The One About Converting Even More Leads - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #6

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and me.

Joe Polish and me.

How you feeling, Joe?

You know, well, before you started recording this thing, Dean. Because that's kind of the role that Dean has taken here. He's in charge of recording the I Love Marketing podcast. And we're both talking about how we both have colds and, you know, tis the season to have a cold.

Well, and blaming it all on the Egyptian uprising, whatever.

I mean, there's all kinds of weird stuff going on in the world, but.

You would have come down here and we wouldn't have gotten. Either of us would have gotten that cold from our friend companion.

Yes. So the deal is I actually went and hung out with Dean a little over a week ago and it's now day nine. And I've been having this. We still have it. It's like this weird sort of thing that, you know, half my, half my staff has come down with a cold. But. But we are here. We're here to serve. It's a healthy.

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor colds from Egypt can stop us from the I Love Marketing podcast.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, you know, since although we are kind of time dating this podcast by talking about Egypt, you know, there was an uprising recently. If you're listening to this, you know, right around, you know, the February 2010 time period, and I was on a plane to Cairo. It had left the gate. It was in JFK airport. They were trying to get snow off the airplane and they could not whatever they spray on the plane to try to melt the snow or remove the snow, they couldn't. It was snowing harder than they could actually remove it. So the gate had to be pulled into the airport. And basically they canceled the flight and postponed it till later in the day. And at that point I'd already been either, you know, a five hour flight from Arizona to jfk, a seven hour layover, which I had an opportunity to go in and hang out with my buddy Ken Glickman and a guy named Jeff Madoff, no relationship to Bernie Madoff. And Jeff Madoff has a production company, Madoff Productions, does the commercials for Victoria's Secret and a bunch of amazing people. And we had dinner together. And then we head back to the airport, get on a plane, plane at 10:20pm and are headed to Cairo. And the protest had started, but it had not turned into a riot. Everything had not erupted in the country yet. And basically when they pulled the plane back in because they couldn't get the ice off of it. They postponed it till 2 o'. Clock. It was really late. I was really tired. And you couldn't leave the airport. It was shut down. There was no taxis going into the city. I never had to spend the night in an airport before. I think there's a movie called the Terminal or something about someone that was.

Right, right.

But I mean, it's kind of like. It was bizarre. But as soon as I got off the plane, I saw a lady with two babies. And I was with my friend Tim Ringgold. And, you know, I didn't feel like I had anything to complain about because you had this woman that had, you know, two babies that she. Two twins that she was caring for. And so my friend Tim went and got her some blankets and we found some cots and we're passing cots out to people and people are spread all over the airport. It was wild. But in a nutshell, had I had that flight taken off or had I taken the. That took off later, two o' clock the following day, I actually canceled because I had a gut feeling that there was not good stuff going on in Egypt because of what I saw the protest on the news. In spite of the fact that I called the hotel and they said, it's fine here, you can come, it's safe. I still had a gut feeling. I followed my gut. And had we taken that flight or had I taken the flight later that they had that did take off, we would have landed right dab smack in the middle of the, you know, massive chaos in Egypt. And then over the following week, it just erupted. And, you know, now that we're doing this podcast, day before yesterday, the president had stepped down finally. But it was. It was wild. And in between all that period of time, we had caught in a cold. And I've had it now for nine days. And it's been very interesting. But we are here to share marketing ideas. And I apologize in advance that everything that I just said was not per se about marketing. It is what I will say, though. In the airline industry, they have a motto which is, we're not happy till you're not happy. That has proven to be true on every aspect of it because it took five hours to even get my friend's luggage off the plane. I actually had a carry on and we were not packed for cold weather. So anyway, we ended up flying to Florida and hanging out with Dean and me. And Dean had a fantastic brainstorm session for a couple of days on all of the things that we are going to do and can do with ilovemarketing.com and you know what, what does I love marketing even mean to you at this point? Because it's. There's so many. It's in its embryonic state right now.

It really is. I'm really, you know, what's shaping up is like, it's very. I told you when we, when you were here that I'm very excited about it because it's so. It encompasses so much stuff. I mean, everything that I love about marketing. You think about all the stuff we love lead generation, we love lead conversion. We love all the psychology behind it, direct mail, all the Internet marketing things. There's so many things that go into marketing that both of us were writing on the whiteboard. In the Evil Scheme Hatchery, we had this whole realization that it can encompass everything that we love. It's a big enough container to house all of the ideas and stuff that we have.

Yeah, exactly. And you know what we should do? Because while I was there, I did shoot some videos on indeed Evil Scheme Hatchery on a Foot video.

I'll post up the tour this week. I'll post up the. When we were there.

Yeah, yeah. I was even down at the cafe and I shot the videos with the ladies behind the famous breakfast cookie. That was one of the very first pictures I think we ever put on ilovemarketing.com and yeah, so you can watch those videos on the ilovemarketing.com website. And yeah, it was really awesome. So having said that, let's share with everyone. Dean, I think where we left off on the last, the last podcast was.

Well, how could anybody forget where we left off last time? Because you were going to share an idea. The one idea that you gave to Bill Phillips that helped him make $3 million in the first hour of you working with him as a consultant. Yes, yes, everybody would love to hear that.

Okay, so let me take you back to 1997. There's this guy by the name of Bill Phillips who had a big sports supplement company called EAS and Applied Science. He had a magazine called muscle media 2000, which is what he eventually dropped the 2000. It was just called Muscle Media. And he had, you know, been in the hardcore bodybuilding market for many years and he basically had, you know, been magazine with rabid following. He was a great writer and, you know, he's the author of Body for Life and his most recent book is Transformation. Transformation.com is where you can find info about Bill Phillips and so basically he had hired me for consulting when I was a whopping $3,850 a day. And you know, now of course I'm 3,000 an hour whenever I do consulting. But basically back then I was 38.50 is what I charge for a day of consulting. And so he brings me in for a day of consulting. And we're sitting down within the first hour. One of the first things Bill does is he shows me a sales letter that he had. And the sales let was basically selling Myoplex supplements. It was a ready to drink, not in the ready to drink containers, but it was like in little packets where you put it in a cup or a blender and you blend it up and you drink it. And so self serving sort of containers. And they were selling boxes of this stuff. And he had a sales letter, and the sales letter had been mailed out to his list. He had a pretty big list. And this particular campaign had brought in 2 million doll revenue. It worked really well. And it was a sales letter with A photo of three semi trucks which were EAs. Semi trucks all backed up to the EAS warehouse because he had a big EAS building where they actually, I think at the time he was the second largest shipper for FedEx. He shipped out so many packages from FedEx daily that FedEx actually staffed people in his building 24 hours a day because it was a 24 hours a operation. When Bill actually owned EAS, which he doesn't anymore, he sold the company a couple years later for $300 million. I think in many ways in large part because of meeting me and implementing some cool ideas I gave him. But again, let's not give too much credit to me because again, it's just ideas, Dean. And we know how important ideas are. Not.

I mean, it's not like it was execution or anything.

Yeah, yeah. So those of you that don't know what we're talking about, you have to go back to the previous issue of I love marketing podcasts to kind of catch up on execution versus ideas. But yes, me and Dean believe ideas are critical. What he needed was an elegant idea. So I gave him a few elegant ideas, which he did a superb job of implementing. And that's one very good thing I will say about Bill. The guy got stuff done. He had this offer, was 40% off my plex. And the sales letter went on to say that, you know, I had. I'm going to kind of shorten the story. But the premise was he made an order from his manufacturer of myoplex supplements. Unbeknownst to him, his manager, general manager, made an order and both of them double ordered. Now they have a warehouse full of myoplex and they need to, you know, get it out. There's so many boxes of this stuff that it's in the semi truck and they don't have room for it in the warehouse. So they're going to have a 40% off sale. And he had mailed out this letter and it was working like gangbusters. It, you know, it had brought in 2 million in revenue. And one of the first things that he says to me, he said, you know, I am the marketing department here. I've got, you know, a couple hundred employees and no one knows how to write copy like me. I need more copy like this. And he showed me the letter and I'm reading through this letter and I said to him, I said, well, have you ever heard of three step letters or sequential mailings? And he's like, yeah. I go, have you ever done them? And he said, no. I go, well, well, here's what you do. What you do is you don't need to write another letter. You take the same letter and you basically. And I said, can I hand write on the letter? And he's like, yeah. So I scribbled second notice, sent you this letter two weeks ago, still haven't heard from you. This offer, extended call now. And I go, and then you put an X through one of the trucks in the picture and you know, you scribble, you know, we have more left. And then I go in after. So you mail that, and if you get more sales from that letter, you mail it a third time. And you and I wrote on the letter, third and final notice. We've sent you this letter twice. You know, this is your final offer to get 40% off Myplex. Call and order now. And I said, so what you do is you mail this letter to every person that hasn't already placed an order. So you mail the second notice and then after that you go to the list and you mail the third notice. And I go, that's it. I go with the handwriting in there. And you're writing, you're going to write what I wrote here or you tweak it a little bit and you mail this letter two more times. I go, you don't need to write a stitch a copy. All you need to do is muck up m U c K M as in Mary, muck up the letter and, you know, scribble on it. You know, People now call it copy doodles or, you know, there's all kinds of terminology. What terminology do you use for, like, handwriting?

Well, there's. Now there's software that you can do it copydoodles, right? Like, something that you can. It makes it easy to make it look like handwriting. Right. On your Word document or whatever, or even on your website. It's amazing to think, like, now nobody even thinks of sending a physical letter. Like, nobody thinks about that as a. As a tool. So the copy doodles and things like that, you can do it on your website, where you can handwrite things. But that was a very popular strategy for direct mail. It's handwriting. It brings a lot of interest into the letter.

Yeah, well, there was always a great line that I always remembered, which is, neatness rejects involvement, ugly works. I can't remember who actually said that, but I always loved that line. Neatness.

That sounds like something Dan Kennedy would say.

Yeah, well, I think it was like, Lou. Oh, God, I can't remember. Lou's Lew guy was his first name Lou. I think it was him. Denny Hatch actually originally told me that quote. But, yeah, I mean, I learned three step letters from Dan Kennedy, because at that time, Dan Kennedy was writing a good portion of my sales copy for me. And so I was doing a lot of stuff with Dan. I even got Bill Phillips to actually hire Dan Kennedy for Day of Consulting and me, at one given time, just to strategize and win. Bill came out with the book Body for Life. There's a little strip that had all the before and after pictures on the COVID of the book. It was like a removable strip. And that idea for that book on Body for Life came from the brainstorm Day of consulting me and Dan did with Bill. But basically so going back to that letter. So I told Bill to mail that same letter two more times with the handwriting on it. So he did. And what happened was he brought in another $3 million in sales. So the point is, had he just mailed that first letter once, it was a very successful campaign. He brought in $2 million. That's huge for someone to bring in that level of sales. He also had a big list, and he had a big business. He was doing 60 million a year in revenue when I met him. However, within the first hour of hiring me for consulting, I gave him one idea, which is to simply mail the letter two more times, and it brought in another $3 million in revenue. Revenue that never would have been brought in from that campaign had he not done that. And so the point is that when it comes to conversion, one of my favorite lines, and I will say lines in quotes a lot because they explain things, is the time to quit going back to the well is when you put a bucket down into the well and you come up and there's no more water in the bucket. So as long as you're continuing to, you know, extract water, keep dipping into the well. And the same thing goes with any sort of mailing list, be it offline online. You know, you can continually do sequential sort of mailings in order to stay in touch with people because different people, people are busy, people are, you know, you're just going to capture their attention at different, you know, times. And that period of time could be in a one week period where you can communicate to people multiple times. That's why you see people emailing every day. Some people, the most I've ever seen a person on a list is they email three times a day for some categories that have such a rabid following. Something to think about, Bill.

Of course I heard some, I forget who it was that they said. I asked them how often they mailed and they said, only on the days that I want to make money.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

People are like, oh yeah, you don't.

Want to mail too frequently because you're going to bug your customers. It's like, well, I'll tell you this, if people don't like you enough to where they're going to communicate to you, then you either need to develop more engagement with them or you need to come up with better stuff, better offers, better connection. Can you overdo it? Yeah, but you shouldn't be the one that decides that your customer should tell you when they're sick of hearing from you. And they'll tell you by either opting out of your list or not buying from you or complaining. However, rarely, rarely are we going to come across someone that is over communicating to their list. It's the same thing with any type of relationships. They just loved me too much. I couldn't handle it. Although in certain dysfunctional situations that could be the case. But however, that's usually people leave because of neglect and being ignored. The time that you will lose your customers to your competitors is when you allow your customers, competitors to pay more attention to your customers than you do. And so it's our job as business owners, as marketers to continually stay in touch with our clients.

Well, here's the thing. You know what? I've got a really great story that we'll tell that will tie that in. When you look at it, people are afraid to communicate to their list or talk to their people because they don't want to offend anybody or they don't want people to think they're communicating too much. And the reality is that the very best thing you can do is communicate to the very best people on your list. Only worry about them, you know, like, if you're thinking about it, who are the people that you really want to serve? They're the people who, who want you to help them. They're the people who want to get the benefit of what it is that you offer. They're the people that you're communicating with and you don't. I think people, especially when we're talking about email lists, because it's so easy to communicate to people, it's so easy to do it every day or multiple times a day that they sometimes worry about people unsubscribing or people you know. But if I communicate, if I email them too much, then they might unsubscribe or they might get mad or whatever, you know, and the reality is, it doesn't matter. You know, if you're communicating, don't mail stuff that isn't adding value. Don't mail stuff that isn't giving people a benefit. But if you've got some information, you've got something that's helpful for people, don't worry about it. Communicate as often as you can. Bring value to people. And so here's.

Can I highlight what you're saying really quick, though? Because this is always what you said about as long as it's valuable and it's creating value for them and it's useful for them, no one's going to get offended by that. And if they do, it doesn't matter. I mean, you're not going to help them anyway. If you're going to provide value and share something that will, even if you're charging money for it, or even if it's just educating them or sharing something, some piece of information, some story that's engaging, something that they will perceive as cool and valuable. I mean, if they're going to get offended from that, are they ever going to give you money? Are they ever going to really be clients? Of course not. So I just really want to highlight that.

Exactly. Is the only people that you want to communicate to. You want to imagine the one person on your list who is your ideal buyer, your ideal client, the one that you can help the most, that you really want to be in a relationship with, only do it as if you are only doing it for them with the real estate agents. One of our clients is in Canada, Chuck Charles. And so we worked together just about a year ago now to come up with this idea of doing a daily video blog of all of the new listings that have come on the market in Milton. And so he had a list of 6,000 people in his email list. And what everybody would be concerned about is what if we, you know, if I email and then people unsubscribe. And so the way I talked about it with him was we, I said, what's going to happen is that we're going to polarize your list, that you're going to repel the bottom 20%, the people who don't want to buy a home in Milton and don't want to hear from you. But we're going to, on the flip side of that, we're going to attract, we're going to energize the top 20%, the people who really are looking for a house in Milton and really would like to hear about all the new listings that come on the market every day. So he started back in just about a year ago, February 18, flipped the switch literally within the first 30 days had or the first couple of weeks, about 1000 or 1200 people had unsubscribed from the list. So immediately his list went from 6,000 people down to 4,800 people within a few weeks. But it was okay because on the flip side, he was getting eight or nine hundred people a day coming and watching the videos that he was doing every day. And since that, it's been, you know, he's had 100,000 views of these videos in the. Over the course of the year. And it's just been the most tremendous lead conversion tool that he never makes an outgoing phone call, never makes a prospect. He does the videos and people will call him when they're ready because of course, he's making offers to people. He's got the cookies right there for them. You think through what would be the next logical step for somebody, what are they going to want to do next if they are somebody who's looking for a house in Milton? So when you look at the offers that we make are offers to come to a home buyer class to learn more information or to take a tour of Milton homes. Join us for a daily tour, talking about running daily tours of homes in Milton or just if you have questions and you want to just get together, meet me at Starbucks. So every single time that he communicates with people it's offering one of those three things. And that's exactly what happens is people then email him back whenever they're ready. He's built this rabid following of people who watch his videos every single day. Husbands and wives who tell him they watch it right before they go to bed. Every night in bed, they're watching the. It's about a 10 to 15 minute video every day where he goes through and talks about all the new listings. But that is the ultimate lead conversion tool. Giving people what they want, giving them the most valuable experience that you can give them.

That's what I'm trying to say.

That's all you're trying to say. Exactly.

The funny thing about it is that every person that has ever done business with a company and been ignored seems. Well, I shouldn't say every single person, like everyone listening, has had the experience where they've bought something. Think about in the last 30, 60, 90 days where you've hired a service company, you've bought anything from someone. Has there ever been any follow up? Typically no. There's maybe some thank you with that, but rarely is there some continuous follow up. But then take the prospecting, customer generating sort of situation. And how many people actually do a great job of continually delivering value? I mean, they really don't like Barney's, the clothing store.

Fantastic.

With their email follow up. I mean, if you ever go into Barney's and buy something, they just do a fantastic job. One of the reasons they charge so much money for what it is they do is because they do things like that and they develop a relationship with people that will come in and will spend typically 3, 4, 5, 10 times the amount of money on a shirt, on jeans, than on regular, even high end clothing stores. There's a lesson to be learned from the very most successful people as they develop and nurture relationships and they continually stay in touch. They're not transaction marketers, they're relationship marketers. And that's what you teach people how to do. And that's really, you know, I mean, I had to figure this out in carpet cleaning in an industry. I'll say this a lot just to remind people because they're like, well, you know, I mean, it might work for carpet cleaning, but it doesn't work for my business. It's like carpet cleaning is an industry where people were having to sell something to people that they don't really want to buy. Nobody wants to buy carpet cleaning. And if you can figure out how to do relationship marketing and make it work there, you can Pretty much apply that to almost any business. The same exact strategies of follow up that I was teaching my carpet cleaning clients, which were the same exact strategies that I was using that, you know, changed my carpet cleaning company around. Because I'm simply, you know, in a lot of ways, Dean, me and you are just converts of our own system.

Yeah, that's true.

We really are. I mean, everything that we're talking about, we're just converts of our own system. I mean, we, we developed a system because we needed to eat, we needed to make a business work. And it ended up becoming, you know, these marketing businesses and us being these quote unquote marketing guys. And that's what I love marketing is about, talking about it, you know, here's, here's the school sort of stuff. But one point I want to make to really drive this home is one of the most successful follow up systems that we use is a newsletter we call a client Compounder. It's a monthly newsletter and it just compounds your clients and you do it with the world's most interesting postcard. We do it with a newsletter. We have all these Twitter tools that we use and that our clients use and that people can use to make money. And every month I will recommend that someone mail a newsletter to their clients or joint venture partners in a carpet cleaning or service business, or for almost any business for that matter, if there's a reason to stay in touch with them. And we'll always get people to be like, I'm going to miss every quarter. I think monthly is too much. And we always have to have this conversation about arithmetic. Currently it costs about a dollar to mail. We've talked about this on previous episodes of the I Love Marketing podcast. But I want to continue to bring this point up. So it costs say like a dollar to mail. So let's say 12 bucks a year you are going to mail someone. So let's just say that the average gross base profit on a job is going to be 120 bucks. Well, you can mail a monthly newsletter every month for the next 12 years before you actually lose money in that sort of scenario. And so if anyone does business with a carpet cleaner any less than once every decade, then it makes sense for them to mail, pay and mail snail mail. We're not talking email here. That's free. Oh, I know, yeah, pay snail mail. An actual physical letter newsletter with a stamp to someone every single month for a decade. And it will still be profitable if they do business with you once a decade, which of course if they don't.

Do business with you. You look at the thing that $120 profit. Most people who you're going to be trying to attract as a corporate cleaner are going to be people who want to get their carpets clean twice a year, right?

Yeah, twice a year they're going to refer people. Exactly. So my point is, with the caveat being unless you do a crappy job, the only reason to not stay in touch with your clients or your customers is if they hate you and you're trying to escape from them because you're like some sort of unethical business person, then you don't communicate with them. But assuming that's not the case, which I always say too, because there's bait and switch and carpet cleaning where people use these low priced coupons. And I always say bait and switch leads to hate and bitch. So why would you ever do that to somebody? It's the stupidest way to run a company.

You're like the Muhammad Ali of marketing.

Yeah, I like that guy, everything.

It's great.

Yeah, I should actually start getting that title. Maybe someone can make a comment about that.

And I mean people are going to remember this. Episode 6 of the I Love Marketing podcast.

Dean Jackson knights knighted me as the Muhammad Ali of.

Muhammad Ali of marketing.

I like that. I mean I really do like this. I like what I'm hearing. So I have sat in front of rooms of these business owners and have it, showed them the arithmetic and the average job is way more than that. But like I'd showed them the arithmetic saying, this cannot not work. I mean there's no way you can do this. You can just mail a monthly newsletter. And I mean for our cleaners, they don't even have to write it. I mean we write it for them. I mean it's done. They don't have to even think that much and it's done for them. And I will still have people be like, oh, I don't want to. I think it's too frequently it's like, well, you're going to make money off this. But then I'll say, well, if you can remember the first time you ever like went out on a date with your wife or your husband or whatever, and I don't know what the whatever part is, that means that they dated a tree or something. I don't know if you can remember the first date that you ever had if you actually went out on a date with someone. And let's say, and I'll keep this clean for, you know, so it's family Listening here. And so at the end of the day, you had a wonderful time. You say to your date, as you're, let's say it's a woman, you're dropping her off at her doorstep of her home and you say, you know, I had a wonderful time. I think it was fantastic. Give her a kiss on the cheek and say, I'd love to do this again. I'll call you in six months. Now if you said that to someone, they would for something. You're never going to go on a second date. I mean, it's ridiculous. But that's exactly how most business owners basically approach follow up. They're like, okay, we bought from you, see you again. Look for us online, find us in the Yellow Pages, whatever. And I used to have people back in the days of when yellow pages were a very big thing, which I still have people that make good money on Yellow Pages, I mean, bringing in 5 to 1 and 10 to 1 because they use direct response ads, driving people to get free reports online or call free recorded messages. I mean, people think that Yellow Pages don't work anymore. There's a lot of ways that you can continue to use yellow Pages with their direct mail campaigns that they do now with their tie in to websites. There's some clever stuff you can still do with Yellow Pages. But I would have people all the time say, the reason I advertise in the Yellow Pages is so my customers can find me. And I always thought that was the funniest thing. You're going to run an ad in the one area where all your competitors look because you're too inept to actually take control of targeting and communicating and being in charge of you communicating to them, not waiting for them to come to you, but you directly going to them. The point of this conversation in a lot of ways is you need to take control of the communication with your customers. It's not up to them to remember you. It's not up to them to perceive the value. You need to continually deliver it to them. And if you do, you don't need to do this. You don't need to do anything. Me and Dean are talking about. If you do, you're going to make a lot more money, you're going to have a lot happier clients. You're going to be able to distribute and share more of whatever it is that you sell. And that's what makes the world go around. If you choose not to do this stuff, you very well could go bankrupt because you don't have any clients. So our objective Here is to share what we absolutely know from experience, our own and through many, many others works. And that's continual follow up and sharing value and not being worried about offending anyone. Because as Gary Halbert said, don't worry about offending the dogs when you're trying to attract the foxes.

I was just going to say that when you look at that, one of the things that I always talk about is identifying who is your ideal customer, who is the ideal person that you really want to do business with, what are the characteristics that they have. So for the real estate agents, one of the things that I talk about are five star prospects. And I've helped people do this in any business. So I'll tell you what they are and then we can talk about them for what it would be for carpet cleaners. But for the real estate agents, a five star process is somebody who is willing to engage in a dialogue, somebody who's friendly and cooperative when you talk with them, somebody who knows what they want, that they're moving. You know, they have a plan and they're willing to share it, that they're moving in the next six to 12 months and number five, that they'd like us to help them. That's a five star prospect. That's the ideal prospect that you could hope for as a real estate agent. Now if you're going to try and turn people into five star prospects, it's very difficult. It's either people are five star prospects or they're not. If they're not willing to engage in the dialogue, there's probably not a good chance that you're going to be able to to work with them anyway. If they're not friendly and cooperative when you talk with them, why would you want to work with them? If they don't know what they want, they don't have a plan that they're willing to share. That's not somebody that you can help. If they're not going to be moving in the next six to 12 months, if it's going to be three or five years from now, if you've got a great follow up program, you may be able to keep in touch with them. But a five star prospect is somebody who's going to reasonably work with you within the next six to 12 months and then would like you to help them. That's the kicker right there. So the bottom line is that those are the only people that you want to be communicating with. But you don't know which of your prospects is the five star prospect until they reveal themselves. So if you're generating a lot of leads, like all the people who call for the Six Steps to Homeownership guide or the guide to Halton Hills House prices or any of those things, the people who are calling, you can't tell just by their name, just by looking at their name and address that they leave on your voicemail or fill out on the form on your website, you can't tell just by looking at that whether they're a five star prospect or not. So there's two choices that you have. And what most people do is they take the choice of treating people like they're not five star prospects until they prove that they are. Meaning that people don't want to spend money, they don't want to spend time, they don't want to go out of their way for people until they know for sure that this is a real prospect or that they're a real buyer, that they're not just a tire kicker or a Looky Lou. And when you think about it, exactly the opposite is the very best course of action that you could have. The very best thing you can do is treat every prospect that comes in the front engine, the front part of your lead generation funnel is to treat every one of them like they are a five star prospect until they prove that they aren't. Because if you're treating everybody like they are a five star prospect, and this goes back to what we were saying about not being afraid to communicate with people as often as you can bring value to them when Chuck was making the switch to doing a daily email to everybody on his list. There's a little bit of fear in that because most people are afraid that they would maybe pull the plug because they look at it and say this isn't working. 1200 people unsubscribed. But the reality was on the opposite end of that, 20% of the people who were left were polarized, were attracted to it. And they were watching those videos every single day because he was treating everybody on that list like they were a five star prospect, like they really want to buy a home in Milton and he's going to communicate to them as if they are going to buy a home in Milton the way that those people would want to be communicated with. So you only focus on the five star prospects, which would be the foxes like Gary Halpert talks about, you know.

Yep, exactly. I mean, that's one thing that always has to be remembered, is that you are, when you're marketing, you are always trusting, attracting the right people and Repelling the wrong. And if you are not repelling, then you're probably being way too vanilla. You're trying to please everybody and you're not going to make some impact. I mean, that's why. Who is the highest paid radio personality that you can think of?

Howard Stern.

Yeah, exactly. Does Howard Stern polarize anyone?

Exactly. But go down the list. Who are the others? Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck. You know, these guys are. That's exactly it. That they're not afraid to have an opinion and they're speaking directly to their audience, the people that they want. The ideal audience for Rush Limbaugh is somebody who's very different than the, you know, the, the audience for Dave Ramsey.

Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, all of this is applicable to whatever business that you're in. You asked me what would be, you.

Know, the five stores, the five star prospects. So let's think about that for. We'll go through the exercise for the carpet cleaners and then we can, you know, think about how it can apply to apply to any business. I've been thinking too, Joe, how we talk about all the examples that I kind of give are real estate examples. The examples you give are carpet cleaning. But when you look at most any business is going to be somewhere in between those two. I mean, real estate being a high ticket item that only occurs once, once every five or seven or 10 years, and yours being a lower ticket item that happens every six months, you know.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think it's actually a match made in heaven in terms of having a couple of real life examples that we can share with people that lots of people can relate to and lots of people can use. And I mean, you know, what's funny is in my, in my life, I've also got my 25 group, which is the highest level, currently the highest level mastermind group in the world for direct response information marketers. And the criteria is make a net income of a million dollars a year, have three years experience in direct marketing, have a ethical reputation. I don't even invite people into the group that I knowingly know could cut a check. But they're kind of egomaniacs because a lot of times very successful people financially are not very coachable because they've done so well financially that they think they know it all. And so I don't want to do business with people that are know it alls. So I don't have, you know, I don't try to attract know it alls. As a matter of fact, in the marketing, I actually make fun of people like that. And so it sort of sifts them out. And you know, so that's a very high end, $25,000 person sort of ticket price. And so I have an income criteria, I have a year experience criteria and I have a personality criteria. I don't have a prospect. Yeah, yeah, you have it broken up very well. For carpet cleaners, of course, high end homes are the ideal. Since I teach my cleaners to be at the higher price points in the market marketplace. They're typically not targeting anyone that rents, they're targeting homeowners, they're targeting people that make a certain level of income, they're targeting people that have children, that have, if they buy list, we'll have everything from allergy sufferers to doing. What I teach the cleaners to do more than anything is do a lot of joint ventures. Do joint ventures at the carpet retailers, interior designers, dry cleaners of clothing. I mean, I've gotten so many cleaners throughout the world to use dry cleaners where people go and drop off their clothes to actually endorse them to their client base. And that typically is a type of individual that's not going to do a lot of their own cleaning. They will typically live in a nice home because they have the type of occupation that they would actually go to a dry cleaner to drop off clothes or they just simply don't want to do it. So the beauty of the carpet cleaning industry, and I would always say this to even my carpet cleaners that would complain about, well, how do you find great prospects? I said, you know, my father used to be a locksmith. A locksmith cannot go and drive up a nice neighborhood and know who's going to lock their keys in their car that night or who's going to get into an argument with their spouse and want to kick the other person out and change the locks in the home. I mean, who's going to get burglarized? I go, you think you have trouble selecting a list? You guys can actually pick targeted homes based on income and know that as long as they have carpet in that home and you craft a promotion, you ask them to actually hire you, you make an irresistible offer like a free room of carpet cleaning and a carpet audit. You literally can go to neighborhoods and target them. That's much different than emergency work, like a locksmith as an example. In a lot of ways, people get so they make such a big deal about how hard it is to find prospects. I mean, if you actually just sat down like you just described as a real estate agent and really said, who's my ideal five star client? And you made a list. No matter what it is, it would be great. And Gary Halbert had his. Remember the hamburger stand story.

Yeah, exactly.

This is a good exercise to kind of go through. Gary Halbert would. Oh, and by the way, by the way, let me have another add moment because one of the beauties of I love marketing is it's not scripted at all. And I can just go on as many tangents as I want with Dean and he just plays along with it in the Halbert Index. The very first newsletter from Gary Halbert that I read, which we posted up on ilovemarketing.com and everyone should read it in 1992, is when he originally wrote that newsletter. That was when I. That's the first newsletter I ever wrote that got me introduced to direct response marketing. And the cool thing is that in that particular newsletter, he said, it doesn't matter how great of a home you have. If you're trying to pitch a $500,000 home and someone only has 100,000, it doesn't matter how great of a deal it is, they can only afford the $100,000 home. His point was you want to target your efforts at players with money. That's what everyone really. In your own business, in your own life, you really want to think about who are the people that actually have money or have certain conditions or certain criteria or certain pains that your product or service or your business Achie. And that's how you want to craft the offering and the communication for those people. So Gary had a story where he talked about a hamburger stand and he would ask people if you were going to open up a hamburger stand and I was going to open up a hamburger stand, what are all the advantages that you would want that would give you the highest possibility of having success with your hamburger stand? And if you're vegan or vegetarian, let's say you're vegan, hamburger stand. So people would always say, well, we want the best location. Real estate is important. We want the best employees, we want the best food, we want the best storefront, we'd want the best advertising. People would go through a whole list of things that they thought would be the most important, important things that they needed in order to have success. And Gary said, well, if you give me just one advantage, if you had all of those other things perfectly well, you gave me one advantage. I could smoke the pants off of you with one advantage. And the one advantage would be give me a starving crowd. And if there's a starving crowd, it doesn't matter. I've always thought of this. When you go to a professional sporting event and they're selling hot dogs and nachos and popcorn and cotton candy and soda and licorice. I mean, if you're a person that eats healthy and you're hungry and you're going to like a football game or a baseball game or something, and you're hungry because you haven't had time to eat dinner when you first get there, you're not going to eat that crappy food. But an hour or two goes by and you're really hungry, you might find yourself eating food that you typically don't eat. Why?

Because, you know, it's so funny, but I told Gary this, that when. Because I heard him tell that story and I told him, you know, that my friend Neil and I had a hot dog cart. We had a hot dog cart where you make the hot dogs and the sausages and the ones like you see on the street. We had one of those.

You really had one of these?

We did. And I'll tell you the story.

I don't know if I like it.

We contracted with a nightclub to put our hot dog car outside of the nightclub. We would only do it on Friday and Saturday nights. And he would show up about 9:30 and we would be there till 1:30. And from the moment we got there until the moment we left, that was lined up outside the door because it was the only food. The nightclub didn't serve food. People were in all night dancing and drinking and they would come out and of course they're hungry. And this club was not very close to other stuff. They'd come right out the door and there we were and we had the hot dog and the sausage and cokes and chips and that's all we would serve. And we would make a lot of money doing that just two nights a week. We could make 12 or $1,500 at the time in one night. Doing the. Just selling hot dogs and sausages to drunken dancers. The thing is that. That is the exact thing of being in front of a starving crowd. Now that those two nights in front of a starving crowd would outperform if we took that hot dog cart and walked up and down the streets all day yelling out, hot dogs. Hot dogs. We wouldn't. We wouldn't sell that many hot dogs in an entire week of being right in front of a starving crowd. You know.

What we have to do? We're going to have to put this on the I Love Marketing website is I've got a video that I took probably a couple years ago with my buddy Jeff Madoff. He's the guy that does all of the commercials with Victoria's Secrets. I always say Victoria's Secret versus Victoria's Secrets. I always mess it up. But the bottom line is secret.

Singular.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there was a street vendor in New York City that had a totally disco hot dog stand. I don't think you've even seen it, Dean. And I'm going to actually go to YouTube and I'm going to send you a link for this video and we're going to pop that up on the I Love Marketing. So any the of you that are listening to this podcast, trust me, this is worth watching. It is a very funny video, but it shows some really good marketing on how someone could even doll up a street vendor food cart. So what does that have to do with, I mean, I know what it has to do. I'm asking you a devil's advocate question. What does that have to do with conversion, Dean? I mean all of the things we're talking about here.

I'm glad you asked that because so much of conversion is beginning with the end in mind. So much of the easiest thing to improve your conversion is to generate better leads. By better leads, I mean know what you're looking for and target the right people. So we've talked about it tonight. We've talked about for real estate agents targeting people who are going to buy a home in your town in the next six months. We talked about it with carpenter cleaners, people who live in high end homes who probably have carpets that they want to keep looking nice and would get their carpets cleaned every six months. And when you do find somebody like that, it's a bigger, it's a bigger job. And so it's a higher dollar ticket item if you own a hot dog cart to get in front of people who want hot dogs. I mean it's like knowing how to set things up so that all of the pieces fall into place from the beginning to the end. If you know where the story is going, if you know how the story is going to end, it's easier for you to set it up at the beginning to find the right people to fit into that, into that role. So it's like a, you know, it's probably the easiest thing that you can do to convert more of your leads is to generate better leads by pre sorting them at the beginning. One of the things that you can do to do that is to stop thinking about your prospects as one thing. You start looking at the different types of. Types of prospects that you have. Same thing like our friend Eben Hagan talks about with creating the avatars for your ideal customers, creating sort of representations of who those people are. And it might be that there's a number of different people who you could target from a lead generation standpoint, that when they raise their hand, you know what they're looking for so that you can craft the next steps to get them into a relationship with you. So with the realtors, it's a different person who's looking for a condo than the person who's looking for a horse farm. So you treat them differently. You don't look for the generalized idea of looking for somebody who's looking for real estate. You narrow it down right from the beginning. If you generate a lead by offering a free guide to Georgetown condo prices and somebody calls for that, there's a good chance that just by calling for that, they've identified themselves as somebody who's interested in a condo. So it makes the. It easy for you to communicate with them in a way that's going to lead to them ultimately finding a condo. Imagine in carpet cleaning, it's the same thing that there's people who are interested in having their carpets clean because it's a cosmetic thing. They like their carpets to be sparkling and they want it because of the decor element of it. But then you've also got other people who maybe have children or themselves who are allergic to dander or to dust, and they want to. They're concerned for the health benefits of having clean carpets. And if you know up front which path people are on, it's easier for you to ultimately convert those leaves.

Oh, yeah, exactly.

What other kind of things would people be most interested in about their carpets?

People that have pets. I mean, I have a lot of carpet cleaners that do joint ventures with veterinarians and with pet stores and stuff. Because obviously if you have pets, they're going to be sometimes peeing or throwing up on the carpet. And it's a good indicator that, that considering the carpet is the sink, that captures everything that you want. People that know how to clean sinks, metaphorically speaking, of course, It doesn't require a tremendous amount of thought. You just really need to put yourself into the shoes of your client. And if you don't really know what, what it is that people are buying or what, you know, for instance, there are some cell phones that sell oh, God. What do they call it? I'm trying to think of the name. I'm going to do a search real quick to see if I can actually find it. There are a division of Nokia called Virtu V E R T U and they are cell phones itself, from 5,000 all the way up to 50,000 and above. And it's a total status play. But the question is, what are they really selling? Are they really selling a phone? What are they really selling? Why is someone buying a $5,000 or $50,000 cell phone? The point is, ask your clients, why do they buy from you? Why do they buy from anyone in your industry? If you ask someone why do they get their carpets clean? Some people will say cosmetic reasons. Some people will say, well, the kids are going back to school. Other people will talk about asthma, allergy, substances.

And some people only get their carpets cleaned when something visible happens, when they've got a stain or something.

Exactly. And see, the job of many of my clients is to educate people on why they should get their carpets cleaned beyond appearance. And we'll use things like, would you sleep in your sheets for. Would you sleep in your bed for six months without washing the sheets? Would you wear your underwear every day for a week and not wash them? I mean, people would be disgusted by that. But would you let every neighbor and kids walk through your carpet with the same shoes that they walk through everything on? Walk all over the carpet, lay all over it, have the dogs and you think clean inside it like every two years is like sanitary?

I mean, it's not.

I've become like Howard Hughes clean freak as a result of being in the cleaning industry. Because I know how disgusting upholstery and carpet can be and I know how beneficial it is to actually clean that stuff. So having said that, if anyone needs a really good carpet cleaner, just go to a website that I set up called Ethical Services and type in your zip code. And. And there are people that are professional cleaners that have signed a code of ethics that they will not use any unethical advertising. They don't use bait and switch. They 100% guarantee their work. They carry proper insurance, they won't employ technicians that are forced to do high pressure selling in order to make a livable wage. They're just great companies that want to do a good job and want to acquire clients. So I set it up that way so that people can find companies that are good companies. That's ethicalservices.com and if there's not anyone in your area that is an ethical services member. You can at least get information on the site on how to choose the right type of cleaning company so that you can make an informed, intelligent decision.

There we go. And I think we can leave it at that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So go get your carpets clean this week. Come up with your ideal five star product prospect. Look at just one or two ways that you can increase conversion in your business and go for it. Like Emerson said, you ask for a new idea when you haven't used the last one that we gave you. Please make sure that if you have a business that you're implementing many of the things that you're hopefully picking up from the I Love Marketing website. In the I Love Marketing podcast, me and Dean really, truly get immense satisfaction and joy out of being able to share this stuff and knowing that our ideas are going to get utilized and benefit other people. And as long as you take everything that we share and use it to create value in the world, with ethics and you know, go capitalism because, you know, capitalism is collaboration between other individuals wanting to create value and exchange value for money. And I believe it's the best system on the planet for making the world a better place. So, Dean, thank you very much. Anything you want to say?

That's it. Let's wrap it up for today and we'll be back next week with even more cool stuff on ilove marketing.com awesome.

And hopefully I won't have. I won't have a cold and I'll be. I'll sound more sane because I'm a little crazy. All right, have a good day. Good evening. Good whatever everyone. See you next time. Ilovemarketing.com make a comment. Let us know what you thought of this podcast. Thank you.