You Need To Use This One POWERFUL Marketing Technique | Joe Polish

All right? If you are not a direct response marketing expert or you do not have one in your company, you are not leaving tons of money on the table. Okay? Direct response marketing is the kind of marketing that is specific, quantifiable, and immediate. Okay? So it's not branding. It is ROI based. It is dollar out, dollar in. Okay? There are many different channels of direct response marketing. There's direct mail, there's tv, there's space ad, there's radio.

You can.

And of course, there's online. That includes things like space ads, text ads, and dedicated emails.

You're also gonna learn some ideas to catapult conversions, and you pretty much guarantee you're gonna learn how to increase sales. But not for me. Today, I'm gonna tell you how to prevent sales. That's right. I'm gonna talk about sales prevention. Now, before you think that I have lost my damn mind and you want to run out of this room, let me tell you why sales prevention can be not only really sexy, but extremely lucrative.

Why direct mail? Why now? And, you know, of course, this could open up a whole stream of different paths we can go down. A lot of people don't use it because they don't understand it. They don't know where to start. And me and you are going to have lots of conversations. So this is not going to be the only video that we record. But I wanted to just sit down and see if we can start getting people intrigued and interested so that the action that they want to take is, like, going, I got to figure out how to do this. That makes a lot of sense to me. I see why I should go down this path.

Everybody going. It's like everybody's going right. Maybe go left and see what's there. There's a lot of opportunity. I mean, I'll use it. It's a very trite example. So I was looking at the database of an online marketer recently. Not a big list.

Maybe.

Maybe she had, I don't know, 10,000 people on her list. And she was like, showing me a list of all the different people of what they bought. So, you know, I have this many people who bought two products, this many people bought three products, all the way down, she had one person who bought 17 products. So I made sort of a joke, but it wasn't really a joke. I said, how many times have you have you had that person to dinner, the one person who bought 17 products? And she looked at me like, what are you talking about? And I said, well, I'm actually teaching you database Marketing. Because what I'm saying is that if you knew that all the different aspects of those people at the top of your list, like your list of 25k members, you treat them like gold because they're all VIPs, but the average marketer doesn't think about their database that way. And it doesn't have to be that big or small database. So I just love that concept of, you know, making sure that you're not sending the same message to everybody. And, you know, it might be that that person who bought 17 products from you, I'm not saying you have to invite them to dinner, but you could, but then you'd send them the three dimensional packages that we talk about, which is direct mail.

Right.

It's not just.

Well, yeah, because you were saying before we started recording, you can't send a three dimensional email. No, explain what you mean by three dimensional. I mean, I get it. Because of direct mail. A lumpy mail.

A lumpy mail.

What does that mean?

Well, you know, it's funny. Marty Edelston, who just passed away when I was doing his eulog, he just died recently. And at his eulogy I was saying, you know, Marty, you know, not that he didn't get the Internet, but he understood that if there was someone he really wanted to have that personal connection with, he knew that a note in his handwriting with things that were of interest to that person, it's a lot different. I mean, yes, we love to attach funny videos and email and we're going to continue to do that. And it's great. And for certain people in our lives, that's great. But when you start looking at people working at a very high level with high ticket products, the ability to connect with people without meeting them individually, I think direct mail gives you an opportunity to get inside their heads in a way, get inside their dreams, aspirations, things that you have in common with them. And it's, you know, I tell people, I tell college students when they go on interviews, you know, I had a whole group of college students, I said, you know, if you go to an interview and after the interview, instead of sending an email, you actually write out a letter. You use paper. And I took a piece of paper, this is called paper and this is called a pen. And if you send a letter and then maybe if you attach an article that you might have been discussing during the interview of something that you were talking about, I was making up what it could be. It could be anything that I will tell you. And then I whispered into the microphone, you'll be the only one doing this. So the differentiation for someone getting a job in a market where you can't get a job, that's direct mail. So then why not take that to the next level, even if you're doing more mass marketing. So I don't know if that makes sense, but it's like a philosophy, it.

Makes total sense because it is something that no one else will be doing. And let's just take young people right now, okay? Now, if this video is watched 50 years from today, totally different story. But right now, anyone over the age of 35, 40, 45, 50 that you may be wanting to work for or partner with or do, I mean, they're used to get, they live in a world where like I'm one of the, this is like the last generation. Here's what I say to people that say, you're my age. I mean, right now I'm 45 years old. I'll be 40, you know, six in a few months. And you know, I remember when there was no fax machines and fax machines came onto the scene. I remember, you know, dialing televisions, black and white televisions as a little kid and the invent of cable television and going to remote controls and going to cordless phones when there was rotary phones and it was touch phones and then it became cordless phones, that was like a new thing. And then when cell phones were like a brick and then pagers and then we got to smaller cell phones and then now smartphones and everything else. I mean, there's never going to be another generation which didn't transition to that. Now any kid born today, they would have no clue.

Well, I told you the story before about how apparently all three year olds are walking around their houses all day going like this because they're playing on their iPad all day. So they think the wall is an iPad screen and they think their mother's face is an iPad screen, they go into the refrigerator, they think they're going to get food by wiping the screen. So I'm not worried about them right now. I mean, I don't know how I'm going to market to them and I'll be dead.

So I'm not going to worry as much.

But right now, as said, everybody has at least had some exposure to a mailbox and it becomes, we're talking multi channel. I'm not saying that we should be talking about direct mail as the be all end all that it's going to replace all other media, but it's this forgotten medium that no One understands it as well as they should. And you know, you've always been such a big fan of it. I've lived it for my whole career. And so we've been talking about this.

For a long time saying, well, I'm.

A fan of it because it still works.

It still works very well.

I mail, let people buy stuff, they join stuff. It moves them along the line. It is an addition to what in your current tools, in your toolbox. If you added this to your. If you're already a successful Internet marketer and we've seen it in our world, I mean, you're teaching people how to do it. I teach people how to do it. When we take all of our 25k members, I sit and say, if you're already a successful business owner and every or the majority of the business you're acquiring is online, one of the best ways that I there could be people far smarter than me in different channels in different areas. I don't know, that could come along. The smartest thing that I think someone could do to double, triple their revenues, their profits, is simply add direct mail into the mix.

I mean, you've been doing some stuff with space, also space advertising and how that can. But direct mail. And as you said before, it still works. I mean, we're seeing response rates. I mean, the problem, you know, you're dealing with the Postal Service, which is tough. And you know that I lobby on Capitol Hill because I don't want it to go away. I still believe in it. And I feel like I don't want to have regrets later on that I didn't educate senators and congressmen that they're making some mistakes about how the Postal Service is going to price themselves out of this incredible business. But we're seeing, I mean, we've been in business for 40 years. I've been there for 32 of it. And our response rates for some of Our offers today 2013 are as high as they've been in the last 20 or 30 years for certain products. I mean, sometimes they're not, sometimes they're not. Sometimes it depends on the product because we're still doing the same kind of great creative, we're still doing the same kind of database marketing. The biggest difference is we don't have the list universes that we used to have. But I'm in $39 product too. I'm selling mass market books and newsletters. What you and I are talking about is kind of taking those same principles and start applying them to some of these real high end Businesses as another channel. And now I'm pretty excited about that because as you said, I can get someone's attention in a whole different way than I can from an email or from tv. I mean there's so many different ways to, to go after your prospects. And I think where direct mail is going to be most useful for, you know, as we, as we move forward in the kinds of stuff that you and I want to probably do together in the marketing world and teach is that it's going to be with the high end marketers that we are hanging around with that are selling high priced product. They want to have a real touchy feely relationship with their audience. And it doesn't matter that your list isn't that big. The size of the list mattered. At $29, $39 product, you just can't get the critical mass and it's very frustrating.

Well, one of the things that I do as a test, like I'll go to conferences and I'll speak and I'll get a bunch of people give me business cards and I will shoot a video and we'll upload it to YouTube and put a link and send an email out, personalized video. And then I'll send personalized cards and things. Always get a response from the letters. Far more in a personalized video is pretty touchy feely.

It's not just a text.

I mean it's me talking to people and all the time I continually validate to myself that when you send something physical to somebody, it's, you know, when you're looking. What's that saying about that you always talk about with the inbox? The least cluttered inbox.

Oh yeah, the least cluttered inbox is the one that you grew up with. So yeah, it's the mailbox.

What does that mean?

Well, it means.

I know what it means.

Well, I looked at your computer when I came in today and you couldn't even find your email. Right.

It was like. And so, you know, you look at.

Someone'S average inbox in their email and even if they're great sorters of that, they can't figure out like what the noise is ridiculous. It so happens that because the postal service has not run the run things as the way they should and a lot of people got out of direct mail, lo and behold, you got an emptier mailbox.

Right.

And then you got more attention. And then if you still are a slave to world class creative as we are, we were sticking out in the crowded mailbox. Now we're Sticking out in a less crowded mailbox so you can see the potential there.

And if it's less crowded, the likelihood of getting noticed and getting through and getting attention, you have an advantage on your side. And so that is the number one reason why I think people should be looking at this because it's not going away.

The postal, you know, the post office.

The reason why the post office is.

A monopoly is that they nobody else can get access to those post boxes. And people are not chopping down, they might be chopping down trees in their backyard. They're not chopping down their mailbox. They're still waiting for something in that mailbox. I don't know what. I mean, look at your genius network interviews. I don't know if I'm an exception or the rule, but you sometimes send links with a hot interview that you just did with somebody. It won't be this one, I'm sure.

But you do the hottest.

You actually have done ones that we've done, which I love. But then you send an envelope with a CD and a transcript of the interview. I think you're still doing that. And so I wait for that.

I have people that still to this day, since I first started a, which used to be called the Joe Polish Superstar Audio tape of the month club, which I started I believe in 1995, that still to this day, you know, and we're doing this at the end of 2013, this particular recording that pay money every month since that period of time because they want to get something physical in the mail.

Yeah, I mean I know a lot of great online marketers who when they send me something three dimensional in the mail, I don't want to mention other names, but same thing. People who pay $50,000 to be in high end mastermind groups when they get the physical package of the interview of the month or whatever, the transcript and the interview makes a big difference.

So you start seeing, I mean, maybe.

Yes, that situation, they're not selling that piece of physical product because they bought the bigger product, but just the level of interest in that physical product and what keeps them connected to that guru. And I know that there are people that stay connected to you from the physical product.

Absolutely.

I mean it's kind of like if you're going to bring your wife, your girlfriend, your husband, your spouse, flowers, it's just going to be a different sort of feeling than if you send an email saying I love you. It just can't be replicated. I don't think it's a stretch to make the Same comparison to anything physical. You can just do things in the mailbox that cause you to stand out and get attention that just aren't quite the same. So like what you were saying earlier, this is not in lieu of, this is not a replacement of, this is an enhancement.

Absolutely.

To everything that you're doing.

So let's go back to what you did. Talk about RFM recency, frequency and monetary. Yeah, and sometimes called unit of sale, you know, whatever.

Right.

Explain that because I want people to kind of understand, not only just think of this as a direct mail thing, but think of this as marketing, you know, because the list is as if not more important than the copy, than the offer, but when all of them together, timing how often they purchase are put together, then it becomes lethal.

Right.

Well, I mean the best segment of our lists are always either our multi buyers or our ex buyers. Those are always your best lists and for the reasons that we just said, because in the case of, of an ex buyer, it's someone who bought, so it probably is an accumulated amount of money that they spent. But a multi buyer is someone who's bought multiple times and they are frequent buyers. That's the frequency. Now recency is what we call hotlines and direct mail. But someone who bought today, you know, you think, you know, common sense. And I used to teach this to college students and I'd say, you know, someone who bought in the last three months is more likely to buy now again. And they go, wait a minute, don't.

You have to give them a rest?

You know, but you start, start getting all the, on how people buy and why they buy and then all of that data, once you have all that recency, frequency and monetary, you can start modeling names. Now a lot of guys online are starting to model their databases and I think this is going to be a breakthrough for online marketers. And I'm seeing it already and I'm very excited about it. But we've been able to do that in direct mail forever. You can do credit screens up front. I mean, I have this dream for online, like for display advertising online, that we'll be able to eventually sell something without a credit card, that we can actually sell what we call a bill me offer in direct mail. I mean, think about that. You know, any online marketer, if they didn't put a credit card offer with their offer, they'd say, I can't market that, I can't afford to. Especially if there's physical product involved. And even if there's not, they don't want to give it away on a bill me, bill me, meaning I'm going to bill you later, I'm going to let you try it for free, right in direct mail. We've been able to do that forever.

And the reason you can do that.

Is that you do the pre screening because you can basically take out the people that you have files of bad debt information. Do that in what we call a merge purge. We're not getting into all the nitty gritty today, but I think those will be some other. We'll do a whole, maybe a whole video just on merge purge and how you pre screen your list so that when you're spending 500 bucks a thousand, you are really careful about every piece that you put into the mailbox.

Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video and I want to let you know.

That I have a new book that's come out and if you'd like to see, get it absolutely free.

There's a link below in the description.

Or you can wait till the end of this video or you can Simply.

Go to joesfreebook.com and you can get a copy there.

As I mentioned to you yesterday, in a few weeks I'll be 82 years old. I literally go 12, 14 hours a day, five and a half days a week. Do not know the name of anybody that keeps up with me at any age at plus I enjoy every minute of it. Our company is 50 years old this year. We'll mail between now and election day next year, November. About 150 million postal letters, 2,300 million emails. We have 75 employees. Most of them are really high powered direct marketers operating at a very high level. 1961, I get the opportunity to go to New York to become executive secretary of a political youth organization that had been founded a few months earlier, earlier on Bill Buckley's family estate. So I run this organization. I'm in charge of everything, including fundraising. And I found out real quick like I didn't like asking people for money. I asked some very famous people for contributions. Charles Edison, youngest son of the inventor J. Howard Pugh of Sun Oil Co. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker of Eastern Airlines. And they were generous, gave me nice contributions, but I didn't like that. So I started writing letters that seemed to work. I got something called a mimeograph machine, started turning them out with a mimeograph machine, hired secretaries, a few here and there. And after a year and a half I said, hey, I want to be relieved of, of all duties in the organization except fundraising through Direct mail. I want to focus on that. Did that for a year and a half, and by then I had a wife and two babies. And I said, I'm out of here. I'm going to start my company. And I thought I knew everything there ever was to know about marketing. Of course, I knew nothing. I didn't know a fraction of 1% of what I know now, but I thought I did. But what I was. I was blind in one eye and had blurred vision in the other, but everybody else was totally blind in terms of direct marketing, so I looked pretty good. But though I knew, I thought I knew much more than I did. Of course, there was one thing I knew I didn't have I needed, and that was names and addresses, people to communicate with. And in the summer of 64, I discovered that if you were running for president, you had to file with the clerk of the House of Representatives all of your $50 plus donors. I went down there for a couple of days with the legal pad and started writing Barry Goldwater's $50 plus donors. And I did that for a couple days and said, hey, Richard, you're not making a lot of progress here. So I hired five or six women, and after a couple months, I had 12,500. That gave me the courage, the confidence to quit a good job with a wife and two babies and go where no one had gone before. No one literally had done political fundraising through postal mail before. And that's one of the most important things you can do in life. We'll talk about that here in a little bit about branding. If you can at all you want to be first, can you be first? And if you can't be first in some category, find a category where you can be first and where you can own that category. I've been in multiple groups of different times. People were talking about me not knowing that I was in the group there, and they were talking about me because I was first. You know, who knows the name of the second pope who was the second person to fly solo across the Atlantic? You know, nobody knows. Okay, it's the first. So whatever, you know, find a category that you can own that you can be first in, and that's how you build your brand. So, anyway, I did that for the next 15 years and had no competitors, basically. And by the way, I caught a lot of criticism because I was doing something no one had ever done before, and I was regularly, literally regularly attacked on cbs, abc, NBC, cnn, New York Times, Time magazine, and Republicans and Democrats. The establishment was coming really Hard at me. But all of the criticism stopped within a few hours. And a few hours was election night, November 1980. Aha. That's what Vigory has been up to, okay? And so the left had been relying mostly for their campaign funds on involuntary sources, the union, views, corporation, foundations, et cetera. And so they ran out there real quick like, and tried to replicate, duplicate what we've been had been doing. And I told my conservative friends, don't worry, you know, it's taken me 15 years to do what I'm doing here. And besides, I'm smarter than they are. So it's going to take them 20 years to catch up with us. Not so. And within three or four years, in my opinion, the left caught up with the conservatives. And to this day, they do a far better job, the left does, than the right does in marketing. Think of the 2008 campaign. Obama had 3 million donors to his campaign. I haven't been able to see numbers for 2012, but it's something north of 3 million donors plus 10 million additional names of his supporters on email. Huge. Republicans had nothing like that. And so as a general rule, to this day, the Republicans are not doing the job they need to do to be competitive with the Democrats. So one of the things that I do to this day at age be 82 in a few weeks, as I said, I spend two to three hours every day studying marketing. Okay, I don't need to do that, but I do two to three hours, six days a week studying marketing. And one thing I can leave with you more than anything else. Study, study, study marketing. I don't know of a competitor that I have on the right that spends two or three hours a month studying marketing. Okay, I've developed something that I call Vigory's Four Horsemen of Marketing. You've got to get these four things right and get them right. Life is downhill, the wind to your back, pretty easy. Get any of them wrong, you're going uphill, win in your face, highly unlikely you're going to succeed. And I'll explain each one, but just the four things briefly are position, differentiation, benefit and brand. Position is nothing more than a hole, hole in the marketplace. What hole in the marketplace can you occupy that no one else is occupying there? And you do that, by the way, privately. That's something you just, and I like to use the example say of Rupert Murdoch, so, and Roger Ailes 20 years ago. They're thinking about setting, building a national cable television news network. They don't sit there and say, well, CBS does this we'll do this. ABC does this, cnn, they don't care what they do because they're going to occupy a hole in the marketplace right of center. 50% of the country is not being served by television news. Life gets pretty simple at that point. Okay, then differentiation is what you do publicly. So publicly they differentiated themselves from all the other television Networks with Bill O'Reilly, Megyn Kelly Hannity, Glenn Beck for a while, okay? That's how they differentiated themselves from the others. Third benefit is obvious. You get news and information on Fox, you don't get anywhere else, okay? Fourth brand. Brand is the ball game, okay? That's products these days are seldomly sold. They are bought, okay? I bought this week a new car. New car to me it's a few years old, but they didn't sell me the car, I bought the car, okay? They could have had hundred different types of cars out there. I was looking at my daughter's strong and wife's strong recommendation for a Lexus, okay? I wanted a Lexus and that was it. I didn't have to be sold. I bought that car. You go into the supermarket now, 40, 50,000 items to be sold. Not one salesperson in the store. They will check you out, but nobody is saying no, Mr. Vigory, you shouldn't buy this brand of paper towels. Buy this one over here. I'm a Viva man. I like viva paper towels. That's what I'm going to buy. I'm sure Bounty makes a good paper towel. But I've been sold before I walk into that store. And so brand is so important for success in your marketing. So position is what you do privately. Differentiation. You differentiate yourself from your competitors by, you know, whatever you do to differentiate yourself. Benefit is number three and then fourth is brand, okay? And by the way, I do almost nothing in my life of any consequence, any importance without a four part plan. We used to get off a lot of us in the late 70s, early 80s, 2025, for a long weekend, Friday, Saturday, and we'd plot and plan for the try to bring conservatives to power. And we'd come up with a problem. There was a young congressman from Georgia, part of our group of 2025, Newt Gingrich. He'd invariably, when we came up with a problem, go to the blackboard. We didn't have white boards in those days. And he'd write four words on there, Vision, goal, strategy and tactics. An hour later we had filled in those four words and we saw a clear path forward of how we should proceed. And that's not the only way to do a plan, but that's a good way to do a plan. It's simple, doesn't take very long. And by the way, the number one benefit of a plan is not working. The plan, that's important, but that's secondary. The number one benefit of writing a plan is writing the plan. Because as you write the plan, it clarifies your thinking, it crystallizes you. Thought you wanted to go over here, but as you write it down, you say, no, I think I need to go over here. More of this, less of that. So the exercise of writing the plan is so, so important. Joe said yesterday that Dan Sullivan gives me a lot of credit for Reagan's election. Quite frankly, I appreciate the compliment, but it's nonsense. And I've seen different people at different times take excessive credit for Reagan's election victories and whatever. And it reminds me of a slow moving freight train and somebody running alongside it pushing that freight train. Look at me, look at me, what I'm doing. Reagan was a freight train and the rest of us had very little to do. The one thing though that was very, very helpful to Reagan was the, what was something called the New Right that came into being in the mid-70s and the entire conservative movement began to come together in the 60s and the 70s with hundreds and hundreds of new organizations. And almost every single one of these organizations was funded. They got their membership, they sold their books, they sold their subscriptions through direct mail. And Reagan, when he ran and lost in 77 and ran and won in 80, was running against the entire Republican establishment for the most part. Bob Dole, of course, Jerry Ford, George Bush, John Connally, Howard Baker, and they were getting the thousand dollar gifts. Reagan depended upon the $10, 15, 25, $50. And he had 250,000 of those people. And so the small givers, through direct mail just changed American history. In March of 1976, Reagan is literally out of money riding commercial airline. And his aide Lyn Knobsinger goes on and buys $90,000 worth of time on NBC. Reagan sits on a stool much like this, I guess for 25 minutes, March 30, 1976, and makes a 25 minute stump speech. The last five minutes he asked for contributions. About $1,600,000 came in and that was huge back in 1976, turned his campaign around, allowed him to go to Kansas City that summer and get 49% of the vote against the sitting president and propelled him onward in 1980 for success. And if he hadn't been able to do that In March of 76, he would have never been the candidate that he was in 1980. There's a number of odds and ends here, but I know Joe wants to get to some Q and A here. But let me just mention a few things here. I know a lot of you are focused on marketing through the Internet and that's important. You need to do that. Obviously, we certainly do it at our company. But the workhorse of marketing today, in my opinion is still direct mail. And when I started in 1961 in New York City, direct mail was the second largest form of advertising in the country. Today, in 2015, it's the second largest form of advertising in the country. And by the way, I understood that most people in the nonprofit community to this day and in commercial world as well, do not understand, do not comprehend that direct mail is advertising. Okay, so in the late 70s, David Broder, the preeminent political correspondent in Washington D.C. at that time, since passed on, just a giant at his time, came to see me and he sat down in my office and we had a casual conversation for an hour or two. And this is late 1970s. And he said, richard, I'm perplexed. I've been all over Capitol Hill, the White House, et cetera. The Democrats have almost a two thirds majority in the House. In the Senate, got the White House, nothing is happening for the Democrats. They're not able to pass their legislation. And said, I've been to Walter Mondale's office. The Vice President, he can't help me. Nobody knows what. Do you know what's happening out there? Well, I don't know, David, if this will be of help. But I began to explain to him what we were doing. Mailing a hundred million posts, letters a year, doing this and that, all under the radar. And when we were mailing those 100 million letters, we were very focused on passing legislation, mostly in those days trying to defeat the Democrats proposed legislation. Jimmy Carter saw him in an interview just this week complaining about he had. He announced in March, April 1977 that he wanted to change the election laws in, in four ways been devastating to the Republicans, like instant voter registration. You just show up on election day and say, I live down the street, I want to vote, federal financing of elections, et cetera. And so anyway, a friend of mine calls at night, woke me up at 10:30 and I said, Paul, you know, we can beat this. He had just come from a meeting of Republican senators saying we can't stop this, it's a bad idea, but it's a time has come and so it's going to pass. I said, we can defeat this. Let's talk in the morning. I'm going back to bed. So we did. We got together for four or five months at my home, my office, et cetera, and we designed the strategy through direct mail, using it as advertising. And we defeated all four pieces of legislation. And to this day, Democrats are still complaining that it didn't get passed. But it was the power of direct mail. Just briefly, a few high points. There were some very good questions submitted to Joe here, but most of them weren't dealing with a lot of the weeds of direct mail. So I may get these questions here, but I'll just briefly say long letters output, short letters counterintuitive. And by the way, most of what we know about direct mail is counterintuitive. You don't want to go to a doctor with an appendicitis attack and say, doctor said, let's go into surgery right away. Great, doc, whatever you say. By the way, where'd you go to school? Medical school? Oh, I didn't. I'm just a natural appendix puller. It just comes to me and funny, my father was a natural appendix puller and his father. No, you're looking for a deviant at that time, okay? It is deviant behavior to lay somebody on a table and cut them up and do what doctors do. Okay? So this, what we do is learn behavior. Most people, and you have to be careful about direct mail. It's very expensive. It does great and wonderful things, but it can also be very, very expensive. And you can lose a lot of money because people say, well, I learned to write in first grade. I know where they sell postage stamps. What's the big deal? It is a big deal. That's why I spend two or three hours every day studying marketing. So if you're going to do a big marketing campaign, get a professional involved, it'll reap great benefits for you. So long letters, I pull short letters. Short paragraphs are better than long paragraphs. Use one or two syllable words. Don't use big words that stop people in their reading. It was a wonderful book called the Man Nobody Knows, written back in the 1920s by a congressman. At the time, he was a major advertising executive and the man nobody knows was Jesus Christ. And he described how he communicated with one and two syllable words. Christ didn't use a lot of three and four, five syllable words. Write to one person. You may be sending it to a million people. Write to one person who is a Likely prospect. Summarize your whole mailing if you can, in a PS Test, test, test, test headlines, test offers, test price. A lot of you have names of your organization doesn't mean anything. So sometimes you need what we call a tagline, a sub headline. Joe, I like these coffee cups and these glasses, but Genius Network doesn't say anything. If it says something like the world's largest gathering of marketing professionals or something like that. What's a genius? Is it, you know, Mensa Society, is it, you know, PhDs, whatever it is. So just a little tagline on there indicating that this is a collection of the world's largest, you know, high powered market or something like that. So anyway, taglines, sometimes your name just doesn't, doesn't say anything. So you need to tell people what it says there.

All right? If you are not a direct response marketing expert or you do not have one in your company, you, you are not leaving tons of money on the table. Okay? Direct response marketing is the kind of marketing that is specific, quantifiable and immediate. Okay? So it's not branding. It is ROI based. It is dollar out, dollar in. Okay? There are many different channels of direct response marketing. There's direct mail, there's tv, there's space ad, there's radio, and of course there's online. That includes things like state space ads, text ads, and dedicated emails. In every single direct response marketing campaign, there are three key components. They are your copy, your offer and your list. The copy is the message that goes out to the prospect. The offer is what that prospect will get and how they receive it. And the list is essentially the pond in which you are found phishing, right? Who you're trying to reach. Many, many people think that in direct response marketing the copy is the most important part of your campaign. That is not true. It is the list that is the most important part of your campaign. Okay? The list is responsible for 60% of that success. Your offer 30% and the copy 10%. The reason is you can have awesome copy and if it goes to the wrong people, you will have zero response. You can have mediocre copy that goes to the exact right audience and you will have a good response. I like to say you don't sell lingerie to lumberjacks. Okay? Okay, so when we talk about, and we're going to talk about online for the purpose of this conversation, but please know it applies to all direct response. Okay? So when you're talking about traffic online, what is the most desirable kind of traffic? Well, it's endorsed traffic. Right. So, yes, your affiliates and your joint ventures, but what is the problem with affiliates and joint ventures? Right? A lot of big guys, they won't mail for untested offers, right? Everybody wants reciprocation, right? So what you end up doing is whoring out your list, right? With working moms only, I don't mail for reciprocation. I mail because a product or service is good for my community. Okay? So. And that's why you should be mailing. And of course, there's a lot of good old boys networks out there. Okay? So what is the solution to getting more traffic? You buy your way in. And that's what we're going to talk about today, essentially is media buying. Now, a lot of people media buy, yet they have never seen a data card. And this in front of you is a data card. And we're going to go through that and why it is so important. Okay? Now, a data card will be in any kind of media kit that you get, even if you're doing space ads or radio or tv, okay? Essentially what it does, it talks to you about the list. Who is on that list? Okay? So here's an example of a data card. You have two examples. The first one is for an email list. The second one is for a direct mail list, okay? And I'm going to show you the little bit of a difference in what you should be asking. Okay? So. Excuse me. So number one is the name of the list, okay? Number two is the universe and the pricing of the list. For this example, you'll see that they've got about 388,000 active magazine subscribers. Okay? That $150 per m over there means $150. A thousand thousand, not $150amillion, not $150 flat. So for every thousand names you rent, you will pay $150. Below that, you'll see their expire count. Expires will be slightly cheaper because they are not active subscribers at the moment. Okay, number three is a description of that list. It will include demographics and psychographic information. Psychographic information is really important because it tells you about their behavior. So you always don't want to just be looking at demographics of a list. Number four. Oh, I'm sorry. Number four goes into the demographic. Number three is more of, you know, what is the list about? What is the, you know, the magazine about? What kind of things do they cover? Okay, number five is the advertising specifications. So will they split Creative. Whenever you're testing a list, you want to make sure you are splitting and you are testing. So if you were sending an email campaign out there, you would rent approximately 40,000 names from this list. To test. You would test 20,000, maybe with separate headlines. Okay. When you test, you test one variable at a time. But this, that's what number five does, is tells you what you can do there as far as those advertising specs. Number six is the last time this list was updated. Number seven is the gender breakout. Okay? Very important. So this list, you'll see, what does it say is 88% female. Okay. Number nine is the source. Where did this information come from? A lot of these on here say things like direct response or say direct mail, inserts, cards. So you want a list that is direct response oriented. Okay? Because that's what you're doing. You're selling to them direct. You want names who came from people direct. Okay. Number 10 is unit of sale. So why is that important? Because if you've got a $300 product and the average unit of sale on this list is 20, 28 bucks, 29 bucks, probably not good buyers for you. Okay. Number 11 is selection. Okay. So this list, you can break out, you can pull selects from there. You can do things like specific states. Before, Fabianne was saying that she knows where her. Her buyers are. Therefore, if she's renting a list, what would she do? She could select those states. Okay. The thing about a selection is you'll see on the side that every select you do will add an additional $16, $12, $10 to that $150, 1000. So every time you do a select, you're not at $150 thousand anymore. Now you're at 160 or 70 or 80 or as many selects as you want. When I was running Weiss research, I did a lot of selects on lists, which is how I broke into a lot of lists that you wouldn't have thought about. Okay, number. Number 12 is essentially the net name policy. What does that mean? That you're going to essentially pay for 85% of the list. You're going to pay for 100%. It's right there. Okay. The next card is the same exact thing, but it's direct mail. But this has one important thing that we use in the direct mail days that people don't ask their list broker. Now, which is the usage. When you do media buying, you are a detective. So if you see on a list, you have three good lists in front of you that you like, and all of them have one common list in common that They've used. Well, guess what? Now you're going to go after that data card. Okay, I know I'm going fast. And the idea of this presentation is to introduce you to the right way to Media Buy. A lot of people, like I said, Media Buy and they've never ever seen a data card before and they're, you know, doing something and doing something right are entirely two different things. Okay, so anytime you're about to go out and spend money, you need to look at a data card in order to do so. Okay, here are some resources for you if you've never done this. Nextmark.com you can go to that website and you can print out your data cards yourself. Okay. Essentially you put in keywords. It's a really easy site. You can print out the data cards and you can start looking. The Oxbridge directory is a wonderful directory. It costs about $2,000. What I do every year is I go on ebay and buy the previous year for about 39 bucks. SRDS is probably the best resources. This is about a $700 a year subscription and then. I'm sorry, actually it's like 6,000 now and then. Changing the channel, which is 12 easy ways to make millions for your business is a book I wrote with Michael Masterson a few years ago. And it really is detailed about direct response marketing and, and multichannel marketing.

So.

Wow. Okay, so here is kind of one of my case studies. When I was at Agora at the time, I had the most successful promotion in agora history in 35 years. It was one sales letter that did $17 million. 30% of that was from joint ventures and affiliates. 70% was from media buying. Okay. If I had not done any media buying and relied only on affiliates, I would have left nearly $12 million on the table. Okay, Anyone who has any questions. Okay, one last thing of what you can do right now is survey your list. I'm a big believer in surveying your list for very different reasons. Okay. Because you need to understand birds of a feather flock together. So you're creating a community of like minded folks. So survey your folks. Ask them what websites they get their news from, what magazines they read, what papers they read. This will help you select your media. Always separate your buyers from your non buyers when you do surveys so that you can see the difference from the people who actually buy. Okay. At the end of every survey I do, I like to offer them a gift. When I was in the financial newsletter world, I would say, would you like a report on gold ETFs or options. It's great for product development ideas and you give them what they want and thank them. You can use the surveys for press releases and then follow up with your community on the results from that survey. And they really appreciate it.

By the way, Luba, are you just feeding Dean like cue cards or what are you doing there?

What's going on?

That's right. Here's a great. This is an amazing story here. So Luba, we've been working on a. An eyebrow and eyelash studio here in Winter Haven called Amazing Brows and Lashes. And this will be a great lead into the next part of this, which is generating leads, right. That, you know, Luba does something at her studio called Microblading, where if you don't know, ladies, I'm sure know about this. Guys, if you don't know about that, you. You know those beautiful eyebrows that all the ladies have? Well, often they have to draw those on with the pencil every single day of their lives. And it gets tiring. And so what Luba does is help to put permanent, semi permanent, last three years or so. Depends. That perfect shape for your eyebrows so that ladies can wake up and not have to do that every morning. It's a permanent sort of makeup solution. And it's something that ladies love to do. It's a little bit expensive, and it's something that is maybe a luxury item for you.

It's not expensive. Depends how you count. You know, if you, like, save so much time. So it's literally not expensive. The money that you spend on nails, it's like 10 times more than what you spend on eyebrows once a year.

That's true.

So if you, if you explain them right.

It'S so inexpensive, ladies, compare $400. Okay, so here's the thing that we had been, you know, in Winter Haven is a small town, 60,000 people, so maybe not, you know, a little bit bigger small town. And we're running Facebook ads offering a $100 gift card for getting your eyebrows microbladed. And so running within a radius, just a, you know, 10 mile radius of Luba's studio, she's built this wonderful email list of ladies only between the ages of 25 and 65.

Right.

Or 75. These all just women in this thing. So built up this list now of, you know, 2,500 people that every single week, when Lupa sends out a message to these people there, somebody is booking something to come in and make an appointment. We did a back to when everything starts opening up now. We did an email that sent out that just had in the subject line eyebrows and said, hey Joe, it looks like we're going to be able to open up again next week. Smiley face. Would you like to get your eyebrows done? Question mark, and that's it. And sent that out. And was it 27 within, you know, within the rest of the evening, 27 people have booked to get their eyebrows done. All this pent up demand that people had been putting things off for all of this time. But that's the value of having the list and the distinction that we learned here. There's two things. Number one is when doing those Facebook ads, we were offering a gift card not 20% off, which is a different thing. It's the same outcome, but it's a different psychology of it. You know, when you start thinking about the idea of what most people are trying to do with their ads is they're trying to convince people to buy something now. And that's why when they run ads, they say 20% off only until May 30, to spur people into action now. So if people are not ready to do something right now, but they know that they would like to, they're not going to respond to the ad because there's no reason for them to. But you can put a gift card in your hope chest, you can gather a book in, bookmark your intention for getting your eyebrows done now without having to get them done right now. And this allows you to play the long game of turning invisible prospects, meaning all of the ladies in 10 miles of the studio into visible prospects, meaning people who are leaning forward, raising their hand and saying, I'm interested in getting my eyebrows done. Maybe not right now, but I'm interested in that. And now she's got this list of 2,500 people and it's like this ATM machine. Whenever you want to do something, you can send it out.

Yeah, it's like not a lot of stylists have lists. So of course I learned this from Dean Genius. And the thing is, like, what was that part?

Okay, good. Yeah. This is the Genius network.

Really?

Yeah.

So the thing is, like, I have people who've been with me for three years and they only now starting getting to me and asking me to book their appointments. It's been like three years. They've been reading my emails and getting all the information. It's only now they're ready to do it.

And that's amazing. Right. So now we've been documenting and doing all of that stuff to mark this as a prototype for a system to show to Multiply to show other stylists how to do this same thing. So now Luba's been building a brow henna training program for styling pros who want to add another profit center to their business. And we used the same gift card idea for the training for how to do the Brauhanna architecture. So that model, if you can do if what you're doing would work with a gift card, that's a fantastic way to get people to respond today and.

This whole two days. We all know that when you come to a Jo Polish event, you are definitely going to get ideas to get more customers in the door. You're also going to learn some ideas to catapult conversions. You can pretty much guarantee you're going to learn how to increase sales, but not for me. Today, I'm going to tell you how to prevent sales. That's right. I'm going to talk about sales prevention. Now, before you think that I have lost my damn mind and you want to run out of this room, let me tell you why. Sales prevention can be not only really sexy, but extremely lucrative. So some results for my business over the last three years due to sales prevention, really effective sales prevention. We've increased our revenue 725% thanks to sales prevention. We've watched our B school enrollments, which is the program that Joe is talking about, grow 2,996%. And one of my favorite stats, which I'm most proud of, we took the refund rate from when we started B school, which was hovering around 19%, which is not unusual for our industry and information and education, and we've taken it downtown to 1.5%. That's been consistent over the last three years. So I want to show you how sales prevention works because it's literally produced millions of dollars in my business. And more importantly, it's helped me produce a brand that not only we love internally as the company, but our customers love even more and they can trust. So hopefully there'll be some ideas in here for you that you can translate into millions of dollars for your brand and your business and help it to grow. Cool. So two examples of sales prevention. First example, when I'm promoting B School, I do what many of us do in this room. You go out and you start talking about it. So whether you do speaking engagements, for me, I do a lot of videos, a lot of webinars, and often teleseminars. So one of the most recent teleseminars I did had a couple of thousand people on it. Super fun. I Love talking to people, hearing about their businesses and of course telling them whether or not B school is right for them. So I'm on this teleseminar, good time woman gets on the line and starts telling me about her life, asking all kinds of questions. And of course she got to the place where everybody gets to on these teleseminars. Marie, is B school right for me? It became evident that it wasn't and I knew it. So after just a moment of awkward silence, I said no, B school is actually not right for you. You sound amazing, you sound lovely. But based on everything that you just shared, I recommend X books, X resources. They would deliver more value to you than my program. My program would be a waste of money for you right now. The host of that teleseminar was shocked as shit. I could feel the uncomfortability. But it was the right thing to do. Now why was sales prevention in that instance so powerful? Three reasons. Number one, it's a pattern interrupt in our world where there's a lot of marketing, marketing, marketing, sell, sell, sell for customers. To hear the founder of a company volitionally telling someone, no, do not give me money. This is not right for you. They sit up and pay attention because you know people on teleseminars are doing like 15 other things. That's like a record scratch. Yes. Reason number two, for the people that we do encourage to join B school, they feel like the chosen ones because they are. This isn't a manipulation technique, it's the truth. When people know that you actively not sell to people, when you discourage them, the people that you do sell to believe you because it's honest and it's true. Cool. The third reason is that level of brutal honesty is so refreshing. Let me ask you this, has anyone here ever gone clothes shopping? Have you ever gone clothes shopping on your own? Right. All by yourself, got no friends, you walk into the store, pull a bunch of clothes off the rack, go into the dressing room, you come out, you're nervous, you ask the sales associate, do I look okay in this? Does this look good? And you know you've had that experience or something. Oh my God, you look fabulous. Don't worry. It's a little tight, but that's really in. You should take it go. You get the clothes home, you try them on, you look in the mirror, you look like a friggin sausage. You should not have bought those clothes, but you were sold to them by someone you trusted. Now counter that with another experience. If you've ever had this one, go into the store, get some clothes, try them on, walk out, does this look good on me? And the sales associate says, you know what? Not so flattering. You should try this or come back when we have more inventory. Which store would you go back to? Which store would you talk about? Second example of active sales prevention. This is my favorite one. This is really what helped us take that refund rate down from about 19% down to 1.5. Now we did other things, but this was one of the main changes. So I'm a student and a fan and a lover of marketing. So when I started B school, I used one of the timeless marketing principles, risk reversal. We all know about risk reversal, right? Usually it's an awesome idea. Try my stuff. 30 days. You don't like it, just let us know, we'll give you all your money back. Anyone ever used that one before? Sometimes it works. So we had that guarantee for B school when we first started the program. But that 19% refund rate, I know I'm not supposed to take any of that stuff personally, but I do. I saw that number, I wanted to friggin throw up. That was disgusting to me. I put so much time and energy and heart into everything that I produce, every single thing that to know that one in five people were walking out of my company, not only taking their money back, which gets the business side of me, but the other side of me thinking they weren't happy, I didn't give them a great experience. This sucks, so I gotta change it. So I looked at the curriculum, I didn't think it was that. I had this intuitive hit, it was that damn refund policy. So I said, you know what, I want to change this. I'm going to try something different. I'm going to create an action takers guarantee. Here's what it sounds like. You can come and try B school, do it for 30 days if you don't feel like we've delivered on our promise. All you need to do to be eligible for a refund is turn in your completed homework. If you do the B school work and you don't get value, we do not deserve your money at all. One change, super powerful. And again, we did some other things, but I really believe that was the big change. Took that refund rate all the way down to 1.5%. So let's dig a little bit deeper and look at why. One of the reasons sales prevention, it helped get all the petas and the pains in the asses and the whiners and the non committed people. They are not signing up for my shit. My shit is expensive. So if they know they gotta work in order to be eligible for a refund, you really think they're going to come in the door? No. Then the second thing it did for the people, it is right for and for me. I'm looking for people that are very action oriented, very committed. That's a challenge to them. They know I take this program seriously. If I'm saying, look, if you do the work and you don't get value, I'll give you everything back, they're like, whoa, she actually cares about our success. The third thing that it did, which was amazing, is it helps bond the community. One of the best things that we have going for us is our amazing community. They sell for us. So when people are in B school together and they know based on how we've structured things that A, we care about their success, but B, even more importantly, everyone else in there is a player. Doesn't matter where they're at in their journey, they are in it to win it. That gives them a reason to bond stronger. It's a stronger community and they spread the word more prolifically. Make sense? So I know I've had fun here framing this discussion around sales prevention. But what it's really about is how can we make our marketing more honest, more transparent and more courageous? How can we have a little more courage in our marketing? So I want you to ask yourself, in your business, are you doing enough active sales prevention? Are you giving enough attention to articulating and creating obstacles to keep the people out who you really are not meant to serve so that you can devote more energy and more love and more caring to those you do. And I'll leave you with just this one final thought. What if the big secret to extreme exploding your sales was having the courage every so often to prevent them? Thank you so much.

Little while ago, Joe reaches out and he says, right, Sims, we want you to come and do this 10 minute talk of the Genius network. And I thought, great. You know, I commenced the entrepreneurial two step and we all do it. We're entrepreneurs, we know this dance very well. Step one, you accept everything. Fantastic, brilliant, lovely. I think I even said awesome, which British people don't do. Then you get step two, stark realization. You know, shit, fuck, crap, what am I going to talk about? So I thought about it and I sank a few whiskeys and looked at what I did. And for the smart people out here that listened at the beginning, I write notes. It's what I do. Simple as That I write notes. I love it. I think it's fantastic. It's well worth doing. And I'm going to be encouraging you to write little handwritten notes to your people. I'm on about those. You work with your vendors, your suppliers, your family, your kids. You write notes. Now you're going to wonder why. You're going to listen to me. Why should you pay attention? This is not what I do. This is what I do. Last year I got a client married in the Vatican and blessed by the Pope. I had a client that wanted an exclusive dinner in Florence. So we kicked everyone out of the Accademia, set up a table of six at the feet of Michelangelo's David. Now, it's pretty cool. Yeah, yeah. Was when we got Andrea Bocelli to come in and serenade him during the dinner time. I'm the guy that sends people down to the Titanic. I've arranged people to have lunch with the Trump family in New York and sadly, I put this guy up here and the fucker hasn't turned up. This is Dan Fitzpatrick, CNBC commentator, very serious, nice guy. Otherwise known to us and the fellow 25k as the short term lead singer of the rock band Journey. That's the shit I do. That's what I get up to. Now, what I want you to do, first of all is I want everyone to put their hand up in the air. Left or right, I don't care, it's your choice. But put your hand up in the air. Put your hand down. Only not yet. Only if you don't sell anything. A book, a course, anything. All right? Put your hand down. I don't know of. Yeah, loaded question, of course, but we needed to get a line in the sand. I don't know of any greater sign of respect and trust than someone putting their hand in their pocket and giving you their money. It's something you should never, ever take for granted. Someone writes me a check, someone gives me a credit card, I literally get goosebumps. That person's trusting me to do something. And they want something from you. They look at you as an asset, they look at you as a value. They're only giving you that money because you have something that they don't. Which is fine. You know, we all pay for things and that makes sense. But what I was thinking about when I was coming here was these people pay us because we have something they want. Have you paid attention to the room that you're in? You've been here two days now. Have you seen the icons, the myths the legends that are in this room, Joe Polish, Dan Dean, there's heroes in this room that most people would get nowhere near. And you're knocking into them in your vinyls and stuff. You know, not physically. I don't know how you play, but, you know, these people are here, and you should pay respect to it. So this actually got me thinking, and it came up with a big question. Who knows you're here? How many of you actually reached out to your people and told them you were at this event? Now, look around you. Keep your hands up, please. Look around you that I find a little bit sad. What have we got here? What's about 40%, 30% that you've told people? These people are giving you money because you've got a value. You were smart when you got here on Sunday. You're fucked smarter on Wednesday when you leave because of the people you've been hanging around with. You've increased your valuation purely by the simple people you stand next to. I try and stand next to Peter because he makes me smarter just by location. So I reached out to a bunch of people a while ago, and I said, well, okay, you know, I want to get this whole hang of this thing, and this is the moment in time where I piss off all the techies. So I reached out and I said, well, how many subscribers do you have? How many followers do you have? And I spoke to some people in this room. I got answers from thousands to millions. The reach of this room is incredible. So I thought, all right, we'll play with an example. We'll go with 5,000 subscribers. You've got 5,000 people in your database. Now, I know a lot of people are like, more than that. Stick with me, you'll be all right. 5,000 subscribers. So I phoned up, constant contact, mailchimp, and a couple of others. I actually had fun doing this because I hadn't really researched it much myself. And I said to him, look, want to work an example? 5,000 subscribers. We send out an email blast. What's the accountability? How does it actually work? How many does it come through? And she said, well, the average is number.

Whoa.

I don't want average. There's no one in this room average. We're movers, shakers. We're captains of industry. Fuck all average about us. I want to know what a really good rate is. So she went, okay, fair enough. 20%. She said, 20% open rate. I went, oh, great. So 20 people read the email. She said, no, no, no. 20 people opened it. She said, maybe your Email client opened it up, maybe it was an autoresponder that could actually class as an open as well. I said, so how many people read it? She went, oh, you're talking about click through rate. Okay, click through rate. What's a decent click through rate? She says, 7%. I said, I just want to make sure I got the math right here because I'm getting a little bit confused. You're telling me that for every 5,000 subscribers I have, I can be pretty sure that 70 people are getting my message. And she said, yeah, that's right. That's a horrible number. That's a worse number. 4,930 people have no freaking idea what you're doing. Now they want to follow you, but if they're not hearing your message, what are they going to do? They're going to wander over and find someone else that does. So that's a very, very scary number. But would you open this? If you got a letter come to you, handwritten, got a stamp on there, would you open it? Because the simple fact you get thousands and thousands and thousands of emails, but your mail, now you're getting all this stuff, it's paperless, so you're paying all your phone bills and everything like that. Your mailbox is now telling you about the local Chinese, your Best Buy certificates. And every now and then you get this land in your letterbox. You'll open it. Is it an invite? Is it a party? Is something cool going on? When I travel, and I know there's a lot of people that travel, there's a lot of people here that fly around a lot. When I was in Florence in Italy last year for the Vatican thing, I actually nicked a bunch of cocktail menus. I just shoved them in and just said, look, a little bit on the side. Brevity is key here. A little note got sent out and I send that out to 2,000 people. Now I know a bunch of you out there going, you don't expect me to mail out to all of my people, do you? Yes, you won't, but I want you to. I want you to try doing it to five. I want you then try doing it to 10. And I thought to myself, you're here and you spent $10,000 to be here, and then you spent flights, and then you spent extra nights. Maybe you're kind of like a bit disturbed. Simple fact is, anywhere to 10, 20, $30,000 has cost you. Now the simple fact is you don't care about the money. I know we all care about money, but the simple fact is, the people that you're on the table with, the new relationship that you could make just in any one of these little networking bits are up at the bar, can make you 100,000. So $30,000, it's not important to you because it's an investment in you. But for three days, you didn't put your kids to bed. Personally, I take that very seriously. I know when I leave my house, I look at it, I go, is this going to make my life better when I get back? I haven't had the chance to hug my wife for three days. I haven't been with my team, I've been here with you. I've sacrificed that because I think this is the value. So how do I tell people that I write them a note. I've already started doing it. I've written notes to my key staff saying, hey, thank you for allowing me the ability to be here. I've written a note to my wife, you know, I'll get home, I won't say anything. Five days time, she'll get a letter in the post, she'll be like, she'll open it up, there's a little note in there for me. Just say, thanks for being you and allowing me to do this again. Doesn't have to be big, but I'm telling you, the impact is fantastic. Now we've got two days and we're nearing day two. So there's a lot of things going in your head. There's a lot of things you're going to want to action. There's a lot of things you're not going to action. Okay? So I decided to help you out. It took me three minutes to design this postcard. You can see it's brilliant. What I want you to do is there's people around here now and they're handing out these postcards. All I want you to do is try it. Send it to one of your key members of staff, send it to a loved one, send it to a vendor, Just say, hey, I'm away for three days. Got some great ideas, I'll catch up with you. Trust me. When you send these out, you get these people contact you, they contact you first, going, I got your postcard, I got your stupid menu, I got your bar tab. I've sent people bar tabs before, saying, I had loads of drink, but I was thinking of you while I was doing it. Scribbled on the back, bar tab in it. Have a bit of a giggle with it, but try be silly. Skymore Fucking love Skymall. Everyone needs a dolphin shaped post box. Rip that out, shove it in an envelope, send it to someone, they love it. Use humor. Get your personality out. The point is, you're not connecting via email. So try this. And remember, if you don't, I know where you live. Thank you.

Thank you. You know, and I just, you know, left my beloved company boardroom that I helped build with Marty Edelston, who an entrepreneur who we both. He loved. You love me too. And so I just left after 34 years, took the company in 1981 from about a $5 million business. And Marty and I, with a lot of help with a lot of other people, but we were the rainmakers for the company and we took it to a high of 150 million in the mid-2000s when we got into all media. So I guess the way I describe myself is that I'm a direct response marketer who never met a medium I didn't like. So I love, you know, I cut my teeth in direct mail. Direct mail is not dead, by the way. And we can talk about that.

And that's what you mean by medium. When you say medium, it's not a psychic. You mean a particular.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean direct mail, Internet, tv, radio, print advertising, everything. Because everything, as you and I both know, should be direct response marketing. We don't want to spend time in brand advertising. That's a different discussion for a different day. And just do stuff that's, you know, not measurable, not accountable.

Which is what, when you say brand, see a lot of people immediately go, I want to build my brand. I mean, I was on the phone yesterday with the genius network member and he's writing a book and he's an expert in how companies can get funding. And he was talking about building his brand. And so I sort of had to, not to burst his bubble, but in a nice way, say, well, look, you know, direct response versus, like, brand building. Brand building is about getting your name out there, right? You know, direct response, that could cost.

You millions and millions of dollars and get. And not get any return.

And many people have gone bankrupt in their approach of trying to build a brand. Now, direct response is getting your name out there and getting a response back. So you can still accomplish phenomenal branding, but have it be measurable and trackable. And that little insight alone, if a company doesn't understand that if they paid a million dollars to learn that and they're a big company, that would be worth a million dollars just to have, like, someone explain for five minutes what we're talking about right at this particular moment. Like what type of marketing should you use? Well, if your ego wants to run the show, you want to always focus on brand building and things that look good but don't have any measurable accountable results. But if you want to actually be able to measure the value of your marketing consultant, measure the value of your marketing.

So anyway, yeah, I mean, that's the amount of money that you can get you will save by hiring the right marketing consultant. Because they're not going to take you down a rabbit hole that is just going to. You're going to throw good money after bad.

Right.

It's funny, you've decorated this entire office with these great demotivation posters. And one of them, the one for consulting, says if you're not part of the solution, there's good money to be made in prolonging the problem. But you know, the interesting thing is we make jokes about that, but actually we're solving problems by telling people not where not to go, at the same time telling them where to go to that point.

The reason those sort of signs get made, which are funny, I mean, I, you know, people go numb to like motivational.

I know.

So my office, anyone's ever been here.

It'S the anti motivational posters, which makes it more motivational.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just ridiculous and funny and all that. But the reason those jokes come into play is because there's so many people that charge money dispensing bad advice. And Gary Halbert, who I originally learned direct response marketing from, he was a great crazy copywriter, became a dear friend of mine, he passed away. The last photo I have is with us. The last time I was with at a Gary.

Gary Benta Venga. Yeah.

Gary said the most expensive information in the world is bad information. And so for anyone considering hiring a consultant, you can spend 5,000 bucks, you can spend 100,000, you can get it for free. But even if you get a free consultant or free advice, if it's bad advice, that bad advice could cost you a fortune. And one thing I want to point out, most people hire someone because they want to grow. They want to grow their business, they want to grow sales, they want to get better clients, want to increase the conversion. Whatever you said. A really important point though, which is about avoiding mistakes. I mean, hiring the right person that could take you off of a bad path or if you're on a track that's doing really well and you're producing a lot of silver coins and you're working your butt off and you're really happy and everything seems awesome. But a consultant, or even the word consultant is kind of weird to say that. But an advice giver can give you advice that will put you on a track with the same effort that will produce gold coins.

Right.

That one thing is dramatically use now. In some cases, it could save you from bankruptcy, it could save your reputation, it could save a ton of stuff. So it's hard to sell that, though. A lot of people don't really get that.

They don't, because it feels preventative. It's like. It's like preventative medicine. Like, you go to a doctor. You can't sell prevention in direct response marketing. Right. You have to sell cures.

Exactly.

But prevention is so important. I mean, we talk about this all the time. How many online marketers today, more so than anybody else, they're committed to one medium.

Again, like they call themselves an Internet market.

They call it some Internet marketer. And 80% of their business is coming from Google or I know one guy, 90% of his business was now on Facebook. What happens when Facebook shuts you down? I mean, you know, Dan Kennedy talks about this all the time, and that's why he talks about direct mail. He talks about all these other media that you should be into. It's not for your. It's not just because you want to be diversified for the sake of being diversified. It's survival. Right. Because you're right. As you said, you go bankrupt if you get shut down. And I know. I know people, and we know the horror stories of people getting shut down because they're so committed to one thing, because it's doing well. We're crushing it, right? Everybody says we're crushing it on the Internet. Well, yeah, the Internet's a cool medium. Look, I'm not a luddite. I mean, you know, I am not, you know, I'm not the dinosaur, even though my email has T. Rex in it. But I believe in all you. Really. All boats rise when you look at all media. Your messaging can get out in so many different ways. And as far as a consultant goes that knows about all those things that you definitely don't know anything about that will enable you to diversify your business that's worth tens of millions. Even if it's not. Doesn't start with a discussion that's all tactical. It can be very strategic. But it's so important to get people to think about those broader issues. And then you start diving deep into the specifics of the different types of marketing that you can do. But everybody thinks a consultant should come in, tell them exactly what to do, that we're going to do this kind of marketing with this sales letter, with this messaging, and then we're done. That's not what you really want. When you start with a consultant, you want that big picture stuff first because you got to make sure that the assessment of your business is in the right place. And you got to have people who have the kind of experience that you and I have.

Yeah. So let's talk. We'll get down to the nitty gritty. We're also going to make some book recommendations because we're in this big room with a lot of books.

Hundreds of books here I could recommend.

Yeah, there's actually 100 you could recommend.

Easy.

And so I've not read every single book in here, but I've read over a thousand books. And we've got some of our favorites that we've found and some that are not in this particular building that's here.

We couldn't find them, but we know they're here somewhere.

They're in the building. This is a big building. I have an 11,000 square foot building. So basically we're going to talk about that stuff. We're going to give people suggestions so that by the time you're done listening to us, I'll use some Dan Sullivan words. You're going to have more direction, more confidence, more capability, and more clarity on how to approach hiring someone or seeking outside help. And I am a big fan of paying people money. Like Dan Sullivan says, you know, if you have enough money to solve the problem, you don't have a problem. And if you have a marketing problem and you can cut a check and you can solve that problem, or at least you can start the path of solving that problem or reaching that opportunity. You know, if you have enough money to reach the opportunity, you can get the opportunity. That's another way of saying it. And so that's what me and Brian are actually going to talk about. We're going to share some examples of actual clients that we've worked with, different copywriters that you've worked with, how they've gotten paid for that. Because I recommend a lot of consultants. And so in certain situations, if it's in the health field, I will recommend someone like you or someone like a Michael Fishman. I was just talking to a guy who runs one of the largest supplement companies in the world. A couple days ago, my buddy Dave Kekich arranged a phone call and he's interested in my genius network group. So I was talking to him and I'm interested in this company because I've actually been a client of this company. But I recommended Mary Ellen Tribbe who's one of our friends and she's, you know, she's, I think she's currently like 25,000 bucks a day to do consulting. And you know, so I hire people all the time myself. I have personally spent over a million dollars a year on education consultants, newsletters, courses, seminars for the last 15 years straight in my whole marketing education. Conservatively, I probably spent $2 million just learning marketing. So when I charge someone what I charge and that fee may go up. I mean currently at the time we're doing this video, it's 25 grand for half a day. You can see the whole way I presented@hiredjillpolish.com you can find about how Brian does his at BrianKurtz K U R T Z me and click on the hire Brian or whatever your thing is there on your website so you can see how we actually promote it. But this whole thing isn't about like you need to hire me or Brian actually. This is to sift, sort and screen people that are a pain in the ass. This is to sift, sort and screen people that are like, I want to work with Joe. And this is kind of like I want to blow off people that I'm not a right fit because again, Dan. Dan Sullivan is one of my dearest friends. I do a podcast with him and so we talk about a lot of stuff. So he's always present in my mind. He says, I only want to sell things to people that want it, not people that need it. So trying to talk someone in when you're a high price, very skilled in any area, consultant or whatever, trying to sell stuff to people that really need it. I'm past that in the beginning of my career. But I don't want that anymore. I just want people that I'm a right fit for.

Yeah, I think that this will sound kind of weird, but it's not like you don't to want, want consulting clients. But you know, there's almost. It's just not worth it. I mean, considering the kind of difference that you're making with your genius network group. One phone call, you put these two people together and all of a sudden it's like game changing for these two multimillion dollar companies, that's a phone call as opposed to like spending a half a day or a day with one client. If you're going to spend a half a day or a day with one client. It's got to be not only worth it to you monetarily, but it's got to be something that.

You know, your talks with Dan Sullivan.

Are called 10x talks. Right?

Right.

And it's not just about 10xing money. It's about 10xing impact. It's about 10xing everything in your life. And I know you're all about that. We had a discussion earlier today about, you know, that if you're just about passion, forget it.

Right.

It's just not, it's just not about being passionate. But we've developed these skills over 20, 30 years and it's not like we forced that into our. We didn't force a passion to ourselves. But we're so good at this and we love it so much because we live it every day now. It's become the passion and we want to share it. But I'll tell you, sharing it one on one, that's special and you're gonna have to like really just want to be with somebody at that high level. The sift sort and screen thing is so powerful. And you know, having been, you know, building one business and you know, being more intrapreneurial than entrepreneurial, I mean, you know, I was a partner in the business. So you know, I was an owner of a, of a nine figure business. So it was great. But when I talk about boardroom and.

I talk about how we built the.

Business, I was basically a free consultant for 34 years.

People.

And I rarely said no to people. I mean, you used to give me.

A really hard time.

It's like, Brian, what are you doing? It's like you're giving away all this, you know, valuable. But it was okay because I, it was part of, I'll say, my own education of what I'm going to do for those 34 years. How I built up all that knowledge, how I built up all that experience. Now's the time to say how do I share that? And I'm only going to share it very selectively. And that, and I think selectivity is what you were getting at. And you and Dan are just drilling that into me. And I've listened to it for a long time because I've watched the way you've run your life and I love it. I want to be like you when I grow up.

I would hope so.

That's what I aspire to. Have you actually be like me when you grow up. That would be awesome. No, here's the point. It's about enhancement, okay? Like you, I only want to work with people that are aligned with me. I only want to align myself with people that are aligned with me and whoever's watching this, I mean, have you ever hired someone that you work with and they're just. You just don't click? I mean, that's a pain in the ass. It's hard to get things done. Not that you can't make progress, but it's the psychological satiation. The joy is not there. I don't like working with people that are a total pain in the ass. Now. I do like people that will call me on my crap. I do like people that I can actually argue and debate because it results in a better goal. I mean, there's rarely any professional sports teams where everyone like, they're winning whatever the game is and they're out holding hands and singing Kumbaya. It can be bloody and stuff. So I'm not talking about the difficulties in that area because in order to have a breakthrough, you typically got to break something. I'm talking about open mindedness and being able to dance together. Those are the types of clients I want if I'm going to do one on one consulting, which I try to talk everyone out of unless they really need that support, specific stuff because frankly, if someone joins Genius Network, they're going to spend a lot more time with a lot more people than if they're going to hire me one on one. But certain situations, people actually want that. But I do charge a lot of money for it. It's not just the $25,000 a day or $25,000 for half a day, or $50,000 for a full day. And again, you can see all this@hiredjoep.com One of the things I'm doing now is, I realize, you know, even all the years of consulting and giving, giving advice away for free, which I still do every day, I do it in the form of ilovemarketing.com I have people that have become millionaires listening to my podcast that have never paid me a penny, that will probably never pay me a penny. Some people in other parts of the world where the travel or doing it over the phone would just be logistically more of a pain in the butt. They listen to my podcast. But the thing with it is people don't pay, they don't pay attention. And people that give us money, it's not even about paying us for our time. It's about making the commitment to themselves, to where they're going.

You once told me that anybody who gave started you had to chase down for the 25,000 for 25K for Genius Network. It was actually a sign almost that they weren't committed to the group. And you don't even want somebody like.

That in a room.

I mean one person like that could ruin a mastermind theoretically.

Right.

And so I'm going to have my own mastermind soon. I'm not going to compete with yours.

Mine's going to be very specific, you.

Know, multi channel marketing at the going to be exactly in my sweet spot.

And I encourage anyone to have that.

Skill to do this right. And all I want to do is have people around me that are going to make me better, but they're going to pay because that's the way you know that. And the thing is I put my money where my mouth is. Right. I've been in your group for many, many years. I always lament that I wasn't one of the first.

I was too cheap those first couple of years.

But I've been in since like 2000, 2010 or so. So 2011.

Yeah.

So I've been in for a long time and I'm in a couple of the groups similar price and it's like it's my tuition, you know, for life in a way. And you know, I spent all that money on my kids college and now they're out. So now it's my turn. Right. And I've been doing that my whole life too. I don't know if I've spent the kind of money that you've spent, but.

I guess I have.

If you start taking into account the copywriters that I've paid and the consultants.

That I have paid.

And back in the 80s and 90s, I don't think even consultants had this, this big view. There were certain consultants that everybody wanted to work with. Like Dick Benson was the direct mail guy and Gordon Grossman was a huge direct mail guy who built the Reader's digest in the 1960s. I had both those guys on retainer now. What did they charge? You know, between two and $5,000 a month. They didn't get a piece of the action when they produced something great for me. I mean all Dick Benson had to do was say test this this way and that was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars immediately. And yet all I had to do was pay him for a while. I was paying him 2000 bucks a month and I had free access to him on the phone. But that's what Dick wanted. I mean Dick, you know, sat in his perch in the ivory tower, answered the phone all day. He probably had 25 clients at 2,000amonth. So for $50,000 a month, all he had to do was answer the phone. That's a model that he was okay with, but he never took a piece of the action of anybody because that wasn't part of the mindset.

That wasn't a model, wasn't a model back then.

But you know what, And I'm not saying that Dick left all that money on the table. I don't think he ever lamented about how much money he left on the table. But I think he did lament about having clients that he wasn't crazy about. I mean, he was a guy that was known for firing clients. And back then you never would fire somebody who's paying you money. And now it's done all the time.

Well, now I try to avoid anyone paying me money unless they totally resonate with me, right. And I feel I can help them. So. And plus, I'm in a great position, as are you, where supply and demand is more in my face. There's more demand for my time than there is supply. So. And plus I have things like Genius Network, I have things like 10x.

As I said, people can, people can get a lot of Joe without getting the one on one.

Exactly. And if they do come to me, I want them to, to come to me. See, because I always say the difference between selling and marketing is selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face to face with somebody. And anyone that would hire us wants to improve their selling and marketing, you would think, and marketing is what you do to get someone on the phone or face to face with you properly positioned so that by the time they work with you, they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified and pre disposed. So I would want someone that would be interested in hiring us for consulting to watch this video and say, oh, I resonate with you, I resonate with Brian or whatever. And they're pre interested, pre motivated, pre qualified, predisposed. Now if you can take that in your own existing company, because there's a lot of great sales organizations that have hired me for marketing consultant because they do good at selling but they don't do a good job at marketing. And so they're able to sell people, but they only have enough people to sell too. Or they're spending too much effort trying to convince people because they don't compel them. And like my friend Dean Jackson and says a compelling offer is 10 times more valuable than a convincing argument where you're trying to convince somebody with marketing. Selling is influence. Marketing is storytelling. We help people tell a better story. We help people come up with the right model. We help people to think through the margins. We have people think through how to automate things, how to get stuff sold and positioned without having to rely so much on human beings to do it. That's why you said, I never found a medium that I didn't love.

Right.

You know, my greatest salespeople in the very beginning of my business in a carpet cleaning company. I mean, I even brought some props. I've got. I don't know if they can be seen from the. From the video here, but we've got stuff on the side of us that I'll grab. Like this one I really thought was good. Like, if you want to expand your business. Yeah, here we go. I think I'll do a little setup video for this later. I'll put it on my different website.

I'll tell you, it's freaking me out.

What do you think of that little toy?

But anyway.

But this is my very first business card, which was certainly a terrible business card. Superior Carpet Care, serving the East Valley, specializing in upholstery, car interior, soil extraction. When I was a Devereaux carpet cleaner, I didn't know anything about words. And what I learned is that you can influence human behavior by words on a piece of paper. The difference between a $1 bill and a hundred dollar bill is the message on the paper. But that was my very first, only one in existence. One. But, you know, so you can either have like, kind of a slinky business that goes back and forth. These are some of the props you can make, you know, all kinds of big mistakes. But we're here to help you erase them and expand your business. I could have done a better job with the props.

No, they're beautiful.

Yeah, no, they are beautiful. But here's. Here's what I'd like to do, because you have some great examples of the way copywriters have gotten paid. One thing that I didn't finish mentioning is that when I'm hiring people, when I'm hiring people, when people hire me for consulting these days, I don't want them to even think about the fee they're paying me. What I want them to focus on is the objective of the result. And so if someone hires me for half a day for 25 grand, I want that person. What's 5% of half a million dollars? It's $25,000. So I'm like, okay, how am I going to add half a million dollars? They're paying me 25 grand for an advance towards the first half a million they make. If the person makes a million, I want them to pay me another 25 grand. If they make 5 million, I want them to pay me a percentage of that. So when someone hires me for consulting, I don't want it to stop. If I can give you a breakthrough, elegant idea, I expect to continue to get paid for that. Why? Because if they're paying me royalties, I will continue to hone the ideas. I will continue to. To help them. I will continue to give them connections. That is the best way to hire a marketing consultant. When I interviewed you and Marty Edelston years ago, one of the things you guys said is, we love paying copywriters royalties. Not like we do it because we're supposed to, but you actually really understand that. Why wouldn't you incentivize someone that is bringing a dollar that never would come into your company? Why would you not incentivize someone for that? Because you, if you reinforce and reward behavior, you're going to get more of it. So to hire someone to go and help you have a breakthrough and bring you tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, why do you want to get them for cheap? I mean, like, pay the price.

The old story was any copywriter working in an agency was probably not worth hiring because they weren't writing copy that was exponentially great. I guess it's the great Gary Halbert quote. You know, every business problem can be solved with a great sales letter. So Marty and I understood very early on that any just a sales letter can just change your business.

So there are people that are just really good at that.

I mean, I always call myself a copywriter wannabe, but I just did a blog post last week, and, you know, after watching the best copy over the last 34 years and working with the best copywriters, I probably couldn't write a package soup to nuts myself. But I know good copy from bad. I know headlines, I know copy platforms, and I also know which copywriters to put you in touch with if I'm working with you as to. Because people say, you know, I get two or three calls a week, Brian, I need to find a good copywriter. It is so much bigger than that. You have to look at everything about your business, everything that you're doing. So I don't want to get too specific about copywriting, but copywriting was One.

Of those areas where the idea of.

Getting paid to play was so obvious.

To me and to Marty and to.

A lot of other big mailers at the time that it didn't make sense to just pay a flat fee for copy. And especially when you. So, I mean, the guys who were the pioneers in this were two of.

The greatest copywriters who ever lived, you.

Know, Gary Bensivenga and Jim Rutz. Jim Rutz just passed away recently. I wrote a blog post on him, the copywriter closest to God, because he.

Was very religious, but he also was.

Somehow, I think he had a pact.

With God to write great copy.

I don't know, I don't want to be sacrilegious here, but so many Bensivenga and Ruts early on in their careers, they knew how good they were. And so they would actually give you this incredible piece of copy and they wouldn't charge you a dime and they would actually bet on that it would do well and that you would pay them royalties. Of course, they learned very quickly that again, the demand for them was so high because they were so good, that then they could charge $30,000 or $40,000 up front against that royalty.

And when did that start? What year? Just to give some perspective, you know.

The first time we hired, it was definitely in the 80s. I'm trying to think maybe, you know, late 80s, early 90s, but it was already happening before that a little bit. And, and, and they set the stage.

For great copywriters for forever.

And to find a copywriter today, even an online guy, you know, they're always going to look for a percentage of sales. So everybody, you got to be good to do it, otherwise you're not going to get hired and who's going to pay you. And, and I tell you, when you get it, this is something again, saving a client a lot of money. If some, if I go to a client and I'm consulting with them and they're telling me, you know, I found this copywriter, he's only going to charge me 3500 bucks to do like a squeeze page and a landing page, you know, and a sales letter and he's going to do an email sequence and it's only 3500 bucks. Isn't that great deal, Brian? And my first reaction is, you're probably going to get what you pay for. But let me see the guy. And then I have a whole process. I mean, I just did. I think I did a 10 minute talk on it for Genius Network about. It's an hour and a half speech about what to look for in a copywriter.

Like what?

It's the same with a consultant. I mean, all of those things that I talked about, you know, someone who's really hungry, someone who's got insatiable curiosity, someone who will dive deep into a subject area because they've been there and done it for a really long time. Copywriter, consultant, Same thing. Dan Kennedy talks about this. To be a copywriter, you should be a consultant and a copywriter. He has a whole course on how you get into a business, even if you just want to be a copywriter.

But you really have to look at.

The whole picture, because you're not just writing copy, you're looking at the entire business structure.

So we owe a debt of gratitude.

To these royalty copywriters because I think they did set the stage. Even though there's a lot of people charging today getting paid for performance that probably don't even know that Gary Bensonvang and Jim Rutz ever existed.

Absolutely.

But this has been an ongoing thing, and we've seen the evolution of it. I mean, we. We've lived through that. It's like, you know, we live through the Model T to, you know, to the cars.

There's that. It's actually. It's very interesting that we're going to be probably the, you know, the generation that actually went from, you know, at the time we're doing this. This video, you know, I just turned 47 years old a couple weeks ago.

Oh, you're such an old man.

I know. Young compared to you. But it's like I got more hair, you know. That's true. You do. But I mean, do you want to go?

No, let's put consultant and you don't want to know one that's picking consultant.

Based on the chair they have.

No.

Did you say, I want to talk about. About insulting or consulting?

Let's talk about consulting. We'll do insulting later.

We should have people hire us to insult them.

We'd be good at it.

Do you know, back in the day, like, other than the sex lines, one of the most profitable 900 numbers, when they used to have the numbers, was insult lines, where people would pay something like a couple bucks a minute to call and get insulted. And that was one of the most profitable lines you got to think about.

Like, you don't rapport through insulting people. I think, yeah, as long as they can take it, you got to. You gotta have thick skin. I mean, for somebody who's not from New York, you know, you're pretty good.

You got pretty thick skin.

Totally.

You know I do.

Exactly.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here.

And if you want to watch some.

More videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

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Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.