The One With Jay Abraham - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #125

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.

And you know, this is going to be a pretty awesome episode of I Love Marketing. I would even venture to say one of the best ever, because we have.

I agree with that.

Yeah.

We got a special guest who, if you've not heard of him, which I'll say who it is in just a moment. This man is responsible for not only probably billions of dollars in sales generation, but he has probably spawned an entire world of some of the greatest marketers and consultants on the planet and has been instrumental in a lot of the learning that me and Dean have been involved in over the years. His name is Mr. Jay Abraham. So, Jay, it's great to finally have you as a guest on ILEV Marketing. How are you?

I'm good and it's very gracious and thank you. It's a little. And it's my pleasure to be here. So have at me. I'm going to try to be a baseball. Have at me.

I love that.

Well, yeah. Prior to us starting to record Jay, we have no questions that he's seen. He doesn't know what we're even going to ask him, but Jay has just done a lot of stuff. I kind of have a list of some of the things you've done. You're a best selling author. You've popularized the phrase unique selling proposition. You created the strategy of preeminence. You're known as the world's leading marketing authority. You have specialties in marketing and business growth and copywriting and sales methodology and joint ventures and leveraging other people's resources on and on and on and on. So how many years you've been doing this? For one, I want to ask you that first. Then I want to kind of get some background on who you are for people that may not know who Jay is.

I've been doing it indirectly since I was 18, I'm 64. And my math is not as adroit as yours, but many years, 30 some years.

Well, you know, I don't know if my math being adroit, but you have one of the most expansive vocabularies of probably anyone that I've ever met.

There's a reason for it. There's a reason for it. And I'll tell you what is that when I was young, it was very important to me to be a precise communicator every day. And I have very humble background. Every day I. I would take five words out of a thesaurus. And I would use each word appropriately, at least as appropriate as I could, knowing I didn't know what I was talking about at least 20 times a day. And I was able to build a reasonably not articulate but precise vocabulary.

That's one of the things that is kind of your, one of your hallmarks. That's one of the things that people recognize you for. And I've always thought that too, that the precision of the language that you use because you always pulling out the right word and words make a difference.

I remember years ago, I mean, this must have been 15 years ago. I'm listening to some cassette tapes, J. Abraham cassette tapes. And he said the word engineered reciprocity. And I never heard that before and I never forgot it because he's got just hundreds of things like that that he will say to explain things. But you're very good, I think one of the best in the world at taking marketing concepts and expl them in ways so that people can understand them and apply them. You're not only very strategic, but you're very, very tactical and.

Yeah.

So who is Jay Abraham? I mean, looking back at your career, how do you explain who you are and what you do?

I was watching a movie a couple of months ago and it really explained me. It was not a great movie, but it was a man who they were chronicling who was very successful not talking about that, but his. He could constantly tell people he was hopelessly curious. Hopelessly curious. My life has been denominated by the fact that I was bored. And so I wanted to learn constantly about as many things and as many industries and as many applications and how everything worked. And after enough years it all congealed and converged and I realized that there was so much that people in one industry didn't understand about possibilities. But that is, I was hopelessly curious. You know, I think I'm kind of.

Hopelessly curious and hopelessly because I've gotten myself into some really crazy situations. But I think there's a lot to be. I mean there's truly so much going on in the world. And to me it's fascinating.

And let's just say this though, that your hopeless curiosity, you're going to look like a genius in 50 years when all this space stuff takes off. Because you are, you're poised for success in the space everything industry.

Well, yeah. You know, I don't even know if Jay knows this, but you know, Jay, I own the website, which soon we'll be doing something with spacemarketing.com spaceadvertising.com I even own Space University wow.com. and you know, I'm very involved with Peter Diamandis. I'm a platinum partner at Singularity University. Ray Kurzweil is a friend of mine. I'm Richard Branson's largest fundraiser. I'm around all these people that are in the space industry. I'm an investor in an asteroid mining company. I mean, there's all kinds of crazy stuff going on and, you know, I'm getting ready for when space travel becomes available, which will happen very soon. And you know, there's going to be a whole industry that's going to be brought up. I'm going to take all this fancy, effective. I shouldn't even say fancy. That's probably not the right word for direct, responsible. I'm going to take all this knowledge.

I have of direct responsibility and repurpose it. That'll be fabulous.

Exactly. So, you know, you've done so much. I mean, what are you most proud of in your life? Because you've had some enormous accomplishments. I mean, if we just talked about success stories, we could spend two weeks just on the success stories alone.

I'll tell you what I think in reflection, because as you get older, you look at what your legacy is. I mean, when you're younger, you look at making money and you look. But I think that I'm again, proudest, most proud, reflectively, that I helped deserving people who didn't know how to fully communicate their extraordinary levels of value and contribution, connect with the people who benefited the most. And as I got older and more clear in my. Not just my vision, but my understanding of the powers and the forces, I was able to create things like preeminence and I was able to understand how to harness it. And I think I'm probably. Of all the things I've done, and I'm not trying to be arrogant, I've done a lot of stuff with 465 industries all over the world. But I think that the people that I've been able to stimulate to achieve and contribute at a higher strata of value creation for their market is what I'm probably the most proud of.

Yeah, well, you know, in my. As I said, Jay, in my observation of it, one of the things that always struck me that is kind of a common theme is that you always seem to act as sort of an ombudsman between the clients and the company who's providing the benefit, that you're always helping the company see it from the client's perspective. And I think that you more than anybody, in my observation, has really kind of introduced this idea of really falling in love with your clients. I mean, it all does really come from love, is what it feels like.

Well, it is, but I've been benefited. And it will take more than an hour, probably take a day to explain all the magnificent and benevolent mentors who took me under their wing and the aggregate sort of a new worldview that they gave me. But from the very beginning, truthfully, and it was like a default, naturally. I can't tell you why and how and what influence, But I always saw when I had clients, the business was not who I saw as my client. I was almost sometimes transparently through them. I always was the advocate, pardon me, of their market. I was always the champion of the prospect or the underserved. And that was inherent in my thinking, sort of naturally. But it evolved as I could. You know, sometimes you're. You have intuitive understanding, but it's not crystallized and it's not, you know, it's not verbalized and it's not really codified. The more you get, again, maybe mature and deeply reflect on it, the more you understand. It's like maybe, you know, having oil but not knowing what to do with it or electricity.

You mentioned mentors. I'm curious, like, who are or were your mentors? And what, what are those lessons you learned from them? If you could just pick.

I had mentors. My mentors were of two kinds. Because of my curiosity, I was able to stimulate a sense of openness and collaborative sort of, I'm going to use the word revelatory, where people would reveal themselves at a very deep, honest and intimate, not sexually intimate, but intellectually and heartfelt intimacy. But, you know, the guy that I worked for when I did Icy Hot taught me to look at life differently. A guy that I worked with when I was in the dry cleaning business taught me to look at life in a whole different way. A guy, you know, Claude Hopkins, vicariously, was dead, but I met Dan Rosenthal many years ago and. Dan Rosenthal, who? Anybody. You should interview him if you can find him. I don't know if you have or not, but just brilliant mind. But he taught me not only to study people from the 20s and 30s when they didn't have the ability to use technology or sexuality or graphics, they had to understand pure, unadulterated human psychology and enduring, immutable facets of the human condition. And he taught me not only to read Claude Hopkins, but he forced me to read first of All Claude Hopkins philosophies, scientific advertising. Then he forced me to read My Life in Advertising so I could understand the context of what the man experienced, to formulate his beliefs. And then he forced me to read not force in a negative, but he just, he really compelled me to then read Taken at the Flood, which is the life of Albert Lasker, who employed Claude Hopkins. And it gave me a really interesting. I mean, I've just been blessed by people. You know, I work for the Deming organization. I work with the world's largest multi variable testing organization. I worked with the world's largest strategic litigation and they had 160 psychologists and sociologists. But I've been, you know, I've been blessed by a lot of people. I've worked with 300 experts, none of which came to me for help with their methodology. But they all came for me to help them, you know, command premium or differentiate or preempt. But I had to learn all of their methodology, at least at a lay level, so I could advocate and distinguish and contrast. So I got educated by everybody in order, sort of like an attorney that's going into a new field that you pay for the privilege of, of getting educated. I mean, I had that all my life.

So why marketing? I mean, why do you love marketing? I mean, Warren, I love marketing. It seems like why this area?

Because marketing is the ultimate. It's an integration of education, of fulfilling non verbalized.

Needs.

It's transformative because if your product or service is really superior value creation, you're adding a degree of benefit enhancement, protection to people's lives. It's very rare in a life you get a chance to transform enormous quantities of people and thinking by me being able to instill and install preeminence or strategy instead of being tactical or, or value added or risk reversal to somebody who ran a business, I was able to help them influence tens of thousands of people and the people, their children. And it's probably intellectually arrogant and selfish. It gives me a forum and a chance to be sitting here in my basement in my shorts talking to you and know that I've had the aggregate geometric influence on millions and millions of people who are not just theoretical but they're contributing and adding value and transforming. If you've never done that, it's a very, very fulfilling and a very, very satisfying thing. And it's probably better than drugs and probably better than sex. It's a very satisfying intellectual thing to do. I don't know if that answer is.

Good, but no, no, I think it's a great answer. And I mean, to me, I created this video. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but this 3 minute and 50 second video called Is Selling Evil?

You did say. I think you sent it to me. Yeah, you sent it to me and I watched it. I thought it was good. It's like a.

It's being a champion for marketers because they get really misinterpreted by a lot of people. And certainly there are people that use marketing in malicious ways and sell crap and fall into the guise of marketing. But real, that goes to intent and.

Ethos and that's a whole different discussion which we can get into. But it's a powerful force. It can be used for extraordinary good and it can be used for extraordinary bad. The wonderful thing about power and forces and things like that, if you understand them, is either you harness them for a purpose or they sort of consume you. It's very interesting.

Yeah, well, I always love the comparison that marketing is to a business what oxygen is to a human body. I mean, it's that important.

And let me ask you about.

Why do you think the public is so apt to think or talk negatively or talk down about marketers as if there's some sort of nuisance or pest or in worst cases, like they're designed to just take advantage of them and manipulate them and screw them over. Why do you think that exists?

I think it's because of abuse and misuse of power, of the power of marketing. I mean, they don't, they usually don't down talk down about Apple. I mean, they're pretty good marketers. You know, I think it depends on your intention, your attention to the market. And I think that most people. I mean, I was involved. I mean I've been involved in so many activities. I was involved in the infomercial market when it first started. At that point it was so powerful that it didn't matter. Intention. People who were scammy, who were totally, you know, totally, totally impervious to even caring about value, made fortunes because the market trusted. I was involved in the information marketing before. Probably most anybody that's not older than I am and I've seen rapscallions, infidels, terribly, terribly poor intended people capitalize. And I think that when you get a power that you don't use for ultimate elevated good, you, you create your own. I mean, I think it's a tragedy because I think marketing is the ultimate. It's the. Let me think if I can say this right. You're Challenging me to think about things from a vantage point I haven't for a long, long time. I think marketing is the most powerful agent of, and we can fill in the blank goodness or badness, you know, contribution, or we have a, it's a, it's not original to me, but we were impacted by a friend of mine who says in life you're either a multiplier or a diminisher. You either take a situation and make it great, take people and make them great, take situations and make them, you know, exquisite, sublime, or you destroy them, you consume them, you devour them. And I think that, I mean, I'm giving you perhaps an esoteric, intellectualized answer, but I think that it's because people who got the power too young, I mean, in the beginning of the Internet there's so many young turks that didn't really deserve to make the money they did and they abused and they, and you know, I'll tell you a story, and it's from my past, but it's a very good indicator. One of my many, many multitudes of jobs when I was young was selling radio advertising. And I was naive and trusting and theoretically ignorant. And I was very good because of my zeal and enthusiasm in selling companies and retailers and doctors who never ever used radio. And I believed in my delusionary optimism that our radio station, a 60 second commercial, could transform and enhance the success of these businesses. And they believe my diluted belief. And to add even one more level of stupidity and embarrassment, I sold people who did not have agencies. And we had in our radio station an in house copywriter whose claim to fame was that he could write a 60 second commercial in 60 seconds. I didn't know what injustice and what disservice I was invoking on people. I would get people to advertise who never did because they believe me and they'd lose all their money, their 2 or 5,000. And I realized I didn't just lose their 2,000, I lost their faith in the medium and maybe their faith in advertising forever. But I think that's, I don't know, I don't get too tangential, but I don't know if that answers you or not.

Yeah, I think it answers it very well. It's caused me to really think about it because that's something that I think about a lot. And I think of any group of people that are enormously skilled that I think are not only undervalued if even identified, but they're treated with large levels of disrespect. Simply because what people are not up on, they're down on. And if they had a bad experience with a quote unquote marketer and they all of a sudden attack the entire subject matter, it's funny because I've seen very skilled marketers, I know I would put myself in this category that have spent years learning what it is that they know. And someone would go to a doctor in a particular or dentist and they would not question what the dentist is recommending because he's a dentist. But everyone seems to have an opinion on how to do marketing or how not to do it. And, and they have no basis. So I see so much incompetence and so much judgment that comes out of the field. So I'm always curious if it's even worth trying to change people's minds.

But there's another side and there's a bigger. There's a duality of tragedy. One is the power is used for the wrong way. The other is there could be such really quality deserving people that have such a superior product, service, concern, commitment, integrated value proposition, but they do not know how to differentiate. They do not know how to communicate, they do not know how to delineate, they do not know how to demonstrate. And so forever, you know, they're mediocre. But that's as big a tragedy, don't you think?

Oh yeah, completely. Completely. And I mean, that's who I think we exist for. And that's the real value of someone that embraces it and understands it. And a lot of times people learn about when I would say direct response and the type of marketing we teach by accident. I stumbled upon the right type of marketing. You know my story. I was a dead broke carpet cleaner living off credit cards and I learned marketing. Never thinking I would teach it or write courses on it or do what I do today. I learned it because I needed business, I needed to survive and it was a means to an end. But I fell in love with the fact that you can change the message on a piece of paper and it would dramatically increase response. And to me that was fascinating that you could replicate the process of selling through.

I got not just enlightened, but smitten. I got hopelessly, hopelessly impassioned with the power of qualitative marketing. Because I had the chance to look at about a half a billion dollars worth of very complexly sophisticated test that a big company did of everything from selling to marketing, to merchandising, to positioning, to point of sale, to, to reactivation, to preservation, to enhancement to see all the variability. I did the stuff with Deming, and I got to see all kinds of variabilities and the aggregate effect of geometry. And I've done lots of things like I helped this, I told you litigation firm. And I saw that I could depict pain and suffering either outrageously, painfully, or amazingly inconsequential just by my ability to understand the psychology of the market. When you recognize the power. I mean, I remember the first thing I ever learned, that a headline, besides this is back way, way, way, way, way pre Internet, that a headline can be 80, 90% of the impact and that it can differentiate 21 times for the same cost, the same effort, the same access. I used that simple understanding to make myself millions of dollars, because I'd go and just change people's headlines or I would change their guarantee or risk reversal, and I would get 25% of the enhancement, and I'd make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by making the same cost, the same ad, the same direct mail. Do better. It was hilarious and fascinating at the same time.

I remember hearing one of the very first examples that I heard you talk about with that was just turning the headline two thirds bank financing on silver.

It made me $450,000 for about two hours worth of experiments. And I stopped there. I actually was lazy. If I kept doing it, I might have made 4 million because I just stopped at that headline. And that was five times. But we've tested ways of greeting people at the front door at a furniture store. One time we tested 33 different ways, and one out produced all the rest by three times, which doesn't sound that significant until you realize that the furniture company was spending, let's call it. It doesn't matter, but let's call it million dollars a month. It was a big, big furniture company. They were getting a finite number of respondents to their ad, and let's call it a thousand a month doesn't really matter. They were closing 150, and all of a sudden they started closing 450. Plus, by this one shift, just how they embraced people at the front door, it increased the average order size, too, by about 35%. Well, when you realize how many I call them impact or leverage points exist that nobody even looks at. And I've learned, I'm not trying to be arrogant, but I've learned how to look at every integrated impact point, leverage point, breakthrough, breakdown that nobody even looks at. Process, sub, process, because each one of them has the power of either massively multiplying or monumentally diminishing the overall result.

Well, that's amazing. You know, I remember Eben Fagan and I went into a. Jennifer Leathers is the name of the store. Oh. And yeah, we went in and that was amazing because they had the, you know, this unique way of greeting people and instead of saying, you know, welcome or can I help you? No, thanks, I'm just looking. They would give me just a 20 second sound bite, say, have you been to Jennifer Levos before? And you'd say no. And they'd go, well, let me tell.

You how it works.

All the sofas that you see are available in all the leathers on the back of the wall. They're in stock and available for immediate delivery and they're guaranteed for a year or life or whatever it was. And you know, I'm Susie, I'll be over here.

Yeah, that kind of. It's powerful. I don't think most people, even today, I mean, it's almost embarrassing because I know there's 9 million online tools and resources. I'll tell you the winning, because the winning phrase that was that much more powerful at the furniture store. I'll tell you because it was pretty interesting. One of the things about testing and this is where people get self, you know, self defeating because of their arrogance and their ignorance. They try to tell the market, we tried all these things. The winning, the winning phrase was. And it makes total sense afterwards, but you don't think logically it was. And what ad brought you into the store today? And the reason, in reflection why it worked was everyone else is, can I help you? Okay, even what you're saying, but think about it. If I ask you what ad brought you into the day, all of a sudden you don't have an out. You inherently and knee jerk are going to say, well, the one for the five piece living room suit or suite. And then I have the ability to say, oh, is it a replacement? Is it new? What's the rest of the house? Tell me why you're doing it. And you take authoritative leadership. Leadership's a very powerful concept in marketing and most people don't really grasp that. I'm sorry, I don't want to, you know, to step on you just. But you were, you were bringing out a thought. May, please continue.

No, that you just said about leadership is really. You have been very impactful in my thinking on that where you, you always say that people are silently begging to be led. And I think that unfortunately the truth about that is that as salespeople or marketers or business owners, they're also silently waiting to be led by their customers or by their prospects.

And they.

And that's a disservice. But there's an apple.

Absolutely.

There's an epilogue and I'm. Yeah, you're going to see that now. That's the consultant side. It's stepping on you guys. But there's a little more to it. People are silently begging to be led, comma by someone they trust, has their best interest at heart. It's gotten to where it has to be amended and expanded because today most people distrust your intentions and they distrust your motives instead of trusting you. And even with, you know, full, you know, transparency with everything else, people you know, if you know and if you've never interviewed him, you should. Stephen M r. Covey and you know, Greg Link, obviously. But they've done seminal work on the impact of trust and trust building and how it triples your results and cuts the timeline and enhances the longevity of buying relationship. And yet most people don't even think about how do I create the trust that lets the prospect know that I have their best interest at heart. Very interesting.

No, it's critical too, because the number one question in all consumers minds is who can I trust? And so part of the thing I always talk about is trust with comfort, rapport with comfort and safety. And if you can accomplish that, that's where you need to be in order for people to feel chummy with you, feel comfortable with you. And the thing, Dean, you know, what I'm realizing by listening to Jay is that I think both of our vocabularies just suck. I mean, it's just. There's no other way to say it.

No, no. I mean, I just told you I have a love of precision. I think that. And by the way, a telephone to me is really. People don't. I know that video is very popular, but you paint a wonderful picture on the canvas of the mind if you can articulate very dimensional and very animated words and phrases and you can help someone shift by doing that. I've learned over my life that the more not articulate, but the more dimensionally precise I am, the more I help the person grasp my point or my message, hopefully.

I got to tell you a story real quick. We just recently interviewed a friend of ours named John Benson. He's this crazy sort of bodybuilder guy with spike hair and he is the inventor of the Ugly Video Sales Letter where It's like a PowerPoint presentation with words on a screen and more people are reading copy online than Ever before because they're actually watching someone read copy. So we just recently did an I love marketing episode, our second one that we've done with John. And he created this really cool system that helps people assemble and put together video sales letters. I gave him a car that I bought that the company started getting in all kinds of financial trouble. Fisker, you know, the highway. I paid $116,000 for this car, and I was going to give it away as a prize, but then the company started getting into financial trou, and I said, I can't do that in case someone doesn't have a dealership or someplace. So I gave this vehicle two weeks ago, at the time we're doing this episode, to John in exchange for him writing me, creating a video sales letter for me for my genius network, because I think he'll do a slam dunk job.

That's smart.

Yeah.

Yeah. And there's a couple reasons I'm bringing this up. One, I had a text message back and forth with John earlier today, and I told him, we're interviewing Jay Abraham today for I love marketing. And he sent back, jay is my hero. This is a guy who learned so much from you. And the best that they can calculate, there's been $10 billion in revenue generated with people that are using his video sales letter formula online.

That's incredible. Well, God, to tell him that. I'm flattered. It's really wonderful.

Well, you'll meet him in New York, because we'll be together in New York for you speaking at the Genius network event next week. So you'll meet him. And the reason I bring that up is that this is a guy that really has studied words. The copy, the application to copy, and then our friend Brian Kurtz. Marty Edelston. Yeah. And they're all big believers in pay copywriters. A copywriter can make you a fortune. And you obviously are a master at understanding in the application of words. And many people would. They would balk at spending a few thousand dollars to have someone assemble a website or an ad or an email or a sales letter. And those people simply are ignorant because they don't know the value of it. So I wanted to just simply ask you about copy. I mean, how powerful?

I'll give you five comments that you just spawned. The first one is, I go back to three things. I got started before the Internet. We used to. One of my many, many, many careers was I was involved with a company that generated 6 million leads every year for financial institutions and everybody else. I'm going to tell you about copy, but I'm going to tell you about also flawed non critical thinking. People would pay US$50 to $100 for a lead and then they try to save $8 by sending a package out third class mail that would take six weeks to deliver. And it was always fascinating me, number one. Number two, when Gary Benzavinga was first starting, he was a fee based copywriter and he was charging $8,000 a package. I saw his copy and was bedazzled. I called him up and I said, Gary, I've got a proposition. How about if you don't sell yourself to anyone, I'll pay you four grand up front, give you four grand out of the back end and half of the rest and I'll just make it available to people for five cents a name. And he wouldn't do it. Five cents, excuse me, a piece mailed and he wouldn't do it. When I was young, what I've learned about copywriting also is that people will spend a fortune to bring in. They'll pay a copywriter big money for the front end and then they'll use a mediocre journeyman to write the internal stuff. And that's the dumbest thing in the world because you've already got, you got the choir and that's the stupid. You should pay through the nose. Because the incremental difference that you can get out of your list once you acquire them, there's just a lot of. I've gotten impacted by some very profound critical thinkers and most people are very, very linear and they're very tactical in everything they do. I mean if you think of incrementalism, I'm going to use a word that may not exist but incrementalism. I always said to somebody, if I can bring you value you never would have had, why would you care If I took 99 cents out of every dollar? Particularly if I can demonstrate that you're going to get most of the residual. But people are very, I mean the reason it's interesting. I did a treatise a couple of months ago on the concept of greatness and it really, it fascinated me because every person I think is inherently programmed for greatness. And yet about 3% of the populace ever do anything more than mediocrity or below. And there's an irony and a tragedy to it because logic doesn't prevail. One of my great. You asked me about joy. One of my great joys is that when I used to do a lot of group education I would take the time to connect the dots for people. It's, it's a little old now and, and it's a little more. I don't, I mean, fundamentals are not what I really do anymore. But when I was younger, I would take the time and say, let me explain logic to you and let me explain. And then I would ask questions why, you know, what's wrong with this picture? And the moment you make the point for somebody, it's clearly evident, but it's like an epiphany. Epiphany's. They're nothing more than something that was always evident. It's just, it's connected for you in a way where you're either somebody like me is so incessant and unrelenting and impactful that you have to submit Dorothy to it, or you know, you're hurting enough. But I'm giving you answers that may not be what you want to hear, but those are the thoughts you spawned.

No, no, I like it, I like it.

It's great.

Well, let me ask you a couple of things based on years of experience with this and probably a lot of people that listen that make their living in the results economy and a lot that teach business owners how to be better at marketing or do marketing for them. What are the best ways you've learned how to actually get paid for installing or advising or consulting people with marketing?

Well, when I started, I learned a couple of things. If I want to be a regular fee based marketing consultant, I'm going to get $200 an hour. But if I want to be a performance based marketing consultant, I might get $20,000 an hour. And to me, the risk reward was so worth it that I always, I learned very quickly to look for what I'll call marketing arbitrage, where there's big gaps of performance, just underperformance sub optimization, as they call it. And I've always made most of my income by looking at what people were not doing, not what they were doing, looking at, you know, I mean, it was hilarious. And you talked about Gary Albert one time and there's a guy, I wish I could remember his name because you know him and he's retired, but he was a very successful marketer. He used to run an insurance agency for nurses. And he came to one of the first programs I ever did. And Gary spoke. And part of our deal was a half hour consult. We're sitting in the bar with the guy talking. I was drinking, Gary wasn't. And the guy was sending out a million letters a year offering nurses insurance Specialty insurance and God, I can't remember his name.

I mean, I know very well using.

A return envelope and we said, put a return envelope in 20,000 of the next hundred thousand and tell us how he did. And it tripled his response. I mean, it, I mean, it's just like I've learned when I was younger, I understood things, like I would, I was. And again, I'm proud of this. I'm not saying it arrogantly. I could figure out how to get people who expired from a newsletter to stay. I could get people who stayed to upgrade. I could get people who upgraded to BE to buy their competitor's newsletter and make a deal with the competitor where we got all the front end and half of all the renewal. I mean, I was able to do all kinds of things that most people never thought about. But I learned how to enhance every performance impact element that was marketing leverageable. But I also learned what they were. And most people didn't know any of them. And even today, most people only know a few of them.

We got to ask you about something. You've probably explained it so many times you're probably sick of it. But the three ways to grow a business, because I mean, it's so fundamental. And do you still look at it the same way today as you did 20, 30 years ago?

When I started, I realized something. People say, oh, how many ways can you grow business? There's a lot of tactics and a lot of techniques, but there's really three major ways. And there's a couple of more sophisticated ways. First, and the one that most people do is they spend all their time, their effort, trying to win the trust of the market. And normally they do it through external media. They'll do it through ads or pay per clicks or this or that. Then the second way, but you sunk most of the cost at the point of sale. If they trust you and if you're preeminent, you got their best interest at heart and you don't want to allow them to buy whatever they want. You want them to buy what they should be buying. It's a very big environment for enhancing the quantity or the combination or the quality. All which means enhance. And the second way, first way is to get more clients. Cost the most, takes the most time. Second way is to increase the size of the sale and you can do it very nobly and very ethically. The third way is to increase the frequency or the utility of value. Frequency means exactly what it says, how often they buy. Utility means if you only sell a few things Figure out other things they buy or find a front end that's lower to get more people started or a back end that's higher or sell the competitors. If it's a market that buys lots of different things like weight loss or biz op or things like that. And I learned that if you like, we have a model. It's like if you had a thousand clients. Most people don't even know how many clients they've got. They don't know categories. They don't look at anomalies and correlations. I've learned how to do all that. But if you have a thousand clients, I'm getting a little complicated. And the average client spends a hundred dollars every time they buy, and they buy twice a year. You're a $200,000 business. If you increase each of those three categories a mere 10% and 1000 goes to 1100 and 100 goes to 110 and 2 goes to mere 2.2, it does not increase the volume 10%, it's 33 and a third. If you increase each category like 25%, it's almost 300%. If you doubled each of those categories, like 800% increase. I got enraptured. I got seduced. I got got lifetime hooked on the power of geometry in a business. And then as I got older, I realized you can do one more. You can add a new product every year, you can penetrate a new market every year. You can acquire on and earn out new clients. And then as I got older and more sophisticated, I realized that you can really do a lot. It's not a way to grow a business. But I was talking about most people go to the outside market to create their client. I stopped doing that long ago. Most of my successes were totally, totally not detouring, but they were shortcutting. I would just go to whoever had access to the market long before affiliates and that stuff. And we did billions of dollars by me figuring out who owned the market and working out a credible way for them to make their clients our clients. And I did that industry after industry. I'm not giving you the exact answer you want, but I hope it's helpful.

No, if everyone went back and rewinded what you just said, if they'd never heard that before, I mean, that is wisdom. I mean, that's truly wisdom. And it could change someone. It will change someone's business and life if they get it and they apply it.

Dean, I could ask.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, please.

It's different than the three ways, but again, I'm Going through my you're going down history. And I feel like the old marketer sitting on the front steps of the old marketer's home being nostalgic. But when I realized the power of the power Parthenon, I realized it's a whole nother dimension of adding geometry to the business. Every new access point or every new impact point or every new way that you reach the market adds another 10% or 3% or 20%, but the aggregate gets into the hundreds of percent. And that's really my ability to understand. And this is not arrogant, it's just, it's clinically and forensically sort of dissecting me to you and Dean and your people. I learned how to use the geometry of business building and most people didn't understand it and many people still don't understand it in its full majesty.

I think what you were just describing there about looking at different ways doing something that you're not already doing to bring people in is an exponential improvement in that way of bringing in people rather than trying to do the one thing that you're already doing incrementally better. As soon as you go from not doing something to doing something that gets a result that's an exponential improvement in, in what you're doing, that adds another pillar, as you would call it, of strengthening your Parthenon.

When I was, again, I'm not trying to antiquate myself. When I was a young man, I had so many. And this is again, I'm just saying this so people can get excited, not I don't want them to think I'm an arrogant and conceited and brash person. I really have a great respect for entrepreneurship and I love them and I'm a great champion and I like the human condition. But when I started doing this, we had more 10 time and 8 time we had success stories that were almost unreal sounding. But it wasn't because I was that good, although I think I was pretty talented. It's because so many entrepreneurs accepted such a limited and such a restricted and such a constrained level of ongoing performance from their actions, their efforts, their activities, their access, their marketing. And we understood how to change that. And it's harder today. I'll tell you what I think today. I think today there are a myriad of generic competitors, but I don't really think there are that many viable competitors if people slow down enough to understand all the dynamics that are going on.

You mean in any market?

Yes, I think there's lots of people, lots of competitors generically, but most of them. They're just cluttering the market. They're not. Do you know Peter Drucker's definition of the difference between a proprietor and an entrepreneur?

No.

No, it's pretty interesting. And it has applicability. So I'm not trying to be attention deficit purposely so. Peter Drucker says the majority of small business people, which are 99% of the market, not just here, but I travel the world, it's everywhere. Japan, China, everywhere. They're proprietors. And a proprietor, his example is literally somebody who opens up a deli in a neighborhood and they've got a decent deli and it's clean and they've got decent signage and they got a clean glass counter and a cheerful and engaging person at the counter and they got decent weight and service people. But it's not descriptive and it's not really distinctive. And what they're really doing is just trying to divert revenue and income from the category or the neighborhood. He said an entrepreneur is somebody who sets out purposely before he or she even builds. This is going to be the most mind blowing experience from the time you walk up. The signage, the look, the experience at the counter, the smell, the display, the presentation, the interaction, everything is going to add such value and value denominated on how the client defines value, not how the entrepreneur does. Whether it's experiential, whether it's acknowledgement, whether it's, it's, you know, just playing a beautiful, beautiful havoc with your taste buds, whatever it is. But they consciously start not just with the end in mind, but with the value creation in mind, totally empathically and respectfully viewing it from the experiential eyes, ears, in this case mouth and taste buds of the client. It's a totally different dynamic.

No, I mean, go ahead, keep interrupting me here, Dean, like that.

Yeah, exactly.

That's the kind of thing though that.

When people hear it that, that's kind of, that's inspiring because you're right, most people don't, don't feel like that.

But what Dean, when I learned, I learned preeminence from somebody else. So I mean almost everything. There's no original thinkers. I used to say, and I'm not going to name names, one of my favorite very prominent people in the life changing world is not an original thinker, but he's an original synthesizer. I'm a synthesizer. Of all the impact and influence I've been blessed to get from so many industries. And I told you, maybe I didn't tell you, But I've done 300 experts, and I had to learn all their methodology and all that has rubbed off on me. But when I learned preeminence, the analogy that somebody made to me was, and I'll tell you two really cool things because they have influenced my marketing thinking and they relate to this. When I learned preeminence, they said, even if you are an ice cream bender from a little stand in Central park, you knowingly and purposely are trying for that 10 minutes that an adult stops and has the ice cream cone to bring him and her a moment of joy, a chance to nostalgically go back to the youth, an escape from the insanity of their life, and you're there to add that value. And then I met Fran Tarkenton many years ago, a nice friend of mine, but I met him right after he'd gone through a really interesting business reversal when he was a lot more, I think, arrogant. He would say that. And he came out with a belief system which I have adopted. It's anytime you ever interact with anybody in any way, for any amount of time, your opportunity and your obligation and your responsibility is to make their life better off because you are in it. And that's pretty profound.

I do my best to operate that way. And if I don't accomplish that, I at least want to annoy them a little bit.

I'm just giving you philosophy, which you may not want, but you're sort of opening yourself up to it. So I apologize if it's not taking you guys in the direction you want to talk.

No, no, actually, I think this is great. This is all very. I think this is perfect. Let me ask you, like right now, Jay, in your business, what do you feel is your highest and best use of your time? I mean, there's so many things that you could spend time on, but.

Yeah, well, I'll give you where I'm doing right now. It's sort of interesting. I'm involved in a multiplicity of activities. On one side, I don't do seminars anymore, but I do do them in China, Japan, because I want to have a presence. There's an emergent, really passionate, not the knockoff pirate type, but the real qualitative people that are just hungry for guidance. And if you know what the BRICS nations are, they're all these third world nations that are very aggressive and they've got incredible focus and commitment and they interest me. So I'm involved in that. I'm involved with a very high end activity that's designed to help entrepreneurs who run 100 to $500 million businesses learn how to integrate convergent, divergent thinking, foresight, insight, hindsight together critical thinking. And it's pretty interesting. We got a book that's got a cool title. It's a CEO who can see around corners. But it teaches family owned businesses how to stop plundering their asset value because most of them could be better off liquidating and putting the assets into a passive investment. I'm involved because I like it with one of the guys from Shark Tank in Stuff for startup Entrepreneurs. But it's like a labor of love and I'm very interested in the crowdfunding business because I think it's going to be like a madhouse of opportunistic people and if you can bring qualitative thinking to both investors and people who are buying for the investment and you can enhance their success. That's interesting. But my mainstay is still really and Joe, you and I have talked about a lot of I prefer not being intellectual entertainment. I want to be involved with real commerce. I want companies that are doing 10, 50, 100 million to let me get involved with them in masterminding their marketing, their strategy, their business model, their revenue approach, their preemptive preeminent distinction, their market access, their marketing. And I want to share it's fee income. But I much prefer rather get very low fees and get very high participation in the results. I engineer because that's what I've always done. I like a lot of stuff. I spend over two hours a day not earning money but multiplying my knowledge. I have a cadre of people who are much brighter than I, representing a broad spectrum. And you do this Joe, of, of areas professions and we talk, you know, once a week or once every two weeks depending on the person. And I, and I listen more. Right now I'm talking because I presume that's what you want from me. But most of the time I learned that you learn a lot more by asking very probative Socratic. I learned Socratic interviewing and it's basically one of the most powerful gifts you can give to somebody is to learn how to ask probative penetrating questions and learn how to track the answer and keep going deeper and deeper and reflect. Also I learned that when you're done with the conversation, don't go on to the next one, stop, spend 10 or 15 minutes reflecting what did I learn from that other person that I don't possess and that I can gain from? What did I do that I'm not very proud of, that I could improve what different way of looking at life or slant came from that? And most people, they're just going through life in a zombified way.

Yeah, no, I love it. Before I forget, I should probably have you define preeminence, the strategy of preeminence, just in case anyone's not clear on that.

Okay, I'll give you the short one. It takes about two or three hours to really fully embedded, but basically it's distinguishing yourself as the most trusted advisor for life in the mind's eye of the market target that you're after. It's having the commitment to lead people. It's not providing information, but providing the most well reasoned, well researched, meaningful and valuable advice. It's, as you said, not falling in love with your product, your service, your company, but falling in love with your clients. And there's four kind of clients, the ones who pay you and the ones you pay, the clients that are your buyers, certainly. But you want to fall in love with your team. You want to grow them, you want to develop. You want to have your vendors be your greatest allies and partners and collaborators and your stakeholders. It's about basically not allowing people to buy less than they should and less quantity than they should, in less frequency quality than they should. Not because you're going to make more money, but because if they don't, they're going to get a lesser outcome. It's about not letting them not buy and not letting them buy from the competitor, not because the competitor's a jackass, but because the competitor isn't going to add the value you do. And you know that if they don't act, they're going to be lessened in the quality or the protection. I can go on and on and on and on and on. It's about being able to think about the transactional impact of your product or service at work in the life of the client. And the best example is not if you're selling a computer, you'd say, well, it's a commodity. I wouldn't. I'd be able to think about that computer helping, you know, enhance their ability to communicate, to, you know, to operate their business. It's having the ability to transcend superficiality and thinking. It's about having the most heartfelt level of empathy, figuring out being able to genuinely know what it's like to be the recipient, having an appreciation and understanding, a respect, a context of really understanding how that person sees life. It's about being able to verbalize and articulate their most heartfelt desires and fears in Ways they've never put into words and go on and on and on.

And on and on.

Because I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. But that's a good introduction.

Yeah. I mean, if someone was intentional and decided to actually do their business that way, it would change everything, not only for them, but for their clients.

I love this. I'm very proud and I've got to say this, and I'm going to run out of time, but I have had the very good fortune of teaching the depth of this and then not just teaching it theoretically, but being able to work with clients and. And evolve it and instill it and install it and dimensionalize it and then inculcate it into all the people that they currently work and turn into their culture and make it part of their marketing and make it part of their communication and make it a natural part of their life. And honestly, that's why I've been able to generate so many success stories at such a distinctive way. Because most people are mediocre, most people are superficial, most people are self consumed, most people are focused on the wrong thing. Only because I'm going to run out of time. What else can I answer for you?

Well, we'll go a couple minutes over, but I've got one last question, Dean, and one short thing I want to say then. I want to ask Jay what he recommends for people to learn more from him. What of his materials, where they can learn more about him. Read any of his books he suggests. But I just want to. Don't step on your toes.

Perfect. You're asking a lot of the things I would have asked. So this is great.

Okay, so you got. So let me ask you this then, Jay. What do you feel is either the keys or the key to succeeding in business and in life? Because you've met so many rich, miserable people and so many wealthy, happy people. You've met people that have made. Made impact. You've made tons of successes for yourself and others. And I'm sure you've had mountains of things that didn't go well. So what do you think are some of the keys?

Because I got started when I was 18 and I'm now 64. I've had three midlife crises. 40, 50, and at 60. Because what's it all about? Alfie and I spent because I could afford a lot of money, therapy and I would never buy anybody for 45 minutes. I'd buy them for a whole week. It was hilarious. Because if I was too busy, I would send somebody in my life that was screwed up. Who would never have the willingness or the money to go there. But I spent a lot of time asking a lot of questions and listening to the answers. And I got one clarity. It's going to answer what your question is that I think is the meaning of business life and the meaning of life. And one of the guys, very profound guy, said to me, most people are obsessed in their life, in their business, in their career, with the end product. They want to be the most successful, they want the fastest growing company, they want the most money, they want the prettiest wife, they want the biggest house. He said if they're unlucky enough to get that, for that reason alone, their delusion will be broken. Because the sky's not going to open, the angels aren't going to trumpet euphoria is not going to rain down on them, they're not going to gain happiness. And it's not going to be all rosy. It's going to be anticlimactic. He said that life is nothing more than the process. This conversation is as good as it gets and it's stimulating, but if you were the janitor, it'd be just as important. When we go to China and Japan, we always go early and we spend the first day riding on the elevators for four or five hours and sitting in the lobby making it a point to smile and engage people until they finally break a smile and you can see their body language change. And it's just like it's, it's enjoying the process and being so externally focused that you're connected and understanding your market perhaps better than they understand themselves. I mean, you probably know my Amazon.com school of business theory, don't you? No, actually, no.

No, I don't.

It's before I ever want to address a market, I go to Amazon.com and look at every book in the category or derivative categories. And I go to every. Every, I guess I'd call it, you know, online community. And I look at the, at the, at the divisiveness. I look at all the five rankings on the book first I look at the titles and the subtitles. I want to know what resonates to people. So I got language patterns. Then I want to look at all the reviews that are either fives or fours or zeros. Because when you're passionate, passionate can be happy and passionate can be unhappy. Your subconscious takes over and your natural feelings articulate. People express what they like, what they don't like in the most dimensional and sincere, authentic and insightful way. And I want to know how people's subconscious mind really works. I don't think anyone really, I mean, I've read so much copy in the halcyon days of online information marketing that was so superficial with hype and bullets and nobody really understood the mind, the hopes, the dreams, the frustrations. They didn't really try to. They just wanted to basically monetize people. I think it's caring. I think it's caring enough to understand because when you understand someone and you demonstrate empathically and verbally that you get them, then that creates trust. And trust is, it's the bridge to prosperity for both entrepreneurs and the recipient, the clients. It's the bridge to connectivity. It's everything. So I don't know if that answer helps, but there's my answer.

No, that's very good. That's very good. And before we wrap up, I have to mention about, I have a friend, J.R. and he's a former Make a Wish kid and his wish was to meet you. He had a kidney transplant and I'm sure you remember that.

Jay.

JR Listens to all of our I love Marketing podcasts. We've actually even interviewed him and he's read every single thing that you have ever written. And I think he's watched and consumed pretty much everything you've produced that he could get his hands on. And I think it's so cool that when he was young that he actually wanted to, to meet, you know, J. Braham.

I was by that and it was very, it was very, it was gratifying. But it was really, I tell you, when we used to do the very expensive seminars, I'm Talking about the 15, $20,000 ones, 20 years ago, I was really impacted by the entrepreneurs who paid to bring their 18 year old kids. And it was really, I took the responsibility extraordinarily seriously because you had a chance to transform that person's life in a formative age. But yeah, it's good only because I've got somebody upstairs waiting for me. I hope this has been useful for your listeners.

Yeah, well, let's do that. So people want to learn from you, they want to follow any of your stuff, anything you recommend. Where's the best place for people to that have never been introduced to you?

We don't sell, I mean, most of the stuff I give away, you know, we sell, you know, something that's got like 30 seminars on it. But I don't really try to sell stuff. I've got resources we give away and you know, they can go there and there's tons of hours and hours. And I'm in a different place at this point in my life. But, yeah, go to abraham.com and if you want to learn about preeminence, I think if you look up, you know, the strategy, we've got. We've got five or seven hours of preeminence somewhere on my website. I don't even know. And we got applications, and we got case studies, and we got like 700 pages of case studies. And I got stuff on great. And I got stuff all over the place, but there's a lot of stuff there. But I don't sell very much anymore. But they can go there. There's lots of. There's hours and hours, hundreds of hours and thousands of pages and have at it, because it's my pleasure. I like, I'm a great champion of the beleaguered entrepreneur, but I'm a greater admirer of the preeminent entrepreneur. Awesome.

Well, we're all going to be together next week in New York for the Genius Network annual event.

Jay.

And both of you are going to be giving stellar, amazing talks. On behalf of myself and Dean. Thank you, Jay. Anything else you want to say, Dean?

Thank you, Jay. It's been great.

Yeah, it's awesome. So everyone give us your comments and let us know what you think. And check out Jay's website and read his stuff because it will change your life. So thank you so much, Jay.

Very welcome, guys.

Awesome. Thanks.