The Art of Spontaneity: Inside 10X Talk With Dean Jackson and Dan Sullivan!

I'm Joe Polish.

I'm Dan Sullivan, and welcome to 10 Times Talk.

Hello, this is Joe Polish.

And this is Dan Sullivan.

And we've got a very special guest on 10 Times Talk today, Mr. Dean Jackson. There you go.

There we go.

The guy that I do, I love marketing with. So, Dean, me and Dan thought it would be really cool to invite you into our podcast, into our episodes, since me and you've been doing one for so long, and we've created a whole movement. And, you know, I'd like to actually take this one and share it with our I love marketing listeners also.

Perfect.

And so today, and Dan doesn't even know this. I mean, truly, he does not know this, but Dan is actually going to interview me and you for TED Times Talk today.

Oh, I love it.

So what do you think about. Is that okay, Dan?

I think that's great.

Okay.

No, I think that's great. I'm up to it already. I've got it all planned out.

The reason I say this, and I'm telling our listeners, I swear, Dan did not know I was going to say that. And I just decided to pop that out on him because Dan is all. He likes walking with a tightrope where there's no safety net, where he doesn't want prep material. He loves being asked questions. And I want to ask you, why do you like operating that way? You feel it actually, I think makes you sharper, makes you more authentic. I mean, why?

Well, I think you're just more spontaneous because you're having to react to the actual moment. And so you're not operating from a script. I don't like operating from a script. You can kind of create things in the moment which you never could have thought about before, and that's why I love it. And, you know, as long as you get really comfortable with the discomfort, then there's no problem with it.

Getting comfortable with discomfort.

It's great.

Yeah. I actually like that as a jumping off point, because when I was definitely afraid of public speaking, you know, I was very shy growing up, and I had a really hard time talking to people, let alone ever doing, like, I remember in school ever having to do.

Like, a public reporting presentation or something.

Oh, my God, it would. It would just freak me out. And as I became an adult, I still very. You know, even to this day, I'm not big on going to cocktail parties and stuff like that. You know, I've talked to people. I don't know the Euro. Most people would never know that about me. However, I've learned. But one of the things that I remember hearing is that what you fear and don't face controls you, but that what you fear and face, you can control it or at least get much better at dealing with it. And so I've put myself out into scary situations and one of the gauges were if it wasn't a little bit scary to me or a lot scary. It's like I'm probably not playing a big enough game. And it's one of my approaches. And so, I mean, I think we all kind of operate that way.

Well, we've done 75 episodes of I love marketing that way. No net, no pre planned.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So anyway, based on my original intent here, do you want to.

Yeah. Well, one of the things I'd be interested in knowing because I can remember back when the two of you just started talking about it. And if you think back and you measure forward, each of you, and I'd like each of you to talk about this. What did you think it was going to be? And now you're 75 episodes down the road. How is it really, really different from what you thought it would be? How has it turned out different? What are some of the strategic byproducts that have totally surprised you? So, Joe, why don't you go first? What did you think?

Well, here's what's funny about I love marketing. I was having a conversation with Dean and this was in December of 2010, and we just had gotten done with talking for about an hour. Me and Dean have known each other for over 15 years. And what's really interesting is we both started studying direct response marketing around the same time, but we didn't know each other. It wasn't until many, many years later where we actually realized what we learned. What? We read all the original marketing books, many that were written in the early 20s, like Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising, Robert Collier letter book, the Gary Halbert Letter, David Ogilvy. All these things that we had studied and learned, we literally had read and consumed the same stuff, but we had applied it in completely separate sort of industries. But we were really good about talking. We kind of knew the same lingo. Like when someone joins strategic coach and they start talking about unique ability and 10 times growth and the lifetime extender. All these things, they become part of your Just talk about them. Me and Dean had that in common. And we had this conversation. We were talking about marketing and I said to Dean, because Dean already has a podcast called Marketing Mondays for the Real Estate Industry because he's trained Thousands of people in that industry on how to better improve their business and their marketing. And I said everything we just talked about in the last hour. Could you imagine if just business owners throughout the world heard what we just said, how valuable and how useful that would be? What if we just started recording our conversations and just putting it out there? And since both me and you love marketing, let me see if I can get I love marketing. So I literally registered the website, I hatemarketing.com the name first, and then I bought I Love marketing. It cost me several thousand dollars, but I talked someone into selling me the name, and we turned it into a podcast. And our initial conversation was this. And a lot of this, I think, came from probably being in strategic coach for so many years. And stuff is about value creation. I said, let's not even try to figure out how to monetize this. You know the term monetization? Everyone's got these buzzwords on, really, meaning, how do you make money? And so I said, let's not even have a plan for that. Let's just put really good stuff out there and see what happens. What you talk about, Dan. Strategic byproducts. Because I knew things would reveal themselves if we just started doing it. All right, so to answer your question, so we started doing it, and it was really awesome. And we had a few of our marketing friends that have big following. They listened to it, they loved it, they tweeted it, they put it on Facebook, they mailed their list, and it started getting picked up very quickly. I mean, how quickly were we on new and noteworthy on itunes?

Yeah, right away. The second episode, we were right up on itunes. That gets you a lot of traction that way because you get noticed when you're new and noteworthy, and that kind of builds more traffic. And. Yeah, so it's been cool. Now we're at the level where we're at between 2,500 and 3,000 downloads a day of new downloads just from itunes. And that's kind of a cool place to be.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, we got tens of thousands of listeners and stuff. And the cool thing that happened is since that time, we've not only gotten so many success stories. I mean, I cannot tell you how many comments and letters and emails we've gotten sent into each of our offices collectively and have been posted on the website and on itunes. About. I've learned more from your podcast about marketing than going to college. I mean, we've heard that dozens of times, which we love hearing that stuff because it's true. And on top of that, there's over 45 meetup groups all over the world that every single day at least 100 people are gathering in some part of the world talking about what me and Dean talk about on I love marketing. And you know, we've got groups in Germany, in the uk, in Ireland, in Spain, Malaysia. Yeah, I mean Australia, New Zealand. I mean all over the world where people are talking about I love marketing. We did a conference, so we've put together a DVD series. We've got a whole variety of stuff. We put a book together of our first 50 episodes and talk about that.

Yeah, well, again, Dean, the thing I'd be interested in is when you first started because you've been doing the Marketing Mondays, what did you think this one was going to do? And then how has it actually turned out much different?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I've been doing Marketing Monday, the podcast by myself and it was, you know, 10, 12 minutes a week, just sharing a concept. And this, I love marketing was a whole different energy of being with somebody else who knows the same thing things adds different dimensions to something. But being able to collaborate like that makes it kind of effortless. It's amazing to me. We were talking about it today. We just recorded our 75th episode. We've been talking about marketing for 75 hours and still have not run out. We're going to go another 750 hours. I mean, it's like the thing that we talked about though was looking back, Joe mentioned that looking back at Claude Hopkins and Robert Collier and all these old marketers, that within the marketing community it's very revered and everybody kind of looks at these as like the Dead Sea Scrolls almost. You know, you got these old things. And I said to Joe, then I said, can you imagine, you know, 100 years from now how cool it would have been if you and I could have listened to Claude Hopkins and Albert Lasker get together for an hour every week and talk about, about the cutting edge marketing in the 1900s, early 1900s. So we kind of looked at it as like creating like a hundred year legacy kind of thing. Like our contribution to, you know, we could see some young kids 50 years from now digging up the archives of the I love marketing, you know, and.

Yeah, I collect quotes from really cutting edge thinkers. And Marshall McLuhan, you know, who was a great prophet on how media was going to develop. He has a great line. He says, first we create the technology, then the technology creates us. And so you've created a technology called I love marketing. Which has gone way, way beyond your original thought about it. And it's done all sorts of surprising things. But who are you today as a result of the technology you've created that's different from who you were before you started? I'll start with you, Dean, and then we'll finish off with Joe.

I think certainly that we both have become more visible because of doing that, because of, I'll say, the generosity. Like we're not holding things back in what we're sharing. I mean, we're sharing the very best stuff that we know. And we always say this. Joe says that, you know, people say they get more out of it than college or more out of the things we talk about on the free podcast than what other people charge for. And so I think it's been a really dynamic kind of thing for visibility, even just for reputation.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, one thing too, which I have to mention on 10 times talk here, is that every single episode, Dan Sullivan has made the cut. Yeah, I mean, we literally talked about him on every single episode. So it's a treat that we all get to be together at the studios here at the Strategic Coach headquarters in Toronto and just do this kind of guest episode with Eudean. I mean, I've become a better marketer. I'm doing more sophisticated online things using video sales letters, using animation, using a variety of different delivery systems and methods of communication as a result of some of the guests we've actually interviewed, because we already have a pretty in depth understanding of direct response marketing. And me and Dean, we never let our egos get in the way. We always take an approach that we're always students. So do you, Dan? I mean, I think that's one of the things between the three of us that I think is quite unique because I know a lot of experts and gurus, they quit going to seminars, they quit reading, and they actually believe their own pr. And so we realize the more that we learn, the more there always is to know. Because the marketing world is always, ever expanding and always changing. When you layer new technologies on top of principle based methods like education based marketing and response mechanisms, it just makes it better. So, I mean, I think it's just made me a better entrepreneur and it's given me a whole new perspective of how the world is responding to what we talk about in different industries. Because through I love marketing, we are encountering people that have businesses and ways of making money that we never even would have thought of had it not been for this. And the same thing with 10 times talk. I think what's happening with 10 times talk in its early stages. I think there's going to be the same evolution that's taken place with I Love Marketing, tons of people listening to it, probably groups that are going to be talking about what me and Dan are talking about. And I will say that it is a way like what you said, dean. You know, 100 years from now, we want something to be timeless, where people can always go and pick up any episode and really learn something and say, you know, that was worth an hour of my time. That was worth me listening to.

Well, here's the thing that I got from listening to I Love Marketing. And Babs and I listen to it on the. You know, we have it downloaded into our iPhone, and so we listen to it on the car radio coming in. And I went back to the point that you made, Joe, right at the beginning of our interview here, that this whole thing about being forced to respond spontaneously, and one of the things that really came through to me with the I Love Marketing is that I had the feeling that each of you were saying things that you were saying for the first time only because you had to respond to something that the other person brought up. And literally, this wasn't old knowledge that was being regurgitated. This was new knowledge that was being created on the spot with a tremendous foundation of experience that each of you had had. But you were articulating things in entirely new ways. Because, first of all, you had the package now called I Love Marketing. Could you reflect on that? Because I had this.

It's like interpretive dance, really.

That's actually. I love marketing, and 10 times talk is our muse.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. And it is true that we don't work from. We don't come on with a preconceived idea of what it's going to be. Typically, what will happen is one of us will text the other, you know, 10 minutes before we're actually going to record about just a general topic. Like, today we did a car cast about postcards, and we went for, you know, a full hour talking about postcards. We could probably do three or four hours just on postcards, because there's a lot of stuff that we didn't talk about.

But we.

We actually love collaborating like that. And I think that we have that kind of chemistry of being able to create together like that.

Well, what I got the feeling is that you guys are like, I have a deep interest in jazz. And jazz, of all the musical genres, is the one where there's more Improv that goes on than in any other musical genre. And everybody looks at these guys, some of them have been in business 40 or 50 years because jazz musicians tend to last longer than any other musicians. And you know, somebody will just come in with a melody line and then the others play around with it and they can sit there and go for 35, 40 minutes and it sounds like it's just been beautifully written. And they say, you know, how do they just do that? And I say, well, you know, to a certain extent it's total improv. But the fact is that they've got what I call riffs in their brain. They have thousands of riffs over the years that they've practiced. And so you guys were kind of like riffing. You were like a great sax player, great piano player, and you guys were just riffing back and forth. But you're just going through stuff.

But it's based on principles. It's based on.

Yeah, that's exactly.

I mean, when you're saying about jazz that even though it sounds like they're completely improvising and making stuff up, it's based on they're all in the same key, they're all in the same tempo, and they're using standard scales that are harmonizing. And that is where mastery of those three things, knowing what that is, allows you to come and create it. And that's exactly the great analogy that we're all coming from the same principle based understanding of marketing.

So talk about that. I mean, Joe, if you had to pick your top three principles, like you always go back to whenever the subject of marketing, what would be the three that would always be part of your repertoire?

Well, definitely education based marketing, that you can do more to sell people by teaching them how to make a buying decision than pressuring them. Okay, so we're very much a big user of free reports, CDs, videos selling in advance by educating people. Another one would be something I learned from Gary Halbert, that any problem in the world could be solved with the right sales letter. So if you're trying to sell anything, but you do not have a sales letter that cans and clones you, which is another principle, maybe I could call that one the third where you can and clone yourself. Because the best salesperson in the world, no matter how persuasive and effective they are, is limited by the clock because you can only talk to so many people in a given time. But a sales letter can talk to a thousand people, you know, 100,000, sometimes millions of people in a sales letter could Be a video, it could be an audio, that sort of thing. So always have a sales letter, always Canon, clone yourself and always use elf. Easy, lucrative and fun. If you cannot set something up so it's easy, lucrative and fun, you will never have an ELF business. You'll have a half business, which is hard, annoying, lame and frustrating.

Yeah. What about you, Dean?

Well, you know, we have just like in music, they have the scales. You know, we've got an overriding context for everything that we talk about on a big scale. We talk about looking at businesses as three independent units. The before unit, all about finding people who want to do whatever it is you do. Your advertising and your marketing. The during unit, the experience that you're creating for people that are actually going through the process with you. And the after unit, building and nurturing lifetime relationships with all of your clients and orchestrating referrals. So underneath that context we have the eight profit activators which are like the scale. And everything that we talk about always fits under one of those eight profit activators. So it gives us the framework to work from. But there's an infinite number of ways to apply all of those things. And just knowing that we both kind of know those forwards and backwards and have multi dimensional experience applying those to all kinds of different businesses. So that's the framework and that helps. It's kind of like the scales, you know, if you know the scales, you know, you can create music.

Exactly.

So what kind of capability has really developed for you, Joe? So if you look ahead at the next two or three years, just based on the value that you've gained from your teamwork with Dean, what becomes possible now as you look forward, that never would have even entered your mind before you started the series.

Well, I will say this, and I've never even had this discussion with either you nor Dean. As you know, we're all friends with Peter Diamandis, the author of a book called called Abundance. He's co founded Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil, who's one of our speakers in the upcoming event that all three of us are going to be speaking at in 25k annual event. He's also the guy that put Spaceship One up into space, that created the technology that Richard Branson created Virgin Galactic out of. And I am very interested now in space and in the marketing of space. I recently registered spacemarketing.com and space advertising.com because I have a lot of links.

Someday.

Yeah. And also I've just spent in the last two weeks close to four Days with Peter Diamandis doing work with his asteroid mining company and XPRIZE Foundation. That does amazing cool stuff. And what I never would have even thought about. You would ask me six months ago, would I be interested in packaging up things related to space and startup space companies and things like that. Never in a million years would I have a thought. But it is fascinated because I realized that if there's going to be any trillionaires made my guess and bet it's going to be made in space because of just the opportunities there. I won't go into too much detail here, but the point is because of doing. I love marketing because of having these conversations. It opened me up to these types of things that I never probably would have exposed myself to. That's a big one.

That's big. And it's funny that we launched our book, the yearbook of the first year. We launched the book by literally launching it into space and having video and pictures taken of the book. So that's kind of an interesting thing. We never would have ever thought that we'd be going to space.

Yes. Our first I love marketing book, which is the best of the first 50 episodes. It's a 424 page book and we literally launched the book up in the space and then we let everyone who was an I love marketing listener that wanted to buy it. It's not a cheap book, it's $99 book. But you know, everything we give away is for free. And people are like, we want all of this summarized. What's the best stuff? So we're like, you know, we're just giving people what they want. And it's so funny I have to mention this, we gave away so much and we still do, you know, information People started posting after, I mean probably like the third episode. When are you guys going to try to sell us something? You know, we said, I go, that's pretty fun. I go, Dean, that's exactly want. It just proves that we're giving value. And then it shifted from when are you guys going to try to sell us something? To will you please sell us something? I will buy something. It was like the greatest thing. And so we gave an opportunity to get this book. And so the first people that actually pre ordered it, we put their name in the first edition so that when we launch it up into space and it's there with action figures of me and Dean, which they had to rush the action figures. So I look really not like me and Dean looks way too thin. But basically it doesn't look future Pacey.

It'S a future vision.

But, you know, they don't look like. I look like some Asian Chinese guy. And Dean, I mean, Dean. What's funny is the best thing about it is Dean has a uniform. He has this whole philosophy of friction free. So he owns many, many black shirts and many, many pairs of tan pants and tan shorts. He's always wearing the same color things, so he never has to think about what to wear. I guess he thinks he's like Steve Jobs or something. But basically, yeah. I mean, we launched it up in the space and we do wacky, crazy, fun, cool things. And we're like, you know what? If we're gonna launch something, we might as well really launch it in the space. And so there's a whole video of. You can see we're up in orbit, floating around with our book.

Yeah, well, talk about monetizing. Dean. We got together, you and I, for lunch just a couple weeks ago. And I had. During the, you know, the last quarter, we had had a phone conference one night, and I asked you a question. And the question was, what single focus and activity would absolutely fascinate and motivate you for the rest of your life? And what the answer was for you is actually very, very interesting. And I'd like everyone to hear what your answer is and what you're doing with it now, because you've actually taken that and turned it into an enterprise.

When you asked me that question, it's a different take on unique ability, but it's a practical, like, what are you doing? Type of a thing with that? And I said to Dan, you know, solving marketing challenges, like looking at. Applying what I know about marketing to different businesses is fascinating to me. And it's motivating to see people. See the lights turn on for people. So after our conversation, you know, I had this thought, why don't I just go and, you know, book a room and invite people to come and spend three days with me and go deep into applying the eight profit activators to the business. So I put up a little post on Facebook and filled the first event and half of a second one in August. And it was just like, you know, really, I'm excited about it because it is something that really does motivate me. You know, it's really like completely in my unique ability. And so it was kind of a. Just in a conversation that's turned into a significant amount of money just in a little bit of time.

Well, I'd be remiss if I didn't have you do an actual plug here with the name of the program. And also, you know, how people who didn't get in on the first two sessions can get into.

So yeah, so I've been calling this the breakthrough blueprint program where it's just you come and look completely at your business and apply the eight profit activators specifically to your business. I told you that, you know, most of the time when we do events, it's big, you know, 500 person events where you really can't get any kind of personal time with anybody. And these events are much smaller, you know, 12 people and focused completely on actually creating the materials. It's harder to hide in a 12 person group than in a 500 person group where you're just going to sit and listen and take in all the information. This is something where you're actually going to do the work and get instant feedback on that and leave with the blueprint that you can actually apply for breakthroughs.

So, yeah, well, I'm going to be in the lineup because I really want to do that. One of the things I always like to do in an interview because interviews themselves are learning experiences. So, you know, at the end of this half hour that we've spent together, what's occurred to you, Joe, that's worth really pursuing for you?

Probably that I really think the model that we are doing with 10 times talk and also I love marketing is something that everyone that is listening that has something valuable that they could share with the world, they can actually do this. I mean, what you're hearing us do, think about your own situation and can you do it? Also I love the fact that technology makes it so easy for people that have true wisdom to reach people that can never be reached otherwise. And we happen to talk about making money and our niche. Between the three of us as entrepreneurs, we want to be heroes to entrepreneurs. We want to empower ethical, awesome entrepreneurs to go out and create value in the world. There's a lot of people that have solved a lot of problems that have not even scratched the surface with having people know about it. And my friend Peter Diamandis talks about people coming online. He calls it the rising billion, that there's going to be 3 billion new minds coming online over the next decade. And how are you going to reach them? So part of it is what's becoming apparent to me here. The more we do 10 times talk, the more we do. I love marketing is just the model that this is. I mean, this is really a unique model that's reinventing education and how people learn about stuff. I mean, there are people. The reason that Dean has Marketing Mondays as an example is it defined a time period. So do that. And then before we end, I want to actually say something and I want to have an opportunity to ask Dean a question about Dan Sullivan. So I just want to. Since this is 10 times talk, and since me and you constantly mention Dan Sullivan in Strategic Coach on I love marketing. And because we're both longtime clients and we spend so much time together with each other, you are part of his you times 10 group, Dean. That's why we're in Toronto right now. I mean, you live here half the year, but I'm in Toronto because of this. Why Dan Sullivan? I mean, out of all the people that we could quote and reference and talk about from your perspective, why Dan Sullivan?

It's something, isn't it? You know, but there's the thing is that Dan's creating a conversation that we both want to be part of. You know, when you look at that, you talk about Peter Diamandis rising billion, that, you know, when you create a conversation, you create an umbrella that some of those people are going to be interested in growing 10 times, and it's such a unifying thought. If that's attractive to you, you're going to gather under that umbrella. You're going to gather to the people who are doing that message. Same thing, you know, with I love marketing, that people who love marketing gather round to support and be with other people who love marketing. And they're so intertwined. They're so intertwined. You know, I mean, part of growing 10 times is really falling in love with marketing because that's the vehicle that can get you there a lot of the time.

Exactly. Yeah. I think that we're kind of identifying and we're kind of selecting who we want to be talking to 10 times talk. If you're interested in growing your business 10 times, 10 times talk seems like a good thing to listen to. I love marketing. If you love marketing, you want to be better at it. There you go.

Yeah.

So anyway, we are kind of there. So, I mean, this has been a pleasure to have Dean Jackson. Not that I talked to this fruitcake enough already, but it's great to have him as a guest on 10 times talk. And of course, Dan, we're going to do. You are our first Official guest on 10 times talk. So there you go. I'm honored there will be more. So what are the famous last words, Dan?

Well, I think in the future, Joe, when we're doing the next episodes, we should have a little card every five minutes, say something about Dean Jackson, you know, so that we all.

Could you imagine.

Make me feel good.

If I could you imagine. You're gonna have to up your game a little bit.

I'll just start spewing out quotes.

Awesome. And you know what? For all of our listeners, thank you so much. Love to hear your comments on what you thought about this. And you can check out 10timestalk.com if you happen to listen to this episode on itunes, because there will be videos, there will be quotes from Dan Sullivan that you can download. There'll be free reports. There's various things that we're going to continually start updating the site with. There will be free things that would be really valuable for you to not only improve your marketing, but, of course, to ten times your business. Thank you, Sam.