The One About Free Recorded Messages - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #39

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

Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jack and Joe Polish.

Joe.

That's right, it's me.

How you doing today?

I'm doing good. How you doing?

Well, good, good.

Hey, we had our first official I Love Marketing meetup group at my office while I was away in San Diego.

I saw some of the. I saw some of the pictures.

Yes, the pictures were good. And we got, you know, it's going really well. So that's awesome.

How many people.

By the time this recording is prob being heard, we will have had our second one of which I will be in attendance. How cool.

Oh, that's great. That's exciting.

Yeah, I'm gonna pop in, popping up everywhere.

Yeah. Well, next week I'm gonna be back in Florida and I'm gonna get one going down there, so that'll be cool too.

Awesome. Yeah. Okay, what's on our agenda? What's on our plate for this episode of I Love Marketing?

Well, I thought maybe this week we could maybe talk about some of our favorite marketing strategies.

Yes. We'll call this the Grab Bag. How about that?

The Grab Bag episode.

Yeah.

Now, I was very impressed because I know you have like a very long list of all the. All the cool things and you've motivated me to make a list myself here.

Yeah, my little riffs, clicks on the daw. Whatever you want to call them.

Right, Exactly. I love that there's a variety of.

Stuff that we can talk about and I've got a whole list of stuff and you can ask me pretty much anything or I can ask you something. We'll just start talking about it and it'll be things that are related to before, during and after, and the eight profit activators and reciprocity and selling and all kinds of stuff.

Let's start with number one because it jumped right out at me with the pre recorded messages.

Yeah. Okay. Number one is on my list is free recorded messages. And the reason I have that one, number one on the list is because, for one, it was one of the very first marketing strategies that I ever used. It's a robot, so it is an elf marketing strategy which is easy, lucrative, and fun to this day. Everyone has telephones. As a matter of fact, there's more mobile phones than there are computers. And I think there's always going to be access to a telephone number in spite of whatever technologies are created. It just seems to make the most sense. And, you know, maybe one day there will be chips in everyone's fingernails and, you know, to carry anything around, but.

I think directly into our, into our ears.

Yeah, yeah, but by that time it'll be a different lifetime than what am I going to care anyway?

Right, right.

So for anyone that has to sell something today or tomorrow or next year, pre recorded messages work well. And yeah, the number one reason that's on the list too is that out of all the things that I've always talked about, especially, you know, when I first started selling, how to advice after, you know, having had tremendous success turning my own carpet cleaning company around originally and teaching people how I did it, using free recorded messages is one of the methods I used to convert prospects into suspects, into prospects into clients, was through the use of free recorded messages. It was free recorded messages that I then used to actually educate business owners about what it is that I was doing in order to get them to request a free report, in order to give them information 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I would always talk about how the 24 hour free recorded message can always deliver an eloquent, persuasive pitch if you're using it to sell. Never complains about a headache, costs peanuts in order to have one, works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, never gets tired, and will usually deliver a much better sales presentation than if I had to rely on my own moods, my energy levels, my, you know, ability to recall certain things, and you just, you just really can't beat it, you know?

Yeah. Well, I remember like my first experience with, with free recorded messages was as using them as a realtor. And I used to run big ads in the newspaper on the weekend edition of the local newspaper. And, and I had the front page of the real estate section and I would run these ads on there and put all of my listings. And I always felt like I had to be right there by the phone when I ran that ad because I spent hundreds of dollars every week on this full page ad and I would get a lot of calls, but I always felt like I was being held hostage to it, you know, like I had to be available because I would feel like I was missing out. If somebody called and I wasn't available to take their call, I knew that they would call somebody else. So it was kind of like being held hostage, you know, that I couldn't really make plans to do things with, with, with my friends or to just, you know, take time off on the weekend because I really wanted to maximize the results that I got from this ad. And so when I heard the idea of using free recorded messages. This was. So I was here in Canada, and there was no, you know, services that you could use for this. So another phone line into my house, and I got a digital voicemail recorder, and I had the clever brainstorm of using the code that you use to check your messages remotely to give people access to listen to the recordings. So I would put out. So I called it the real estate info line. And I would have people call the number and then they would press star 99. Like, I would use the recording to explain to people what to do. So to start the recording, please just press star 99. And that was the secret code that you could use to, you know, if you're calling your number from somewhere else and you wanted to see if you had any voicemail Messages, you'd press star 99 or whatever number you set up as the code, and it would say you have five messages or six messages or whatever it was. And so I would have these nice little graphics done where I had the listings on the front page. I would advertise six of them on a page, and I had them numbered with. I had a little info line logo. And I would have them numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. And so I would record the. I would call my voicemail and leave a message that was the description of that property. So I would be talking all about that property. And then when people called in, they would hear, in order, the houses that were. That were for sale or to skip, you know, skip to the next message, they could press seven, you know. And so I would just describe that to people, how that would work. And I just remember the very first time that I ran that, because I would have free recorded message on there, and people would feel safe to call, knowing that they weren't going to have to talk to a real estate agent. And of course, I had caller ID on the phone, and so I could, you know, see everybody who called. Now that. Just putting that in there. I ended up getting three times as many calls on the weekend than what I got when I was running that ad with just my phone number on it. So, you know, we always talk about the. That more people will call if you use the words free recorded message. And I found that to be absolutely true that I got three times more people to call on those ads, because in a typical weekend, I would get 10 people to 12 people to call directly when I was running it with my regular phone number on it. And then when I ran it as the free recorded message, I would get 30 to 40 people who would call and listen to the messages and then I would follow up and call everybody back on Monday. And it ended up giving me my whole weekend because I didn't have to be there waiting for the phone to ring.

Well, the point behind that is that it is not only effective in terms of delivering a message, it's not only non threatening, but it also saves you a tremendous amount of time. Often refer to this as time management marketing because of that exact reason. And if you look on the list that I have, you know, which I emailed you a copy and you're probably looking at it from an iPad or something. Number 65 is three magic words. And the three magic words, the reason I call them magic words is free recorded message. And you know, free recorded message is just does wonders. And like what you were saying, you got triple the amount of calls simply because it's non threatening. When people see that, you know, it removes this phone call fear that I think most consumers have. Especially if you have to call someone to inquire about a service or something where you don't really know exactly what the price is going to be. And you know that, you know, if you're going to engage someone in a conversation in order to get information, their hope and expectation is that you will buy from them. And because people want you to buy from them and when you're talking to them live, there is a certain level of hesitancy, there's a certain level of resistance, there's a certain level of fear. So much so that many consumers that are kind of looky lose or they're not really 100% sure who they're going to go with, they sometimes opt out of not even calling at all or really postponing and postponing and postponing the decision because they just don't even want to deal with having to say no to somebody or get information from someone and then tell them no or I have to think about it or whatever because a lot of people are in the thinking about it stage. In the example of carpet cleaning, most carpet cleaners think of there's prospects that are going to buy or they're not going to buy. My whole thing is I would tell my cleaners and of course I'm telling everyone now and I love marketing is that there's a lot of people that want to buy, they just don't want to buy right now. And they're in the information gathering stage. And if you create a non threatening, very robotic system, and I know we're talking about free recorded messages right now. But this could still apply to print sales, letters, websites, blogs, you name it. Although, you know, if you like the idea of, of how this free recorded message concept sounds and you've never tried it, then, you know, go to coanetworks.com and get yourself a 24 hour free recorded message. We even have a special link. You know what we should do? We have, we have a link that.

We think.

Page with this episode so people can actually go in there because we've actually worked it out with them to give all of our. I love marketing.

And that's who we both use. I mean, we both use coa.

Yep. But anyway, you know, if you've never tried it before, just do it. It's inexpensive, it's easy to test. Everyone can put one on their business card. They can put it on their website. I have it on my Twitter page, you know. JoePolish. Twitter.com JoePolish you can see an example of a free recorded message. I have a free recorded message on the outside of the Nightingale Conant program I sell. We have, you know, free recorded messages on business cards. I mean, they're just, they're everywhere that you can, you know, put a message. And when you, when you do that, you're giving, like you said, you know, three times as many, many calls. I want to, you know, without sounding redundant, I really want to highlight that.

Because I want, I want to too, because I mean, you're. I don't want to say that lightly. You know, that really was the twofold benefit to me of not only getting more people to call, but not actually having to talk to them real time was, you know, just an incredible experience. I just remember because, you know, the first weekend I was wondering how it was going to work and if it's just like, you know, all the time I would hear the, I would hear the voicemail going off in the basement. You know, I would hear the, the click and hear, you know, because you could hear the actual messages, you know.

Well, yeah, I mean, and then I.

Learned, you know, I learned how to turn down the, the volume. But in the beginning it was, it was all, it was interesting to me to be, you know, sitting upstairs and just hearing this going on down in the basement and I'm, you know, having dinner with some friends or whatever and just not having to be constantly jumping to answer the phone.

Well, the cool thing too is how many. If you're running a free recorded message and say you're doing radio or television or you're doing a Big campaign where you're putting a lot of messages out there at one given time. You couldn't possibly field effectively all of those phone calls. And when I say field them, maybe you could have a big phone room of people and you have other people than yourself. But this gives. Do you how many people have an opportunity to actually listen to me and have. Over the last 15 years, I mean, we're talking tens of thousands of free recorded messages with my voice on them have delivered information to business owners and to consumers about a variety of different things. I mean, literally thousands of communications that would have taken hundreds, if not thousands of hours to deliver. And all of that was done while I was sleeping, while I was having lunch, while I was working on other campaigns, while I was doing a variety of different things. And the 24 hour free recorded message robot did it for me. And this was being done way before the Internet even existed because. Exactly. Yeah, you can point to YouTube videos or whatever, but you know, the point is this is just massive, massive leverage. So going back to three times as many calls and you didn't have to actually spend any of your time talking to people and you could relax. I mean, there's a lot of.

And I got the name and phone number of everybody who called. Right. And so, you know, and as it evolved, you know, I evolved to where I, I didn't call people back, but in the beginning I did and a lot of people do. But, you know, it's still, you know, it's better than cold calling for sure. You know, calling somebody who, you know has called on something because they had an interest in it. And I started using those pre recorded messages on everything, like you said, on ads on business cards in front of homes, on the infobox flyer of the, of the house. And all, all of those things are wonderful uses. But when I started pairing it with direct response ads like when I started, you know, you, you and I both have talked about using our, our guides. I did the guide to, to Halton Hills House, the guide on how to buy your first home. And you know, I had ads and postcards that we would use for those. And people would call and leave leave a message. Here's something that was very interesting to me. I ended up. In the beginning, I would set up the messages when people were calling for my, for the guide. I would have them call and the message would basically say, thanks for calling about the guide to Halton Hills house prices. To get your guide, just leave your name and your mailing address and your telephone number and your email Address, if you have one, and we'll get your guide out to you right away. That was really, that was the essence of the message. And the messages that I got would be, my name's Joe Polish, I live at, you know, whatever the address is, and here's my phone number. And sometimes they would leave an email address. So I would get what I asked for. And I had this big breakthrough. I was kind of reading Stephen Covey's book on the seven habits. And it was just, you know, you kind of go deep with things. And I was struck by this begin with the end in mind, you know. So I really started thinking about these recorded messages and I thought, what kind of message would I like to hear when I pick up these messages, when I record them? And I thought I'd like to hear a message of people not only leaving their address information, but then telling me a little bit about what their plans are and what kind of a house they're looking for. So I slightly changed the recorded message and I just said the same thing. Thanks for calling about the guide to Halton Hills house prices. If you'd like your guide, just leave your name, your mailing address, your telephone number and your email address if you have one, and tell me a little bit about the kinds of houses that you're most interested in and whether you're coming from out of town or you live in Georgetown. And people would leave messages that would say, hi, it's Joe Polish. Here's my address, here's my telephone, here's my email. And you know, we're just getting started. We're first time buyers. We're kind of maybe thinking about a townhouse. We kind of like the ones down on River Run. We can probably spend about 200,000. You know, I mean, they'd start leaving more conversational messages just because I instructed them to do that. And that was, it was profound, the difference in the level of connection when I called people back. Because now they've kind of opened up to me a little bit, you know.

Well, you know, also the reason people open up to you is because they've actually, they've had a one sided conversation, meaning you talking to them in a different sort of non threatening sort of environment.

Right.

And although you've really not spoken with them in person at all, their, their receptivity level is completely different. And that's one of the things that I say this a lot and I've said this to thousands of people over all the events and stuff that I've done. And I just know That a lot of people, you know, don't really hear and understand quite the impact that I want them to understand when I say receptivity level. So that's why I'm talking about it as if everyone's a second grader or something and like they really need to hear this.

Right.

I just want everyone to really think about that. Like when you're talking to someone face to face, to take a car salesperson and say you're looking at a Toyota 4 rim as an example and they're explaining to you all the benefits of the Forerunner. And you were really interested in a Forerunner before you even showed up. But you have this person in front of you talking about a Forerunner and why it's so great. And maybe they're asking you questions, maybe they're just talking. You're listening at a completely different receptivity level because you're on guard and you're thinking about your response back to the person versus if you were to hear that same exact information being delivered in a 24 hour free recorded message before you decided to even drive down to the dealership to hear about all of the reasons why a 4Runner is good and questions to ask, misconceptions, stuff following kind of like a consumer awareness guide template, you would just hear the same information differently because you don't have to respond to somebody. When you don't have to respond to somebody, it's different. So in your particular case, you know, you're coming across to them like one of their trusted buddies who's just talking to them. And here's my whole point too, because I don't want this to sound manipulative. I mean, if you really are giving people useful, valuable information so that they can make an informed, intelligent decision, I mean that's about as friendly and about as open and about as honest and transparent as you can be as a business owner. And what I like about this, if this is used totally in an ethical manner, this is the most ethical way to present and market yourself that I'm aware of.

Yeah, well, you know what's very interesting too is that I, from my personal experience as this that I found, and so I can completely empathize with what people go through when they switch to a format where they feel maybe a little bit out of control, like if you're used to running ads and being there when people call because you're the best at closing them or you know, that's kind of the mentality that people have, that you're the best at converting those leads when they call or those callers that my natural. This was sort of evolved as I really started to understand and trust direct response that I initially, when I switched to using recorded messages for that full page ad, I wanted as many people to call as I could and I wanted to call everybody back. And so I would do that. But then as I kind of evolved, I used it for the guides for the, for the book on how to buy your first home. And I would want people, again, as many people to leave their contact information so that I could follow up with them and then something. We can't talk about recorded messages without talking about our friend Terry Hunnefeld, because Terry really went very deep with recorded messages. And the innovation that Terry had and what I really learned from him was he didn't want to talk to people. The only people he wanted to talk about are the ones who were already ready to buy. He wanted not only for them to call and listen to the recorded message, he didn't want them to leave their information so that he followed up with them. What he would do is he would leave a long recorded message that tells people everything that he wanted to tell them and used it to filter out all of the people who were not ready to buy. Now, he didn't want to call anybody back. He was looking for the top 10%. So if he had 100 people call and listen to that recorded message, he knew that the top 10 of those would call him and say, we listened to your recorded message. We're ready to get started. When can we get together? And that's really the next level of what I was sharing with you about slightly changing the message to have people leave me a message and tell me about what they were looking for. But as you get more confidence, as you get more experience doing it, you start to trust it more and you start to know that the purpose. You're not going to lose out, you're going to actually gain by only speaking to the ones who now not only listen to the recorded message, but hang up the phone and dial another number to talk to Terry. That was really how that, how that whole thing went. You know, it wasn't. He wasn't getting anybody to leave a message. They were listening and then they would hang up and they would dial him directly. And it was a whole different world. I think that's how you use your, your, your consumer awareness recorded message.

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. In the, in the beginning because, you know, now you can have people redirect, you can have them press other extensions to go to menus you can have totally evolved now. Yeah, yeah. I mean there's all kinds of, you know, computer tracking so you can see how long people actually listen to the message.

And it was way more thing up. It was way more expensive when we, when you and I started doing it too.

Oh, it was infinitely more expensive. I mean, by the minute. Yeah. That's why I get annoyed when I give this idea out to people and they can literally get a free recorded message that you can get just so many thousand minutes. Yeah, yeah. Every month. And it costs literally, you know, 20, 35 bucks a month depending on it. So. Yeah, but I mean I would have people, I would even tell people on the phone when they would, if they actually did call my office directly, I would actually try to get them to listen to a free recorded message first and then call me back and I'd say, yeah, you know, I've set up a 24 hour free recorded message that teaches you almost everything you would need to know initially to hire a professional carpet cleaner. If you listen to that free recorded message and you decide you'd like to do business with me, just call me back and I'll be happy to book a job for you. I then would direct them to the robot because I wanted the robot to spend 10 minutes of non threatening quality time with them consuming stuff. And it wasn't until a lady told me that she had listened to my recorded message three times and took notes that it really dawned on me the impact of a 24 hour free recorded message. Because this was about carpet cleaning. And to this day I will hear basically ignorant. And when. I don't mean ignorant. That's. There's a difference between ignorance and stupidity because there's tremendous amounts of stupidity. Also, stupidity is when you hear something that has been proven to work, you hear other people talk about it and you still question if it'll work. Ignorance is this, oh, I've never heard of this before. Let me hear about it. Ignorant people will say, well, will anyone really listen to a 5 or 10 minute recorded message? And then you will tell them, well, yes, as a matter of fact, one of the most successful free recorded messages from one of my carpet cleaning Clients was an 18 minute message on how to choose a carpet cleaner? And people would be like, who on Earth would spend 18 minutes listening to a free recorded message over the telephone on how to choose a carpet cleaner? And that's someone who's really genuinely interested in getting their carpets clean or that's engaged in the recording and most people aren't sitting There with a timer saying, how long is this thing that's like with a sales letter people, who's going to read a long form sales letter? Well, if you got someone engaged, it's kind of like my conversation with Neil Strauss, which I interviewed him on the anatomy of addictive writing. And he's written a bunch of best selling books. And he said as a marketer, it's one thing to keep somebody around for 10, 20, 30 pages of sales copy on a sales letter. How do you keep people around for two or three hundred pages of a book? Well, you get them engaged. And so when people say someone's not going to read a long sales letter, that's like saying no one's going to read a book, no one's going to watch a movie.

Nobody's going to sit and watch a movie. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, no one has time to what? Well, if you keep them entertained, if you keep them engaged, if you're talking about something they're interested in, you'd be very surprised how much they would actually listen for it. So a stupid person is someone that hears all that stuff and still continues to listen to their broke, idiotic friends that know nothing about marketing say that people have a short attention span and they won't read long copy. And you can only do a three minute video because after that everyone just quits listening. As if there's some timer in everyone's brain that after the five minute mark they just won't listen anymore. Which of course you, you know, that's utter nonsense. And all experienced marketers know that's utter nonsense. But you know, we have to always talk about that because there's forces out there in the form of really, you know, ignorant, dumb people that will try to convince marketers that no one's going to read a long sales letter. No one's going to listen to a long free recorded message. And my longest free recorded message that I ever used for carpet cleaning services was, was about 12 minutes. I mean, there are times where I went 15 minutes and 17 minutes and things like that. But, you know, one that I used for a very long time, very consistently was 12 minutes long. And I had people that would call and listen to it twice and they would tell me, yeah, listen to it twice, because I wanted to write down what you were saying about the six costly misconceptions about carpet cleaning. And I needed to get the seven questions ask a carpet cleaner before I invite them into your home. And you know, and what's really funny is I would tell people like how to avoid 4 carpet cleaning rip offs 8 mistakes to avoid when choosing a carpet cleaner, I would tell them all of these things on the free recorded message. And because I told them those things, they rarely asked me the questions and they rarely brought up the stuff that I even told them because their belief was, well, if this guy's telling me these are the mistakes to avoid, then this person's obviously not making these mistakes. If this person is telling me these are the questions to ask a carpet cleaner before you invite them into your home, then obviously this person lives, he knows the answers. Yeah. And it creates this. You are instantly credentializing yourself simply by putting the information out there. And so, you know, I mean we can go on and on about the free recorded message thing, but the point.

Is, I think we should. We should, I think we should. Like, as I was looking down this list, I'm, I mean there's, I really think we should continue talking about free recorded messages because there's, there's just so much even more to say.

Okay, well here, let, then I'll grant you your wish. Here, like see number 46 on my little riff lifts, it says, paper is expensive, ink is cheap.

Mm, okay.

I think I heard, first heard Dan Kennedy say that or Gary Halbert, I'm not sure. But paper's expensive, ink's cheap. And that was really more, you know, it still is to this day. Paper is more expensive than ink. And so the whole point behind that is how do you make an ad or a business card or the side of a service vehicle like a carpet cleaning van or a plumber's van, or an H vac van or a pest control van? How do you make what it is you say bigger without paying for more space? How do you make a half page, yellow page ad? As an example, back in the yellow page days, how do you say more without paying for more space? Free recorded message. That was the beauty of it is you can take. One of my very first users of a 24 hour free recorded message in the carpet cleaning industry was a guy named Don Delew in Denver, Colorado, still in business to this day. Healthy Home Carpet Care I think is the name of his company. And I sold him a script to a free recorded message for 250 bucks. And I just wanted him to report his success to me. And he was running half page phone book ads in the Denver phone book at the time that he first gave me 250 bucks. And I cut his advertising cost in half and quadrupled his response that he was Getting and it took him from a half page phone book ad. He used the free recorded messages in different formats. But let me just talk about simply about the phone book. He actually went to an ad smaller than the size of the business card that said warning, don't call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this free recorded message. What ended up happening? He spent 250 bucks a month on that in column ad and he ended up generating over $62,000 in business as a result of that. The first year he used it, that's when it dawned on me like wow, you know, this is a pretty big deal. And you know, in order to say all, if he didn't have a free recorded message to convey all the information and he had to pay for like space in the phone book, it probably would have taken him about five or six full page ads to say everything.

To say all of that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's the point I want to make. So people that are still spending money on advertising, like if you're going to run a 30 second or 15 second radio commercial, but you've got like 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 minutes of information you'd like the consumer to hear in order to sell them, how can you actually do that without paying for that additional advertising space? That real estate, you know, you do it in the form of a free recorded message. So you direct them. You know it is, it's just, it's multi step advertising. You not just, you know, because what most people would do is they run a blown up version of their business card. Name, rank, serial number. Here's who we are, here's what we do. Here's our, our phone number. Call us if we can help you. Versus you know, call this free recorded message to get a consumer awareness guide. Call this re recorded message to get more information, that sort of stuff. And it just allows you to expand the message without paying for more space.

I used to have in my listing presentation when I was going to talk to people about selling their house, I would have two facing pages in my presentation binder that on one side I would show a typical real estate ad, like a typical ad in the, in the real estate section of the newspaper that would have the little picture of the house and then it would have two or three lines underneath the picture. You know, that's all people would usually advertise on one house. And then on the facing page of that I would show our ad where I had one of the boxes there. But then I would put the whole script, all of the Stuff that I would say about that house because it was, when they called the recorded message, it was demonstrated to people that it's almost like having, you know, a half page ad just for your house because of all of the extra things that I can use to describe their property. Am I explaining that right? Do you know that? Yeah, yeah. So I would show them the script that I would use to talk about the houses and it was very visual because, you know, on the, you know, on the left side of the page it would just have that little ad up at the top and all the rest was, was white space. And then on mine it would show the picture, but then it would have all of these words going all the way down the page describing the house.

You know, which is totally fantastic.

Yeah.

And you know, people love that too because, you know, one of the things in real estate which a lot of times, you know, sometimes the advertising that you're running is to really just show the, the person that you're actually doing something to try to sell their home. And when they see a well put together communication piece about their home, they're going to go out and tell other people, oh, listen to this free recorded message about my house for sale.

Well, I wouldn't leave it to chance. I would give them little business cards with the picture of their house and the free recorded message for them to hand out. And I would actually get to the point where I would have, I would, when I'm calling, when I was calling people each week to give them the update.

The.

I would say to them, tell them all the, here's how many calls we got on the hotline from the ad about your property. Here's how many people called from the Infobox flyer. These are all the appointments we had set up. These, you know, give them all the update, the rundown on what's going on. And then I would ask them at the end, I would say, and how did you do? And it was funny because the first time they did well. What do you mean how did I do well? How many people were you able to give the cards out? Did you meet anybody who was thinking about buying a home? It was kind of funny because the first time you do it, they're kind of caught by surprise. And then, and then now the next week they're prepared and they're saying, well, I was talking to a couple of people at work and they start now validating that they're actually doing something too.

That is comedy.

It was kind of comedy. It was funny. But there's the thing is that you know for certain which of your ads are actually working, because it's not just anecdotal. You get the reports that show you the. All the calls you've had, so you know which extensions are getting action. So I know that if I use one extension for the Infobox flyer, use another extension for the newspaper ad, those are the kind of things that you can do to track.

Let me bring something up which is inevitably going to come up with all our I love marketing listeners and especially the ones that don't listen. But actually the ones that are the I love marketing implementers, which is a much different animal than the I love marketing listeners. The listeners are ones that hear this stuff and say, wow, this is a really great podcast. These are really good ideas. The implementers are one that actually say, these are really good ideas. Let's actually grab one of these and let's actually put it to work for us and start using it. What will inevitably happen is someone will put together a free recorded message and then they might not hit the mark and people may listen to it, but they don't respond or they may not call the message. And what I want to point out is like, you know, you've got to treat this the same way that if you're, you know, trying to learn to walk, I mean, you want to use some, obviously some, you want to put some effort into it, you want to go in the direction that you want to walk. You know, you actually need to have your balance. So. But if you were to look back at the first time you actually tried to walk, you probably fell down quite a bit. And if you, you know, stumbled like three or four times and then said, you know, this walking thing just doesn't work, I'm going to give it up. I don't mean to again, talk in a kindergarten level here. It's just this is how human beings actually respond to certain things. Like, we'll have someone set up a free recorded message. They'll try one or two ways to get the message out. They won't get any phone calls. And then they'll be like, yeah, I just don't think this is working for me. Or they'll get people to call the phone number, but then they don't convert the people to either call them or to press 0 to be directed directly connected or whatever. They're leave contact info so we can email you a free report or whatever your mechanism is. It's the same thing. I mean, you want to test and look at where are they hanging up? Are you making a call to action, is it an irresistible offer? There's many elements that tie into a lot of the different things that we talk about on these podcasts. And so if you set one up, you know, please don't shoot yourself in the foot by just, you know, going into it kind of. Well, if it doesn't work after two or three tries, or if no one calls, I'm just going to scrape the whole idea that free recorded messages don't work. It's one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make, not just with free recorded messages, but with any marketing technique. And that's not to say that, you know, after spending 10 or $20,000 on something, if it's not working, you don't have a serious problem. Sometimes it could be what you're trying to sell, sometimes it could be the offer. But free recorded messages work. They work day in, day out. They've worked for hundreds of thousands of selling situations. And me and Dean have been so involved in free recorded messages for well over 15 years in our own businesses. I mean, I've brought in millions of dollars of sales that initiated themselves with a 24 hour free recorded message by doing advertising, advertising advertising that has a secondary reason for response. I want everyone to write that down or think about that term, secondary reason for response. Because most advertising is there's a single reason for response. Here's the phone number or here's the website, go visit it. A secondary reason for response could be here's the phone number, here's the website. But if you'd like to hear this 24 hour free recorded message to get more information, call here. It's kind of like for people that are not ready to make a yes decision, but they're kind of like, well, maybe I like to get more information and through secondary reason for response offers in an ad or promotion that drove people to a free recorded message. I know for a fact that if you tweak them and you test it and you look at different ways to phrase it, different headlines, different content that you put on the free recorded message, different calls to action that you can just like a sales letter, you want to hone it, you want to keep chiseling it till you get it to where it's profitable. So sorry, I kept kind of barreling there and I think you were trying to cut in. But you know, you know me that.

But you know, one of the mistakes that people make in, in thinking that they're not working is they think that sometimes they think it's the recorded message. But the truth is that they haven't been able to get anybody to call and listen to the recorded message. So, you know, you've really got to do three things. You've got to get somebody to call the phone number, you've got to get them to listen to the recorded message and you've got to get them to take the next step, whatever that next step is. Just like when I was talking about the, you know, when I got crystal clear on what the, what it looked like with the end in mind was I wanted people to leave a message that said who they are and told me a little bit about what they were looking for. And so you have to judge each element on its own. So you know, the ad or the postcard or the flyer or the lead generating business card or the side of the van, all of those things. What you're measuring there is are they working to get people to call and listen to that recorded message? So that's the only job of the lead generator. Then once people call and listen to that recorded message, the only job of the recorded message is actually to get them to take the next step, which could be to leave their information there. It could be to hang up and call this other number or call you directly, whatever. You have to measure it in benchmarks. It's almost like cracking a combination. You know, you have to get everything has to be dialed in. You can have the world's best recorded message. But if you don't have a predictable, reliable, consistent way to get people to call that phone number and listen to the recorded message, you may as well not even have it. You could have the world's best lead generators that get a ton of people to call and listen to the recorded message. But if you don't have the right words, the right tone, the right offer on that recorded message, nobody's going to take the next step. So you really have to get it all dialed in. And just like you said, it's experimentation. It's like running and knowing what's going to happen when you run those ads. And the good news is once you crack that code, that code, you can basically run with that for a long, long time. I'm not going to say forever, but I mean, I haven't run out of, you know, the guide still works and the guide to buying their first home still works. And we've got, you know, hundreds of realtors all over the country who, thousands who use those recorded messages for that.

You know, I've got one free recorded message line that's simply A lead generator for people to leave their name, address and phone or other. They don't even ask for an email on it. In the carpet cleaning niche, we don't use it as heavily as we used to, but we still do have people call it and they leave their name, address and phone number in order to get sent a free report. And I have not changed that recorded message in 12 years.

That's what I'm saying is that this kind of work, that's what I love about marketing. And I know you love it about marketing too, that it's not. Once you crack a code like that. The longevity of it is so great.

Well, yeah, it goes back to an ad, is brand new, to someone that's seen it for the first time. And my voice has changed in 12 years for someone that's never heard it before, they've never heard my voice. And if it works and people are responding to it. But you know, a lot of times you don't tinker with a working wheel. And the beauty is I can always test against this stuff. Because all you do is get another free, you know, phone number.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, you know, this is a difficult test.

You don't even need another phone number now, you know, now the thing, the ones we use with coa, you can use, you know, you can have hundreds of extensions. So you could, you know, it's infinite.

Really.

It's great.

Yeah. And Aaron Gerber, like Gerber baby food at COA Networks, you know, he's, he's an expert in this. He can walk you through and tell you how to do stuff. Here's one thing I'd like everyone to do because the implementers are also the early adopters for the meetup groups. And so they're the ones that are starting I love Marketing meetup groups. They're the ones that are attending I love marketing meetup groups. And me and Dean are really so happy and really honored and proud of everyone that has started an I Love Marketing meetup group. And we want to just sincerely thank you, thank you for doing that because we know the value of discussion groups between people in marketing and using the I Love Marketing curriculum and ideas and strategies we talk about as the jumping off points to have discussions and stuff. And what I would encourage everyone to do is have a conversation at the next meetup group that you go to, about 24 hour free recorded messages. Those that get 24 hour free recorded messages is set up, hand your business cards out to everyone and have them listen to your free recorded message, even maybe have one person play their free recorded message to the whole group and then just critique it. And not critique it to find fault, but just to say, hey, yeah, this is worth testing. Don't look for 400 things you can do to change it. Just say, does this sound like it's up to par up to snuff? And if you're already testing it, let people know the numbers, let them know the the response. Give them out business cards. If you're a carpet cleaner as an example and you go to just like a BNI group, hand out your business cards with free recorded messages to all the people there and have them refer business, have them pass it out and use it as a sounding board to get feedback to show other people what you're doing and how you're doing it so that they can get ideas to go set up their own free recorded messages, different ways that you're doing lead generation with it it and things along those lines would make for a very lively and very useful I love marketing meetup group discussion. So I just wanted to point that out. Can I say something also? You know, it's funny is what this started out as a grab bag episode will be like about one particular thing.

As we started talking about it, I started realizing like, this is such a valuable topic that I can't believe that we haven't talked about it this in depth in, you know, this is our 39th episode right now, and it's taken us 39 episodes to get to this. But it's such a fundamental thing. We talked about recorded messages and how we use them. But I mean, going this deep on it, I'm surprised that we haven't gone this deep on it yet because it's such a vital tool.

And I also want to let people know that we're always testing stuff too. Like for instance, to kind of go backstage with the way that we record the I Love Marketing podcast right now, me and Dean, for the very first time. We don't even know if it's going to work for this particular episode. If the quality and clarity of this episode is really high quality than what you've heard in the past, it means that we actually got our microphones working. Both Dean and I are recording into GarageBand off of a microphone, a particular type of mic that we have attached. You know, he's in. Where are you at in Florida right now?

I'm in Toronto right now.

You're in Toronto right now? See, I don't even know where the heck he's at.

We just got into a conference Line. Next week I go back to Toronto.

Yeah, gotcha.

Next week I go back to Florida.

I mean, gotcha. All right, so I'm in Arizona and Dean's in Toronto. And you know, we call into a specific conference line where we record the calls. And the best we can do on the recording quality is the recording we do off the phones. But what we're doing right now as we're recording into mics, but this is the very first time we're trying this, and if we have it matched up right and the sound volume is okay, then we're going to pay to have it edited, which is not going to be an inexpensive editing job. Although this is a free podcast, we're going to do our best in the future to continually increase the quality of the recording. So it sounds like literally we're in a studio together, although we're in different parts of the country. And just like we are suggesting test free recorded messages, things this particular tests may not work and we may just use the recording like we've been doing of the recording of the conference line. But if the recording does work, then boom, we've just improved the quality of the recording. But see, this is going to take us several episodes to get it just right. Using a free recorded message is no different. It may not be perfect the first time you use it. It may totally flop. It may not work at all, and it may take you several times. But the point is we, we are really wanting you to get it down and be willing to test it. That's the deal. Because it is all about testing. And something this important that could replicate hours and hours of selling face to face, that could set something up. That is a robot that could work for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Never complain about a headache, Always show up on time, and in many cases do a better job selling what it is you're selling than any live salesperson you could ever hire. It's worth figuring out how to do this. It's worth getting it down because you'll spend more time training a live human being to sell something than you ever will doing a free recorded message script. So, a couple of suggestions. One, sit down and just record a script for yourself into something that you don't ever intend on having on a free recorded message. Meaning just get a recording device and talk and then have it transcribed. If you want to use a service like copytalk.com, you can do that to transcribe right into a phone, or you can just get any sort of Olympus Recording device. You can record in a GarageBand on an Apple computer, whatever, and just record what you think is the best sales pitch. The other option is record yourself actually selling or educating a real customer or prospect live in person, and then have it transcribed and then go through that transcription and highlight all of the really important elements that you're sharing, all of the important things, and then cut out all of the nonsense. And then you have the template for your script. And that script can end up becoming a video at some point. It could end up becoming a sales letter. You could take your existing sales literature that you get good response from and you can say, okay, I'm just going to take this great sales letter that we've been using or this great video and I'm going to have that transcribed and I'm going to turn it into, into a free recorded message, because there's a lot of stuff that you already probably are saying or that your company is saying about itself that has never been recorded with a voice into a free recorded message format. And one of the main things that I don't want to end this call because we've only got a few minutes left here, is without saying, sift, sort and screen. Sift, sort and screen. One of the beauties of a free recorded message for prospects is it sift sorts and screens people that are genuinely interested in what you're selling versus people that are just price shoppers or looky loos. And if you're gonna have to go out and sift, sort and screen people, there's no better way to do it than with a robot. This is, you know, so anyway, there's more I could say to that, but I'm just trying to just think of everything that I would probably want to leave everyone with before we end this particular episode.

Yeah.

Any final thoughts on this, Dean?

I think that sift, sword and screen. That's exactly what we were talking about with what Terry Huntevel was doing of using the long message to know that when he got a hundred people to call and listen to the recorded message, he knew that 10% of them would call through to him. So, you know, we always used to talk about this by, you know, if you focus all of your attention on getting, you know, two to 300 people a month to call and listen to a recorded message. And you've got that recorded message so scripted and so dialed in that you know that 10% of the people are going to call through to you. If you get 200 people to call and listen, that means that every Single business day of the month, you're going to have somebody call and take that next step. You know, it's just that predictable.

Exactly. And for people that are out there going, well, you know, I don't know if I can put a free recorded message. Like how many sales do you have to make? Like on a very low level, you can get a free recorded message with a lot of space on it for people to call, meaning you can get many, many calls into it. You can have a multi, you know, you could have a long message and you know, for like 30 bucks a month. I mean, you know, I had Bill Phillips back In right about 1990, end of 1998, beginning in 99, he was, he was spending at one point $30,000 a month on free recorded messages. That's how many people were calling and listening to information about his physique. Transformation winners. This is right before Body for Life came out.

That was probably back when we were paying 25 cents a minute for people.

No, no, that's what my point is. It was like way more expensive than it is today. I mean, just like recording equipment. You can do recording equipment today with software for 200 bucks. It would have cost 10 grand a decade.

Right?

So yeah, my point is, but here's the point I wanted to make. Think about how many people were listening to messages for him to. And this was a large company he was doing. He built it up to 200 million a year in sales. But he was literally speaking to thousands and thousands of people robotically for less than the cost of an employee, much less than the cost of a high level employee. But that $30,000 investment was, man, I mean, it was just, you know, the return is huge. And so today you can do the same sort of thing for probably less than $500 that he was doing for 30 grand a month.

What do you think?

And that was with thousands and thousands of calls. And most people listening. They're not going to be getting thousands and thousands of calls. But if you are and it's working, God bless you, you're probably going to be making millions of dollars.

What do you think about. Because one of the things that I know some people may be thinking is that, you know, free recorded messages, it's so old school, you know, that's like, that's like. So September 10th, as they say, you.

Know, it's like, yeah, well, that's like saying that, you know, bench press, squat and deadlifts, you know, that's just an old way of lifting weights, you know, I mean, whatever it's, you know, I mean, I think it's even, here's what.

I'm saying, prominent now though, you know, because everybody, you look, what everybody does have within three feet of their person at any given time is a cell phone that they can call and listen to a recorded message anywhere. Anywhere they are.

Yeah. Tell the carpet cleaner that on the back of his van that says warning, don't call any carpet cleaner until you listen to this free recorded message versus warning. Don't hire a carpet cleaner to your van. This website. Well, guess what? When someone's driving behind their van, they don't have a computer. You know, some people probably do. They have smartphones and stuff, but they're not going to go to a website. But they will listen to a free recorded message while they're in a parking lot, while they're driving behind somebody, while they're on their speakerphone. They will do that. And you, I mean, literally when I have some of my carpet cleaners put 20, I have carpet cleaners that will have their vans level and some will spend a fortune on beautiful full color printing with pictures of families and dogs and dust mites and all kinds of fancy graphics and everything. And I'll get some carpet cleaner that has a magnet that he gets it like Office Max and, you know, has it just black and white and it'll slap it on there that'll say free recorded message. And they'll get more calls in the first week of doing that than they've gotten in the entire year with their fancy.

Exactly. Yeah.

You know, so old school or not, I mean, you know, opinions don't count. Testing the real world counts. Well, that's exactly what's, you know, and some people are like, well, what's it going to cost you to test it? Well, it's going to take you a little bit of time, but the time you're going to spend putting together a free recorded message, I guarantee you, even if you don't get it to work, you know, initially will force you to really think about what you need to convey to consumers. And going back to Steve Jobs, you know, whole philosophy is technology is important, but psychology is infinitely more important. That's not the exact Steve Jobs quote. He does have one that basically says that. I mean, that is the premise that they always focus on the user experience first, not the technology. And basically going through this whole process is going to cause you to really think through your business, how you're communicating, what you're saying. And most likely, likely if you do it, you're Going to then have a robotic technique that's going to work for you over and over and over again. And then you will thank us and you will make a lot of money and then you will invest in our I love marketing DVDs, which you can go to the website and click on that button and get on the list because yeah, they're coming. You should buy them. You should buy them right now.

They're coming.

We should set up a free recorded message on why they need to buy our DVDs.

Why wouldn't we?

Why wouldn't we? Yeah, so there's a lot more that we can say. And I actually liked where this went. We can do a little grab bag one in the future, maybe next week, maybe, you know, whenever we decide to do that. However, I thought there was a lot of really good stuff here. And so if you go to ilovemarketing.com, dean's going to put a link up there where you can go and get a free recorded message set up with CoA networks. If you don't want to use them, there's other companies that do it. We like that company because they're very inexpensive, they work very well, and it's one of my favorite favorite sources to use free recorded messages. And just remember that if you remove the fear that consumers have for something it is that you're selling that they want, they will buy it from you. So use 24 hour free recorded messages to instill trust, overcome objections, teach them the things that they don't know, that they don't know about your business, remove the fear. And if you do a good job of doing it and get it right, then they will buy from you. And they will do this through a totally robotic system that doesn't even require you to talk to people. And there's nothing more exciting than making a sale to someone that you didn't even have to talk with. They call you up and they're like, ah, when can I get it? Or they simply place an order and you have had, no, you didn't have to do any sort of face to face, you know, or any sort of cold call selling. I mean, and that's, that's the beauty of this method. There's people that have gone to marketing, gotten marketing degrees that have spent years learning marketing techniques and we just taught you something in the span of an hour that can smoke almost any marketing method out there and it still works. If you still think this is too old school for you, everything we just said applies to video, applies to the Internet. Applies to any sort of sifting, sorting and screening mechanism to using education based marketing in advance to sift, sort and screen people, give them information and position yourself so they want to do business with you. So all of this is applicable, no matter what someone's excuses they want to make for why this may not work for them.

I get why it was number one on your list too, because it would be number one on my list in terms of something that you can do the least expensive, fastest, accurate, easiest to test thing that you could do. Because literally without any kind of computer skills or video skills or technical skills, you don't need all of that to use free recorded messages. Literally. You could, you know, record a, you could record a message, you could hand draw some flyers, print them out, start spreading them all over town and, and start getting calls today. I mean, it's that, that fast. We, you know, I did a training on how to use recorded messages and we, one of the things that we did was we documented everything that we did. So we put up these flyers, we used these just yellow flyers all over town. And before we even got back from putting up the flyers, we'd already had people call in the, the hour that we were gone putting up the flyers, you know. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

So, yeah, you know, in, in the famous words of Wayne Gretzky, you miss 100% of the shots. You don't. So go ahead and do it. And I don't know if I'm gonna say this right, but my. My dear friend, friend, Marty Edelston, the founder of Boardroom Inc. The publisher is a bottom line personal. He has some letterhead that says good, better, best. Never let it rest until your good is better and your better is best. So apply that to all of your marketing methodologies. And Dean, we gotta wrap up because we're past time on this episode of I love Marketing.

Perfect.

So thanks everyone and those of you that invested in our DVDs. They are about ready to ship. So go to ilovemarketing.com click on the button there. If you want information about our I Love Marketing event, get yourself signed up for a meetup group. If you want to start your own meetup group, there is a downloadable document we now have@ilovemarketing.com on how to start your very own meetup group and keep the love going, because that is what makes the world go around.

I love marketing.

Goodbye, everyone.

Bye.