The Difference Between Sales And Marketing with Dan Sullivan - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #158

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast.

Hi, this is Joe Polish. And what you're about to hear is I had some special guests where me and Dan Sullivan usually do the 10x talk recordings, just me and Dan. What we decided to do is invite my good friend Dean Jackson and another very special guest onto these episodes and we recorded them in the Strategic Coach headquarters and we're going to actually take these podcasts and also put them on the podcast episode. I love marketing that I do with Dean Jackson, but just wanted to let you know that you're about to hear some really great conversations and I hope you find them incredibly useful and incredib valuable. So now join me, Dean Jackson, Dan Sullivan, and a very special guest and enjoy what you hear. Hello, everyone. I'm here with Dean Jackson and Dan Sullivan. We're in the studio in Toronto again.

That is exciting. This is a great setup right here. I always love coming down here.

Of course, it's probably nicer than your bedroom or wherever else you do the podcast than you do them just with me.

Right.

You probably dress nicer in your typical uniform.

No, no, I'm wearing exactly the same thing now.

Dean has a uniform where he always we Tommy Bahama shorts or pants, I guess, when you're ever in an area where there might be a little chilly. And your black hat, your famous black hat.

That's right.

So we're here with the brilliant superhero outfit.

Well, it's a brand. I mean, there's a brand. There's a Dean Jackson brand.

That's right.

And you gotta stick to it. I mean, once you establish a.

People would be surprised if they saw Batman wearing a different thing every time they ran into him, wouldn't they?

Yeah, that's Dean trying to take over the Batman role.

I wasn't thinking about it like that. I was thinking about superheroes in general.

See, that's the first time we can catch Dean trying to diss me because usually I'm the one that's.

No, Dean is just attaching his brand to another brand, which you highly recommend. So there's nothing wrong with what Dean just said, you know, I mean, it's chapter and verse. It's out of the gospel.

Okay, what we're going to talk about today is marketing and selling and predominantly selling. I want to say a couple things before we do this because Dan, you created this whole concept called the three sales. And before we get into that discussion, most people that think of marketing. Well, most people don't think about marketing or their completely confused by it. I always ask people what their definition is of marketing and there's many different types of marketing and of course the type of marketing that we subscribe to and that we're always talking about on I love marketing is direct response marketing where the point is not to just get your name out there which is image or brand building type of marketing and advertising, but it's really direct response where it's get your name out there, get a response back, do things that are trackable, do things that are specific, make calls to action, use compelling copy, that sort of stuff. It's emotionally engaging. And I'll give you Dan Sullivan's definition of selling that I asked him a while back. But again there's many different ways to think about this. So when people ask me what's the difference between selling and marketing? That was sort of a shtick that I have is selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get them on the phone or face to face with you properly positioned. So by the time they are talking with you or engaging with you and your company, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and predisposed to do business with you. And I've always thought about the aversion that people have to selling. Like they had high pressure situation because people love to be sold, they hate to be pressured. However, if they've ever been in a pressure situation or they've had marketing done to them and it felt like oh, someone was talking me into something, they have this aversion to marketing like it's a bad thing. And I always say, well if you think marketing is bad, try holding your breath. It's like saying oxygen is bad. Your business is not going to survive without marketing any more than a human is not going to survive without oxygen. And so I've started really saying to people, look, if you have a problem with selling and marketing, think of marketing as storytelling. Because if you tell a better story, you're going to get a better result, you're going to get better engagement, better buy in, better listening, better everything. And think of selling as influence. And the more influential you are, the more effective you're going to be. And that's in a business environment. Now Dan has actually created this thing called the three sales which we'll go deep on. The first one is money sales, the second is freedom sales and the third is capability sales. Before we jump into that, is there anything Dean or Dan you guys would like to say about how you think of marketing or how you think of selling. And then let's just get into this discussion. And I want to encourage our listeners to take notes because I think this episode is just going to be jam packed with usefulness.

You know, I think that part of the frustration that I see that people have when they're frustrated with selling or marketing or they feel they're not good at it is that they're looking at it as trying to convince somebody to buy their stuff. And being unsuccessful at that is a source of frustration for them. And they keep trying to figure out if they just knew how to sell, that they could convince people to buy their stuff. And you and I, all of us know when we talk about marketing, about getting in a position where we kind of bookend the process with being crystal clear on who your audience is and then jumping ahead to seeing what would be a dream come true for them. Before you even start with the marketing stuff, one of the things we were talking about in my most recent Mastermind groups, I was posing this question of what would have to happen? How would you have to treat what you do or your marketing if your goal was to have your arrival received as joyfully as the Publisher's Clearinghouse sweepstakes van pulling up to their driveway? What would have to happen for you to create that kind of elation about somebody getting the opportunity to work with you?

Right.

So it's an interesting thing because most people don't think about it like that.

You know, I mean, I think people that don't do well with marketing, or worse, they actually despise it. They think it's kind of like, oh, we got a shoehorn in a sale here at, oh, you know, I don't want to have to take care of that, you know, trying to sell people stuff. I mean, they've got this whole mindset. I think the biggest obstacle to people being effective at selling in marketing is not the fact that they can't learn it or that it's not available. Certainly they can listen to this podcast and they can learn more about marketing and selling than 99% of the population. What it is is they underestimate the value of it. I mean, the biggest obstacle is they just don't place importance on it. And it's like not placing importance on nutrition and then expecting to feel good. I mean, it just doesn't make sense. Which lends itself to what I want to ask Dan to start describing, which is the three types of sales, which, instead of thinking about selling other People or products and services. The biggest influential job you have to do is the one in your own head. On your. So, Dan, I could give your definition of selling, because I love it, but you're right here in front of me. So let's have you talk about this.

Well, what I've noticed, and I notice it in my own family, I notice in people I've grown up that just haven't really, really done well in their life. And they're very, very frustrated because they don't believe that everything on the planet moves because of a sail. They almost have a religious belief. There must be some other reason why things move on the planet. And after looking at this 50 years, I realized that you either believe in selling or you believe in the tooth fairy.

You're right.

No. And the tooth fairy comes in the form of government. The tooth fairy comes in the form of somebody opening doors for you. But it's like there's only these two belief systems that either happens because I have something of great value that I effectively communicate to someone else where I'm not selling them on something. What I'm doing is setting up the conditions where they sell themselves on a better future. And I've got something that can assist with that. I'm not the total answer to what they want in the future, but I've got part of the piece that would actually help them. Now, you either believe that the world works that way, or you got to believe that there are mysterious forces operating, like fairies and angels that actually create the world for you. And I don't see a third possibility here. It's either selling or it's tooth fairy. So having said that, then you have to understand, well, what's actually happening in the sale. And again, I just observed this. I observed this in myself. I've coached 6,000 entrepreneurs myself. And I said, you know, there's two things that happen when you have a great sale, and one of them is intellectual and the other one is emotional. And so the first thing you have to do is that you have to engage people intellectually in a future desirable result that they don't have now, but if they had it, it would be really good for them. So it's an intellectual engagement. You have to engage their mind. And a lot of people think they can make an intellectual sale. The intellectual sale only sets it up, but then you have to be able to enable them emotionally to commit to deciding and taking the action that will actually get the future results. So the two things are necessary, but you have to understand it's not happening between you and the other person, it's actually happening between the other person and a future that they're visualizing. And then if they buy into that, they come back and say, well, can you assist me with that? Do you have a product? Do you have a service? Do you have an experience? Do you have something that can assist me? And you're just one of a number of things that they need. But if you're the one who really sells them on their future, then you're the main salesperson.

Right. So I remember when I first asked you, Dan, we're in a workshop at Strategic Coach and I said, Dan, what's your definition of selling? And he didn't even bat an eye. He said to get someone intellectually engaged in a future result that's good for them and get them to emotionally commit to take action to achieve that result. And since then I've actually shared that with hundreds of thousands of people because I talk about it quite a bit. But I've had entire conferences filled up with hundreds of people where I would put that definition. I'd write it out on a flip chart and I would say, what are the most important words? And people would say engage and result and emotional. And I'd say, well, the keywords is good for them because you can get people intellectually engaged in a future result and get them to commit to take action that is horrible. Like eat this crappy food, watch this pornography, go out and smoke a lot of cigarettes. There's a lot of. That's where people get hung up on good or bad. It's not like marketing is good or bad. Is a hammer good or bad? Well, if you go around beating people with a hammer, that's probably not a good. It's like anything else. I mean, it's how you use it. It's your intention behind it if there's a value creation. And so there's a lot to this. But the point is, if you're a person that has a bigger future, the mechanism of how you're going to reach your bigger future is selling. It's not just selling to other people for monetary reasons, it's for psychological reason, for what it's going to do for you. Because everything that comes out of your mouth, my mouth, anyone's mouth, is designed to either attract or repel. And like I've said in that short video, people can type in is selling evil into Google. And it pops up that 3 minute and 50 second video where I'm literally talking about Dan's definition of selling. I say that, you know, you can use it like a gun. You can use it for self defense, you can use it to rob people. I mean, it's all what you're doing. And you know, if you've ever read a book, gone to a movie, eaten at a restaurant and told someone about the book, the restaurant, the movie, and you influence them enough to actually go to that restaurant, read that book, go to that movie, which has happened to almost every human being on the planet, then you have successfully made a sale. And people are selling all the time, but they have the biggest problem translating it to the real world, and they label themselves. I don't know how to sell. Well, you're selling all the time. Watch your kids. Your kids are probably selling you. They're doing a great sales job on you, but no one trained them how to do it. Let's talk about the three sales Dan, that you created this process. You have the front stage, which is money sales, and then you have the backstage, which is freedom, sales and capability sales. And this, I think, is profound. And I think if people grasp this, it will change the way that they interact with their business and their lives and other human beings.

Yeah, well, you know, my focus is just successful entrepreneurs, okay? And I start with just why they're successful now. And all of them that I deal with firsthand in strategic coach, they got where they are because they're really good salespeople. And one of the crossovers that happens, I say, you're doing it at the heart, and there's another whole realm called marketing. And then I send them to, I love marketing, and I send them to your program, and I send them to Genius Network because that's not my realm. But I do get them comfortable with the fact that they're great salespeople. But I say one of the big mistakes that entrepreneurs make is that they start their business as a salesperson. But right away they say, well, I'm going to put away my sales hat and I'm going to put on my manager's hat or I'm going to put on my research hat. And I said, well, that's the biggest mistake you can make, because regardless, from the moment you start your company until you end up 50 or 60 years later, you should never take off your sales hat. It's just that along the way, as things grow, you're going to make different kinds of sales and you're going to have other salespeople working with you and for you. So I said, obviously, the first sale you have to make is the Money sale. Because if you don't have chips, they don't let you come into the casino and they don't let you stay at the table. You know, I mean, yeah, I'm really valuable, but where are your chips? And chips are cash flow. I always say if there's a God in the entrepreneurial heaven, the name of that God is cash flow. You know, as long as the 30th of the month tells you that the next month is okay, you're in business and that's it. So you got to make the money sale, and that has to be structured. And Dean, your marvelous system with the blueprint breakthrough just takes them through the money making system to make sure that there's no gaps in the system. And the repeat business keeps getting better, the renewal business keeps getting better, and the new business. Same thing with you, Joe. That's front stage. That kind of sale happens front stage. So one of the models I use in Coach is the theater model. And I say, you go to a great play and it's like magic, okay? But part of the magic is they don't let you see the backstage. They only let you see the front stage. When you go to Disney World, you just see Mickey out there taking photographs. You don't see Mickey minutes later taking off his head and smoking. That's grounds for a lawsuit at Disney World. I mean, kids can have psychotraumatic experience of seeing Mickey with his head off smoking, and Disney's gonna get sued for $10 million, and the kid's gonna be a mess as a result of that experience. But the thing that's really, really interesting, there's two types of sales. So I'm a salesperson. So when I started Coach, I was the salesperson. But now if I put all my different sales together, salespeople in the company who are selling either before, during, or after the actual experience. And so day to day, 99% of the sales in the front stage are happening through people other than myself. But backstage, I'm selling two things. One is I'm selling other people. I'm freeing me up. And so I've got a team of roughly a dozen direct people who just keep looking at Dan's schedule and says, dan doesn't have to do that. Dan doesn't have to do that. The way I sold them is I said, if you can free me up, I'm going to show you what this is going to look like three years from now and how you're going to be able to grow and you're going to be Able to take over whole areas of responsibility. Your income is going to go up, your bonuses are going to go up, and you're going to just be freed up to do what you love doing. So I call that the freedom sale. A lot of people call it delegation. I said it's a crappy word, you know, because it's bureaucratic. It's not. It's freedom. You're selling freedom for yourself.

That's a great distinction. That's what a great reframe.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're selling freedom, you know, and then the second one is capability. And third one. The third one, I'm sorry, the capability sale. It's really the growth sale. Because you're constantly, as you grow, going to be needing capabilities that you either have to bring in from the outside into your organization, or they are outside capabilities that it doesn't make sense to actually have them in your car because you couldn't pay for it. I mean, a really great copywriter. I wouldn't have a really great copywriter actually working in my company. The level of Paris or someone like that, because there's not enough. And you don't want Paris inside your organization. You want him outside. And he can do in two hours what other people would take a couple weeks to do. I mean, he's just so good. But there's these really extraordinary capabilities. And what I want to do is I want to sell those capabilities on why they should give their best work to my organization. And so that means that the whole world of unusual and unique capabilities is part of my organization. If I can sell them on the vision of where I'm going. So I got to have the money sales because I got to get a foundation, then I have to have the freedom sales so I can grow personally. And then I have to be able to sell unusual capabilities out in the world. And that genius network is just that. So I think that all three of us, coming from a different angle, are always talking about these three different kinds of sales.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I think when I actually grasp that selling and marketing will open doors that cannot be opened any other way, and that these doors are just waiting to be opened. It's just the thing that Gary Halbert used to say when I made the they're never closed.

They're not closed anyway. You just got to open. Nobody tries to open them.

Right. Like I learned marketing to delivering a message in direct mail. And it really is the closest you're ever going to come to printing money legally. Because with the right sales, you can Persuade many people to jump on your train if you're selling a train ticket or me.

Exactly.

It really is. And so the key is, how do you sell yourself? Dan, when you wake up in the morning, like you get up and you're a person that I always have admired because out of every book, course, seminar, program, workshop, everything I've ever watched, listened to. I mean, you are the most congruent with your message of anyone that I've ever seen. And of course I have an advantage because we spend an enormous amount of time together. You just seem to have not only developed some great tools and some great strategies, but you also have lived them. And you're a convert of your own system. You've transformed yourself. I mean, you've talked. If people don't know the history of you, they can listen to the first episodes we did on 10xtalk.com and they can hear about a lot of the stuff in your life. But I mean, you've really learned how to make your life work. And when parts of your life don't work, you've learned how to quickly transform those areas because you know how to take messes and turn it into raw material to continually create a better future. So how do you sell yourself when you start the day?

Yeah, well, you know how when you take an airline flight, they say in case of emergency, who's the person you notify? So at a really bad time in my life, I translated that in case Dan screws up his life. Who do you phone? And I just found out there really wasn't anybody you could phone if I screwed up my life. And that's hard for a lot of people because ultimately there's no one else except yourself. If you're going to to make something of your life, that can never be anyone else's responsibility. It's 100% your responsibility. And I think you have to accept that. But if you take complete responsibility for your life, you also get complete ownership of your life. Anybody else's opinion about how you should run your life? As long as you're willing to be 100% responsibility? That may be interesting information, but it has no bearing on what you're going to do. So you say, how do I get up in the morning? It's actually what I did before I went to bed every night. By six o' clock I've already sold myself on the following day. So this is what tomorrow is going to be like. This is the purpose of tomorrow, this is the importance of tomorrow. This is the ideal outcome of tomorrow. If I Screw up tomorrow. This is the worst that's going to happen. If I do it right, this is the best that's going to happen. And tomorrow night I'm going to have a checklist of whether that was a great day and I check it off. But that's got to be finished by mid afternoon because between mid afternoon and six I got to create tomorrow. So I got to get tomorrow out of the way by 3 o' clock in the afternoon. And the other thing is that I've learned don't put unreasonable things down. Actually write down checkpoints that you can actually pull off because I don't want to carry the list over to the next day. A lot of people, they put down 20 things, but they could only get five of them. So I've learned never make a list you can't accomplish. And the other thing is if you change your mind about any one of them, you have complete permission to change your mind. So the reason why I think people hate sales and I think the reason why they're bad at sales is because they never sold the person who is going to be the salesperson. They've never sold themselves on who they are. They've never sold themselves on their own value, and they've never sold themselves on their future. And when they try to sell what people are picking up, this is a person who doesn't know himself. This is a person who doesn't think she's very valuable. This is a person who doesn't really have a future. Why would I want to buy? I see a lot of people. You know, the difference between them when they're confident and not confident is when they're confident, they look at your shoes while they're talking rather than their own shoes. And you just see people and they say, well, it's an unfair world. It doesn't work. But you're not sold on yourself. It has nothing to do with the world, is that you've just never made a commitment to yourself. You've never taken responsibility for yourself. Well, nobody wants to buy that.

Yeah, that is interesting. It's almost like that's. You often hear, even Jay Abraham says, you know, people are silently begging to be led. And, you know, it's kind of like what you're saying. What I'm hearing is that people are, when they're not completely sold themselves, they're waiting for somebody else to kind of lead them, but nobody can unless you're completely committed.

And the way you actually get to this is when you're truly in a position, when you're looking at someone who is. If you're discouraged, encourage others. I saw that subway somewhere in the last couple of days. So if you have a friend, everyone listening, if this just hasn't landed for you, if you have a friend or someone that you care about in your life, could be a client, there's a bigger future that you can see, and they can't see it, and they're maybe going to be in some trouble or something bad is going to happen if you don't persuade them into a bigger future that's good for them. So you have to get them intellectually emotionally engaged. And this is something I learned from Dan. Who are you being when you're in a situation like that, you're typically a good listener. You're empathetic, sharing, you're caring, you're persuading. I mean, you're doing what needs to be done in order to get someone out of that mess. And if you're doing it with good intentions, all these wonderful, great characteristics present themselves because of that. So the pressure to do something and make that sale actually allows you to intensify all of these wonderful qualities and to exhibit them. And so when I've asked audiences, who are you being? Who's the best of you? That expresses itself in that situation? They list out literally dozens and dozens of all these great qualities. And then I say to everyone, well, if all of these great qualities come out of you when you're in a position of selling, then how often should you be selling? And it takes usually a little while, but someone will finally say, all the time. Exactly. I mean, your life needs to be one of that. It's just how it's used. It's a great thing. And so to kind of wrap up, Dan, you have this whole sort of thinking about other people's bad news as your good news. And money is made by transforming bad news into good news. And I also think that takes it to a much personal level, too. You say, in the beginning of an entrepreneur's career, there's two things they need. They need ignorance and courage. You're talking about confidence, and if you're not confident, you don't feel good about what you're doing. And so courage doesn't feel good, but confidence does. But until you get to that state of confidence, you actually have to have the courage to at least go through this conversation we've had. So I'd like to kind of end this with you telling the story about how you were in the army in that whole thing, when you learned what.

Courage meant, yeah, I was drafted right at the start of the Vietnam in 1965, and went to basic training. And for the most part, it's kind of boring. And it's. I mean, they work you hard and everything else, but there's nothing particularly scary about it. But there is one event that happens. There's actually two. One is live machine gun fire, where if you raise your head 12 inches, you're a casualty. But the other one is grenade. You practice with live grenades. They show you how to do it the night before so that you can think about it during the night when you get there in the morning. And it's scary because you're down in a pit. You're down there with an instructor, and you get two live grenades. And if you drop it, I mean, if some accident happens in five seconds, you're a hamburger. So the trainer's down there just to grab the grenade if you screw up. So the next morning we show up, and the first sergeant, who's in charge of the whole exercise says, is anybody scared here? And I raised my hand and he said, by the way, he always called me shit for brains, so he really loved me. So he says, but Sullivan, he says, he's the only one I scared. You're all scared. But Sullivan is the only person who's actually saying he's scared. You should be scared. And he said, I'm going to tell you the difference between fear and courage. He says, fear is peeing your pants. Courage is doing what you're supposed to do with wet pants. And I always remembered this, that a lot of people think that courage. He's really, really courageous. It's like the person is really feeling good about themselves when they're being courageous. They aren't. They're feeling about themselves. And that's what courage is, that you persist and you keep going forward and you do what you have to do, even though you don't feel good. Where you feel good, courage has turned into confidence. But the growth factor that produces confidence is actually courage for a period of time when you don't feel good, you're not certain about it, but you persist. And then after you've done it, there's an achievement. And that achievement automatically transforms the courage into confidence. And a lot of people say, well, where do I get the confidence? I said, start with courage. Well, I'm really scared of doing that. And I said, that's the perfect ingredient for courage.

Exactly. Exactly. I love it. And so that's a good setup. And I remember this thing that Jim Rohnwood said is you can't hire someone to do your push ups for you. And so when you talk about being responsible. So now. Yeah, exactly, Dean, remember that. Okay, so with that I want to wrap up this episode just by encouraging everyone to listen to this advice and really think about the sales job that you need to do on yourself if you want to become more effective and that realize that selling and marketing with the right intention is the most honorable thing that you could ever do. If you create value in the world, you are doing the world and yourself a disservice by not being more effective at it. And go through the courageous stage because I always talk about you can have an elf business, easy, lucrative and fun, or a half business, hard, annoying, lame and frustrating. And rarely does things just become elf. It becomes elf after a process. But you have to be willing to go through that process. And so the success people in the world are the ones that are willing to do the things that the unsuccessful people are not willing to do. And if you need more help, come to all of our programs. Go through one of Dean's breakthrough blueprints, get yourself signed up for strategic coach@strategiccoach.com or go to geniusnetwork.com and take a look at what we do. But this is just giving you some real insight to some great thinking and things that, you know, we've all done this. Every single one of us here had to go through those stages ourselves. And so subscribe to our podcast. Please post your comments on ilovemarketing.com and 10xtalk.com and share this with anyone that you know in business that could use some encouragement. Because the best way to get good at this stuff is to teach it to other people.

All right.

Famous last words from either one of you.

Well, I think this whole thing about confidence, about feeling good about what you're doing and knowing that, I think it's a good exercise to think that question is, what would have to change in the way that you deliver your result if your goal was to make your arrival feel like the Publisher Clearinghouse Sweepstakes Prize patrol van arriving at somebody's mail or their inbox or their office? Just that exercise changes the way you think about it. Because then you have to take their perspective. You have to take that. You're getting them intellectually involved in a brighter future that's good for them from their perspective.

Yeah. And mine is that life is a choice between two things. It's either selling or it's the tooth fairy.

Right? So if you want to opt for the tooth fairy. That's your prerogative. But we're just here to serve.

There you go.

Okay.

We're just here to help. So awesome. I love it. Thank you both, and thanks, everyone, for listening again. Give us your comments and feedback and have yourselves a wonderful day. And that's totally checks. Yeah, exactly. And that's totally based on you, because if you decide not to have a good day, you just sold yourself on having a crappy day.

Perfect.

Awesome. See ya next time.