cooler than it already is. So I'll let you lead this one.

Dan, you haven't really talked about this, but you've had a huge win since we talked last time on 10 times talk. And it was your whole communications program and marketing program that allowed Arianna Huffington, with her book, her latest book, which is called Thrive, to actually debut. I mean, actually the first chance it had to come out on the New York Times bestseller list, it came out as number one. And I have to tell you, being a writer and being around writers for 40 years, I have to tell you, debuting as number one on the new York Times is akin to winning an Olympic gold medal. So this was an amazing achievement. What I want to talk about is, first of all, the methodology that you have pioneered in Genius Network. You have an actual thinking process of how people can put together a network of the highest possible talent available who all work together in a team to produce a particular marketing result. And this was a big one. And then I'd like to back up just a little further and go Back to the 10 times talk session where we really talked about another coach that you worked with, really identified nine particular personal capabilities that actually make you a great networker. And I like to piece those three things together and haven't thought about it before. So this is literally going to be created out of the conversation. But the first thing I'd like to talk about was just your assessment of the situation from the moment that you launched the project with Arianna, of how certain you were that you were going to get that result. So what part of it operated and it produced the result? Exactly what you're going to predict and what part of it was surprising to you.

Well, thank you, Dan. Let me give some background, too. Ariana had this book, she'd already written it. It was going to come out on March 25, 2014. And I got a call a couple months before that date from Peter Diamandis. And he had just told me that he had spoken with Arianna and that he had recommended that she reach out to me and that he was going to send an email because she had called him and said, hey, who was the marketing person that helped you get your book Abundance on New York Times? And he said, well, that's Joe Polish and the people at Genius network that he put together, which Peter started calling the Justice League of Marketers. He said, you've already met Joe because you spoke at his event in 2012, so you already know him. So let me just shoot an email and see if he'll be able to help you with this. And so got an email from Peter and Ariana and set up a one hour call with Arianna to first establish what she wanted to do. Now, Ariana is, you know, a high profile person. She's well known.

Yeah. And I should say to the listeners, in the new world of the Internet, Arianna Huffington is one of the big players. I mean, the Huffington Post is probably the dominant site on the Internet. It's the equivalent of the New York Times in the print world or the Wall Street Journal in the print world. This is a big deal and she's incredibly well connected and she knows there's probably not a person in the world that if Arianna Huffington phoned and said, Arianna Huffington would like to talk to you, they wouldn't take the call.

I've also found that out too, because she knows everybody. So I first wanted to establish what is her outcome. Did she just want to make the New York Times? Did she want to create a movement based around the subject of her book Thrive, which in a nutshell, is that the current definition that most people have of success being money and power is not a very fulfilling and even realistic definition of success. Because she tells the story of in 2007, after she had sold her company for, you know, three hundred and something million dollars, she was getting four to five hours of sleep a night. She was totally exhausted. She collapsed from exhaustion, hit her head on the corner of a desk, fractured her cheekbone, had to get stitches in her eye, go to multiple doctors. And she said, you know, by any measure of success, I wasn't successful at all. My life was a total mess and this ain't working. And so she wrote a book called Thrive. And she wrote it after she had completely changed her life. She became a total sleep advocate and she started meditating and she just started taking care of herself and she started dropping a lot of projects and we're working. And so she wrote this book about it. And I really liked the subject matter. It had nothing to do with politics and just simply had to do with, you know, living a better life and how to go about doing that. So she had many things she would love to be on New York Times. Of course, that's a big deal because that was a catalyst. And she also wants to create a movement and change the conversation about how a lot of people describe success. Because she knows a lot of quote unquote, very financially successful people and most of them are a little out of control or a lot out of control. And of course why I really like this is I've got 17 plus years hanging around conversations with you, Dan, where you're the only organization that I've ever seen that has the most complete system on teaching free days, focus days, buffer days, while simultaneously teaching you how to multiply your success dramatically while subtracting all the messes and crap out of your life and doing what you're good at. So you've kind of, you know, I've kind of got a built in sort of cool system here with my relationship with you and strategic coach. So I had an hour conversation with her and I used a strategic coach tool called the Impact Filter. And after our initial call I created sort of an outline and I said what do I want to accomplish to create a plan and a path for Ariana to hit the New York Times bestseller list with pre order purchases of books, all kinds of involvement from other people promoting it and help her create a movement by way of access to my genius network relationships. Example Marie Folio, Yazimo, Brendon Bouchard, people like that and the importance, what's the difference it'll make? This will allow Ariana to get on New York's time list, save her a lot of time, money and energy, utilizing marketing strategies and systems that are currently not showing her a way to make a bigger impact with less effort and I become a time saver for her. And what does a completed project look like? This by the way was written on February 4th, which is my birthday and by February 10th we've finalized dates to hold a one day in person event for everyone that supports her campaign and creates a knowledge product that can be bonused and packaged and used to educate the world. Building Ariana's brand and sharing this important message with the world and then you have this great process where what's the worst result if I don't take action? And I wrote we've blown an opportunity to really share Ariana's important message out to the world and her book and movement don't reach the full potential I know it can be. And what's the best result if we do take action? We promote the one day event to my genius network and 25k clients and other players who can really help build this movement. Thrive becomes a New York Times bestseller and Ariana's experience is so extraordinary, she refers people to Genius Network. By the way, I shared this whole thing with Ariana. So what's the success criteria? So the success criteria thrive as a New York Times bestseller. Did we accomplish that? Yes. Not only did it become a New York Times, it debuted number one. Second, I'm in the advisory role recommending relationships that could really align with Ariana's goals For the books, which I did. I referred her to several people who have done interviews with her that have done all kinds of stuff that moved a tremendous amount of books. I've set her up with all kinds of database methodologies. So that obviously was accomplished. The third was a one day event is scheduled to coincide with my event August 14th through 15th in Newport. And then the day after we're going to do a one day event with Ariana. So we've got that schedule. The next one was we create a knowledge product that is transformative and changes people's lives, truly shifting how people define success. So we're actually going to videotape a whole day really talking about this subject matter. You and Babs are going to be there and people like Brendan and we're going to have Dr. Mark Hyman and we're going to have, let's see, Dean Graziosi, quite a few really awesome people. And the next thing I wrote is I opened up Ariana's eyes to new, better and different marketing strategies that ultimately frees up her time. The next one was we promote the heck out of each other through Huffington Post via ad space and articles. Now I'm a writer for Huffington Post. There's been four articles that I've written on this subject. Ariana thinks of me as a badass marketer, which of course she does now. And Ariana's experience is so extraordinary that she joins my group and refers others. So that'll be the next one. So basically I started with that and the reason I did that is it just helped me think it through. And now I had done an initial one prior to that on the 15th of January. So like about 20 days earlier just to kind of think it through. But I actually shared that one with Arianna. Then you know what, we went to work. We had less than a month and 10 days to actually accomplish something that if I would have had six months out, it would have been a whole nother thing. But we still managed to do it. And the way that we did it was we didn't do just one thing. We. We did a series of things. And there's a big difference. See, people have this misconception because she's Arianna Huffington. That immediately means she's going to have a New York Times bestseller. I mean, you can have a media outlet. Steve Forbes, who spoke at my 2012 conference, also same event that Ariana spoke at, he had a brand new book come out. It didn't even hit the Times. Why not? Because he's not well known. Not because he doesn't have a platform called Forbes magazine. It's because the marketing wasn't done. This is a marketing game, and that's what people have to understand. And when people hear marketing, like, what is marketing? Marketing is communication. Marketing is storytelling. Marketing is giving people a specific call to action. Marketing is allowing it and making it easy for people to do business with you. And marketing requires doing a bunch of stuff. There's this great little saying that I saw on the side of a packet of sugar years ago. I don't know why my brain remembers this stuff, but it was a little packet of sugar. It was a little caption. I saw it in a restaurant. I was like waiting for my food and looking at these little quotes on packets of sugar. And it said, advertising. The caption was, he who has something to sell and whispers in a well is not as apt to make the shiny dollar as the guy that climbs the tree and hollers. So you have to tell your story. So when people hear marketing, they think, oh, manipulation, trickery. No, I mean, everything that we do is storytelling. It is communication. It's education. And so she was going to go on book tours and she was going to ask friends to tweet about it. But I said, well, you need more than that. Do you have a website? There was no website devoted to the book. Every book needs to have a website. It doesn't need to, but if you want to be a New York Times number one best seller, you better have a damn website. So I had a website created for her and then we turned it over to her team, not just to talk about the book, but to also capture leads. Because once someone shows interest in the subject matter, you want to continue to drip on these people with valuable, useful content because they've identified themselves. And I'm interested in this. And some people aren't ready to maybe buy or engage, but if you at least capture their name and email and offer useful things to them, like other talks, invitations to webinars, things like that, then they're going to give you their name and you will continue to sell to them. Secondly, just like a movie, you want to Have a trailer. So I had the Draw shop, which does the animated videos, put together a trailer, a book trailer for her book. And it's a voiceover with Ariana talking about her story and about Thrive. And that was one thing that we did. Secondly, this was a big one. She didn't want to game the system. I mean, Ariana has enough money where she could have bought up all the books herself, put them in a garage, no one ever would have known about it. But she didn't want to do that. She's Ariana. She can't do stuff like that. I said, well, let's get people that legitimately have clients that they can give the book to, they can send it to, and let's have them pre purchase orders. Let's get as many people to pre purchase this book in advance. And so I reached out, you got some for Strategic Coach clients. Brendan Bouchard, Mike Koenigs, Dean Graziosi, Mary Morrissey, and a whole slew of different people. Like, yeah, this book totally speaks to my audience. And so we sold some pre orders of books that way. Then I introduced her to Marie Folio, who has a big following online. And so she lives in New York, and she did an interview with Ariana, and a couple of days before the book was to be released, she sent out that video, did a blog post about it, immediately got about 25,000 views, drove people to do that. While I was on Necker island with Richard Branson, I'm on the island with one of my close friends, Dr. Mark Hyman, who has written eight New York Times bestsellers, and three of them have been number one. And at the time, I was in Necker island with him, and he was number one on New York Times. And in spite of that, I got him to, literally, he loves Ariana because they're close friends. And he actually sent out a Facebook pitch, a tweet, and an email to his list suggesting that they actually get a copy of Thrive. So now Ariana could have done that, but she didn't think to do it, maybe as proactively as I think about doing it. So what's the tweets going to say? What are the Facebook messages going to say? So I provided that, and so we got a lot of people to actually promote it.

Yeah. Well, the interesting thing here, just two things I want to say. There's a certain. What I would say, if you're really great at something, it's far better that other people tell the story than you tell the story.

Absolutely.

The other thing is that because you're so personally involved with your own movement forward, it's very, very difficult for you to think of all the different things that you can do. But you're coming at it. I mean, two months before this was not even a thought in your mind. So you hit it totally fresh. You're emotionally involved in the success of the story, but you're not emotionally involved in it from the standpoint of the way that Ariana has. So a lot of people don't realize this. That why we need other people who are great at what they do is because they have a more deep personal. I'm not saying that they're not depressed, devoted to it and not committed to it, but they're kind of depersonalized. So the emotions don't really interfere with it. They're just looking at the actions to get a result. But then the other thing is that, Joe, I can trace you back to the early story of you just grasping what marketing could do with yourself as a carpet cleaner, just keeping ahead of the bills in Phoenix. The story that you just told about what you did over the last two months is really the result of 25 years of testing and proving out and connecting vast amounts of different marketing strategies and abilities in the marketplace. But you had a chance just to put it all to work, and you had everybody at a phone call's notice that you could just call somebody up and say, hey, I'm going to do this. You have such a trust with them and there's such credibility that you were able, within, you know, probably a week's time to put together all these different experts because you gave them a great sense of purpose and a great clarity of what the results were to be achieved. All of a sudden, this team comes together. You literally created a marketing company that lasted two months. And then, of course, there's certain parts of it that go on afterwards. But the reason is that you've always approached things as networks. And one of the things I'd like to get across to the listeners on 10 Times Talk is there's only so much you can do as an individual, and you will achieve what an individual can. Achie but if you really want to go big, it's got to be through networks of people who, in their own right, are just as good at what they do as you are at what you do.

Exactly. You got to connect the plumbing, and your plumbing has to be aligned with their plumbing, and you can move a lot of stuff through it. And this is good plumbing. I mean, I guess that plumbing analogy could sound kind of weird, but that's exactly it. It's. What I have is I have a genius network. And you talked about the Magic Rapport formula in the beginning of how that ties in together and some of the things that Fabienne Fredrickson, who actually interviewed me about, how do I build rapport with people? She was curious, because that's a question I get all the time, is how do you meet all these people? How do you manage all these relationships? What do you do? How does someone do it? What are the things that you can teach to other people? And so after I had this conversation with her, she listened to everything that I was saying, and she actually broke it up in steps. And so some of the steps that she wrote down for me, she created the Joe Polish Nine Step Magic Rapport Formula. And the first step is when I meet people, I focus on how I can help them. I don't go into deals saying, oh, let's figure out how I can squeeze something out of this person first. I try to figure out how can I help them so that naturally they're just going to want to help me. Because if I can't create value for someone and all they can do is create value for me, that's not a very fulfilling sort of relationship. It's very transactional. I mean, life gives to the giver and takes from the taker. So, I mean, it's like, it's that sort of thing. The second thing is be willing to invest time, money and energy on relationships. And since I spend a good deal of time, money and energy developing and nurturing relationships, it's kind of like if you spend time, money and energy developing a field of crops or an orange tree, you know, whenever you want the orange, because you've taken care of the orange tree, there's an orange that you can pull down. So I can tap in to a lot of talent and capabilities very quickly, just like you said. I mean, we literally, in a span of a week, I had all kinds of things in motion. Not because I'm lucky, not because I'm using trickery, it's because I've harvested relationships and I was able to tap into my relationship equity. Just like if you saved money and you need to make a withdrawal because you're going to make a purchase, whenever I need to get something done, I've made so many deposits into other people's lives in terms of relationships that whenever I need to tap into that relationship equity, it is right there. I can cash in on some of it. The others Be the type of person that people will always answer the phone for. Because I always approach creating value. Most people that I will go out and ask for something, help, assistance, involvement, alignment. I've got a whole lot of people that were happy to do it. Another part is step number four is be grateful and valuable. If you just operate that way and you treat people that way, guess what? They're probably going to treat you that way. Which leads to the next one, which is treat people the way you want to be treated. I mean, it's pretty simple. It's like the golden rule. But that's the deal. I can go on and on, but that's some of the things that I do. But those tie into the genius network. Because the ultimate thing is I have a genius network. And what I consider a genius network is a group of people that have skills and capabilities that are really useful for me. And by helping them get what they want, they will help me get what I want. In this particular case, I have a tool called my genius network. And so I did a whole genius network just on putting together the plan and the path to make Arianna Huffington's newest book, Thrive, a best seller. And my outcome was to have her experience be so extraordinary that she hits New York Times and that we can collaborate and do things that are mutually beneficial to both of us. And what I told her too, I mean, I said, look, Arianna, what would be great for me, you're a well known person, you know a lot of people, I'd like to have you speak at my event and I'd like to put together a knowledge product with you that we record and then we share this print, probably for free. We haven't decided if we're going to do the entire thing for free, but I say we just put it out there. It will continue to carry this message, which is another form of marketing about the subject of Thrive, which I really reinforce. Also, I sort of had, if you even want to call it a motive, and I wouldn't even say like a sneaky motive, because all of this is totally out in the open. You take a guy like you, strategic coach, you have one of the best programs on the planet for teaching workaholic, crazed, successful, bright entrepreneurs how to get their act together. And you know how to, you've been doing this for years. And not only do you know how to teach it, deliver it, have people think about it, created all these tools, you're actually one of the very few people that I know that is in the space of advising other people on how to live a better life that actually walks the walk and talks the talk better than like any other human being I've ever seen, that sort of position. So you're a messenger that actually lives his message. And, and so one of my things is this is another way for me to share strategic coach with the world by tying it into this sort of thing, because the world needs things like strategic coach. And so when we create a knowledge product, which I actually got that term knowledge product from you, I mean, I used to call things information products until, you know, I heard you talk about knowledge products and I'm like, you know, information products really doesn't describe how valuable some of the content is because it kind of doesn't sound as good. But in the information marketing world, that's how everyone talks. And so knowledge products, then I created a genius brainstorm, you know, free flow ideas. What do I want to create? You know, I want to create an impact filter for send Ariana, which I did a draw shop to do a video, introduce her to Marie Foglio, introduce Ariana to my buddy Jeff Madoff, who does all the Victoria's Secret commercials. So I flew to New York and did an interview with Ariana about this book. And we used that as a bonus. I had Ariana record a promo video for the event we're doing in Newport so I could share it with all of our 25k members. And she was doing an event with Sheryl Sandberg, which happened a couple weeks ago. And this was going to be a live event. It was sold out, 2,400 people. And so I looped my buddy Brendan Bouchard, who's one of my 25k members, into this thing because he's very smart when it comes to book marketing and live streaming events. And so he was doing an event in San Francisco where this was actually being held. And at the time he was doing his live event, he coordinated with his team to actually help them set up the technology to live stream the event so that people that weren't there, they could actually watch it for free. And then we would promote the book Thrive, because she said, well, I'm going to be speaking with Sheryl Sandberg to 2,400 people, which is much different than 2,400 people are going to buy books. And what about all the people that aren't there? So we live streamed the event, sent out an email to my list, to Brendan's list, to a couple of other people's list. Arianna promoted it, Twitter, Facebook, and we ended up selling 1800 copies of the book thrive just from that live stream. After several things were actually botched up on the technology with it. I mean, it didn't go totally smoothly. And now that livestream is being replayed. Had we not done that, we never would have had the tying of buying the book. And there's no way, had we not done that live stream, we wouldn't have sold any of those books because these purchases came from people that weren't even there. And that's a pretty big deal. You know, many book tours and visits of bookstores that an author, no matter how famous they are, has to go to in order to sell 1800 books, like in one fell swoop. And we did it combined with something she was going to do anyway. And so that gave her a whole like, wow, every time I go and do a talk, I can actually live stream it and we can set it up so people. So we did things like that.

As you know, if you're around strategic coach, everything that we do starts with a positive focus and ends with a positive focus. And so, Joe, I'd like you to wrap up this session of 10 times talk by just saying the three biggest things that you now know about your capability right now. You know, we're a little bit after the actual achievement of the book being number one on the New York Times list that you did not know before you got the phone call from Peter and the email from Peter. And just where have you grown in both understanding and skill and confidence over the last two and a half months? Because it's really important that people record their wins and actually use them to create the next level. So I'd like you to do that right now.

Yeah. The insights I got is the absolute power of my creation of a genius network tool because I thought it through and I identified who are the top people that I needed to pull in. And so I listed those people out and then I broke that down into the action steps and I put timelines next to it and I accomplished it because I simply followed a plan. Secondly, if you nurture and harvest relationships, they are incredibly valuable because you could have not bought the things that we did. Someone can't just say, oh, Joe, I want to have a book be a New York Times bestseller and let me pay you a bunch of money. I mean, it had nothing to do with that. It had to do with orchestration. And orchestration comes through preparation and the ability to pull it together very quickly. Let me think of if I had to narrow it down to three. I don't know any other word to say this, but I realized I got a lot more Oprah power than I realized. You know, I mean, Oprah can promote things and make a big impact. And Ariana went on Ellen. That was a huge deal. She got some great media and stuff. But the real thing that debuted on New York Times were our marketing efforts. And she knows that. And she still would have done very well with the book. But that was a huge game changer to have it debut. So with that, this is just the start because we planted a seed. We, like you mentioned, it's like winning the gold medal. The beauty of it is now how I leverage it and how I use that and how much of a big deal it is and how the strategic byproducts, which is one of your terms that will come out of this scenario. So it's been really great. And for the listeners, what I hope this serves as an example for is if you do not have a genius network and are not thinking about who are all of the wonderful capabilities and skills that are out there and what are you doing to help lead those people into what they want so that when the time comes that you can literally harvest those valuable fruits of your labor, are you putting your labor into the right relationships in the right way? Are you acknowledging people? Are you creating value first without expectations so that you can literally have your own genius?

Yeah, I think probably the biggest make or break thing about this is that before you can go to the bank and borrow, you actually have to make deposits. And so for 25 years, you've been making deposits into your bank account. But the bank account here is other people's genius. And you've built up such a high credit rating and such a high balance in all of your bank accounts with all these individuals. You know, I mean, you called us up and said, you know, would you buy 500 books? And we said, of course we will. We didn't have a committee meeting about it. We didn't call our accountant about it. You know, we just said, sure, send the 500 books and the invoice and we'll send the check for it. And you've made so many deposits in your Strategic Coach account that if you give a phone call and say, dan, would you do this? My answer, you know, is a three second answer, of course I'll do it. And I think that that's the other thing, is that people know what they'd like to get from other people. But that's not where the game starts. The game actually starts with spending a lot of time finding out what they need and providing it to them and building up an account. And some people are not good investments, so you don't do that with them because they don't reciprocate. But I think you have a keenness now. I think you have a really quick read on whether someone is going to be a player in bigger games that you're going to be playing in the future.

Yes, exactly. And I want to touch on what you said, then we'll wrap up. Is that in the process of doing this and asking for people to be involved, it hasn't depleted or lowered my bank account at all. It's actually magnified it for everybody. And so the beauty of doing this and doing this type of genius networking and tapping into your genius network is it actually continues to enrich the relationships because everything that I did and how I did it created a win win for everybody. Every one of the books that was purchased is actually getting sent to someone or getting gifted to an actual client. So, I mean, none of it was, quote, unquote, buying your way onto the times because everything was actually done. And she was so gracious and very appreciative. And that's what I really liked about Ariana, which is why I continue to do things with her. She's one of those people where none of the relationships so far has been, oh, Joe, do this for me because I'm Arianna Huffington. And a lot of people that are really well known, they forget. They actually think because they're well known and they surround themselves with a bunch of yes people that they don't have to be nice. And she's nice, she's cordial and she wants to do stuff and she wants to make a difference. And I like hanging out with people like that. So that's why I did it and that's why we'll continue to do this stuff. And you know, I will have to put a plug to Strategic Coach when I heard all money earned ethically is a byproduct of value creation. I take that very seriously. And there we go. So thank you.

Well, it's some years or a lot of little wins, but right in the first part of this year that that was a fantastic win and it's great to do a little bit of a review on it and actually analyze how it came about. So I really appreciate you taking the time to walk everybody, myself and all the listeners of 10 types talk. You kind of let them behind the curtain and to see how it works from the backstage so that there's a great front stage result.

And what I'll do, I'll post the interview with I did with Arianna as a bonus episode on the 10xtalk.com website. So if anyone wants to see that actual interview, go ahead and check it out at 10xtalk.com and please share 10x talk with all of your friends and loved ones. Yes, Loved ones. And that's it. So thank you, dad.

Okay. Thank you, Joe.