The One About Immediate Money Getting Ideas - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #67

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

Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. The Joe Polish.

You're stealing that from me because, you know, my Twitter handle is TheDeanJackson.

No, I didn't know that. Well, see, mine's just Joe Polish because no one even needs to distinguish between me and that Joe Polish. Right. Because, I mean, there's a million Dean Jacksons in the world, but there's very few Joe Polishes, not just a name.

So listen, you've been like a traveling fool.

Yep. And that is the honest truth in the world.

Has Joe Polish been. I mean, when does the. You think. Yeah, it's been crazy.

I've been actually a traveling idiot. No person in their right mind traveled. I've tried to church untraveled in the last month and a week. I, you know, we've talked about, you know, I tore my meniscus at Brendan Burchard's studio, you know, over a month ago, and then, you know, went to Necker island and then went to Ted Med and went to Robin Robbins event and spoke. You know, they really seem to like that because I used the F bomb a couple of times during my presentation. Oh, boy, 500 people. But, you know, and that was good. But other than that, I'm very pleasant, very caring, gave the audience some great stret. I had dinner with Lou Ferrigno that Robin Robbins set up. Went to Strategic Coach, met with my buddy John and Missy Butcher, they own Precious Moments, the Figurine company. And then Lifebook, which is a great organization, one of the coolest personal development things on the planet. MyLifeBook.com and then what else? Had dinner with Dan Sullivan, Babs twice while in Chicago. Went to Strategic Coach, what else? Went to Peter Diamandis X Prize foundation. And that was completely badass. We did a coaching call earlier today for our Platinum 2.0 folks. And I mentioned, we talked about pricing, which I want to talk about on today's call because it'll be a good follow up for all of our Platinum 2.0 members and for people that are not in our group and don't pay us large sums of money to do thinking exercises and meet in person and all that sort of stuff, which is just foolish if you ask me. But people that don't do that are not aware of that. We talked a lot about pricing on that particular call and we take people through these tools and exercises that we have I mentioned at the Xprize foundation for Peter, the Author of Abundance and the founder of Singularity University and Zero Gravity Flights and that sort of stuff. Yeah, he just had all these just amazing tech people. Paul Allen from Microsoft was there. And Arianna Huffington is going to come and speak at my August 8th and 9th annual event that we're doing for 25K members. That's a $10,000 person event we're doing in New York. And Peter's speaking and Peter Diamandis and probably you. We'll probably have you say a couple of things there. Dan Sullivan and all that things to say. And the guy I was really impressed with was who, you know, I would like to say we've kind of hit it off and became friends was Graham Weston, who is the founder of Rackspace. And I just really liked his views.

On, you know, I love. We both use Rackspace and that's. We've talked about that. But, you know, my thing. That's pretty exciting because their commitment to fanatical service. I think that's a power word, isn't it? Fanatical service.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they've got 4,300 employees. They're in San Antonio and just a smart dude and really focused on taking care of people. Hugh McLeod from Gaping Void and wrote a couple of great books called Evil Plans and Ignore Everybody. He draws really cool art on the back of business cards. And his books are fantastic. I think everyone should read them. You'd find them really just kind of cool. Some of my favorite books. And we need to get him.

We need to get him on here.

Yeah, yeah, we do. We do. Maybe we'll send this episode to him and we can. He can hear us talk about him. But yeah, he was a smart guy and his artwork is really cool. Check out gapingvoid.com if you've never seen it or read it. It's very clever. Yeah, his artwork is really super cool. And it's just, you know, a lot of profound statements that he makes. And yeah, you know, hung out with Quincy Jones and, you know, we had a whole bunch of marketers that have been.

I saw that picture with Quincy Jones.

Yeah, there's pictures that we'll put them up on. Maybe. Maybe we can put some of that stuff on this episode or something. I don't know. Maybe.

Whatever. Send me over whatever you've. Whatever you want to.

A collage of pictures of me at Ilove marketing. Well, we should have a photo section on. I love marketing, just so people can follow my daily antics. We can take pictures of me eating breakfast. Photo a day Tearing my meniscus, getting rehab and massages, pedicures once in a while. Because I do have a smiley face on my toes. I have a smile.

That's what we could do.

Yeah. And so for those people, that's like.

When we went to get the couple's pedicure in Toronto.

Yeah, we did. What did you think about that?

It's so funny because you were talking about tearing your meniscus at Brendan's studio. And I was with Brendan in New York. We went to the Mandarin Oriental SPA on the 35th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. It's the number one spa in New York City. And it was fantastic. It was really great.

Well, here, look. I was with a lovely in beautiful Renee area at Brendan's studio apartment. We were doing P90X when I actually tore my meniscus. Not because it was anything wrong with P90X, it was just because I was a dumbass and I shouldn't have been doing plyometrics with a knee hurting, but I didn't think I was hurting it and I just was already hurt and I just kind of took it over the edge. But, Renee, awakenyoursource.com, by the way, see, I'm. I'm going to do product placement for people. I talk about we should start charging them a fee.

That's fantastic.

We got thousands and tens of thousands of listeners of this, and they're hearing all these website plugs. These people should be paying me. All right, so for all those people that are like, oh, Joe and Dean should shorten their free, let me mention free podcast to 30 minutes so that you can get it down. I mean, those are the people that obviously don't like any of our commentary, any of our goofing around. And, you know, we're not here to cater to those people. We're here to cater to our fans and true lovers of marketing that realize marketing lovers is about the setup. It's about the setup in order to sell some stuff. So what are we going to talk about today, Dean? What are we going to go over?

You know, I think we should talk about some immediate money things that are available in everybody's business right now. Kind of. They're already there. They're hidden things that are assets that people have that can easily be deployed for virtually no money. And I think it would be a good idea to start talking about some of those things.

Well, you begin.

Okay, so I think that let's set the stage then, because there are three things that we were talking about before this call that are very easy to implement, that can have a pretty dramatic impact. And we both believe that everybody should do this. Number one is raising prices. We just spent a whole more than 90 minutes. We did our Platinum 2.0 call tonight. And one of the things that we really talked about in depth was raising prices. And we talked about pricing psychology. So maybe we could kind of talk a little bit about that because I love the math of what, you know, when we talked about raising prices by 10%, what that actually does to your bottom line and how you can overcome the fear that everybody, you might lose customers by doing it right.

And you will, because if you raise your prices, three things will happen. Your sales will either go up, your sales will either go down, or your sales will stay exactly the same. A lot of times people are searching in their companies for ways to make more money and get more clients and sell more stuff because they think that is what they need to do in order to make more money. But what if you could only generate the amount of business you're getting right now? Now, of course, this is going to seem like a weird thing for someone that yet doesn't have a business just starting out in business or literally has two clients or something. Now, assuming you have a little bit of traction, a little bit of movement, what if you could only survive with the amount of clients that you currently are getting right now? Meaning you couldn't get any new clients. Well, how could you maximize what you're getting? Well, you either get those people to buy more frequently or you get them to buy more or you charge them more money. Right? So, you know, there's a guy, years ago when I had my carpet cleaning company and before I started selling stuff to carpet cleaners, marketing information to cleaners, back in 1994, 1995, I was learning, I was going through the educational process of learning the most effective way to sell anything by not selling, which is what marketing is selling in advance using direct response. I was reading Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy, studying, implementing, trying things out, testing things. One of the books that I came across was called how to Sell at Prices Higher Than youn Competitors by a guy named Larry Steinmetz. And still to this day, fabulous book on pricing and margins. So I ended up interviewing Larry years ago and I became friends with him and I had him do some analysis because he was really familiar with how banks create risk factors for who they loan money to and industry sectors and various things and how service businesses work and margins that are typical, average, above average, below average, et CETERA So I'd sent him, I think as a fax, because it certainly wasn't an email. Sent him a fax with some data that he asked for about carpet cleaners and then he was going to compare it to banking standards with carpet cleaners based on how they loan people in the cleaning industry money and stuff like that. He basically found that. I went in more detail on our coaching call. I'll just sum it up. Basically, a highly profitable carpet cleaner can afford to lose 43% of their business and still maintain the same net bottom line profit with a 10% increase. And an average carpet cleaner can, with a 10% price increase, can lose about 39% of the work and still make the same amount of net bottom line profit, not gross revenue, but net. And so say you're bringing in $10,000 a month and out of that, 2,500 of it is net that you actually get to keep as a carpet cleaner. Now obviously if you're a bigger company, you may be operating on 5% margins, 3% margins, 10% whatever. But the thing is that carpet cleaner can, can literally, with a 10% price increase, generate $6,000 in business, lose 40% of their revenue sales, and still maintain the same net bottom line profit of $2,500 a month. And so, you know, now obviously there's, I don't want to get too much into the numbers because that's not 100% completely accurate on all levels across all businesses. But just from a service business example, a carpet cleaner can literally afford to lose 40% of their revenue and still maintain the same net bottom line profit. And what I discovered with my work with Larry is that applies to a tremendous amount of businesses, including boys and girls that are listening to us right now. With a 10% price increase, are you really going to lose 40% of your customers? And if you would, then basically you probably wouldn't want those people anyway because the only reason they're probably doing business with you is low price. When marketers talk about unique selling proposition, low price is not a unique selling proposition. It's more like a universal selling proposition. If the only criteria or the best criteria that you're offering people in the marketplace to do business with you is a low price, that's a really shitty position to be in. I mean, because the only thing is.

Unless you're going to go all the way.

Yeah. I mean, and you're not going to compete with Walmart or Ikea or, you know, I mean, God, what are like the lowest price, you know, dollar Stores, you know.

Well, like we talked about. Yeah, like Southwest and like the companies who are completely organ around the idea of being the lowest price. And that's kind of, we talked about that, that it's never a mom and pop or an independent operation who can lead on the lowest price. It's always a huge conglomerate. It's always a big, well, financially backed company that is doing that. And it's very expensive to be the low cost leader. You have to have deep, deep pockets to be able to operate on razor thin margins.

Yep, exactly. So here's the deal. If you don't want to listen to the rest of this episode where we're going to talk about all this stuff, the one thing that would be really beneficial for you is to figure out how to raise your prices 10% and not lose more than 40% of your clients. And preferably if you raise your prices 10%, your sales may actually go up, up. Because that does happen in situations. A lot of times it's because perception, oh, it's more expensive, it must be better. And sometimes your sales will go down. But if they go down 40%, then you really need to take a look at the quality of what it is you're delivering. If there's such a differential at that rate between pricing and the quality of your service, you need to improve the delivery, you need to improve the product, you need to improve the service, you need to improve the customer service, service related around it. You need to improve the likability factor and the bonding. And those are all different scenarios. But it doesn't always need just better marketing to make more money. Simply it's just raising your prices. People always say, well, how much do you charge? How do I know what to charge? The way that most people determine what to charge when they start business is they look at everyone in their industry and figure out what they're charging. The chiropractor looks at the chiropractor down the street and sees what he's charging. Crack backs and snap necks. And the dentist is looking at, what does this dentist charge for teeth cleaning? The carpet cleaner looks at, what's this guy charging per square foot per room? The real estate agent is what percentage commission. The graphic designer is looking at, what's this person charge per hour? Where do they charge for a logo? And on and on and on and on. And that has nothing to do with reality. I mean, you think it does when you're first starting in business. But what you learn if you end up studying marketing is that the formula for how much you charge for something is based on your ability to sell it. If you want to know what to charge, the answer is it's based on your ability to sell it. One of the things I talked about on the call, I said I charge $6,000 an hour for consulting and minimum blocks of two hours. And I preferably refer people to hire me for four hours for half a day for $25,000. And even before we even go to that, I only want to do consulting if it just has to be such a specific thing because I really want people joining my 25k group because I actually make more money when I do that and I don't have to work as hard and they may get more out of it. Right, right, exactly. They get more out of it. They get six days with some of the top entrepreneurs in the, you know, a 12 month period and all the benefits and memory, all that stuff. But the thing I said is like, why would a guy that has no college degree that was pretty much a derelict for a good portion of high school and growing up and I don't know what a derelict really means. I don't know if that's a proper way to describe me, but it says it's funny.

That's a perfect word describing you. You mean?

Yeah. What's the definition of a derelict? I don't know, whatever.

But you know, one moment please.

You can pull it up online and you can tell me if I'm accurate.

I'm going to do that right now.

Yeah, do it.

I think it does really subscribe you.

And it pisses people off that went to college for like 10 years and you know, I mean, you can hire like some of the greatest attorneys in the world for a hell of a lot less than what I charge for marketing per hour. But why do I charge that? Well, for one, I can. Secondly, I have a very unique sort of skill set, delivered in a manner that literally no one else in the world does it quite like I do with Approvable.

And that's the thing doing what we do and knowing what we know and being able to apply it to somebody's business for any amount of money. There's a quantifiable measurable ROI on the money that they're spending. They're buying money at a discount.

Exactly. And even now, well, this. You know what, I'm glad you said that because that's a great. Since I use lawyers as an example, you can hire one of the best attorneys in the world and at the end of it, half the time you're still going to be out of money. But you can give me large sums of money. And in most cases, if you follow my advice, it will never cost anyone a penny. Because when people give guys like you and me money and they follow our advice and, you know, it's got to be a right fit. I mean, there's certain one thing I will do if people come to me with a problem that literally they need a different type of marketer for. I'm not going to take their money. I don't want it. I have a whole website set up called hirejoepolish.com which actually is my filtering mechanism for people that should they hire me, should they not hire me, that sort of stuff. But basically, yeah, I mean, it's all what you're delivering. One of the price defined mathematically means how much does one of those things cost? Value is what do you get in relationship to what you're paying for? So what is price? What is value? One thing I said earlier today is that the marketplace takes you at your own appraisal. I mean, if you think about. You take a piece of jewelry in to get appraised, you appraise a house, how much is it actually worth? Well, it depends on what someone's willing to pay for it. Depends on how you package it, how you communicate it, how you sell it, how you instill value. If you're not getting paid by the marketplace, what you want for whatever it is you're selling, is it because of what you're selling, or is it because of how you're selling it, or is it because of you? It's maybe a little bit of all those things, but marketing absolutely shifts and changes the perception. And you can have the greatest thing in the world if you do a poor job of presenting it, communicating it, educating people on it, specifically matching it to people that want it, need it, can be helped by it, et cetera, et cetera, then it's not the market's fault, it's your fault. It's entirely up to you. You're responsible for making your case. Like the Karas Seminars ad in Airline magazine says, in life, you don't.

I love those.

You don't get what's fair. You get what you negotiate.

You get what you negotiate. Yep. Yeah. All right, here's what. So derelict, the adjective use of derelict, is in very poor condition as a result of disuse and neglect. I think that was pretty much.

That would. Yeah, that would be. I would say in my youth, that would be some. If I had a pie Chart, I would, you know, give a pie chart. Slice of percentage. Yeah. There would be derelict could probably be part of that pie.

And look at you now.

Look at me now.

Look at you now.

New and improved or just better packaged and marketed?

I think probably a little of both.

Yeah. Who knows? Who knows?

A little of both.

Yeah. So Dean, you know, I know you're going to have, I'll philosophize during this and maybe you can bring some land the plane and create some reality around it.

Well, what would it take for people to raise their prices by 10%? I mean.

Oh, well, okay, right away. That's a good question. Well, here's the thing. Like I price cutting. I used to teach a seminar on pricing. Not like a whole day, but like hour, two hour segments. I would talk about it in the context of the seminar I used to do years ago called how to double your business in six months or less. And many people can double their business literally in a matter of weeks if they do the right thing. Hell, if they have the right sales letter, they can sometimes ten times their business. Like now with online, they can do it in three days. But that sounds hyping unrealistic and stuff. Possible, not probable for most people, but possible. But price cutting is a self inflicted wound. Your competitors do not raise your prices. You do it. You write what you charge, the bid, the estimate or whatever, you publish the price, you put it on your website, you put it in your ads. And if your competitors prices are lower than yours, then that's their problem. It's not yours unless you want it to be yours. And you're the one that tells the printer or the web designer or whoever prints your menus if you own a restaurant what to put on the area where you say price. Your competitors do not raise your prices. And if you don't believe me, then call all of your competitors and ask them if it's okay if you can raise your prices. I mean it's just silly. So people do it to themselves. That's the first thing that comes grips with. So your question is, well, how do you go about doing it? Well, first you got to realize that you're the one that picked your price. You're the one that states it. And so you're going to have to. The fish rots from the head down. And so you got to, you've got to improve your perception of yourself if you don't think you're worth what you charge or you actually have to improve the service. One of the things we actually talked about on our Platinum 2.0 call. And I'm going to keep saying that because people need to get that in their head. Platinum 2.0. Platinum 2.0. If you really want to accelerate, if you're getting a lot out of. I love marketing. Again, that's. I mean, look, listen to. I love marketing. Listen to all of past episodes. If you listen to just what we give out and never give us a penny, you're still going to know 99.999% more than pretty much all businesses on the planet. And most people are not really good at marketing because they won't take the time to do it. But I can assure you the thing that has allowed me and the most successful people that I know to do really well is making great margins with great marketing and great pricing and great packaging and great delivery. And I use the term delivery as the way that you actually deliver the service. If you screw up delivery one time with your best customers or clients, they're going to be looking for a different source to get whatever it is you're selling. And if you want to lose sales, then screw up delivery. And that doesn't matter if you're a high price or you're low price. If you screw up delivery, if you screw up doing something to somebody, you either better make it up to them, give them their money back so that they can give you another shot, or you lost. If you want to sell at premium prices, then you need to make your delivery problems go away. If you want to clear up a.

Delivery problem, that is the problem in itself. Yeah, yeah.

And that's what you were talking about.

Is that there's prices are too low, Their prices are too low to be able to really fulfill. And sometimes raising the prices can eliminate the problems of being able to fulfill because you have more money to actually do what it is. More money to play with, to serve people.

Right, Right. Yeah. And so, you know, and if you want to clear up a delivery problem, then raise your prices. Because most of the delivery problems that are experienced are aggravated and created, like you said, Dean, by prices that are too low. And people don't think about that. It's like, well, shit, man, I can't. It's like people that are paying premium prices, they have a different set of expectations. And nobody pays premium prices for delivery problems. I will pay more money for convenience. I like flying Southwest Airlines.

Things that people will pay. That's one of the things that people will pay more money for. I mean, you know, they'll pay more money for convenience. They'll pay more money for speed. You know, they'll pay more money for a more comprehensive solution to what they have, you know.

Yeah, and I put all that under the area of delivery. You know, if you go to Amazon, you want to book overnight, you're going to pay more money. But you know what, there you go. Zappos, which is owned by Amazon. It was kind of interesting. Oh, by the way, I was with Tony Hsieh, who's a friend of mine for the last two and a half days at the XPRIZE foundation thing and hung out with Quincy Jones, which was really super cool. I'll figure out how to name drop and make it look like I'm cool because I know famous people or whatever in between this. But you take an example of Amazon, which is really low prices. You can get really good prices. You can get even lower prices at. What's always fun to do is you go to Costco and you look at stuff that's being sold there and you actually. Which I think Costco just does a phenomenal job. Again, like you were saying earlier, it's like you have to have a lot of money to sell at low prices, but you take something out of it. You really do like Zappos.

It's expensive, right?

Right. Zappos is more expensive than buying many of the same products on Amazon, although Amazon owns Zappos. But Zappos is focused on really meticulous, amaz customer service. So, you know, in many cases, you pick one or the other, you know, you can get really phenomenal. You can send back any pair of shoes, you know, from Zappos. If you don't like them, they encourage you to do it. I mean, why? Because they want you to know they care about you and that you like them and stuff like that. And so, you know, Southwest Airlines, very low price carrier, really like that airline, though. Simple. You know, why all the other airlines do not model many of the things that Southwest does is beyond me. I mean, I fly first class when I typically go United or US Airways. I live in Phoenix, so they only have Virgin America flying out of Phoenix. So I can never fly Virgin flying out of Phoenix. But Southwest, JetBlue, great. But Southwest is like my favorite. I mean, they're just the easiest airline. I was flying back from LA yesterday on Southwest Airlines last night with my girlfriend and you know, I get a text that they had a gate change. I mean, I've never had been on. Not that other airlines don't do it, but I'm not aware of it because I fly all kinds of different airlines. And Southwest is the only one that will text me if the flight is delayed or if there's doing a gate change. But see, here's the thing. You can still pay for the fly by lane, which costs 10 or $15 more on a low price airline. So even a low priced carrier like Southwest still has the ability, if you pay more money, to have a different sort of a delivery where you can actually go through the lines.

That's the thing. I mean, you and I both always do that if, you know, flying. Because Southwest doesn't have first class, they have their business select class, which lets you get on faster or, you know, get on higher. When we were flying back from Eben's wedding, remember we were number one, two, and three.

Right, exactly.

On the boarding thing. And we got that whole exit row with all the extra leg room.

Yeah, because I didn't want to freaking be cuddling with you on a damn plane. That's especially, you know.

Between us.

Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, you know, we don't want to talk about that. But yeah. So the point is, if you, if you raise your prices, it affords you the ability to do a lot better marketing, A lot more marketing. Delivery problems can go away because you have enough margins.

I don't want to fly by that. You like that? The fly by lane? Yeah, I don't want to fly by that. That is a good way to raise prices without raising them across the board is offering a little higher level. And you can go, you could even go with a 50% premium on things that would. Some of the people who really would want that would be more than happy to pay that.

Yep, exactly. Exactly. And here's another thing too, like when you take Southwest, because it's a great example, like, you know, the most heinous thing that you can do to your customers is to fail to deliver correctly and on time. In the most grievous thing that your suppliers or your vendors can do to you is screw up delivery for you. Like anyone that's ever relied on a printer or a web designer or a phone company name an auto mechanic, an airline to get you somewhere on time. And they don't, or it's late and they don't take corrective action, you get annoyed. And then if it happens over and over again, you become very annoyed and you quit doing business with them unless they're literally the only option. The airline industry, many of the airlines have become, and there's a reason many of them don't make a penny, is literally they forget that the customer is where the revenue comes from. We've gotten to a point where certain sort of industries are so despised and the airline industry is being one of them. Not that people don't want to fly and not that they're ever going to stop, because they're not. I mean, it's fantastic that planes exist. I mean, I'm actually quite grateful for the fact that, you know, flight and everything exists. I mean, it's awesome. It's just the amount of crap that certain airlines put you through because they're so oblivious to, you know, customer service. And it's now become accepted that, you know, flying sucks, you know, airline sucks, airline, you know. And even the motto we're saying, you know, airline industry is, you know, we're not happy till you're not happy, until you're not happy. And it's like, you know, if you actually charged people more money and really made a great effort to say, we're going to always do our best to be on time and when we're not on time, here's what we're going to do for you. I can guarantee you there is enough people out there that would pay probably double fees to just not have the stress and the angst that goes along.

With, to take away uncertainty.

Right now, not a lot, but see my example is if you raise your prices 10%, you can lose 40% of your business, like in the cleaning industry. Now, I don't know how that applies to the airline industry or many other different industries, but the point is there's a large segment of people just look at first class and see that's the bummer because I do fly first class quite a bit. Whenever the flights are over two hours, I will typically fly first class unless the pricing is just. So if it's a difference, completely crazy. I know if it's 4,000 or 300, I'm probably going to pay 300, but there's many cases. But there are times where I'll fly private just because I don't even want to deal with the aggravation. And there's been entire, there's been entire industries built around catering to high end. The difference is you look at people that shop at Walmart, people that shop at Target, people that shop at Nordstrom's, people that shop at Neiman Marcus. There's a whole different type. You're not going to see people in Neiman Marcus walking around in flip flops carrying big bottles of Mountain Dew. And not that there's anything wrong with that. It's Just who do you want to carry? I mean, personally, Dean, I don't know if you walking around in flip flops of Mountain Dew and Neiman. We should try that, actually. We should do videos of you walking around Neiman Marcus looking like he just came out of Walmart. What do you think?

Right.

You up for that?

That'd be perfect.

We could do awkward moments with each other again. Awkward moments with.

I'm going to be in Phoenix. I'm going to be in. We're going to be doing our Platinum two point in. In May.

Yeah, yeah. We should do a field trip to dollar stores and stuff with people and have. And see what happens. But all right.

So anyway, I'll do a field trip to the. To the IPIC Theater.

Yeah, yeah.

There's another example of charging premium prices.

Yeah. Me and Dean go to the IPIC theater. We pay $186. Was that right? I think that was the first time we went there. I mean, we.

It was about that. $186 for three of us.

Yep. And we spent. Who was the third person? I can't remember. It doesn't matter. It might be someone we don't want to talk about, but.

Sony.

What's that?

It was Sony. Oh, that's right. That's right.

Yeah. Your wife. All right, so I apologize. I should have. If I was a more caring human being, I would have remembered that. So let's see. So if you. I want to go back to. If you raise your prices, three things will happen. Your sales will go up, your sales will go down. Sales will stay the same. The point of this episode of I Love Marketing is to get everybody to raise their prices 10%. If you raise your prices 10%, I would be curious to have people literally try this and then post@ilovemarketing.com, what happens? Did your sales go down? Did your sales go up? Did your sales stay the same? And really look at how it affects your net bottom line profits. Because business is a game of margins.

I think that's a scary thing. When we were just talking about this idea. Excuse me. When we're just talking about this. The idea, given the choice of just across the board, raising your prices, which is very scary to people, even if you raise them minimally. I'm thinking it through here. I'm liking, as a strategy, offering a premium level, as a intermediate step, as a very completely risk free way to charge more money. Because when you think about that, just like you said, the fear that people have is that if I raise my Prices, I'm going to maybe lose customers. And maybe they will. If you offer a premium level to what you're already doing, more than 10%, 20%, 30%, 50% more, double maybe, depending on what you can do. There's virtually zero downside to that.

Right.

Because the only downside will be that nobody takes you up on.

Right. Yeah, exactly. No one takes you up on it. And the fact is, if you actually have people that like you and you really. You know, I should pull up that blog from Seth that I read earlier.

Yeah.

Do you mind if I read that? Let me see.

Yeah, I'll read it. I got it right here.

Okay, go ahead and read it.

Okay, so this was the one that Seth sent a couple of days ago. And the title is, if you think that's what we want, why don't you give it to us? I love how he's pretty. He's pretty clear, right?

Yeah.

So here's what he says. The sign in front of the breakfast bar at the hotel says, from garden to table. Really? Virtually every item I see has been processed four times, steamed, stored, and steamed again. Marketing pitches are finely tuned to resonate with the audience in mind. Too often, though, the marketer is only in charge of the pitch and someone else in the organization has to make the thing. So the marketer brags about how tasty the food on the airplane is, or how reliable the cell phone service is, or how magically transporting the aromatherapy of the soap is. And then someone else, someone under different pressures and constraints, has to deliver. And they rarely do. They rarely do because the paying customer isn't their customer. Their customer is the quality control department, the accounting department, and the don't rock the boat department. Marketers need to spend less time making promises and more time keeping them.

Yep, exactly. And then he shows a sea monkey ad, which is like the old original sea monkey ad that says, enter the wonderful world of amazing life. Sea monkeys own a bowl full of happiness instant pets and it's only $1.25. And then I remember as a little kid seeing this and actually ordering them. And it says, free, a one year supply of growth food. Two living plasma three, water purifier four a magnificent, fully illustrated. I can't even read this thing because it's a manual of sea monkey care, raising, training and breeding. Our famous growth guarantee in writing, blah, blah, blah. But it was a very hypey ad. But it was funny and it was very clever and stuff. But the point is, like today, you don't make promises to People charge them a bunch of prices and then deliver crap. I mean, there's things called Yelp and there's reviews on Amazon and on ebay and everywhere else. Basically, if you're going to charge higher prices, you really need to deliver value because perception is reality. And. And if you're going to deliver subpar stuff, then sell it really cheaply. But if you're going to deliver something that's a great product combined with great service, set it up so that you are the Four Seasons choice. If you really want to live in that world, and even if you don't want to live in that world, even if you don't want to be the best, the top, the most expensive, etc. You will still be well served to, like you mentioned, Dean, offering a premium option, still raising your prices, doing a better job of educating people, because we talked about this earlier in our Platinum 2.0 call. But the four letters that I always think about, four letters, four words. When it comes to volume, people are like, oh, I just want more business. I can get more volume. Volume means more work. Put that up on the wall somewhere. Volume means more work. I don't want to do more work. I want to do less work. And I want to make more money. And I want to have the very best clients and I want them to be very happy and I want to have enough margins so that I can deliver really, really good stuff. And people walk away with an awesome experience and they want to tell other people about it. That's the deal. That's why I think it makes a hell of a lot of sense to really think through how to look at the before, during and after units of your business. I think if you read the Breakthrough DNA report, which is available for the very high price of free@ilovemarketing.com, you can opt in and download that report and read it. And as you're reading it, think through not only the marketing activators, but how pricing and raising your prices actually affects all of the different eight profit activators. I think it'll, you know, that alone will be a great way for you to really think about how to add more value, real value and perceived value, how to educate people more, how to connect with them more, how to bond with them more, and it will change your business. I mentioned a quote on the Platinum 2.0 call today. Owen Young, who originally built General Electric, said, it's not the crook we fear in modern business. Rather, it's the honest guy who doesn't know what he is. Doing. That's the saddest thing about people that, that really work hard, really have good stuff, want to do good, want to give people a good price, and they just don't know what the hell they're doing and they go broke and they screw up the marketplace for other people because they just simply. There's a quote by Cletus Pichel. I'm not sure how you pronounce his last name, but it's like if your customer truly needs a low price, you can't afford to sell him. Can't afford to sell him. So if you are dealing with people that truly need the lowest price, then start a charity because you don't want to play that game. I mean, you can play that game if you want. I will just say that when I say don't play that game, it's not like a command, it's just that you're just going to suffer. And if you don't want to suffer, get into the price game. Because Gary Halbert, you know, one of the favorite quotes I got from Gary Halbert a long time ago was a lot of games in life, you only win if you don't play. And the price game is a game. I don't think anyone ever played games.

So let's sum up what our pricing recommendation is now. Do you think it's fairly clear to people where we stand on that?

Yeah, I think so. We can beat it a little more, but I think it's clear.

I think it's clear. So we promised that we'd talk about three ways to get some. That hidden money that's already there in your business doesn't really cost anything. This is just a decision to either raise your prices across the board or offer a premium level of service, offer something extra to everybody. And you notice that certainly some number of people, some percentage of people, I would guess 20, 30% of people would take a higher option if you offer it to them. Just because there are certain people who will only get the best of everything.

Yeah, I mean, heck, I even teach carpet cleaners how to package their services, which is a great way to raise prices. Just do packaging models of bronze, silver and gold, you know, good, better, best, premium, etc. Etc.

Well, let's talk about some of the other things then, because one of the things that everybody has are clients, customers, patients, whatever it is that you call whoever your customers are that have stopped doing business with you, did business with you at one point, and maybe are inactive. And that is a potential gold mine for you. It's A strategy that you can. Or it's a group of people that you can strategically communicate with to reactivate those people at a very low cost and instantly get cash going in your business.

What do you think are some of the strategies that you would suggest?

Well, I think just asking them to come back is one. Giving them an opportunity. If anything has changed, if anything has changed in your business, it's a great opportunity to send them a letter with a gift certificate or with some kind of an incentive or offer to come back and experience it again. If it's something that you've got somebody or a business that people repurchase on a regular basis, if you can reactivate somebody, it's worth using the cost of, you know, one time, one visit or one, you know, if somebody, if you're a massage therapist and somebody used to come to you every week, and they came and came and came, and then they stopped coming. And you can, you know, send them a letter inviting them back and offering them a free massage to come back and, you know, see them again. That's. There's a great opportunity that some of those people who come back will continue again then to come back on a regular basis. Same thing if you own a restaurant. You know, somebody hasn't been in in a long, long time, and you send them and bring them back and they start coming back regularly, or you had some kind of a subscription service and they were subscribers and then they stopped being subscribers and you've made changes over that time. You can invite, write them back to try it out again. It's such a winning strategy. And low, low cost, low risk.

Yeah. And I mean, see, that's the beauty of a sales letter. If you've got a great communication and you've not talked to people in a while, they've not done business in a while, you just call them, you mail them, you email them, you send them, send them a video, you text them if you got their text, you know, I mean, you, you don't even have.

To be a great copywriter to write a letter like that.

Well, no, because, you know, in a lot of ways, you're already dealing with someone that already has a certain level of rapport with you.

Well, they already know you like you, trust you. And in that kind of thing, it's way more important what you're saying than how you say it. You know, had a really great example of this. Do you ever see that show the Shark Tank with the investors, with Mark Cuban and Kevin o' Leary and Barbara Corcoran and Damon John that show where entrepreneurs come and they pitch their idea to these sharks and the sharks then will, you know, they are looking for funding and they're trying to convince the sharks to invest in their business. And this one lady was on and she was so excited about her product and she hadn't really made any money yet, but she had a lot of passion and they weren't hearing anything. She hadn't really made a big success of it yet. And they were about to kind of turn her down. Robert herjavec was asked, well, give us some why should we invest in than you? And she was saying about how she wanted her daughter to see that her mother really made something of herself and to be a role model for her. And then just as she's about to give up, it dawned on her and she pulls out of her pocket. She goes, oh, and I've got this million dollar order from Walmart and I need money to fulfill the orders. And all of that stuff, no matter what she said, now all of a sudden every one of the sharks is completely interested in her. Yes, completely turned it around with just those, oh, and I've got this million dollar order from Walmart and I need the money to fulfill the order. I mean, all that other stuff, all that pitch, all the drama, all the presentation that she went into, really selling them on her product and on her. And it all came down to, oh, and I've got this order from Walmart. Fascinating. Joe Polish. Oh boy.

All right, here's what happened.

I know he's going to dial back. I'm going to keep talking about some of these other strategies that we can use because so much of this is really about looking at the opportunities that you have, looking with, looking at what you've got and being able to deploy just easy strategies to harvest that money. Really, that's kind of sitting there. We talked about, excuse me, raising your prices as an easy way to do that. What we're just talking about now is reactivating your people who've been doing business with you, who stopped doing business with you for whatever reason, and you make them an offer to come back. You know, it's a fantastic thing. We did that for years with, for two or three years with. We used to do big real estate seminars all over the country. We had a coaching program and we would invite people who were part of the coaching program and then for whatever reason had, had stopped being part of the coaching program, invited them back to see the new event, to see the new stuff that we had implemented. And 40% of the people who came back decided to rejoin the coaching program. So it was a very, very low risk, high profit venture, something that we could do that took advantage of the asset that we already had, which was the names and the relationship and the history with the people who already know us, like us, and trust us. So if you've got that kind of a list, you've got that kind of situation, it's something that's really worth taking advantage of. Now, when Joe comes back.

I'm back here. Dean, now.

So sorry. Okay, good.

I just wanted to.

No problem. I figured that's what happened.

It's the first time in our. This is the first time, and I love my marketing history that I ever got dropped from a call.

Isn't that funny? Yeah. And here we are. Yeah.

So what did I miss? What do you have to reiterate in order to get me up to speed, but make it sound like you're actually giving an example to me?

I landed the plane on raising prices. I landed the plane on reactivating your former clients. Do you have any inactive clients? Do you have anything to add to that one?

You know, just by doing the call we did earlier Today, the Platinum 2.01, I actually, you know, realized that with a reactivation campaign, with the amount of clients that I have, I've literally got about 10, not 10, $5 million sitting there, you know, unrealized, unrecognized, ungathered. You know, obviously, it's like the John Lennon and Paul McCartney conversation, you know.

Yeah, right.

Let's sit down and write ourselves a swimming pool. So I got, you know, I got to sit down and obviously create a communication. I want to do a video. I want to do like a Paul Abdul talking card. I have one of these. If people don't know what I'm talking about. If you go to I love marketing and type in Dan Kennedy, you can see the speech that I gave at Dan Kennedy's event. It was the most successful speech they ever had at Glaser Kennedy history in terms of selling. And the whole presentation is up there on. I love marketing and I have this talking card as Paul Abdul endorsing my 25k group. And basically it's a great strategy that anyone could actually use a similar methodology like that to go out the client. One of the things I will say is that you just got to make sure that your clients really like you. You have to communicate with them. You have to determine what they really want, what they feel that they must have, and just call them, mail them, email Them you have to fish. You're not going to catch fish if you don't throw out the bait. And if you don't bait the hook and you don't put it out there. So you know, the time that someone loses a customer to a competitor is when they typically allow the competitor to pay more attention to the customer than they did. And so, you know, make sure that you're paying attention to them and if you've not paid attention to them in the right way or you know, this hopefully will be a wake up call to remind you of, you know, the opportunity to do that and do that right now, this very moment, before that, before the. I love Martha standing by before it even ends.

There you go.

You know, I mean you can be making, you could be running small classified ads. So yeah, that is the deal. That is the deal.

So let's talk about real quick then the third thing which would be, would be going back to leads that have been unconverted. Every business has prospects that they have spoken to, given a quote to, who have come in for a consultation, who've talked on the phone, who've made an inquiry, who've been sent materials, who have been in some manner considering being a customer of your business and for whatever reason have not yet done that. And sometimes businesses get so busy working on dealing with all of the people that they're actually working with in their during unit that they often forget or don't take the time to go back and try and reactivate those unconverted leads. And I shared.

Oh wait, wait, wait. I've got a great strategy though for that, Dean. You know, if you're a realtor, you can actually send out an email that says are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? Are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? That is the magic formula.

Let me write that down. What is this magic formula?

It's like the special nine word. It's the nine word magic email formula that I invented. No, I'm kidding. No, see that's where Dean was getting ready to go and give every. No, this is actually brilliant. Dean came up with it. I deserve no credit whatsoever. Yeah, go for it. Explain this because this is a great reactivation model that if, you know, if people paid $10,000 to hear this, it would still be a damn bargain. And you know what? You're getting it today for the low, low, low price. Here we are talking about. See, we're not even charging any. I mean this is raise your prices. How the hell do we raise prices on a free Podcast.

I think we just raise them by 80% right now. So 80% on top of free? You know, it's 80% freer.

My friend Robin. Robin says, never complain about a blessing. You know that anyone that ever bitches about. I love marketing. They're just complaining about a blessing. They have no idea. Simply ungrateful people. Oh, you should report you. You should include that. You should improve the recording quality. Oh, you should make this shorter. Joe talks too much shit and babbles too much. We could have said the same thing in 10 minutes. It's free. Free.

Amen.

Okay, but priceless. Yes. I'm just bantering here. All right, let's go through that process because this is about to change some lives of the smart people that hear it and actually do something with it.

Well, here's the thing. I've had so many real estate agents who have used this strategy, and I call it the amazing nine word email that revives dead leads. And it's a very simple strategy. When you go through your desk, your email, your computer, all the pieces of paper that you write phone messages on or quotes on, or, you know, whatever, whatever method you have of collecting the information from people who are potential prospects, when you go back and you gather all those up and they've been kind of in that limbo for 90 days or more, and you send them a simple email with just their name in the subject line. So it would say Joe, and then on the inside, the message would just say, 9. Are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? That's it. And the temptation that you're going to have is to want to add more to it. You're going to want to solve the mystery for people, and you're going to want to say, you know, are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? Because if you are, then blah, blah, blah. And that's going to solve the mystery for them. And there's no need for. Not necessarily, no need, no compulsion for them to respond. If you send a message that has an open loop like that, an unsolved mystery, your mind can't really abide an unsolved mystery. So it will rattle around in there until it's resolved. So when you send out that message, are you still looking for a house in Georgetown? It's almost like you can imagine yourself saying that to somebody in person. If you looked at somebody and you said that to them and you're standing there, it would be very, very difficult for them not to reply.

It would be very awkward.

It would be very awkward. So we talked about that with, with Tim Paulson. You know, whatever the business we're talking about hair transplant or hair restoration prospects. And what would you say?

Yeah, hair club for men. Because he used to be the, he used to be the vice president of marketing for vice club.

Or we talked about with carpet cleaners saying, you know, are you still looking to get your carpets cleaned? That kind of thing, Whatever it is, what would be the question that you could ask that would re engage your prospects into action? If you're a graphic designer, are you still looking for a logo design?

Yeah, the chiropractor thing of like, does your back hurt?

Does your back still hurt? Yeah, whatever it is, if your business, if there's something, what would be the most appropriate question that you could ask that would re engage your prospects that you've already deemed dead, that you've already closed the file on those you weren't hoping to reactivate them? There's a big, big, big opportunity in that every time I send out that message about that strategy to my realtor list, they always reply back and tell me about the responses that they get immediately. People that they had given up hope on. And it's fascinating.

Yeah, it is. It totally is. So how are we doing for time, Dean? I'm not looking at the clock.

We're over. We're giving them more than what they've paid for. Right now. We're in extra innings.

Okay, well, here's what I would like to do. I would love to get everyone's feedback about pricing, about results you've gotten from listening to I love marketing. If you're brand new to love marketing, then listen to past episodes. Thanks for listening. We do this because we love marketing. We want to obviously help the good, ethical business people of the world be more effective at marketing and obviously be more successful in profitability in their business. Which is why we did this particular call on the subject. You know, it's entrepreneurs that make the world go around. They're the ones that employ people, they're the ones that provide the jobs, they're the ones that provide innovation. And if they're really good people, hard working, value creators, innovative, they deserve to get paid for what they do. And the marketplace takes you on your own appraisal. So we want you to be more valuable in your own mind first. Because most, if not all of price resistance is in the minds of the seller and not the buyer. And people will make excuses for that and think differently. But it's almost all buying resistance can be overcome. If you're targeting the right people, if you're setting it up so they know, like, and trust you, if you're making irresistible offers, if you're offering things that they really want and need. And one thing that I do want to mention mentioned too, if you have any challenges with raising your prices or people have any sort of, well, you know, you're charging this much. How do I know it's the right thing? Guarantee your work. You know, I mean, take all the risk out of them doing business with you. I mean, you know, because if you really did work for someone or sold them a product or service and they were unhappy and you would give them their money back just because it's like the right thing to do, like, if you really didn't deliver on it, then you're. When you're already offering a guarantee, you're just not getting any value out of it by using it as a marketing technique, as a marketing methodology. So really understand that the number one question in all people's minds is who can they trust? And if you don't have strong enough trust and rapport, but you know, you can solve their problem, you know that your product or service is the right fit for them, guarantee it. Because competency starts with guaranteeing your work. I mean, it really does. And if you want to be competent, if you want to be well paid, if you. You want to be one of the top, then do it right. Because as my friend Ken Glickman says, you do not get the proverbial cigar in life until you do it right and never before. So do it right. Part of doing it right is really getting the message right. Communicating it right. Thinking rom return on marketing dollars, not rr, in terms of response rates and focus on just raising your prices and delivering exactly what you say you will do. And yeah, and if. If all else fails, blame Dean because it's his fault.

I'll take the blame.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. So. All right, Joe, that's it, man. So until next time, Dean.

That is it.

That's it. We'll talk to everyone later.

Happy day, Batman and Robin.

Bye bye.