Ambassador Marketing

Hi, this is Gay Hendricks. I want you to really tune into this episode of the Big Leap podcast because we're taking apart something that for many people is a challenge, which is how to think about marketing in a whole new way. Mike presents a whole new paradigm for how to think of it, and I found it very fascinating because it fits in so well with the kind of principles and ideas that I teach. So come join us, and I think you'll have your mind and heart both expanded.

All right, this is something. I call it ambassador marketing. It's how to be an ambassador and influence the most influential people. And we get into some really, really cool ways of deconstructing how you think about who you are, who you want to be a hero to, and how to influence the influencers. So all that and more in this episode of the Big League.

All right, Gay, this is a really exciting idea and a concept, something I call the ambassador model. And the way I'd like to frame it is imagine for a moment that you had a certain type of person that you wanted to reach, either with your books or your business, whatever it is. And instead of marketing to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, you could find just one person who, with their recommendation alone, could bring you all the clients, all the customers, all the followers you could ever maintain for the rest of your professional career. How would that feel?

Wow. Well, it's a brand new model, and I'm very interested in it because it fits so well with a lot of the things that I teach, and I'm very interested. One of the things I appreciate about your mind, Mike, is the way you're able to kind of take things apart and make really complicated things really simple. I'm in that line of work myself. That's one of my superpowers, is to take really big things like how to make a big leap or how to love yourself or how to be in the world in a way that allows you to have everything you want and need. Those kinds of things are in the sweet spot of what I teach also. And this new model, I think, has some real advantage for helping people shape their thinking so that it saves them a lot of time and energy. So that's kind of the big payoff, and let's dive right into it.

Okay, great. So for. We're going to do this both for viewers and listeners. So if you're a listener, I'm going to do my best to paint the picture that I'm going to draw on screen today. But I'm going to begin with something to look at. So basically, if you imagine for a moment, circle number one, and we're going to end up with four circles. They're concentric circles, kind of like a target. There's a bullseye. So the one in the middle.

Represents your perfect ideal customer. Okay, so I'm going to put cost in the center. And the other idea here is, who do you want to be a hero to? And just for the sake of our. For our audience today, because we can't ask everyone, I'm going to say to you, gay, you got a brand new book that just came out. But if I were going to have you answer, who do you want to be a hero to? What would your response be to that?

I want to be a hero to every transformationally minded person in the world. A person who says, wakes up one day and says, hey, I think I'd like to get out from under my limitations and bring forth my highest potential. What I call your genius. And there are lots of them. I get email from hundreds of them every day. But I know that there are millions and even billions more out there that we haven't touched yet. But that's my ideal person I want to be a hero to.

Great. So we're going to call them transformational entrepreneurs. Is that okay to frame it that way?

Okay, yeah.

Business minded. Either they want to start a business around that expansive mindset. And so the next question I would have and the next circle we're going to draw here is we've got the hero in the middle. What affinity groups might they belong to? And when we say affinity group, it could be.

It could be a Facebook group, it could be a magazine they listen to, it could be a show they watch, it could be a podcast they listen to. But if you were going to guess for a moment that that affinity group belongs to or trusts a specific.

In this case, the hero trusts an affinity group. What pops into your head that they might belong to where there might be a bunch of these transformationally minded entrepreneurs inside?

Yes. Well, I speak to groups all the time like that. I just spoke to a group that has 1500 salespeople working for them around Denmark. And so that would be a great example of an affinity group. I also spoke a while back to a couple of network marketing groups that had thousands of people out there. And so that's great because oftentimes they will have everybody buy a copy of the Big Leap. And so I'll be speaking to an informed audience. Not just a great audience, but an audience who's primed So I, I would.

Say.

It could be a business, it could be a Facebook group. I've, I spoke recently on an Instagram live to a person, I mean, on a person's Instagram that has several hundred thousand followers. So that would be another good example of an affinity group.

Okay, great. So inside of this, the key thing, and we're going to get to that in a moment, is in this affinity group, there may be a multiple.

Okay?

Now, one thing that we know that we have in common here are these are. They're big leap book lovers, okay? And more recently, it could be people who use the book and have that in common. And this is going to be very helpful as we move forward. Now, for someone who doesn't have a platform, the key thing that I just want you to think about is think of a couple groups that own relationships with the kind of people that you want to do business with. So again, that's concentric circle number two. Now we're going to go out to concentric circle number three. And these are going to be influencers. Okay? So in an influencer, if I said to you right now, gay, who has been responsible for maybe getting you some of the speaking gigs or access to the affinity groups? Okay, so the influencer makes an introduction, the connection, who might that be?

Well, I wouldn't be here without standing up on a stage with Oprah 30 years ago with our book Conscious Loving. I mean, that was. We went from before that I was a university professor. For me, a good bestseller was 500 copies of a clinical psychology textbook. You know, that was read by 500 pairs of graduate students, eyes every year. That was, to me, a monster bestseller. But, you know, being up on Oprah's stage, Suddenly they're taking 10,000 orders an hour for the book, you know, at the publishers, and rather, rather than 500 a year. And so it changed everything in my world, just having one person like that influencer. And we were on other shows as well at that time, but none of them had the impact of Oprah because she was really in the height of her early power at that time. And later on, when we were on the show again later on in the 90s.

It was good, but it didn't have that same monster impact as it had the very first time, for sure.

But I want you to get into the now, which is, are there some influencers right now who are connecting you to affinity groups who have been responsible for some of these opportunities, these recent speaking opportunities or gigs that you can pinpoint?

Yes.

One comes to Mind is Jack Canfield. That you know Jack, he's the person who created the Transformational Leadership Council of whom I'm a, of which I'm a member. And so just very recently, he made a connection for me that ended up speaking to a very big group of high level people.

Just today, as a matter of fact, oddly enough, his former partner, business partner, Mark Victor Hansen, who wrote those Chicken Soup books with Jack, emailed me today and told me about a person that has a top 10 business podcast that wanted an introduction to me. And so I immediately connected up with the person. So that'd be a good example of that.

Great, great. Well, that's helpful. So I put on here, Oprah, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Now I'm going to give you one more big idea. Now this is the most important one of all. And then I'm going to make my big point, which is the ambassador relationship.

Okay?

Now an ambassador is someone who, their, their introduction, they could access and introduce you to a whole bunch of influencers who in turn influence multiple affinity, affinity groups. And that ambassador, just their effective endorsement.

Will give you access to as many customers as you could ever deal with for the rest of your professional career. And so the setup for this is instead of doing all kinds of complicated marketing, so in the world of online marketing, for example, someone will say, well, I need Facebook marketing or I need.

JV partners and a whole bunch of them so they can mail my stuff. But instead, if you thought to yourself, if you could influence one ambassador with an amazing story, and there's really two stories have to come out of this, one of them is a story that would speak to that ambassador's heart, okay? And it would be why they should trust you and want to put their neck on the line for you. In other words, they're going to risk their reputation for you and they need you to provide them with a perfect hero story, you know, why? So something they can pass along. So you have to touch the ambassador and then you have to equip them with the story they can share with the person you want to be a hero to. So the question I would ask you is right now, you've already had your Oprah, but if there was one person you believe that if you could influence them, they could give you access to multiple influencers, multiple affinity groups that could feed, like, become buyers for your books, put lots of people into the big leap experience and whatever other dreams you have that you'd like to come true. Who might that ambassador be?

That really is stumping Me, because I keep running through different people in my mind and everything, but.

Boy, help me with that a little bit.

Okay. Throw a few ideas.

Yeah. I'll give you an example of a few people that would be fascinating. You know, like Steven Sinek would be someone. They're in the business, the world of business. Or.

The woman who wrote the books about being vulnerable, Brene Brown. Okay. She's pretty modern.

But what I would look for would be someone who has a huge audience and people look up to them, and they've got. They literally can put a huge group of followers in place. And I remember, for example, when we first started this podcast, and this isn't the big one. This is more like an official and influencer. But you were on a podcast. I can't remember which one. And he had a big audience. And on the podcast, you made a specific ask, which was go to itunes and.

You know, rate and review our podcast. And we literally got, I think, 400 ratings and reviews from one show.

Okay.

Which, by the way, that is a. That's a significant needle mover. Yeah.

That was Kevin Fredericks. He's a comedian who has a popular podcast. He and his wife. He goes by Kev on stage. Kev on stage on Instagram. And great guy. And he and his wife are big fans of the Big Leap. And actually, that's a very interesting one. You should mention him because he and Melissa have other friends who are.

Big in the black community. Kevin is a black guy from. I forget where he's from originally, but he's spoken about being from a Nigerian family, I think. But anyway.

Other comedians had me on their shows later that. Because they follow Kevin because he's very successful in their area. So I see exactly what you mean now. Yeah.

Great. And here's the way. So very often, great ambassadors are not necessarily highly visible influencers. They're like producers. Producers. So what I like to do, this is a great experiment, is if you think of someone who has an audience who is an influencer, you literally have to just ask them. So I'd like you to do an exercise with me, and I'll actually give you this exercise for Real Gay, which is think about some people, you know, who have sizable platforms, sizable audiences, and you know that just being on their podcast would get more listeners for the show, for example, or more buyers for your book. And ask them and literally just start texting a bunch of them. Text like 30, 40 people. And what I always do that. One of my strategies is I open up my. My phone and I just Skim through and whiz through all the text messages I've had. Now I'm a texter. That's how I communicate with most people. It's my intimate way of communicating. I don't like email. I don't check it very often. I have my assistant do it. But if it's email for you, great. But these are people who know like and trust you. Whiz through, make a list of like 25 or 50 people, which doesn't take long, and then send them a quick text message message and ask him this one question, which is if you were to think right now of someone you really trust, who you see as an influencer, whose content you follow, books you read, and if they make a recommendation, you do it or follow it, who are the top three people who pop up in your head? Okay? And you get that list. And what you look for are what are the commonalities? Because if you find out after sending out 25, and let's say 15 of them get back to you and five of them say it's Brene Brown or whomever, and then you say, who do you know who's got a connection with Brene and would be willing to make an introduction? I've got an idea for her. And what you do is you look for a warm intro. And if you get. And then the exercise we do is what's the story? And this requires that you understand their world and their platform. And really, Bernay is still an influencer. You want the influencer of influencers. That's the ambassador. But it might be a.

It could be a book agent, for example. It could be a talent agent. It could be someone who manages talent at CAA in your case. And like, if the CAA artist does this one thing, and this is the story I like to pose.

And most people can visualize Oprah. So I'm going to use Oprah as the example because it's simple. But think of the most famous person you can imagine who is most connected, has a platform, has visibility, has a lot of trust, and I'm going to, for the sake of this, I'm going to call you, meaning you. Who's listening right now? X. Okay. So Oprah gets up and says, I want to tell you about X. X is the smartest expert who's gotten the most results. And you may or may not have heard of X before. But I'm here right now because you need X's help. And what I want you to do is go to X's website or go Talk to X. She's over here, he's over here. And he's going to give you an opportunity and I want you to say yes. I don't care what it costs, I don't care what the investment is. You're going to say yes, you're going to write out a check and you're going to do exactly what X says.

And I feel so strongly about this that if you don't do this, I don't want you to be part of my audience, part of my group. I don't want to. I don't want you to be part of my environment anymore because it tells me something about your character. That's how strongly I feel this way. So I'm going to take a half hour break right now. That's plenty of time to sign up, to register, to go talk. Say yes and when you're done, come back because I've got something else very important I want to share with you. Okay? And at that point they may bring up some people and who give social proof about why you're so good. But Oprah, you were able to give Oprah a story and a reason why she would put her reputation on the line for you, craft a story that she can pass along in some kind of proof and then execute on that, stake her reputation. So when we go back, Gay, think about this right now. Is there an influencer of influencers? It could be the agent, it could be someone that they all listen to. They might get checks from them. They know that their word is gold, their reputation is stellar and they've got enormous stress. And the funny thing is it often comes from what I call a silent giant. Not someone who necessarily has a massive audience themselves, but they're the behind the scenes producer's producer. And I'll give you a real life example of one in a second. But first I want to just check and see if you've got something interesting to comment on here.

Yeah, the first person I thought of is actually, I can't think of his last name right now, but he's the head of.

Caa, what used to be caa, Ari.

What is his name? Ari.

Anyway, he manages Ari Emanuel.

Yes, Ari Emanuel, that's right.

Yep. Worth a half a billion dollars, by the way. Born in 1961. I got him right here.

Okay, good. Yeah, I would probably go go for him.

That's a really, really good idea. And Ari could absolutely make 10 calls. And again, you have to think about what is the compelling story that Ari needs to hear. So it's A double pitch? Yeah, it's what are, what would get him so riled up. It has to be deeply personal and then he has to be given a story that he can tell.

That'S super compelling, that doesn't make him, that doesn't ruin his reputation. Right. That he's willing to stake on. And this is an advanced thought process. But what's important is it changes the way you interact with and create your own story that you live inside.

And so I know, for example.

You know, for quite some time for me, I did a bunch of work with Tony Robbins, okay? Now he was a perfect ambassador for me for many, many years. And, and for, in my world, people who were Tony Robbins customers were people I would like to be a hero to. A lot of them made for good customers.

The Tony Robbins group was an affinity group. Tony himself is an influencer and he's an ambassador. So it was an, he had an unusual mixture of all that. And because I had proximity with him, a lot of photos, created products and spoke on a stage.

It was just a total no brainer. Right? And, and that also extended into, for example, Brian Tracy did a bunch of stuff with him. And what happened is the more people like that, that I spent time with, the more people wanted to do business with me. And.

And so I'm going to give you another name that a lot of people have never heard of, but it's a great example of an ambassador and an influencer of influencers. And it's a guy named Max Martin. And I don't know if I've told you about Max Martin before in the past or we've used him, you recall, can't remember. Okay, so here I'm going to show his Wikipedia page and describe him to you right now. And for people who haven't heard of him, the bottom line is Max Martin is a Swedish record producer who next to John Lennon and Paul McCartney is the top, third most. He has more hot number one singles as a producer. Okay. And some of the people he's worked with, like here's some of the names. Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Pink, Usher, Avril Lavigne, Jesse J, Katy Perry, Christina Aguilera, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, the Weeknd, and I mean the list goes on and on. And here are some of them. You know, he did like I Kissed a Girl by Katy Perry, Baby One More Time by Britney Spears, California Girls by Snoop Dogg and Katie, Raise your glass. I mean they're, they're hits, hits, hits, hits, hits. This guy's worth right now About a half a billion dollars. And the funny thing is, is most people have never heard of him before. Only the people need to know him. Everyone in, in the music business and pop, if you want a number one, most likely you want Max Martin to be producing and writing for you. He can make all the calls, make sure the right song, the right beat, the right now is happening. And songwriters and producers make more money than the artists, no question. He can walk down the street and with total anonymity. No one knows who he is except the people in need to know who he is. He's got more money than he'll ever spend, which gives him an enormous amount of power, freedom and independence. And he can make someone with a phone call. So for him to stake his rate, his reputation requires a certain level of social proof. You've, you have to have earned your right to be next to him or at his side. So this is not a short term play, but I found that strategic ambassador marketing can happen extremely quickly when you compose the right story.

So that's what I have really.

Let's.

Let me put you on the spot about that, Mike, just to give people a taste of a story. If you were communicating with Max Martin, what kind of story would you want to put before Max?

So first of all, what I would look for with Max is, and I'm going to assume for a moment that this would be.

A.

You gotta remember that again, this has to be super strategic. So with a Max Martin, what you would be looking for from him, I would suspect is, let's say, for example, you're a young up and coming star and you've got good chops, good experience, you've performed and you've got a small following.

Okay.

And you're looking for the big pop. Now one of the guys who recently had a big pop is Lil Nas X. You remember who he is?

Yeah, yeah.

And you know, he popped out of kinda nowhere, but he did the Old Town Road and he did rap and country and it got popular because Billy Ray Cyrus got behind them and sang and performed. And then he just popped literally out of nowhere. And he's, you know, he's 22 years old right now. I mean, so he's like 18 at the time. And so.

What I would go to a Max Martin for is recreating that circumstance. And basically what I'd look for is, let's say you're the, you know, a little Naz and his kid, he's African American, he's young, he's gay, so he kind of meets the times for whatever the current, you know, texture of the world is in America.

But you'd want to have a hook. But you know, again, it would come from young person, great hook, great talent, no hits, or has done one thing and has a following.

And be like, if you put this person together with this star and had this beat, it's going to blow up. And Max could engineer that. So he would be able to take a young unknown, match them with the star, put together a crossover, in this case, something unique and different. And with literally three or four calls, do the song, produce it, connect with the big star that would lend their platform and boom, it'd be blast off time. And that's what big producers do is they are in the right place at the right time with the right combo and they're leveraging platforms. That's why you see like when Johnny Cash came back.

That was another example of.

I gotta think of the dude's name, guy who produced Rick Rubin. Yeah, Rick Rubin.

Yep.

So Rick Rubin did the same thing. And I mean, Johnny Cash was over, he was done. And he figured out a way. And there's a great documentary about Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash and how he resurrected his career and he exited incredibly well. You know, performing with a ton of people. It's the same thing when Lady Gaga did the connected with. Who's the old lounge. Lounge lizard singer?

Oh, Tony Bennett.

Tony Bennett. I mean Tony was, you know, I don't know exactly where he was in his career, but holy cow, whole generation found out about Tony Bennett.

Yeah.

And again, we're only using music right now, but this happens in business all the time. And.

Ambassadors come in many, many forms. And this is a non obvious way of thinking about building and growing a brand. And I found it to be one of the most powerful exercises that I do with my clients because I can literally help them find money out of nowhere and simplify their marketing with two great stories.

That's beautiful. Well, I really appreciate that. I think that it also speaks to a point we've talked about before that you and Dan Sullivan talk about too, which is focusing on who, not what, you know, like who the connection might be that might lead you to the what. A lot of entrepreneurs spend their time focusing on the what and neglect the whole that could be connecting them.

You're absolutely right. Or who not how is the other part, which is we often get so hung up on how do I do that? How, how, how? Getting all. Getting stuck in the minutia and one who can solve all of your business Problems and one great connection. And I would go so far as to say it takes a magnificence story to make that happen. And I think I've told you this before, but we did an episode, a Dan episode was the Civitas moment. And I don't know if you remember it. It's the story of. Of Julius Caesar. But the. The bottom line is.

What is the one story your audience needs to hear to inspire them and speak to them? And what it takes is a communication of a transformation that they genuinely want and. And know that most people are stumbling through life thinking they want one thing, and what they need is something different. The transformation occurs in the. In the what you need, not in what you want. Because, you know, it's. It's like the old thing. If I only won the lottery. Well, we know that 95% of people who win the lottery within three years are broke and they're worse off than when they started. That's because they didn't earn it and they weren't psychologically ready. A lot of rich people wind up that way, too, because they weren't ready. But, you know, the best time to get rich is usually in your 50s or 60s when you've done the preparation, the mental preparation, and you can actually handle the pressures that you're not aware of that got you there. And I agree.

Yeah, I got rich in my 40s, but I did some stupid things in the first five years that I wish I'd gotten rich in my 50s and avoided those things I started doing when I was 45.

Yeah. Yeah, well. And there's a high probability, I'm not asking you to put yourself on the spot, that a lot of what made you rich, you lost most of the riches and had to re. Earn it because your brain was recalibrated. And that's what I find all the time, is like, I've known a lot of rich people who are broke now. Broke and broken.

No, I didn't tank my original money, but I almost tanked my marriage by focusing on things that were too much. You know, getting involved in too much work and business and deals and losing my connection with Katie and the people around me. And.

I also, in those days, had an expensive habit, which was expensive hobby, I should say, which was I collected classic British sports cars and some other British cars like Jaguars and Rolls Royces and things like that. And I realized one day that I was consuming a lot of my time on stuff that wasn't central to my basic happiness in life. And so, you know, they Always say that the two best days in a Rolls Royce owner's life is the day he gets it and the day he sells it to the next poor sucker.

That's right.

Yep.

Same thing with boats. Well, you know the three Fs, right. If it flies, floats, or blanks, rent it, don't buy it.

I had not heard that, but I could have benefited from that advice at different times in my life.

Oh, my goodness. Well, this has been very useful, Mike. I love things in a way, what you're talking about here is what I call an algorithm. It's a way of taking a bunch of very complex stuff and.

Boiling it down to several simple moves. And that, to me, that's worth its weight in gold. That's how you and I both got here. And that's how we want our audience to prosper, too, by learning those simple little things that cut out a lot of the hassle of being in life and being in business.

Yeah. Well, and. And this is. At this point in time in my life, I am deeply fascinated with two big ideas, the first one of which is mental models. I told you that before we even started recording. Which are what are the structures that we want to teach ourselves to think in, to simplify our thinking and not make dumb mistakes. Okay. And that's really what mental models are about. Charlie Munger is a fan of those. The second is what are the fewest number of words, the shortest story someone you want to transform needs to hear or see in order to raise their hand and say, I'm in. It's a marketer's paradise. But it's also, if you think about why the greatest masters, the greatest spiritual masters for great spiritual masters is because they were profound, found storytellers, whether it was Christ or Buddha or Krishna or Muhammad, they went out and motivated people with transformational stories. And the audiences, the crowds could imagine themselves in that position. And that yields massive power. And so if there's one thing I'd like us to think about for one of our upcoming episodes, are thinking more about the books or the spiritual leaders, the guides that. In the. In specific stories that have profoundly transformed us, that have left indelible programming inside of us. And so that's a challenge I want to. I'm going to give it to me, but also to you, to think about, which is if we could deconstruct some parables.

Yeah. Because all of those have some incredible life wisdom woven into them. And I probably. I would say that more than anything else, my ability to tell stories has created my Success in many ways, because that's what I do in my books. I tell one story after the other of either myself or someone else that engaged in something and had a transformation as a result of it. And so my life has been about collecting those essential little things that people can do to really change their lives.

Yes, the world belongs to, interestingly, again, a longer conversation. It's scientists, inventors, and what I'll call a CEO storyteller. And CEO just means someone who can lead a mission and a vision to completion. But you know, you rank in the. The. The third, obviously. But there's another gentleman that I've been reading his books lately. It's Naval Ravikant, who is a true fascinating polymath and he has a fantastic book. It's the almanac of. Of Naval Ravikant. And he's filled with these kinds of thoughts and thinking.

So interesting. I'll have to check him out. Never heard of him before. That's one thing.

I really enjoy getting his brother on our podcast who is a friend. So K is his name, who wrote a great book called Live youe Life or Love Yourself like your Life Depends on It.

That's good. My first big hit book was Learning to Love Yourself.

Great. Well, I know you guys are going to deeply connect, so I'm going to reach out to him as soon as we're done today with the recording and get them on our show. But in the meantime, why don't we wrap this critter up And I would like to just say if you've enjoyed this level of thinking, one of Gay's and my goals for you is to help you get to wherever it is you want to go, whether it's building ambassador relationships, rethinking the way you think, or using some of the models that Gay talks about in all of his books. Whether it's your Genius Zone, the Big Leap, or Conscious Luck, or any of the books in his library, through this experience we put together, which is the Big Leap experience. And you can learn more about the Big Leap Experience by just going to bigleappodcast.com and clicking on the Apply button. Or we also have a place you can go to sign up and register, and that is by texting the letters BL to 858-443-4-5316. And of course, if you've enjoyed this episode, share it. Gay, how would you like to wrap it up?

Well, I want to appreciate you first of all, for this general discussion because this is the kind of thing that I think can make a big difference in people's lives to have a new way of thinking about something that maybe has been a problem for them in the past. And so I love this new model. And we'll have more to say about that later.

Absolutely. So with that, check out Big Leap, the Big Leap Experience. Leave comments you can write to us on the Big Leap podcast.

Website. In the meantime, we'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening or watching.

Also, remind them of how they can text and get the information, too. Mike.

Right, Mark. Yeah. One more time. That is texting. BL 285-843-45-3316. We'll see you in the next episode. You can leave us comments there, too. So long.

Thanks a lot, everybody.